THE COMPLETE

ELIZABETH

GILBERT

eat pray love

ALSO INCLUDING:

Committed

The Last American Man

Stern Men

& Pilgrims

BLOOMSBURY

Table of Contents

Eat, Pray, Love

Commited

The Last American Man

Stern Men

Pilgrims

Note on the Author

Contents

Introduction Or How This Book Works Or The 109th Bead

Italy Or ‘Say It Like You Eat It.’ Or Thirty-six Tales About the Pursuit of Pleasure

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

India Or ‘Congratulations to Meet You.’ Or Thirty-six Tales About the Pursuit of Devotion

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Indonesia Or ‘Even in My Underpants I Feel Different.’ Or Thirty-six Tales About the Pursuit of Balance

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Chapter 78

Chapter 79

Chapter 80

Chapter 81

Chapter 82

Chapter 83

Chapter 84

Chapter 85

Chapter 86

Chapter 87

Chapter 88

Chapter 89

Chapter 90

Chapter 91

Chapter 92

Chapter 93

Chapter 94

Chapter 95

Chapter 96

Chapter 97

Chapter 98

Chapter 99

Chapter 100

Chapter 101

Chapter 102

Chapter 103

Chapter 104

Chapter 105

Chapter 106

Chapter 107

Chapter 108

Final Recognition and Reassurance

INTRODUCTION

Or

How This Book Works

Or

The 109th Bead

When you’re traveling in India—especially through holy sites and Ashrams—you see a lot of people wearing beads around their necks. You also see a lot of old photographs of naked, skinny and intimidating Yogis (or sometimes even plump, kindly and radiant Yogis) wearing beads, too. These strings of beads are called japa malas. They have been used in India for centuries to assist devout Hindus and Buddhists in staying focused during prayerful meditation. The necklace is held in one hand and fingered in a circle—one bead touched for every repetition of mantra. When the medieval Crusaders drove East for the holy wars, they witnessed worshippers praying with these japa malas, admired the technique, and brought the idea home to Europe as rosary.

The traditional japa mala is strung with 108 beads. Amid the more esoteric circles of Eastern philosophers, the number 108 is held to be most auspicious, a perfect three-digit multiple of three, its components adding up to nine, which is three threes. And three, of course, is the number representing supreme balance, as anyone who has ever studied either the Holy Trinity or a simple barstool can plainly see. Being as this whole book is about my efforts to find balance, I have decided to structure it like a japa mala, dividing my story into 108 tales, or beads. This string of 108 tales is further divided into three sections about Italy, India and Indonesia—the three countries I visited during this year of self-inquiry. This division means that there are 36 tales in each section, which appeals to me on a personal level because I am writing all this during my thirty-sixth year.

Now before I get too Louis Farrakhan here with this numerology business, let me conclude by saying that I also like the idea of stringing these stories along the structure of a japa mala because it is so . . . structured. Sincere spiritual investigation is, and always has been, an endeavor of methodical discipline. Looking for Truth is not some kind of spazzy free-for-all, not even during this, the great age of the spazzy free-for-all. As both a seeker and a writer, I find it helpful to hang on to the beads as much as possible, the better to keep my attention focused on what it is I’m trying to accomplish.

In any case, every japa mala has a special, extra bead—the 109th bead—which dangles outside that balanced circle of 108 like a pendant. I used to think the 109th bead was an emergency spare, like the extra button on a fancy sweater, or the youngest son in a royal family. But apparently there is an even higher purpose. When your fingers reach this marker during prayer, you are meant to pause from your absorption in meditation and thank your teachers. So here, at my own 109th bead, I pause before I even begin. I offer thanks to all my teachers, who have appeared before me this year in so many curious forms.

But most especially I thank my Guru, who is compassion’s very heartbeat, and who so generously permitted me to study at her Ashram while I was in India. This is also the moment where I would like to clarify that I write about my experiences in India purely from a personal standpoint and not as a theological scholar or as anybody’s official spokesperson. This is why I will not be using my Guru’s name throughout this book—because I cannot speak for her. Her teachings speak best for themselves. Nor will I reveal either the name or the location of her Ashram, thereby sparing that fine institution publicity which it may have neither the interest in nor the resources for managing.

One final expression of gratitude: While scattered names throughout this book have been changed for various reasons, I’ve elected to change the names of every single person I met—both Indian and Western—at this Ashram in India. This is out of respect for the fact that most people don’t go on a spiritual pilgrimage in order to appear later as a character in a book. (Unless, of course, they are me.) I’ve made only one exception to this self-imposed policy of anonymity. Richard from Texas really is named Richard, and he really is from Texas. I wanted to use his real name because he was so important to me when I was in India.

One last thing—when I asked Richard if it was OK with him if I mentioned in my book that he used to be a junkie and a drunk, he said that would be totally fine.

He said, “I’d been trying to figure out how to get the word out about that, anyhow.”

But first—Italy . . .

ITALY

Or

‘Say It Like You Eat It.’

Or

Thirty-six Tales About the

Pursuit of Pleasure

1

I wish Giovanni would kiss me.

Oh, but there are so many reasons why this would be a terrible idea. To begin with, Giovanni is ten years younger than I am, and— like most Italian guys in their twenties—he still lives with his mother. These facts alone make him an unlikely romantic partner for me, given that I am a professional American woman in my mid-thirties, who has just come through a failed marriage and a devastating, interminable divorce, followed immediately by a passionate love affair that ended in sickening heartbreak. This loss upon loss has left me feeling sad and brittle and about seven thousand years old. Purely as a matter of principle I wouldn’t inflict my sorry, busted-up old self on the lovely, unsullied Giovanni. Not to mention that I have finally arrived at that age where a woman starts to question whether the wisest way to get over the loss of one beautiful brown-eyed young man is indeed to promptly invite another one into her bed. This is why I have been alone for many months now. This is why, in fact, I have decided to spend this entire year in celibacy.

To which the savvy observer might inquire: “Then why did you come to Italy?”

To which I can only reply—especially when looking across the table at handsome Giovanni—“Excellent question.”

Giovanni is my Tandem Exchange Partner. That sounds like an innuendo, but unfortunately it’s not. All it really means is that we meet a few evenings a week here in Rome to practice each other’s languages. We speak first in Italian, and he is patient with me; then we speak in English, and I am patient with him. I discovered Giovanni a few weeks after I’d arrived in Rome, thanks to that big Internet café at the Piazza Barbarini, across the street from that fountain with the sculpture of that sexy merman blowing into his conch shell. He (Giovanni, that is—not the merman) had posted a flier on the bulletin board explaining that a native Italian speaker was seeking a native English speaker for conversational language practice. Right beside his appeal was another flier with the same request, word-for-word identical in every way, right down to the typeface. The only difference was the contact information. One flier listed an e-mail address for somebody named Giovanni; the other introduced somebody named Dario. But even the home phone number was the same.

Using my keen intuitive powers, I e-mailed both men at the same time, asking in Italian, “Are you perhaps brothers?”

It was Giovanni who wrote back this very provocativo message: “Even better. Twins!”

Yes—much better. Tall, dark and handsome identical twenty-five-year-old twins, as it turned out, with those giant brown liquid-center Italian eyes that just unstitch me. After meeting the boys in person, I began to wonder if perhaps I should adjust my rule somewhat about remaining celibate this year. For instance, perhaps I could remain totally celibate except for keeping a pair of handsome twenty-five-year-old Italian twin brothers as lovers. Which was slightly reminiscent of a friend of mine who is vegetarian except for bacon, but nonetheless . . . I was already composing my letter to Penthouse:

In the flickering, candlelit shadows of the Roman café, it was impossible to tell whose hands were caress

— But, no.

No and no.

I chopped the fantasy off in mid-word. This was not my moment to be seeking romance and (as day follows night) to further complicate my already knotty life. This was my moment to look for the kind of healing and peace that can only come from solitude.

Anyway, by now, by the middle of November, the shy, studious Giovanni and I have become dear buddies. As for Dario—the more razzle-dazzle swinger brother of the two—I have introduced him to my adorable little Swedish friend Sofie, and how they’ve been sharing their evenings in Rome is another kind of Tandem Exchange altogether. But Giovanni and I, we only talk. Well, we eat and we talk. We have been eating and talking for many pleasant weeks now, sharing pizzas and gentle grammatical corrections, and tonight has been no exception. A lovely evening of new idioms and fresh mozzarella.

Now it is midnight and foggy, and Giovanni is walking me home to my apartment through these back streets of Rome, which meander organically around the ancient buildings like bayou streams snaking around shadowy clumps of cypress groves. Now we are at my door. We face each other. He gives me a warm hug. This is an improvement; for the first few weeks, he would only shake my hand. I think if I were to stay in Italy for another three years, he might actually get up the juice to kiss me. On the other hand, he might just kiss me right now, tonight, right here by my door . . . there’s still a chance . . . I mean we’re pressed up against each other’s bodies beneath this moonlight . . . and of course it would be a terrible mistake . . . but it’s still such a wonderful possibility that he might actually do it right now . . . that he might just bend down . . . and . . . and . . .

Nope.

He separates himself from the embrace.

“Good night, my dear Liz,” he says.

“Buona notte, caro mio,” I reply.

I walk up the stairs to my fourth-floor apartment, all alone. I let myself into my tiny little studio, all alone. I shut the door behind me. Another solitary bedtime in Rome. Another long night’s sleep ahead of me, with nobody and nothing in my bed except a pile of Italian phrasebooks and dictionaries.

I am alone, I am all alone, I am completely alone.

Grasping this reality, I let go of my bag, drop to my knees and press my forehead against the floor. There, I offer up to the universe a fervent prayer of thanks.

First in English.

Then in Italian.

And then—just to get the point across—in Sanskrit.

2

And since I am already down there in supplication on the floor, let me hold that position as I reach back in time three years earlier to the moment when this entire story began—a moment which also found me in this exact same posture: on my knees, on a floor, praying.

Everything else about the three-years-ago scene was different, though. That time, I was not in Rome but in the upstairs bathroom of the big house in the suburbs of New York which I’d recently purchased with my husband. It was a cold November, around three o’clock in the morning. My husband was sleeping in our bed. I was hiding in the bathroom for something like the forty-seventh consecutive night, and—just as during all those nights before—I was sobbing. Sobbing so hard, in fact, that a great lake of tears and snot was spreading before me on the bathroom tiles, a veritable Lake Inferior (if you will) of all my shame and fear and confusion and grief.

I don’t want to be married anymore.

I was trying so hard not to know this, but the truth kept insisting itself to me.

I don’t want to be married anymore. I don’t want to live in this big house. I don’t want to have a baby.

But I was supposed to want to have a baby. I was thirty-one years old. My husband and I—who had been together for eight years, married for six—had built our entire life around the common expectation that, after passing the doddering old age of thirty, I would want to settle down and have children. By then, we mutually anticipated, I would have grown weary of traveling and would be happy to live in a big, busy household full of children and homemade quilts, with a garden in the backyard and a cozy stew bubbling on the stovetop. (The fact that this was a fairly accurate portrait of my own mother is a quick indicator of how difficult it once was for me to tell the difference between myself and the powerful woman who had raised me.) But I didn’t—as I was appalled to be finding out—want any of these things. Instead, as my twenties had come to a close, that deadline of THIRTY had loomed over me like a death sentence, and I discovered that I did not want to be pregnant. I kept waiting to want to have a baby, but it didn’t happen. And I know what it feels like to want something, believe me. I well know what desire feels like. But it wasn’t there. Moreover, I couldn’t stop thinking about what my sister had said to me once, as she was breast-feeding her firstborn: “Having a baby is like getting a tattoo on your face. You really need to be certain it’s what you want before you commit.”

How could I turn back now, though? Everything was in place. This was supposed to be the year. In fact, we’d been trying to get pregnant for a few months already. But nothing had happened (aside from the fact that—in an almost sarcastic mockery of pregnancy—I was experiencing psychosomatic morning sickness, nervously throwing up my breakfast every day). And every month when I got my period I would find myself whispering furtively in the bathroom: Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you for giving me one more month to live . . .

I’d been attempting to convince myself that this was normal. All women must feel this way when they’re trying to get pregnant, I’d decided. (“Ambivalent” was the word I used, avoiding the much more accurate description: “utterly consumed with dread.”) I was trying to convince myself that my feelings were customary, despite all evidence to the contrary—such as the acquaintance I’d run into last week who’d just discovered that she was pregnant for the first time, after spending two years and a king’s ransom in fertility treatments. She was ecstatic. She had wanted to be a mother forever, she told me. She admitted she’d been secretly buying baby clothes for years and hiding them under the bed, where her husband wouldn’t find them. I saw the joy in her face and I recognized it. This was the exact joy my own face had radiated last spring, the day I discovered that the magazine I worked for was going to send me on assignment to New Zealand, to write an article about the search for giant squid. And I thought, “Until I can feel as ecstatic about having a baby as I felt about going to New Zealand to search for a giant squid, I cannot have a baby.”

I don’t want to be married anymore.

In daylight hours, I refused that thought, but at night it would consume me. What a catastrophe. How could I be such a criminal jerk as to proceed this deep into a marriage, only to leave it? We’d only just bought this house a year ago. Hadn’t I wanted this nice house? Hadn’t I loved it? So why was I haunting its halls every night now, howling like Medea? Wasn’t I proud of all we’d accumulated— the prestigious home in the Hudson Valley, the apartment in Manhattan, the eight phone lines, the friends and the picnics and the parties, the weekends spent roaming the aisles of some box-shaped superstore of our choice, buying ever more appliances on credit? I had actively participated in every moment of the creation of this life—so why did I feel like none of it resembled me? Why did I feel so overwhelmed with duty, tired of being the primary breadwinner and the housekeeper and the social coordinator and the dog-walker and the wife and the soon-to-be mother, and— somewhere in my stolen moments—a writer . . . ?

I don’t want to be married anymore.

My husband was sleeping in the other room, in our bed. I equal parts loved him and could not stand him. I couldn’t wake him to share in my distress—what would be the point? He’d already been watching me fall apart for months now, watching me behave like a madwoman (we both agreed on that word), and I only exhausted him. We both knew there was something wrong with me, and he’d been losing patience with it. We’d been fighting and crying, and we were weary in that way that only a couple whose marriage is collapsing can be weary. We had the eyes of refugees.

The many reasons I didn’t want to be this man’s wife anymore are too personal and too sad to share here. Much of it had to do with my problems, but a good portion of our troubles were related to his issues, as well. That’s only natural; there are always two figures in a marriage, after all—two votes, two opinions, two conflicting sets of decisions, desires and limitations. But I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to discuss his issues in my book. Nor would I ask anyone to believe that I am capable of reporting an unbiased version of our story, and therefore the chronicle of our marriage’s failure will remain untold here. I also will not discuss here all the reasons why I did still want to be his wife, or all his wonderfulness, or why I loved him and why I had married him and why I was unable to imagine life without him. I won’t open any of that. Let it be sufficient to say that, on this night, he was still my lighthouse and my albatross in equal measure. The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving. I didn’t want to destroy anything or anybody. I just wanted to slip quietly out the back door, without causing any fuss or consequences, and then not stop running until I reached Greenland.

This part of my story is not a happy one, I know. But I share it here because something was about to occur on that bathroom floor that would change forever the progression of my life—almost like one of those crazy astronomical super-events when a planet flips over in outer space for no reason whatsoever, and its molten core shifts, relocating its poles and altering its shape radically, such that the whole mass of the planet suddenly becomes oblong instead of spherical. Something like that.

What happened was that I started to pray.

You know—like, to God.

3

Now, this was a first for me. And since this is the first time I have introduced that loaded word—GOD—into my book, and since this is a word which will appear many times again throughout these pages, it seems only fair that I pause here for a moment to explain exactly what I mean when I say that word, just so people can decide right away how offended they need to get.

Saving for later the argument about whether God exists at all (no—here’s a better idea: let’s skip that argument completely), let me first explain why I use the word God, when I could just as easily use the words Jehovah, Allah, Shiva, Brahma, Vishnu or Zeus. Alternatively, I could call God “That,” which is how the ancient Sanskrit scriptures say it, and which I think comes close to the all-inclusive and unspeakable entity I have sometimes experienced. But that “That” feels impersonal to me—a thing, not a being—and I myself cannot pray to a That. I need a proper name, in order to fully sense a personal attendance. For this same reason, when I pray, I do not address my prayers to The Universe, The Great Void, The Force, The Supreme Self, The Whole, The Creator, The Light, The Higher Power, or even the most poetic manifestation of God’s name, taken, I believe, from the Gnostic gospels: “The Shadow of the Turning.”

I have nothing against any of these terms. I feel they are all equal because they are all equally adequate and inadequate descriptions of the indescribable. But we each do need a functional name for this indescribability, and “God” is the name that feels the most warm to me, so that’s what I use. I should also confess that I generally refer to God as “Him,” which doesn’t bother me because, to my mind, it’s just a convenient personalizing pronoun, not a precise anatomical description or a cause for revolution. Of course, I don’t mind if people call God “Her,” and I understand the urge to do so. Again—to me, these are both equal terms, equally adequate and inadequate. Though I do think the capitalization of either pronoun is a nice touch, a small politeness in the presence of the divine.

Culturally, though not theologically, I’m a Christian. I was born a Protestant of the white Anglo-Saxon persuasion. And while I do love that great teacher of peace who was called Jesus, and while I do reserve the right to ask myself in certain trying situations what indeed He would do, I can’t swallow that one fixed rule of Christianity insisting that Christ is the only path to God. Strictly speaking, then, I cannot call myself a Christian. Most of the Christians I know accept my feelings on this with grace and open-mindedness. Then again, most of the Christians I know don’t speak very strictly. To those who do speak (and think) strictly, all I can do here is offer my regrets for any hurt feelings and now excuse myself from their business.

Traditionally, I have responded to the transcendent mystics of all religions. I have always responded with breathless excitement to anyone who has ever said that God does not live in a dogmatic scripture or in a distant throne in the sky, but instead abides very close to us indeed—much closer than we can imagine, breathing right through our own hearts. I respond with gratitude to anyone who has ever voyaged to the center of that heart, and who has then returned to the world with a report for the rest of us that God is an experience of supreme love. In every religious tradition on earth, there have always been mystical saints and transcendents who report exactly this experience. Unfortunately many of them have ended up arrested and killed. Still, I think very highly of them.

In the end, what I have come to believe about God is simple. It’s like this—I used to have this really great dog. She came from the pound. She was a mixture of about ten different breeds, but seemed to have inherited the finest features of them all. She was brown. When people asked me, “What kind of dog is that?” I would always give the same answer: “She’s a brown dog.” Similarly, when the question is raised, “What kind of God do you believe in?” my answer is easy: “I believe in a magnificent God.”

4

Of course, I’ve had a lot of time to formulate my opinions about divinity since that night on the bathroom floor when I spoke to God directly for the first time. In the middle of that dark November crisis, though, I was not interested in formulating my views on theology. I was interested only in saving my life. I had finally noticed that I seemed to have reached a state of hopeless and life-threatening despair, and it occurred to me that sometimes people in this state will approach God for help. I think I’d read that in a book somewhere.

What I said to God through my gasping sobs was something like this: “Hello, God. How are you? I’m Liz. It’s nice to meet you.”

That’s right—I was speaking to the creator of the universe as though we’d just been introduced at a cocktail party. But we work with what we know in this life, and these are the words I always use at the beginning of a relationship. In fact, it was all I could do to stop myself from saying, “I’ve always been a big fan of your work . . .”

“I’m sorry to bother you so late at night,” I continued. “But I’m in serious trouble. And I’m sorry I haven’t ever spoken directly to you before, but I do hope I have always expressed ample gratitude for all the blessings that you’ve given me in my life.”

This thought caused me to sob even harder. God waited me out. I pulled myself together enough to go on: “I am not an expert at praying, as you know. But can you please help me? I am in desperate need of help. I don’t know what to do. I need an answer. Please tell me what to do. Please tell me what to do. Please tell me what to do . . .”

And so the prayer narrowed itself down to that simple entreaty— Please tell me what to do—repeated again and again. I don’t know how many times I begged. I only know that I begged like someone who was pleading for her life. And the crying went on forever.

Until—quite abruptly—it stopped.

Quite abruptly, I found that I was not crying anymore. I’d stopped crying, in fact, in mid-sob. My misery had been completely vacuumed out of me. I lifted my forehead off the floor and sat up in surprise, wondering if I would see now some Great Being who had taken my weeping away. But nobody was there. I was just alone. But not really alone, either. I was surrounded by something I can only describe as a little pocket of silence—a silence so rare that I didn’t want to exhale, for fear of scaring it off. I was seamlessly still. I don’t know when I’d ever felt such stillness.

Then I heard a voice. Please don’t be alarmed—it was not an Old Testament Hollywood Charlton Heston voice, nor was it a voice telling me I must build a baseball field in my backyard. It was merely my own voice, speaking from within my own self. But this was my voice as I had never heard it before. This was my voice, but perfectly wise, calm and compassionate. This was what my voice would sound like if I’d only ever experienced love and certainty in my life. How can I describe the warmth of affection in that voice, as it gave me the answer that would forever seal my faith in the divine?

The voice said: Go back to bed, Liz.

I exhaled.

It was so immediately clear that this was the only thing to do. I would not have accepted any other answer. I would not have trusted a great booming voice that said either: You Must Divorce Your Husband! or You Must Not Divorce Your Husband! Because that’s not true wisdom. True wisdom gives the only possible answer at any given moment, and that night, going back to bed was the only possible answer. Go back to bed, said this omniscient interior voice, because you don’t need to know the final answer right now, at three o’clock in the morning on a Thursday in November. Go back to bed, because I love you. Go back to bed, because the only thing you need to do for now is get some rest and take good care of yourself until you do know the answer. Go back to bed so that, when the tempest comes, you’ll be strong enough to deal with it. And the tempest is coming, dear one. Very soon. But not tonight. Therefore:

Go back to bed, Liz.

In a way, this little episode had all the hallmarks of a typical Christian conversion experience—the dark night of the soul, the call for help, the responding voice, the sense of transformation. But I would not say that this was a religious conversion for me, not in that traditional manner of being born again or saved. Instead, I would call what happened that night the beginning of a religious conversation. The first words of an open and exploratory dialogue that would, ultimately, bring me very close to God, indeed.

5

If I’d had any way of knowing that things were—as Lily Tomlin once said—going to get a whole lot worse before they got worse, I’m not sure how well I would have slept that night. But seven very difficult months later, I did leave my husband. When I finally made that decision, I thought the worst of it was over. This only shows how little I knew about divorce.

There was once a cartoon in The New Yorker magazine. Two women talking, one saying to the other: “If you really want to get to know someone, you have to divorce him.” Of course, my experience was the opposite. I would say that if you really want to STOP knowing someone, you have to divorce him. Or her. Because this is what happened between me and my husband. I believe that we shocked each other by how swiftly we went from being the people who knew each other best in the world to being a pair of the most mutually incomprehensible strangers who ever lived. At the bottom of that strangeness was the abysmal fact that we were both doing something the other person would never have conceived possible; he never dreamed I would actually leave him, and I never in my wildest imagination thought he would make it so difficult for me to go.

It was my most sincere belief when I left my husband that we could settle our practical affairs in a few hours with a calculator, some common sense and a bit of goodwill toward the person we’d once loved. My initial suggestion was that we sell the house and divide all the assets fifty-fifty; it never occurred to me we’d proceed in any other way. He didn’t find this suggestion fair. So I upped my offer, even suggesting this different kind of fifty-fifty split: What if he took all the assets and I took all the blame? But not even that offer would bring a settlement. Now I was at a loss. How do you negotiate once you’ve offered everything? I could do nothing now but wait for his counterproposal. My guilt at having left him forbade me from thinking I should be allowed to keep even a dime of the money I’d made in the last decade. Moreover, my newfound spirituality made it essential to me that we not battle. So this was my position—I would neither defend myself from him, nor would I fight him. For the longest time, against the counsel of all who cared about me, I resisted even consulting a lawyer, because I considered even that to be an act of war. I wanted to be all Gandhi about this. I wanted to be all Nelson Mandela about this. Not realizing at the time that both Gandhi and Mandela were lawyers.

Months passed. My life hung in limbo as I waited to be released, waited to see what the terms would be. We were living separately (he had moved into our Manhattan apartment), but nothing was resolved. Bills piled up, careers stalled, the house fell into ruin and my husband’s silences were broken only by his occasional communications reminding me what a criminal jerk I was.

And then there was David.

All the complications and traumas of those ugly divorce years were multiplied by the drama of David—the guy I fell in love with as I was taking leave of my marriage. Did I say that I “fell in love” with David? What I meant to say is that I dove out of my marriage and into David’s arms exactly the same way a cartoon circus performer dives off a high platform and into a small cup of water, vanishing completely. I clung to David for escape from marriage as if he were the last helicopter pulling out of Saigon. I inflicted upon him my every hope for my salvation and happiness. And, yes, I did love him. But if I could think of a stronger word than “desperately” to describe how I loved David, I would use that word here, and desperate love is always the toughest way to do it.

I moved right in with David after I left my husband. He was— is—a gorgeous young man. A born New Yorker, an actor and writer, with those brown liquid-center Italian eyes that have always (have I already mentioned this?) unstitched me. Street-smart, independent, vegetarian, foulmouthed, spiritual, seductive. A rebel poet-Yogi from Yonkers. God’s own sexy rookie shortstop. Bigger than life. Bigger than big. Or at least he was to me. The first time my best friend Susan heard me talking about him, she took one look at the high fever in my face and said to me, “Oh my God, baby, you are in so much trouble.”

David and I met because he was performing in a play based on short stories I’d written. He was playing a character I had invented, which is somewhat telling. In desperate love, it’s always like this, isn’t it? In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding that they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place.

But, oh, we had such a great time together during those early months when he was still my romantic hero and I was still his living dream. It was excitement and compatibility like I’d never imagined. We invented our own language. We went on day trips and road trips. We hiked to the top of things, swam to the bottom of other things, planned the journeys across the world we would take together. We had more fun waiting in line together at the Department of Motor Vehicles than most couples have on their honeymoons. We gave each other the same nickname, so there would be no separation between us. We made goals, vows, promises and dinner together. He read books to me, and he did my laundry. (The first time that happened, I called Susan to report the marvel in astonishment, like I’d just seen a camel using a pay phone. I said, “A man just did my laundry! And he even hand-washed my delicates!” And she repeated: “Oh my God, baby, you are in so much trouble.”)

The first summer of Liz and David looked like the falling-in-love montage of every romantic movie you’ve ever seen, right down to the splashing in the surf and the running hand-in-hand through the golden meadows at twilight. At this time I was still thinking my divorce might actually proceed gracefully, though I was giving my husband the summer off from talking about it so we could both cool down. Anyway, it was so easy not to think about all that loss in the midst of such happiness. Then that summer (otherwise known as “the reprieve”) ended.

On September 9, 2001, I met with my husband face-to-face for the last time, not realizing that every future meeting would necessitate lawyers between us, to mediate. We had dinner in a restaurant. I tried to talk about our separation, but all we did was fight. He let me know that I was a liar and a traitor and that he hated me and would never speak to me again. Two mornings later I woke up after a troubled night’s sleep to find that hijacked airplanes were crashing into the two tallest buildings of my city, as everything invincible that had once stood together now became a smoldering avalanche of ruin. I called my husband to make sure he was safe and we wept together over this disaster, but I did not go to him. During that week, when everyone in New York City dropped animosity in deference to the larger tragedy at hand, I still did not go back to my husband. Which is how we both knew it was very, very over.

It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that I did not sleep again for the next four months.

I thought I had fallen to bits before, but now (in harmony with the apparent collapse of the entire world) my life really turned to smash. I wince now to think of what I imposed on David during those months we lived together, right after 9/11 and my separation from my husband. Imagine his surprise to discover that the happiest, most confident woman he’d ever met was actually—when you got her alone—a murky hole of bottomless grief. Once again, I could not stop crying. This is when he started to retreat, and that’s when I saw the other side of my passionate romantic hero—the David who was solitary as a castaway, cool to the touch, in need of more personal space than a herd of American bison.

David’s sudden emotional back-stepping probably would’ve been a catastrophe for me even under the best of circumstances, given that I am the planet’s most affectionate life-form (something like a cross between a golden retriever and a barnacle), but this was my very worst of circumstances. I was despondent and dependent, needing more care than an armful of premature infant triplets. His withdrawal only made me more needy, and my neediness only advanced his withdrawals, until soon he was retreating under fire of my weeping pleas of, “Where are you going? What happened to us?”

(Dating tip: Men LOVE this.)

The fact is, I had become addicted to David (in my defense, he had fostered this, being something of a “man-fatale”), and now that his attention was wavering, I was suffering the easily foreseeable consequences. Addiction is the hallmark of every infatuation-based love story. It all begins when the object of your adoration bestows upon you a heady, hallucinogenic dose of something you never even dared to admit that you wanted—an emotional speedball, perhaps, of thunderous love and roiling excitement. Soon you start craving that intense attention, with the hungry obsession of any junkie. When the drug is withheld, you promptly turn sick, crazy and depleted (not to mention resentful of the dealer who encouraged this addiction in the first place but who now refuses to pony up the good stuff anymore—despite the fact that you know he has it hidden somewhere, goddamn it, because he used to give it to you for free). Next stage finds you skinny and shaking in a corner, certain only that you would sell your soul or rob your neighbors just to have that thing even one more time. Meanwhile, the object of your adoration has now become repulsed by you. He looks at you like you’re someone he’s never met before, much less someone he once loved with high passion. The irony is, you can hardly blame him. I mean, check yourself out. You’re a pathetic mess, unrecognizable even to your own eyes.

So that’s it. You have now reached infatuation’s final destination —the complete and merciless devaluation of self.

The fact that I can even write calmly about this today is mighty evidence of time’s healing powers, because I didn’t take it well as it was happening. To be losing David right after the failure of my marriage, and right after the terrorizing of my city, and right during the worst ugliness of divorce (a life experience my friend Brian has compared to “having a really bad car accident every single day for about two years”) . . . well, this was simply too much.

David and I continued to have our bouts of fun and compatibility during the days, but at night, in his bed, I became the only survivor of a nuclear winter as he visibly retreated from me, more every day, as though I were infectious. I came to fear nighttime like it was a torturer’s cellar. I would lie there beside David’s beautiful, inaccessible sleeping body and I would spin into a panic of loneliness and meticulously detailed suicidal thoughts. Every part of my body pained me. I felt like I was some kind of primitive spring-loaded machine, placed under far more tension than it had ever been built to sustain, about to blast apart at great danger to anyone standing nearby. I imagined my body parts flying off my torso in order to escape the volcanic core of unhappiness that had become: me. Most mornings, David would wake to find me sleeping fitfully on the floor beside his bed, huddled on a pile of bathroom towels, like a dog.

“What happened now?” he would ask—another man thoroughly exhausted by me.

I think I lost something like thirty pounds during that time.

6

Oh, but it wasn’t all bad, those few years . . .

Because God never slams a door in your face without opening a box of Girl Scout cookies (or however the old adage goes), some wonderful things did happen to me in the shadow of all that sorrow. For one thing, I finally started learning Italian. Also, I found an Indian Guru. Lastly, I was invited by an elderly medicine man to come and live with him in Indonesia.

I’ll explain in sequence.

To begin with, things started to look up somewhat when I moved out of David’s place in early 2002 and found an apartment of my own for the first time in my life. I couldn’t afford it, since I was still paying for that big house in the suburbs which nobody was living in anymore and which my husband was forbidding me to sell, and I was still trying to stay on top of all my legal and counseling fees . . . but it was vital to my survival to have a One Bedroom of my own. I saw the apartment almost as a sanatorium, a hospice clinic for my own recovery. I painted the walls in the warmest colors I could find and bought myself flowers every week, as if I were visiting myself in the hospital. My sister gave me a hot water bottle as a housewarming gift (so I wouldn’t have to be all alone in a cold bed) and I slept with the thing laid against my heart every night, as though nursing a sports injury.

David and I had broken up for good. Or maybe we hadn’t. It’s hard to remember now how many times we broke up and joined up over those months. But there emerged a pattern: I would separate from David, get my strength and confidence back, and then (attracted as always by my strength and confidence) his passion for me would rekindle. Respectfully, soberly and intelligently, we would discuss “trying again,” always with some sane new plan for minimizing our apparent incompatibilities. We were so committed to solving this thing. Because how could two people who were so in love not end up happily ever after? It had to work. Didn’t it? Reunited with fresh hopes, we’d share a few deliriously happy days together. Or sometimes even weeks. But eventually David would retreat from me once more and I would cling to him (or I would cling to him and he would retreat—we never could figure out how it got triggered) and I’d end up destroyed all over again. And he’d end up gone.

David was catnip and kryptonite to me.

But during those periods when we were separated, as hard as it was, I was practicing living alone. And this experience was bringing a nascent interior shift. I was beginning to sense that—even though my life still looked like a multi-vehicle accident on the New Jersey Turnpike during holiday traffic—I was tottering on the brink of becoming a self-governing individual. When I wasn’t feeling suicidal about my divorce, or suicidal about my drama with David, I was actually feeling kind of delighted about all the compartments of time and space that were appearing in my days, during which I could ask myself the radical new question: “What do you want to do, Liz?”

Most of the time (still so troubled from bailing out of my marriage) I didn’t even dare to answer the question, but just thrilled privately to its existence. And when I finally started to answer, I did so cautiously. I would only allow myself to express little baby-step wants. Like:

I want to go to a Yoga class.

I want to leave this party early, so I can go home and read a novel.

I want to buy myself a new pencil box.

Then there would always be that one weird answer, same every time:

I want to learn how to speak Italian.

For years, I’d wished I could speak Italian—a language I find more beautiful than roses—but I could never make the practical justification for studying it. Why not just bone up on the French or Russian I’d already studied years ago? Or learn to speak Spanish, the better to help me communicate with millions of my fellow Americans? What was I going to do with Italian? It’s not like I was going to move there. It would be more practical to learn how to play the accordion.

But why must everything always have a practical application? I’d been such a diligent soldier for years—working, producing, never missing a deadline, taking care of my loved ones, my gums and my credit record, voting, etc. Is this lifetime supposed to be only about duty? In this dark period of loss, did I need any justification for learning Italian other than that it was the only thing I could imagine bringing me any pleasure right now? And it wasn’t that outrageous a goal, anyway, to want to study a language. It’s not like I was saying, at age thirty-two, “I want to become the principal ballerina for the New York City Ballet.” Studying a language is something you can actually do. So I signed up for classes at one of those continuing education places (otherwise known as Night School for Divorced Ladies). My friends thought this was hilarious. My friend Nick asked, “Why are you studying Italian? So that—just in case Italy ever invades Ethiopia again, and is actually successful this time— you can brag about knowing a language that’s spoken in two whole countries?”

But I loved it. Every word was a singing sparrow, a magic trick, a truffle for me. I would slosh home through the rain after class, draw a hot bath, and lie there in the bubbles reading the Italian dictionary aloud to myself, taking my mind off my divorce pressures and my heartache. The words made me laugh in delight. I started referring to my cell phone as il mio telefonino (“my teensy little telephone”). I became one of those annoying people who always say Ciao! Only I was extra annoying, since I would always explain where the word ciao comes from. (If you must know, it’s an abbreviation of a phrase used by medieval Venetians as an intimate salutation: Sono il suo schiavo! Meaning: “I am your slave!”) Just speaking these words made me feel sexy and happy. My divorce lawyer told me not to worry; she said she had one client (Korean by heritage) who, after a yucky divorce, legally changed her name to something Italian, just to feel sexy and happy again.

Maybe I would move to Italy, after all . . .

7

The other notable thing that was happening during that time was the newfound adventure of spiritual discipline. Aided and abetted, of course, by the introduction into my life of an actual living Indian Guru—for whom I will always have David to thank. I’d been introduced to my Guru the first night I ever went to David’s apartment. I kind of fell in love with them both at the same time. I walked into David’s apartment and saw this picture on his dresser of a radiantly beautiful Indian woman and I asked, “Who’s that?”

He said, “That is my spiritual teacher.”

My heart skipped a beat and then flat-out tripped over itself and fell on its face. Then my heart stood up, brushed itself off, took a deep breath and announced: “I want a spiritual teacher.” I literally mean that it was my heart who said this, speaking through my mouth. I felt this weird division in myself, and my mind stepped out of my body for a moment, spun around to face my heart in astonishment and silently asked, “You DO?”

“Yes,” replied my heart. “I do.”

Then my mind asked my heart, a tad sarcastically: “Since WHEN?”

But I already knew the answer: Since that night on the bathroom floor.

My God, but I wanted a spiritual teacher. I immediately began constructing a fantasy of what it would be like to have one. I imagined that this radiantly beautiful Indian woman would come to my apartment a few evenings a week and we would sit and drink tea and talk about divinity, and she would give me reading assignments and explain the significance of the strange sensations I was feeling during meditation . . .

All this fantasy was quickly swept away when David told me about the international status of this woman, about her tens of thousands of students—many of whom have never met her face-to-face. Still, he said, there was a gathering here in New York City every Tuesday night of the Guru’s devotees who came together as a group to meditate and chant. David said, “If you’re not too freaked out by the idea of being in a room with several hundred people chanting God’s name in Sanskrit, you can come sometime.”

I joined him the following Tuesday night. Far from being freaked out by these regular-looking people singing to God, I instead felt my soul rise diaphanous in the wake of that chanting. I walked home that night feeling like the air could move through me, like I was clean linen fluttering on a clothes-line, like New York itself had become a city made of rice paper—and I was light enough to run across every rooftop. I started going to the chants every Tuesday. Then I started meditating every morning on the ancient Sanskrit mantra the Guru gives to all her students (the regal Om Namah Shivaya, meaning, “I honor the divinity that resides within me”). Then I listened to the Guru speak in person for the first time, and her words gave me chill bumps over my whole body, even across the skin of my face. And when I heard she had an Ashram in India, I knew I must take myself there as quickly as possible.

8

In the meantime, though, I had to go on this trip to Indonesia.

Which happened, again, because of a magazine assignment. Just when I was feeling particularly sorry for myself for being broke and lonely and caged up in Divorce Internment Camp, an editor from a women’s magazine asked if she could pay to send me to Bali to write a story about Yoga vacations. In return I asked her a series of questions, mostly along the line of Is a bean green? and Does James Brown get down? When I got to Bali (which is, to be brief, a very nice place) the teacher who was running the Yoga retreat asked us, “While you’re all here, is there anybody who would like to go visit a ninth-generation Balinese medicine man?” (another question too obvious to even answer), and so we all went over to his house one night.

The medicine man, as it turned out, was a small, merry-eyed, russet-colored old guy with a mostly toothless mouth, whose resemblance in every way to the Star Wars character Yoda cannot be exaggerated. His name was Ketut Liyer. He spoke a scattered and thoroughly entertaining kind of English, but there was a translator available for when he got stuck on a word.

Our Yoga teacher had told us in advance that we could each bring one question or problem to the medicine man, and he would try to help us with our troubles. I’d been thinking for days of what to ask him. My initial ideas were so lame. Will you make my husband give me a divorce? Will you make David be sexually attracted to me again? I was rightly ashamed of myself for these thoughts: who travels all the way around the world to meet an ancient medicine man in Indonesia, only to ask him to intercede in boy trouble?

So when the old man asked me in person what I really wanted, I found other, truer words.

“I want to have a lasting experience of God,” I told him. “Sometimes I feel like I understand the divinity of this world, but then I lose it because I get distracted by my petty desires and fears. I want to be with God all the time. But I don’t want to be a monk, or totally give up worldly pleasures. I guess what I want to learn is how to live in this world and enjoy its delights, but also devote myself to God.”

Ketut said he could answer my question with a picture. He showed me a sketch he’d drawn once during meditation. It was an androgynous human figure, standing up, hands clasped in prayer. But this figure had four legs, and no head. Where the head should have been, there was only a wild foliage of ferns and flowers. There was a small, smiling face drawn over the heart.

“To find the balance you want,” Ketut spoke through his translator, “this is what you must become. You must keep your feet grounded so firmly on the earth that it’s like you have four legs, instead of two. That way, you can stay in the world. But you must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look through your heart, instead. That way, you will know God.”

Then he asked if he could read my palm. I gave him my left hand and he proceeded to put me together like a three-piece puzzle.

“You’re a world traveler,” he began.

Which I thought was maybe a little obvious, given that I was in Indonesia at the moment, but I didn’t force the point . . .

“You have more good luck than anyone I’ve ever met. You will live a long time, have many friends, many experiences. You will see the whole world. You only have one problem in your life. You worry too much. Always you get too emotional, too nervous. If I promise you that you will never have any reason in your life to ever worry about anything, will you believe me?”

Nervously I nodded, not believing him.

“For work, you do something creative, maybe like an artist, and you get paid good money for it. Always you will get paid good money for this thing you do. You are generous with money, maybe too generous. Also one problem. You will lose all your money once in your life. I think maybe it will happen soon.”

“I think maybe it will happen in the next six to ten months,” I said, thinking about my divorce.

Ketut nodded as if to say, Yeah, that sounds about right. “But don’t worry,” he said. “After you lose all your money, you will get it all right back again. Right away you’ll be fine. You will have two marriages in your life. One short, one long. And you will have two children . . .”

I waited for him to say, “one short, one long,” but he was suddenly silent, frowning at my palm. Then he said, “Strange . . . ,” which is something you never want to hear from either your palmreader or your dentist. He asked me to move directly under the hanging lightbulb so he could take a better look.

“I am wrong,” he announced. “You will only have only one child. Late in life, a daughter. Maybe. If you decide . . . but there is something else.” He frowned, then looked up, suddenly absolutely confident: “Someday soon you will come back here to Bali. You must. You will stay here in Bali for three, maybe four months. You will be my friend. Maybe you will live here with my family. I can practice English with you. I never had anybody to practice English with. I think you are good with words. I think this creative work you do is something about words, yes?”

“Yes!” I said. “I’m a writer. I’m a book writer!”

“You are a book writer from New York,” he said, in agreement, in confirmation. “So you will come back here to Bali and live here and teach me English. And I will teach you everything I know.”

Then he stood up and brushed off his hands, like: That’s settled.

I said, “If you’re serious, mister, I’m serious.”

He beamed at me toothlessly and said, “See you later, alligator.”

9

Now, I’m the kind of person who, when a ninth-generation Indonesian medicine man tells you that you’re destined to move to Bali and live with him for four months, thinks you should make every effort to do that. And this, finally, was how my whole idea about this year of traveling began to gel. I absolutely needed to get myself back to Indonesia somehow, on my own dime this time. This was evident. Though I couldn’t yet imagine how to do it, given my chaotic and disturbed life. (Not only did I still have a pricey divorce to settle, and David-troubles, I still had a magazine job that prevented me from going anywhere for three or four months at a time.) But I had to get back there. Didn’t I? Hadn’t he foretold it? Problem was, I also wanted to go to India, to visit my Guru’s Ashram, and going to India is an expensive and time-consuming affair, also. To make matters even more confusing, I’d also been dying lately to get over to Italy, so I could practice speaking Italian in context, but also because I was drawn to the idea of living for a while in a culture where pleasure and beauty are revered.

All these desires seemed to be at odds with one another. Especially the Italy/India conflict. What was more important? The part of me that wanted to eat veal in Venice? Or the part of me that wanted to be waking up long before dawn in the austerity of an Ashram to begin a long day of meditation and prayer? The great Sufi poet and philosopher Rumi once advised his students to write down the three things they most wanted in life. If any item on the list clashes with any other item, Rumi warned, you are destined for unhappiness. Better to live a life of single-pointed focus, he taught. But what about the benefits of living harmoniously amid extremes? What if you could somehow create an expansive enough life that you could synchronize seemingly incongruous opposites into a worldview that excludes nothing? My truth was exactly what I’d said to the medicine man in Bali—I wanted to experience both. I wanted worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence—the dual glories of a human life. I wanted what the Greeks called kalos kai agathos, the singular balance of the good and the beautiful. I’d been missing both during these last hard years, because both pleasure and devotion require a stress-free space in which to flourish and I’d been living in a giant trash compactor of nonstop anxiety. As for how to balance the urge for pleasure against the longing for devotion . . . well, surely there was a way to learn that trick. And it seemed to me, just from my short stay in Bali, that I maybe could learn this from the Balinese. Maybe even from the medicine man himself.

Four feet on the ground, a head full of foliage, looking at the world through the heart . . .

So I stopped trying to choose—Italy? India? or Indonesia?—and eventually just admitted that I wanted to travel to all of them. Four months in each place. A year in total. Of course this was a slightly more ambitious dream than “I want to buy myself a new pencil box.” But this is what I wanted. And I knew that I wanted to write about it. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to thoroughly explore the countries themselves; this has been done. It was more that I wanted to thoroughly explore one aspect of myself set against the backdrop of each country, in a place that has traditionally done that one thing very well. I wanted to explore the art of pleasure in Italy, the art of devotion in India and, in Indonesia, the art of balancing the two. It was only later, after admitting this dream, that I noticed the happy coincidence that all these countries begin with the letter I. A fairly auspicious sign, it seemed, on a voyage of self-discovery.

Imagine now, if you will, all the opportunities for mockery this idea unleashed in my wise-ass friends. I wanted to go to the Three I’s, did I? Then why not spend the year in Iran, Ivory Coast and Iceland? Or even better—why not go on pilgrimage to the Great Tri-State “I” Triumvirate of Islip, I-95 and Ikea? My friend Susan suggested that perhaps I should establish a not-for-profit relief organization called “Divorcées Without Borders.” But all this joking was moot because “I” wasn’t free to go anywhere yet. That divorce—long after I’d walked out of my marriage—was still not happening. I’d started having to put legal pressure on my husband, doing dreadful things out of my worst divorce nightmares, like serving papers and writing damning legal accusations (required by New York State law) of his alleged mental cruelty—documents that left no room for subtlety, no way in which to say to the judge: “Hey, listen, it was a really complicated relationship, and I made huge mistakes, too, and I’m very sorry about that, but all I want is to be allowed to leave.”

(Here, I pause to offer a prayer for my gentle reader: May you never, ever, have to get a divorce in New York.)

The spring of 2003 brought things to a boiling point. A year and a half after I’d left, my husband was finally ready to discuss terms of a settlement. Yes, he wanted cash and the house and the lease on the Manhattan apartment—everything I’d been offering the whole while. But he was also asking for things I’d never even considered (a stake in the royalties of books I’d written during the marriage, a cut of possible future movie rights to my work, a share of my retirement accounts, etc.) and here I had to voice my protest at last. Months of negotiations ensued between our lawyers, a compromise of sorts inched its way toward the table and it was starting to look like my husband might actually accept a modified deal. It would cost me dearly, but a fight in the courts would be infinitely more expensive and time-consuming, not to mention soul-corroding. If he signed the agreement, all I had to do was pay and walk away. Which would be fine with me at this point. Our relationship now thoroughly ruined, with even civility destroyed between us, all I wanted anymore was the door.

The question was—would he sign? More weeks passed as he contested more details. If he didn’t agree to this settlement, we’d have to go to trial. A trial would almost certainly mean that every remaining dime would be lost in legal fees. Worst of all, a trial would mean another year—at least—of all this mess. So whatever my husband decided (and he still was my husband, after all), it was going to determine yet another year of my life. Would I be traveling all alone through Italy, India and Indonesia? Or would I be getting cross-examined somewhere in a courtroom basement during a deposition hearing?

Every day I called my lawyer fourteen times—any news? — and every day she assured me that she was doing her best, that she would telephone immediately if the deal was signed. The nervousness I felt during this time was something between waiting to be called into the principal’s office and anticipating the results of a biopsy. I’d love to report that I stayed calm and Zen, but I didn’t. Several nights, in waves of anger, I beat the life out of my couch with a softball bat. Most of the time I was just achingly depressed.

Meanwhile, David and I had broken up again. This time, it seemed, for good. Or maybe not—we couldn’t totally let go of it. Often I was still overcome with a desire to sacrifice everything for the love of him. Other times, I had the quite opposite instinct—to put as many continents and oceans as possible between me and this guy, in the hope of finding peace and happiness.

I had lines in my face now, permanent incisions dug between my eyebrows, from crying and from worry.

And in the middle of all that, a book that I’d written a few years earlier was being published in paperback and I had to go on a small publicity tour. I took my friend Iva with me for company. Iva is my age but grew up in Beirut, Lebanon. Which means that, while I was playing sports and auditioning for musicals in a Connecticut middle school, she was cowering in a bomb shelter five nights out of seven, trying not to die. I’m not sure how all this early exposure to violence created somebody who’s so steady now, but Iva is one of the calmest souls I know. Moreover, she’s got what I call “The Bat Phone to the Universe,” some kind of Iva-only, open-round-the-clock special channel to the divine.

So we were driving across Kansas, and I was in my normal state of sweaty disarray over this divorce deal—will he sign, will he not sign?—and I said to Iva, “I don’t think I can endure another year in court. I wish I could get some divine intervention here. I wish I could write a petition to God, asking for this thing to end.”

“So why don’t you?”

I explained to Iva my personal opinions about prayer. Namely, that I don’t feel comfortable petitioning for specific things from God, because that feels to me like a kind of weakness of faith. I don’t like asking, “Will you change this or that thing in my life that’s difficult for me?” Because—who knows?—God might want me to be facing that particular challenge for a reason. Instead, I feel more comfortable praying for the courage to face whatever occurs in my life with equanimity, no matter how things turn out.

Iva listened politely, then asked, “Where’d you get that stupid idea?”

“What do you mean?”

“Where did you get the idea you aren’t allowed to petition the universe with prayer? You are part of this universe, Liz. You’re a constituent— you have every entitlement to participate in the actions of the universe, and to let your feelings be known. So put your opinion out there. Make your case. Believe me—it will at least be taken into consideration.”

“Really?” All this was news to me.

“Really! Listen—if you were to write a petition to God right now, what would it say?”

I thought for a while, then pulled out a notebook and wrote this petition:

Dear God.

Please intervene and help end this divorce. My husband and I have failed at our marriage and now we are failing at our divorce. This poisonous process is bringing suffering to us and to everyone who cares about us.

I recognize that you are busy with wars and tragedies and much larger conflicts than the ongoing dispute of one dysfunctional couple. But it is my understanding that the health of the planet is affected by the health of every individual on it. As long as even two souls are locked in conflict, the whole of the world is contaminated by it. Similarly, if even one or two souls can be free from discord, this will increase the general health of the whole world, the way a few healthy cells in a body can increase the general health of that body.

It is my most humble request, then, that you help us end this conflict, so that two more people can have the chance to become free and healthy, and so there will be just a little bit less animosity and bitterness in a world that is already far too troubled by suffering.

I thank you for your kind attention.

Respectfully,

Elizabeth M. Gilbert

I read it to Iva, and she nodded her approval.

“I would sign that,” she said.

I handed the petition over to her with a pen, but she was too busy driving, so she said, “No, let’s say that I did just sign it. I signed it in my heart.”

“Thank you, Iva. I appreciate your support.”

“Now, who else would sign it?” she asked.

“My family. My mother and father. My sister.”

“OK,” she said. “They just did. Consider their names added. I actually felt them sign it. They’re on the list now. OK—who else would sign it? Start naming names.”

So I started naming names of all the people who I thought would sign this petition. I named all my close friends, then some family members and some people I worked with. After each name, Iva would say with assurance, “Yep. He just signed it,” or “She just signed it.” Sometimes she would pop in with her own signatories, like: “My parents just signed it. They raised their children during a war. They hate useless conflict. They’d be happy to see your divorce end.”

I closed my eyes and waited for more names to come to me.

“I think Bill and Hillary Clinton just signed it,” I said.

“I don’t doubt it,” she said. “Listen, Liz—anybody can sign this petition. Do you understand that? Call on anyone, living or dead, and start collecting signatures.”

“Saint Francis of Assisi just signed it!”

“Of course he did!” Iva smacked her hand against the steering wheel with certainty.

Now I was cooking:

“Abraham Lincoln just signed it! And Gandhi, and Mandela and all the peacemakers. Eleanor Roosevelt, Mother Teresa, Bono, Jimmy Carter, Muhammad Ali, Jackie Robinson and the Dalai Lama . . . and my grandmother who died in 1984 and my grandmother who’s still alive . . . and my Italian teacher, and my therapist, and my agent . . . and Martin Luther King Jr. and Katharine Hepburn . . . and Martin Scorsese (which you wouldn’t necessarily expect, but it’s still nice of him) . . . and my Guru, of course . . . and Joanne Woodward, and Joan of Arc, and Ms. Carpenter, my fourth-grade teacher, and Jim Henson—”

The names spilled from me. They didn’t stop spilling for almost an hour, as we drove across Kansas and my petition for peace stretched into page after invisible page of supporters. Iva kept confirming— yes, he signed it, yes, she signed it—and I became filled with a grand sense of protection, surrounded by the collective goodwill of so many mighty souls.

The list finally wound down, and my anxiety wound down with it. I was sleepy. Iva said, “Take a nap. I’ll drive.” I closed my eyes. One last name appeared. “Michael J. Fox just signed it,” I murmured, then drifted into sleep. I don’t know how long I slept, maybe only for ten minutes, but it was deep. When I woke up, Iva was still driving. She was humming a little song to herself. I yawned.

My cell phone rang.

I looked at that crazy little telefonino vibrating with excitement in the ashtray of the rental car. I felt disoriented, kind of stoned from my nap, suddenly unable to remember how a telephone works.

“Go ahead,” Iva said, already knowing. “Answer the thing.”

I picked up the phone, whispered hello.

“Great news!” my lawyer announced from distant New York City. “He just signed it!”

10

A few weeks later, I am living in Italy.

I have quit my job, paid off my divorce settlement and legal bills, given up my house, given up my apartment, put what belongings I had left into storage in my sister’s place and packed up two suitcases. My year of traveling has commenced. And I can actually afford to do this because of a staggering personal miracle: in advance, my publisher has purchased the book I shall write about my travels. It all turned out, in other words, just as the Indonesian medicine man had predicted. I would lose all my money and it would be replaced immediately—or at least enough of it to buy me a year of life.

So now I am a resident of Rome. The apartment I’ve found is a quiet studio in a historic building, located just a few narrow blocks from the Spanish Steps, draped beneath the graceful shadows of the elegant Borghese Gardens, right up the street from the Piazza del Popolo, where the ancient Romans used to race their chariots. Of course, this district doesn’t quite have the sprawling grandeur of my old New York City neighborhood, which overlooked the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, but still . . .

It will do.

11

The first meal I ate in Rome was nothing much. Just some homemade pasta (spaghetti carbonara) with a side order of sautéed spinach and garlic. (The great romantic poet Shelley once wrote a horrified letter to a friend in England about cuisine in Italy: “Young women of rank actually eat—you will never guess what— GARLIC!”) Also, I had one artichoke, just to try it; the Romans are awfully proud of their artichokes. Then there was a pop-surprise bonus side order brought over by the waitress for free—a serving of fried zucchini blossoms with a soft dab of cheese in the middle (prepared so delicately that the blossoms probably didn’t even notice they weren’t on the vine anymore). After the spaghetti, I tried the veal. Oh, and also I drank a bottle of house red, just for me. And ate some warm bread, with olive oil and salt. Tiramisu for dessert.

Walking home after that meal, around 11:00 PM, I could hear noise coming from one of the buildings on my street, something that sounded like a convention of seven-year-olds—a birthday party, maybe? Laughter and screaming and running around. I climbed the stairs to my apartment, lay down in my new bed and turned off the light. I waited to start crying or worrying, since that’s what usually happened to me with the lights off, but I actually felt OK. I felt fine. I felt the early symptoms of contentment.

My weary body asked my weary mind: “Was this all you needed, then?”

There was no response. I was already fast asleep.

12

In every major city in the Western World, some things are always the same. The same African men are always selling knockoffs of the same designer handbags and sunglasses, and the same Guatemalan musicians are always playing “I’d rather be a sparrow than a snail” on their bamboo windpipes. But some things are only in Rome. Like the sandwich counterman so comfortably calling me “beautiful” every time we speak. You want this panino grilled or cold, bella? Or the couples making out all over the place, like there is some contest for it, twisting into each other on benches, stroking each other’s hair and crotches, nuzzling and grinding ceaselessly . . .

And then there are the fountains. Pliny the Elder wrote once: “If anyone will consider the abundance of Rome’s public supply of water, for baths, cisterns, ditches, houses, gardens, villas; and take into account the distance over which it travels, the arches reared, the mountains pierced, the valleys spanned—he will admit that there never was anything more marvelous in the whole world.”

A few centuries later, I already have a few contenders for my favorite fountain in Rome. One is in the Villa Borghese. In the center of this fountain is a frolicking bronze family. Dad is a faun and Mom is a regular human woman. They have a baby who enjoys eating grapes. Mom and Dad are in a strange position—facing each other, grabbing each other’s wrists, both of them leaning back. It’s hard to tell whether they are yanking against each other in strife or swinging around merrily, but there’s lots of energy there. Either way, Junior sits perched atop their wrists, right between them, unaffected by their merriment or strife, munching on his bunch of grapes. His little cloven hoofs dangle below him as he eats. (He takes after his father.)

It is early September, 2003. The weather is warm and lazy. By this, my fourth day in Rome, my shadow has still not darkened the doorway of a church or a museum, nor have I even looked at a guidebook. But I have been walking endlessly and aimlessly, and I did finally find a tiny little place that a friendly bus driver informed me sells The Best Gelato in Rome. It’s called “Il Gelato di San Crispino.” I’m not sure, but I think this might translate as “the ice cream of the crispy saint.” I tried a combination of the honey and the hazelnut. I came back later that same day for the grapefruit and the melon. Then, after dinner that same night, I walked all the way back over there one last time, just to sample a cup of the cinnamon-ginger.

I’ve been trying to read through one newspaper article every day, no matter how long it takes. I look up approximately every third word in my dictionary. Today’s news was fascinating. Hard to imagine a more dramatic headline than “Obesità! I Bambini Italiani Sono i Più Grassi d’Europa!” Good God! Obesity! The article, I think, is declaring that Italian babies are the fattest babies in Europe! Reading on, I learn that Italian babies are significantly fatter than German babies and very significantly fatter than French babies. (Mercifully, there was no mention of how they measure up against American babies.) Older Italian children are dangerously obese these days, too, says the article. (The pasta industry defended itself.) These alarming statistics on Italian child fatness were unveiled yesterday by—no need to translate here—“una task force internazionale.” It took me almost an hour to decipher this whole article. The entire time, I was eating a pizza and listening to one of Italy’s children play the accordion across the street. The kid didn’t look very fat to me, but that may have been because he was a gypsy. I’m not sure if I misread the last line of the article, but it seemed there was some talk from the government that the only way to deal with the obesity crisis in Italy was to implement a tax on the overweight . . . ? Could this be true? After a few months of eating like this, will they come after me?

It’s also important to read the newspaper every day to see how the pope is doing. Here in Rome, the pope’s health is recorded daily in the newspaper, very much like weather, or the TV schedule. Today the pope is tired. Yesterday, the pope was less tired than he is today. Tomorrow, we expect that the pope will not be quite so tired as he was today.

It’s kind of a fairyland of language for me here. For someone who has always wanted to speak Italian, what could be better than Rome? It’s like somebody invented a city just to suit my specifications, where everyone (even the children, even the taxi drivers, even the actors on the commercials!) speaks this magical language. It’s like the whole society is conspiring to teach me Italian. They’ll even print their newspapers in Italian while I’m here; they don’t mind! They have bookstores here that only sell books written in Italian! I found such a bookstore yesterday morning and felt I’d entered an enchanted palace. Everything was in Italian—even Dr. Seuss. I wandered through, touching all the books, hoping that anyone watching me might think I was a native speaker. Oh, how I want Italian to open itself up to me! This feeling reminded me of when I was four years old and couldn’t read yet, but was dying to learn. I remember sitting in the waiting room of a doctor’s office with my mother, holding a Good Housekeeping magazine in front of my face, turning the pages slowly, staring at the text, and hoping the grown-ups in the waiting room would think I was actually reading. I haven’t felt so starved for comprehension since then. I found some works by American poets in that bookstore, with the original English version printed on one side of the page and the Italian translation on the other. I bought a volume by Robert Lowell, another by Louise Glück.

There are spontaneous conversation classes everywhere. Today, I was sitting on a park bench when a tiny old woman in a black dress came over, roosted down beside me and started bossing me around about something. I shook my head, muted and confused. I apologized, saying in very nice Italian, “I’m sorry, but I don’t speak Italian,” and she looked like she would’ve smacked me with a wooden spoon, if she’d had one. She insisted: “You do understand!” (Interestingly, she was correct. That sentence, I did understand.) Now she wanted to know where I was from. I told her I was from New York, and asked where she was from. Duh—she was from Rome. Hearing this, I clapped my hands like a baby. Ah, Rome! Beautiful Rome! I love Rome! Pretty Rome! She listened to my primitive rhapsodies with skepticism. Then she got down to it and asked me if I was married. I told her I was divorced. This was the first time I’d said it to anyone, and here I was, saying it in Italian. Of course she demanded, “Perché?” Well . . . “why” is a hard question to answer in any language. I stammered, then finally came up with “L’abbiamo rotto” (We broke it).

She nodded, stood up, walked up the street to her bus stop, got on her bus and did not even turn around to look at me again. Was she mad at me? Strangely, I waited for her on that park bench for twenty minutes, thinking against reason that she might come back and continue our conversation, but she never returned. Her name was Celeste, pronounced with a sharp ch, as in cello.

Later in the day, I found a library. Dear me, how I love a library. Because we are in Rome, this library is a beautiful old thing, and within it there is a courtyard garden which you’d never have guessed existed if you’d only looked at the place from the street. The garden is a perfect square, dotted with orange trees and, in the center, a fountain. This fountain was going to be a contender for my favorite in Rome, I could tell immediately, though it was unlike any I’d seen so far. It was not carved of imperial marble, for starters. This was a small green, mossy, organic fountain. It was like a shaggy, leaking bush of ferns. (It looked, actually, exactly like the wild foliage growing out of the head of that praying figure which the old medicine man in Indonesia had drawn for me.) The water shot up out of the center of this flowering shrub, then rained back down on the leaves, making a melancholy, lovely sound throughout the whole courtyard.

I found a seat under an orange tree and opened one of the poetry books I’d purchased yesterday. Louise Glück. I read the first poem in Italian, then in English, and stopped short at this line:

Dal centro della mia vita venne una grande fontana . . .

“From the center of my life, there came a great fountain . . .”

I set the book down in my lap, shaking with relief.

13

Truthfully, I’m not the best traveler in the world.

I know this because I’ve traveled a lot and I’ve met people who are great at it. Real naturals. I’ve met travelers who are so physically sturdy they could drink a shoebox of water from a Calcutta gutter and never get sick. People who can pick up new languages where others of us might only pick up infectious diseases. People who know how to stand down a threatening border guard or cajole an uncooperative bureaucrat at the visa office. People who are the right height and complexion that they kind of look halfway normal wherever they go—in Turkey they just might be Turks, in Mexico they are suddenly Mexican, in Spain they could be mistaken for a Basque, in Northern Africa they can sometimes pass for Arab . . .

I don’t have these qualities. First off, I don’t blend. Tall and blond and pink-complexioned, I am less a chameleon than a flamingo. Everywhere I go but Dusseldorf, I stand out garishly. When I was in China, women used to come up to me on the street and point me out to their children as though I were some escaped zoo animal. And their children—who had never seen anything quite like this pink-faced yellow-headed phantom person—would often burst into tears at the sight of me. I really hated that about China.

I’m bad (or, rather, lazy) at researching a place before I travel, tending just to show up and see what happens. When you travel this way, what typically “happens” is that you end up spending a lot of time standing in the middle of the train station feeling confused, or dropping way too much money on hotels because you don’t know better. My shaky sense of direction and geography means I have explored six continents in my life with only the vaguest idea of where I am at any given time. Aside from my cockeyed internal compass, I also have a shortage of personal coolness, which can be a liability in travel. I have never learned how to arrange my face into that blank expression of competent invisibility that is so useful when traveling in dangerous, foreign places. You know—that super-relaxed, totally-in-charge expression which makes you look like you belong there, anywhere, everywhere, even in the middle of a riot in Jakarta. Oh, no. When I don’t know what I’m doing, I look like I don’t know what I’m doing. When I’m excited or nervous, I look excited or nervous. And when I am lost, which is frequently, I look lost. My face is a transparent transmitter of my every thought. As David once put it, “You have the opposite of poker face. You have, like . . . miniature golf face.”

And, oh, the woes that traveling has inflicted on my digestive tract! I don’t really want to open that (forgive the expression) can of worms, but suffice it to say I’ve experienced every extreme of digestive emergency. In Lebanon I became so explosively ill one night that I could only imagine I’d somehow contracted a Middle Eastern version of the Ebola virus. In Hungary, I suffered from an entirely different kind of bowel affliction, which changed forever the way I feel about the term “Soviet Bloc.” But I have other bodily weaknesses, too. My back gave out on my first day traveling in Africa, I was the only member of my party to emerge from the jungles of Venezuela with infected spider bites, and I ask you—I beg of you!— who gets sunburned in Stockholm?

Still, despite all this, traveling is the great true love of my life. I have always felt, ever since I was sixteen years old and first went to Russia with my saved-up babysitting money, that to travel is worth any cost or sacrifice. I am loyal and constant in my love for travel, as I have not always been loyal and constant in my other loves. I feel about travel the way a happy new mother feels about her impossible, colicky, restless newborn baby—I just don’t care what it puts me through. Because I adore it. Because it’s mine. Because it looks exactly like me. It can barf all over me if it wants to—I just don’t care.

Anyway, for a flamingo, I’m not completely helpless out there in the world. I have my own set of survival techniques. I am patient. I know how to pack light. I’m a fearless eater. But my one mighty travel talent is that I can make friends with anybody. I can make friends with the dead. I once made friends with a war criminal in Serbia, and he invited me to go on a mountain holiday with his family. Not that I’m proud to list Serbian mass murderers amongst my nearest and dearest (I had to befriend him for a story, and also so he wouldn’t punch me), but I’m just saying—I can do it. If there isn’t anyone else around to talk to, I could probably make friends with a four-foot-tall pile of Sheetrock. This is why I’m not afraid to travel to the most remote places in the world, not if there are human beings there to meet. People asked me before I left for Italy, “Do you have friends in Rome?” and I would just shake my head no, thinking to myself, But I will.

Mostly, you meet your friends when traveling by accident, like by sitting next to them on a train, or in a restaurant, or in a holding cell. But these are chance encounters, and you should never rely entirely on chance. For a more systematic approach, there is still the grand old system of the “letter of introduction” (today more likely to be an e-mail), presenting you formally to the acquaintance of an acquaintance. This is a terrific way to meet people, if you’re shameless enough to make the cold call and invite yourself over for dinner. So before I left for Italy, I asked everyone I knew in America if they had any friends in Rome, and I’m happy to report that I have been sent abroad with a substantial list of Italian contacts.

Among all the nominees on my Potential New Italian Friends List, I am most intrigued to meet a fellow named . . . brace yourself . . . Luca Spaghetti. Luca Spaghetti is a good friend of my buddy Patrick McDevitt, whom I know from my college days. And that is honestly his name, I swear to God, I’m not making it up. It’s too crazy. I mean—just think of it. Imagine going through life with a name like Patrick McDevitt?

Anyhow, I plan to get in touch with Luca Spaghetti just as soon as possible.

14

First, though, I must get settled into school. My classes begin today at the Leonardo da Vinci Academy of Language Studies, where I will be studying Italian five days a week, four hours a day. I’m so excited about school. I’m such a shameless student. I laid my clothes out last night, just like I did before my first day of first grade, with my patent leather shoes and my new lunch box. I hope the teacher will like me.

We all have to take a test on the first day at Leonardo da Vinci, in order to be placed in the proper level of Italian class for our abilities. When I hear this, I immediately start hoping I don’t place into a Level One class, because that would be humiliating, given that I already took a whole entire semester of Italian at my Night School for Divorced Ladies in New York, and that I spent the summer memorizing flash cards, and that I’ve already been in Rome a week, and have been practicing the language in person, even conversing with old grandmothers about divorce. The thing is, I don’t even know how many levels this school has, but as soon as I heard the word level, I decided that I must test into Level Two—at least.

So it’s hammering down rain today, and I show up to school early (like I always have—geek!) and I take the test. It’s such a hard test! I can’t get through even a tenth of it! I know so much Italian, I know dozens of words in Italian, but they don’t ask me anything that I know. Then there’s an oral exam, which is even worse. There’s this skinny Italian teacher interviewing me and speaking way too fast, in my opinion, and I should be doing so much better than this but I’m nervous and making mistakes with stuff I already know (like, why did I say Vado a scuola instead of Sono andata a scuola? I know that!).

In the end, it’s OK, though. The skinny Italian teacher looks over my exam and selects my class level:

Level TWO!

Classes begin in the afternoon. So I go eat lunch (roasted endive) then saunter back to the school and smugly walk past all those Level One students (who must be molto stupido, really) and enter my first class. With my peers. Except that it becomes swiftly evident that these are not my peers and that I have no business being here because Level Two is really impossibly hard. I feel like I’m swimming, but barely. Like I’m taking in water with every breath. The teacher, a skinny guy (why are the teachers so skinny here? I don’t trust skinny Italians), is going way too fast, skipping over whole chapters of the textbook, saying, “You already know this, you already know that . . .” and keeping up a rapid-fire conversation with my apparently fluent classmates. My stomach is gripped in horror and I’m gasping for air and praying he won’t call on me. Just as soon as the break comes, I run out of that classroom on wobbling legs and I scurry all the way over to the administrative office almost in tears, where I beg in very clear English if they could please move me down to a Level One class. And so they do. And now I am here.

This teacher is plump and speaks slowly. This is much better.

15

The interesting thing about my Italian class is that nobody really needs to be there. There are twelve of us studying together, of all ages, from all over the world, and everybody has come to Rome for the same reason—to study Italian just because they feel like it. Not one of us can identify a single practical reason for being here. Nobody’s boss has said to anyone, “It is vital that you learn to speak Italian in order for us to conduct our business overseas.” Everybody, even the uptight German engineer, shares what I thought was my own personal motive: we all want to speak Italian because we love the way it makes us feel. A sad-faced Russian woman tells us she’s treating herself to Italian lessons because “I think I deserve something beautiful.” The German engineer says, “I want Italian because I love the dolce vita”—the sweet life. (Only, in his stiff Germanic accent, it ends up sounding like he said he loved “the deutsche vita”— the German life—which I’m afraid he’s already had plenty of.)

As I will find out over the next few months, there are actually some good reasons that Italian is the most seductively beautiful language in the world, and why I’m not the only person who thinks so. To understand why, you have to first understand that Europe was once a pandemonium of numberless Latin-derived dialects that gradually, over the centuries, morphed into a few separate languages— French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian. What happened in France, Portugal and Spain was an organic evolution: the dialect of the most prominent city gradually became the accepted language of the whole region. Therefore, what we today call French is really a version of medieval Parisian. Portuguese is really Lisboan. Spanish is essentially Madrileño. These were capitalist victories; the strongest city ultimately determined the language of the whole country.

Italy was different. One critical difference was that, for the longest time, Italy wasn’t even a country. It didn’t get itself unified until quite late in life (1861) and until then was a peninsula of warring city-states dominated by proud local princes or other European powers. Parts of Italy belonged to France, parts to Spain, parts to the Church, parts to whoever could grab the local fortress or palace. The Italian people were alternatively humiliated and cavalier about all this domination. Most didn’t much like being colonized by their fellow Europeans, but there was always that apathetic crowd that said, “Franza o Spagna, purchè se magna,” which means, in dialect, “France or Spain, as long as I can eat.”

All this internal division meant that Italy never properly coalesced, and Italian didn’t either. So it’s not surprising that, for centuries, Italians wrote and spoke in local dialects that were mutually unfathomable. A scientist in Florence could barely communicate with a poet in Sicily or a merchant in Venice (except in Latin, of course, which was hardly considered the national language). In the sixteenth century, some Italian intellectuals got together and decided that this was absurd. This Italian peninsula needed an Italian language, at least in the written form, which everyone could agree upon. So this gathering of intellectuals proceeded to do something unprecedented in the history of Europe; they handpicked the most beautiful of all the local dialects and crowned it Italian.

In order to find the most beautiful dialect ever spoken in Italy, they had to reach back in time two hundred years to fourteenth-century Florence. What this congress decided would henceforth be considered proper Italian was the personal language of the great Florentine poet Dante Alighieri. When Dante published his Divine Comedy back in 1321, detailing a visionary progression through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, he’d shocked the literate world by not writing in Latin. He felt that Latin was a corrupted, elitist language, and that the use of it in serious prose had “turned literature into a harlot” by making universal narrative into something that could only be bought with money, through the privilege of an aristocratic education. Instead, Dante turned back to the streets, picking up the real Florentine language spoken by the residents of his city (who included such luminous contemporaries as Boccaccio and Petrarch) and using that language to tell his tale.

He wrote his masterpiece in what he called dolce stil nuovo, the “sweet new style” of the vernacular, and he shaped that vernacular even as he was writing it, affecting it as personally as Shakespeare would someday affect Elizabethan English. For a group of nationalist intellectuals much later in history to have sat down and decided that Dante’s Italian would now be the official language of Italy would be very much as if a group of Oxford dons had sat down one day in the early nineteenth century and decided that—from this point forward—everybody in England was going to speak pure Shakespeare. And it actually worked.

The Italian we speak today, therefore, is not Roman or Venetian (though these were the powerful military and merchant cities) nor even really entirely Florentine. Essentially, it is Dantean. No other European language has such an artistic pedigree. And perhaps no language was ever more perfectly ordained to express human emotions than this fourteenth-century Florentine Italian, as embellished by one of Western civilization’s greatest poets. Dante wrote his Divine Comedy in terza rima, triple rhyme, a chain of rhymes with each rhyme repeating three times every five lines, giving his pretty Florentine vernacular what scholars call “a cascading rhythm”—a rhythm which still lives in the tumbling, poetic cadences spoken by Italian cabdrivers and butchers and government administrators even today. The last line of the Divine Comedy, in which Dante is faced with the vision of God Himself, is a sentiment that is still easily understandable by anyone familiar with so-called modern Italian. Dante writes that God is not merely a blinding vision of glorious light, but that He is, most of all, l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle . . .

“The love that moves the sun and the other stars.”

So it’s really no wonder that I want so desperately to learn this language.

16

Depression and Loneliness track me down after about ten days in Italy. I am walking through the Villa Borghese one evening after a happy day spent in school, and the sun is setting gold over St. Peter’s Basilica. I am feeling contented in this romantic scene, even if I am all by myself, while everyone else in the park is either fondling a lover or playing with a laughing child. But I stop to lean against a balustrade and watch the sunset, and I get to thinking a little too much, and then my thinking turns to brooding, and that’s when they catch up with me.

They come upon me all silent and menacing like Pinkerton Detectives, and they flank me—Depression on my left, Loneliness on my right. They don’t need to show me their badges. I know these guys very well. We’ve been playing a cat-and-mouse game for years now. Though I admit that I am surprised to meet them in this elegant Italian garden at dusk. This is no place they belong.

I say to them, “How did you find me here? Who told you I had come to Rome?”

Depression, always the wise guy, says, “What—you’re not happy to see us?”

“Go away,” I tell him.

Loneliness, the more sensitive cop, says, “I’m sorry, ma’am. But I might have to tail you the whole time you’re traveling. It’s my assignment.”

“I’d really rather you didn’t,” I tell him, and he shrugs almost apologetically, but only moves closer.

Then they frisk me. They empty my pockets of any joy I had been carrying there. Depression even confiscates my identity; but he always does that. Then Loneliness starts interrogating me, which I dread because it always goes on for hours. He’s polite but relentless, and he always trips me up eventually. He asks if I have any reason to be happy that I know of. He asks why I am all by myself tonight, yet again. He asks (though we’ve been through this line of questioning hundreds of times already) why I can’t keep a relationship going, why I ruined my marriage, why I messed things up with David, why I messed things up with every man I’ve ever been with. He asks me where I was the night I turned thirty, and why things have gone so sour since then. He asks why I can’t get my act together, and why I’m not at home living in a nice house and raising nice children like any respectable woman my age should be. He asks why, exactly, I think I deserve a vacation in Rome when I’ve made such a rubble of my life. He asks me why I think that running away to Italy like a college kid will make me happy. He asks where I think I’ll end up in my old age, if I keep living this way.

I walk back home, hoping to shake them, but they keep following me, these two goons. Depression has a firm hand on my shoulder and Loneliness harangues me with his interrogation. I don’t even bother eating dinner; I don’t want them watching me. I don’t want to let them up the stairs to my apartment, either, but I know Depression, and he’s got a billy club, so there’s no stopping him from coming in if he decides that he wants to.

“It’s not fair for you to come here,” I tell Depression. “I paid you off already. I served my time back in New York.”

But he just gives me that dark smile, settles into my favorite chair, puts his feet on my table and lights a cigar, filling the place with his awful smoke. Loneliness watches and sighs, then climbs into my bed and pulls the covers over himself, fully dressed, shoes and all. He’s going to make me sleep with him again tonight, I just know it.

17

I’d stopped taking my medication only a few days earlier. It had just seemed crazy to be taking antidepressants in Italy. How could I be depressed here?

I’d never wanted to be on the medication in the first place. I’d fought taking it for so long, mainly because of a long list of personal objections (e.g.: Americans are overmedicated; we don’t know the long-term effects of this stuff yet on the human brain; it’s a crime that even American children are on antidepressants these days; we are treating the symptoms and not the causes of a national mental health emergency . . .). Still, during the last few years of my life, there was no question that I was in grave trouble and that this trouble was not lifting quickly. As my marriage dissolved and my drama with David evolved, I’d come to have all the symptoms of a major depression—loss of sleep, appetite and libido, uncontrollable weeping, chronic backaches and stomachaches, alienation and despair, trouble concentrating on work, inability to even get upset that the Republicans had just stolen a presidential election . . . it went on and on.

When you’re lost in those woods, it sometimes takes you a while to realize that you are lost. For the longest time, you can convince yourself that you’ve just wandered a few feet off the path, that you’ll find your way back to the trailhead any moment now. Then night falls again and again, and you still have no idea where you are, and it’s time to admit that you have bewildered yourself so far off the path that you don’t even know from which direction the sun rises anymore.

I took on my depression like it was the fight of my life, which, of course, it was. I became a student of my own depressed experience, trying to unthread its causes. What was the root of all this despair? Was it psychological? (Mom and Dad’s fault?) Was it just temporal, a “bad time” in my life? (When the divorce ends, will the depression end with it?) Was it genetic? (Melancholy, called by many names, has run through my family for generations, along with its sad bride, Alcoholism.) Was it cultural? (Is this just the fallout of a post-feminist American career girl trying to find balance in an increasingly stressful and alienating urban world?) Was it astrological? (Am I so sad because I’m a thin-skinned Cancer whose major signs are all ruled by unstable Gemini?) Was it artistic? (Don’t creative people always suffer from depression because we’re so supersensitive and special?) Was it evolutionary? (Do I carry in me the residual panic that comes after millennia of my species’ attempting to survive a brutal world?) Was it karmic? (Are all these spasms of grief just the consequences of bad behavior in previous lifetimes, the last obstacles before liberation?) Was it hormonal? Dietary? Philosophical? Seasonal? Environmental? Was I tapping into a universal yearning for God? Did I have a chemical imbalance? Or did I just need to get laid?

What a large number of factors constitute a single human being! How very many layers we operate on, and how very many influences we receive from our minds, our bodies, our histories, our families, our cities, our souls and our lunches! I came to feel that my depression was probably some ever-shifting assortment of all those factors, and probably also included some stuff I couldn’t name or claim. So I faced the fight at every level. I bought all those embarrassingly titled self-help books (always being certain to wrap up the books in the latest issue of Hustler, so that strangers wouldn’t know what I was really reading). I commenced to getting professional help with a therapist who was as kind as she was insightful. I prayed liked a novice nun. I stopped eating meat (for a short time, anyway) after someone told me that I was “eating the fear of the animal at the moment of its death.” Some spacey new age massage therapist told me I should wear orange-colored panties, to rebalance my sexual chakras, and, brother—I actually did it. I drank enough of that damn Saint-John’s-wort tea to cheer up whole a Russian gulag, to no noticeable effect. I exercised. I exposed myself to the uplifting arts and carefully protected myself from sad movies, books and songs (if anyone even mentioned the words Leonard and Cohen in the same sentence, I would have to leave the room).

I tried so hard to fight the endless sobbing. I remember asking myself one night, while I was curled up in the same old corner of my same old couch in tears yet again over the same old repetition of sorrowful thoughts, “Is there anything about this scene you can change, Liz?” And all I could think to do was stand up, while still sobbing, and try to balance on one foot in the middle of my living room. Just to prove that—while I couldn’t stop the tears or change my dismal interior dialogue—I was not yet totally out of control: at least I could cry hysterically while balanced on one foot. Hey, it was a start.

I crossed the street to walk in the sunshine. I leaned on my support network, cherishing my family and cultivating my most enlightening friendships. And when those officious women’s magazines kept telling me that my low self-esteem wasn’t helping depression matters at all, I got myself a pretty haircut, bought some fancy makeup and a nice dress. (When a friend complimented my new look, all I could say, grimly, was, “Operation Self-Esteem—Day Fucking One.”)

The last thing I tried, after about two years of fighting this sorrow, was medication. If I may impose my opinions here, I think it should always be the last thing you try. For me, the decision to go the route of “Vitamin P” happened after a night when I’d sat on the floor of my bedroom for many hours, trying very hard to talk myself out of cutting into my arm with a kitchen knife. I won the argument against the knife that night, but barely. I had some other good ideas around that time—about how jumping off a building or blowing my brains out with a gun might stop the suffering. But something about spending a night with a knife in my hand did it.

The next morning I called my friend Susan as the sun came up, begged her to help me. I don’t think a woman in the whole history of my family had ever done that before, had ever sat down in the middle of the road like that and said, in the middle of her life, “I cannot walk another step further—somebody has to help me.” It wouldn’t have served those women to have stopped walking. Nobody would have, or could have, helped them. The only thing that would’ve happened was that they and their families would have starved. I couldn’t stop thinking about those women.

And I will never forget Susan’s face when she rushed into my apartment about an hour after my emergency phone call and saw me in a heap on the couch. The image of my pain mirrored back at me through her visible fear for my life is still one of the scariest memories for me out of all those scary years. I huddled in a ball while Susan made the phone calls and found me a psychiatrist who would give me a consultation that very day, to discuss the possibility of prescribing antidepressants. I listened to Susan’s one-sided conversation with the doctor, listened to her say, “I’m afraid my friend is going to seriously hurt herself.” I was afraid, too.

When I went to see the psychiatrist that afternoon, he asked me what had taken me so long to get help—as if I hadn’t been trying to help myself already for so long. I told him my objections and reservations about antidepressants. I laid copies of the three books I’d already published on his desk, and I said, “I’m a writer. Please don’t do anything to harm my brain.” He said, “If you had a kidney disease, you wouldn’t hesitate to take medication for it—why are you hesitating with this?” But, see, that only shows how ignorant he was about my family; a Gilbert might very well not medicate a kidney disease, seeing that we’re a family who regard any sickness as a sign of personal, ethical, moral failure.

He put me on a few different drugs—Xanax, Zoloft, Wellbutrin, Busperin—until we found the combination that didn’t make me nauseated or turn my libido into a dim and distant memory. Quickly, in less than a week, I could feel an extra inch of daylight opening in my mind. Also, I could finally sleep. And this was the real gift, because when you cannot sleep, you cannot get yourself out of the ditch—there’s not a chance. The pills gave me those recuperative night hours back, and also stopped my hands from shaking and released the vise grip around my chest and the panic alert button from inside my heart.

Still, I never relaxed into taking those drugs, though they helped immediately. It never mattered who told me these medications were a good idea and perfectly safe; I always felt conflicted about it. Those drugs were part of my bridge to the other side, there’s no question about it, but I wanted to be off them as soon as possible. I’d started taking the medication in January of 2003. By May, I was already diminishing my dosage significantly. Those had been the toughest months, anyhow—the last months of the divorce, the last ragged months with David. Could I have endured that time without the drugs, if I’d just held out a little longer? Could I have survived myself, by myself? I don’t know. That’s the thing about a human life—there’s no control group, no way to ever know how any of us would have turned out if any variables had been changed.

I do know these drugs made my misery feel less catastrophic. So I’m grateful for that. But I’m still deeply ambivalent about mood-altering medications. I’m awed by their power, but concerned by their prevalence. I think they need to be prescribed and used with much more restraint in this country, and never without the parallel treatment of psychological counseling. Medicating the symptom of any illness without exploring its root cause is just a classically harebrained Western way to think that anyone could ever get truly better. Those pills might have saved my life, but they did so only in conjunction with about twenty other efforts I was making simultaneously during that same period to rescue myself, and I hope to never have to take such drugs again. Though one doctor did suggest that I might have to go on and off antidepressants many times in my life because of my “tendency toward melancholy.” I hope to God he’s wrong. I intend to do everything I can to prove him wrong, or at least to fight that melancholic tendency with every tool in the shed. Whether this makes me self-defeatingly stubborn, or self-preservingly stubborn, I cannot say.

But there I am.

18

Or, rather—here I am. I am in Rome, and I am in trouble. The goons of Depression and Loneliness have barged into my life again, and I just took my last Wellbutrin three days ago. There are more pills in my bottom drawer, but I don’t want them. I want to be free of them forever. But I don’t want Depression or Loneliness around, either, so I don’t know what to do, and I’m spiraling in panic, like I always spiral when I don’t know what to do. So what I do for tonight is reach for my most private notebook, which I keep next to my bed in case I’m ever in emergency trouble. I open it up. I find the first blank page. I write:

“I need your help.”

Then I wait. After a little while, a response comes, in my own handwriting:

I’m right here. What can I do for you?

And here recommences my strangest and most secret conversation. Here, in this most private notebook, is where I talk to myself. I talk to that same voice I met that night on my bathroom floor when I first prayed to God in tears for help, when something (or somebody) had said, “Go back to bed, Liz.” In the years since then, I’ve found that voice again in times of code-orange distress, and have learned that the best way for me to reach it is written conversation. I’ve been surprised to find that I can almost always access that voice, too, no matter how black my anguish may be. Even during the worst of suffering, that calm, compassionate, affectionate and infinitely wise voice (who is maybe me, or maybe not exactly me) is always available for a conversation on paper at any time of day or night.

I’ve decided to let myself off the hook from worrying that conversing with myself on paper means I’m a schizo. Maybe the voice I am reaching for is God, or maybe it’s my Guru speaking through me, or maybe it’s the angel who was assigned to my case, or maybe it’s my Highest Self, or maybe it is indeed just a construct of my subconscious, invented in order to protect me from my own torment. Saint Teresa called such divine internal voices “locutions”— words from the supernatural that enter the mind spontaneously, translated into your own language and offering you heavenly consolation. I do know what Freud would have said about such spiritual consolations, of course—that they are irrational and “deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is no nursery.” I agree—the world isn’t a nursery. But the very fact that this world is so challenging is exactly why you sometimes must reach out of its jurisdiction for help, appealing to a higher authority in order to find your comfort.

At the beginning of my spiritual experiment, I didn’t always have such faith in this internal voice of wisdom. I remember once reaching for my private notebook in a bitter fury of rage and sorrow, and scrawling a message to my inner voice—to my divine interior comfort—that took up an entire page of capital letters:

“I DO NOT FUCKING BELIEVE IN YOU!!!!!!!!”

After a moment, still breathing heavily, I felt a clear pinpoint of light ignite within me, and then I found myself writing this amused and ever-calm reply:

Who are you talking to, then?

I haven’t doubted its existence again since. So tonight I reach for that voice again. This is the first time I’ve done this since I came to Italy. What I write in my journal tonight is that I am weak and full of fear. I explain that Depression and Loneliness have shown up, and I’m scared they will never leave. I say that I don’t want to take the drugs anymore, but I’m frightened I will have to. I’m terrified that I will never really pull my life together.

In response, somewhere from within me, rises a now-familiar presence, offering me all the certainties I have always wished another person would say to me when I was troubled. This is what I find myself writing to myself on the page:

I’m here. I love you. I don’t care if you need to stay up crying all night long, I will stay with you. If you need the medication again, go ahead and take it—I will love you through that, as well. If you don’t need the medication, I will love you, too. There’s nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I will protect you until you die, and after your death I will still protect you. I am stronger than Depression and I am braver than Loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me.

Tonight, this strange interior gesture of friendship—the lending of a hand from me to myself when nobody else is around to offer solace—reminds me of something that happened to me once in New York City. I walked into an office building one afternoon in hurry, dashed into the waiting elevator. As I rushed in, I caught an unexpected glimpse of myself in a security mirror’s reflection. In that moment my brain did an odd thing—it fired off this split-second message: “Hey! You know her! That’s a friend of yours!” And I actually ran forward toward my own reflection with a smile, ready to welcome that girl whose name I had lost but whose face was so familiar. In a flash instant, of course, I realized my mistake and laughed in embarrassment at my almost doglike confusion over how a mirror works. But for some reason that incident comes to mind again tonight during my sadness in Rome, and I find myself writing this comforting reminder at the bottom of the page:

Never forget that once upon a time, in an unguarded moment, you recognized yourself as a friend.

I fall asleep holding my notebook pressed against my chest, open to this most recent assurance. In the morning when I wake up, I can still smell a faint trace of Depression’s lingering smoke, but he himself is nowhere to be seen. Somewhere during the night, he got up and left. And his buddy Loneliness beat it, too.

19

Here’s what’s strange, though. I haven’t seemed to be able to do any Yoga since getting to Rome. For years I’ve had a steady and serious practice, and I even brought my Yoga mat with me, along with my best intentions. But it just isn’t happening here. I mean, when am I going to do my Yoga stretches? Before my Italian speed-ball breakfast of chocolate pastries and double cappuccino? Or after? The first few days I was here, I would gamely roll out my Yoga mat every morning, but found I could only look at it and laugh. Once I even said aloud to myself, in the character of the Yoga mat: “OK, little Miss Penne ai Quattro Formaggi . . . let’s see what you got today.” Abashed, I stashed the Yoga mat away in the bottom of my suitcase (never to be unrolled again, it would turn out, until India). Then I went for a walk and ate some pistachio gelato. Which Italians consider a perfectly reasonable thing to be eating at 9:30 am, and I frankly could not agree with them more.

The culture of Rome just doesn’t match the culture of Yoga, not as far as I can see. In fact, I’ve decided that Rome and Yoga don’t have anything in common at all. Except for the way they both kind of remind you of the word toga.

20

I needed to make some friends. So I got busy with it, and now it is October and I have a nice assortment of them. I know two Elizabeths in Rome now, besides myself. Both are American, both are writers. The first Elizabeth is a novelist and the second Elizabeth is a food writer. With an apartment in Rome, a house in Umbria, an Italian husband and a job that requires her to travel around Italy eating food and writing about it for Gourmet, it appears that the second Elizabeth must have saved a lot of orphans from drowning during a previous lifetime. Unsurprisingly, she knows all the best places to eat in Rome, including a gelateria that serves a frozen rice pudding (and if they don’t serve this kind of thing in heaven, then I really don’t want to go there). She took me out to lunch the other day, and what we ate included not only lamb and truffles and carpaccio rolled around hazelnut mousse but an exotic little serving of pickled lampascione, which is—as everyone knows— the bulb of the wild hyacinth.

Of course, by now I’ve also made friends with Giovanni and Dario, my Tandem Language Exchange fantasy twins. Giovanni’s sweetness, in my opinion, makes him a national treasure of Italy. He endeared himself to me forever the first night we met, when I was getting frustrated with my inability to find the words I wanted in Italian, and he put his hand on my arm and said, “Liz, you must be very polite with yourself when you are learning something new.” Sometimes I feel like he’s older than me, what with his solemn brow and his philosophy degree and his serious political opinions. I like to try to make him laugh, but Giovanni doesn’t always get my jokes. Humor is hard to catch in a second language. Especially when you’re as serious a young man as Giovanni. He said to me the other night, “When you are ironic, I am always behind you. I am slower. It is like you are the lightning and I am the thunder.”

And I thought, Yeah, baby! And you are the magnet and I am the steel! Bring to me your leather, take from me my lace!

But still, he has not kissed me.

I don’t very often see Dario, the other twin, though he does spend a lot of his time with Sofie. Sofie is my best friend from my language class, and she’s definitely somebody you’d want to spend your time with, too, if you were Dario. Sofie is Swedish and in her late twenties and so damn cute you could put her on a hook and use her as bait to catch men of all different nationalities and ages. Sofie has just taken a four-month leave of absence from her good job in a Swedish bank, much to the horror of her family and bewilderment of her colleagues, only because she wanted to come to Rome and learn how to speak beautiful Italian. Every day after class, Sofie and I go sit by the Tiber, eating our gelato and studying with each other. You can’t even rightly call it “studying,” the thing that we do. It’s more like a shared relishing of the Italian language, an almost worshipful ritual, and we’re always offering each other new wonderful idioms. Like, for instance, we just learned the other day that un’amica stretta means “a close friend.” But stretta literally means tight, as in clothing, like a tight skirt. So a close friend, in Italian, is one you that can wear tightly, snug against your skin, and that is what my little Swedish friend Sofie is becoming to me.

At the beginning, I liked to think that Sofie and I looked like sisters. Then we were taking a taxi through Rome the other day and the guy driving the cab asked if Sofie was my daughter. Now, folks—the girl is only about seven years younger than I am. My mind went into such a spin-control mode, trying to explain away what he’d said. (For instance, I thought, Maybe this native Roman cabdriver doesn’t speak Italian very well, and meant to ask if we were sisters.) But, no. He said daughter and he meant daughter. Oh, what can I say? I’ve been through a lot in the last few years. I must look so beat-up and old after this divorce. But as that old country-western song out of Texas goes, “I’ve been screwed and sued and tattooed, and I’m still standin’ here in front of you . . .”

I’ve also become friends with a cool couple named Maria and Giulio, introduced to me by my friend Anne—an American painter who lived in Rome a few years back. Maria is from America, Giulio’s from the south of Italy. He’s a filmmaker, she works for an international agricultural policy organization. He doesn’t speak great English, but she speaks fluent Italian (and also fluent French and Chinese, so that’s not intimidating). Giulio wants to learn English, and asked if he could practice conversing with me in another Tandem Exchange. In case you’re wondering why he couldn’t just study English with his American-born wife, it’s because they’re married and they fight too much whenever one tries to teach anything to the other one. So Giulio and I now meet for lunch twice a week to practice our Italian and English; a good task for two people who don’t have any history of irritating each other.

Giulio and Maria have a beautiful apartment, the most impressive feature of which is, to my mind, the wall that Maria once covered with angry curses against Giulio (scrawled in thick black magic marker) because they were having an argument and “he yells louder than me” and she wanted to get a word in edgewise.

I think Maria is terrifically sexy, and this burst of passionate graffiti is only further evidence of it. Interestingly, though, Giulio sees the scrawled-upon wall as a sure sign of Maria’s repression, because she wrote her curses against him in Italian, and Italian is her second language, a language she has to think about for a moment before she can choose her words. He said if Maria had truly allowed herself to be overcome by anger—which she never does, because she’s a good Anglo-Protestant—then she would have written all over that wall in her native English. He says all Americans are like this: repressed. Which makes them dangerous and potentially deadly when they do blow up.

“A savage people,” he diagnoses.

What I love is that we all had this conversation over a nice relaxed dinner, while looking at the wall itself.

“More wine, honey?” asked Maria.

But my newest best friend in Italy is, of course, Luca Spaghetti. Even in Italy, by the way, it’s considered a very funny thing to have a last name like Spaghetti. I’m grateful for Luca because he has finally allowed me to get even with my friend Brian, who was lucky enough to have grown up next door to a Native American kid named Dennis Ha-Ha, and therefore could always boast that he had the friend with the coolest name. Finally, I can offer competition.

Luca also speaks perfect English and is a good eater (in Italian, una buona forchetta—a good fork), so he’s terrific company for the hungry likes of me. He often calls in the middle of the day to say, “Hey, I’m in your neighborhood—want to meet up for a quick cup of coffee? Or a plate of oxtail?” We spend a lot of time in these dirty little dives in the back streets of Rome. We like the restaurants with the fluorescent lighting and no name listed outside. Plastic red-checkered tablecloths. Homemade limoncello liqueur. Homemade red wine. Pasta served in unbelievable quantities by what Luca calls “little Julius Caesars”—proud, pushy, local guys with hair on the backs of their hands and passionately tended pompadours. I once said to Luca, “It seems to me these guys consider themselves Romans first, Italians second and Europeans third.” He corrected me. “No—they are Romans first, Romans second and Romans third. And every one of them is an Emperor.”

Luca is a tax accountant. An Italian tax accountant, which means that he is, in his own description, “an artist,” because there are several hundred tax laws on the books in Italy and all of them contradict each other. So filing a tax return here requires jazzlike improvisation. I think it’s funny that he’s a tax accountant, because it seems like such stiff work for such a lighthearted guy. On the other hand, Luca thinks it’s funny that there’s another side of me— this Yoga side—that he’s never seen. He can’t imagine why I would want to go to India—and to an Ashram, of all places!—when I could just stay in Italy all year, which is obviously where I belong. Whenever he watches me sopping up the leftover gravy from my plate with a hunk of bread and then licking my fingers, he says, “What are you going to eat when you go to India?” Sometimes he calls me Gandhi, in a most ironic tone, generally when I’m opening the second bottle of wine.

Luca has traveled a fair amount, though he claims he could never live anywhere but in Rome, near his mother, since he is an Italian man, after all—what can he say? But it’s not just his mamma who keeps him around. He’s in his early thirties, and has had the same girlfriend since he was a teenager (the lovely Giuliana, whom Luca describes fondly and aptly as acqua e sapone—“soap and water” in her sweet innocence). All his friends are the same friends he’s had since childhood, and all from the same neighborhood. They watch the soccer matches together every Sunday—either at the stadium or in a bar (if the Roman teams are playing away)—and then they all return separately to the homes where they grew up, in order to eat the big Sunday afternoon meals cooked by their respective mothers and grandmothers.

I wouldn’t move from Rome, either, if I were Luca Spaghetti.

Luca has visited America a few times, though, and likes it. He finds New York City fascinating but thinks that people work too hard there, though he admits they seem to enjoy it. Whereas Romans work hard and resent it massively. What Luca Spaghetti doesn’t like is American food, which he says can be described in two words: “Amtrak Pizza.”

I was with Luca the first time I ever tried eating the intestines of a newborn lamb. This is a Roman specialty. Food-wise, Rome is actually a pretty rough town, known for its coarse traditional fare like guts and tongues—all the parts of the animal the rich people up north throw away. My lamb intestines tasted OK, as long as I didn’t think too much about what they were. They were served in a heavy, buttery, savory gravy that itself was terrific, but the intestines had a kind of . . . well . . . intestinal consistency. Kind of like liver, but mushier. I did well with them until I started trying to think how I would describe this dish, and I thought, It doesn’t look like intestines. It actually looks like tapeworms. Then I pushed it aside and asked for a salad.

“You don’t like it?” asked Luca, who loves the stuff.

“I bet Gandhi never ate lamb intestines in his life,” I said.

“He could have.”

“No, he couldn’t have, Luca. Gandhi was a vegetarian.”

“But vegetarians can eat this,” Luca insisted. “Because intestines aren’t even meat, Liz. They’re just shit.”

21

Sometimes I wonder what I’m doing here, I admit it.

While I have come to Italy in order to experience pleasure, during the first few weeks I was here, I felt a bit of panic as to how one should do that. Frankly, pure pleasure is not my cultural paradigm. I come from a long line of superconscientious people. My mother’s family were Swedish immigrant farmers, who look in their photographs like, if they’d ever even seen something pleasurable, they might have stomped on it with their hobnailed boots. (My uncle calls the whole lot of them “oxen.”) My father’s side of the family were English Puritans, those great goofy lovers of fun. If I look on my dad’s family tree all the way back to the seventeenth century, I can actually find Puritan relatives with names like Diligence and Meekness.

My own parents have a small farm, and my sister and I grew up working. We were taught to be dependable, responsible, the top of our classes at school, the most organized and efficient babysitters in town, the very miniature models of our hardworking farmer/nurse of a mother, a pair of junior Swiss Army knives, born to multitask. We had a lot of enjoyment in my family, a lot of laughter, but the walls were papered with to-do lists and I never experienced or witnessed idleness, not once in my whole entire life.

Generally speaking, though, Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure. Ours is an entertainment-seeking nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one. Americans spend billions to keep themselves amused with everything from porn to theme parks to wars, but that’s not exactly the same thing as quiet enjoyment. Americans work harder and longer and more stressful hours than anyone in the world today. But as Luca Spaghetti pointed out, we seem to like it. Alarming statistics back this observation up, showing that many Americans feel more happy and fulfilled in their offices than they do in their own homes. Of course, we all inevitably work too hard, then we get burned out and have to spend the whole weekend in our pajamas, eating cereal straight out of the box and staring at the TV in a mild coma (which is the opposite of working, yes, but not exactly the same thing as pleasure). Americans don’t really know how to do nothing. This is the cause of that great sad American stereotype—the overstressed executive who goes on vacation, but who cannot relax.

I once asked Luca Spaghetti if Italians on vacation have that same problem. He laughed so hard he almost drove his motorbike into a fountain.

“Oh, no!” he said. “We are the masters of bel far niente.”

This is a sweet expression. Bel far niente means “the beauty of doing nothing.” Now listen—Italians have traditionally always been hard workers, especially those long-suffering laborers known as braccianti (so called because they had nothing but the brute strength of their arms—braccie—to help them survive in this world). But even against that backdrop of hard work, bel far niente has always been a cherished Italian ideal. The beauty of doing nothing is the goal of all your work, the final accomplishment for which you are most highly congratulated. The more exquisitely and delightfully you can do nothing, the higher your life’s achievement. You don’t necessarily need to be rich in order to experience this, either. There’s another wonderful Italian expression: l’arte d’arrangiarsi—the art of making something out of nothing. The art of turning a few simple ingredients into a feast, or a few gathered friends into a festival. Anyone with a talent for happiness can do this, not only the rich.

For me, though, a major obstacle in my pursuit of pleasure was my ingrained sense of Puritan guilt. Do I really deserve this pleasure? This is very American, too—the insecurity about whether we have earned our happiness. Planet Advertising in America orbits completely around the need to convince the uncertain consumer that yes, you have actually warranted a special treat. This Bud’s for You! You Deserve a Break Today! Because You’re Worth It! You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby! And the insecure consumer thinks, Yeah! Thanks! I am gonna go buy a six-pack, damn it! Maybe even two six-packs! And then comes the reactionary binge. Followed by the remorse. Such advertising campaigns would probably not be as effective in the Italian culture, where people already know that they are entitled to enjoyment in this life. The reply in Italy to “You Deserve a Break Today” would probably be, Yeah, no duh. That’s why I’m planning on taking a break at noon, to go over to your house and sleep with your wife.

Which is probably why, when I told my Italian friends that I’d come to their country in order to experience four months of pure pleasure, they didn’t have any hang-ups about it. Complimenti! Vai avanti! Congratulations, they would say. Go ahead. Knock yourself out. Be our guest. Nobody once said, “How completely irresponsible of you,” or “What a self-indulgent luxury.” But while the Italians have given me full permission to enjoy myself, I still can’t quite let go. During my first few weeks in Italy, all my Protestant synapses were zinging in distress, looking for a task. I wanted to take on pleasure like a homework assignment, or a giant science fair project. I pondered such questions as, “How is pleasure most efficiently maximized?” I wondered if maybe I should spend all my time in Italy in the library, doing research on the history of pleasure. Or maybe I should interview Italians who’ve experienced a lot of pleasure in their lives, asking them what their pleasures feel like, and then writing a report on this topic. (Double-spaced and with one-inch margins, perhaps? To be turned in first thing Monday morning?)

When I realized that the only question at hand was, “How do I define pleasure?” and that I was truly in a country where people would permit me to explore that question freely, everything changed. Everything became . . . delicious. All I had to do was ask myself every day, for the first time in my life, “What would you enjoy doing today, Liz? What would bring you pleasure right now?” With nobody else’s agenda to consider and no other obligations to worry about, this question finally became distilled and absolutely self-specific.

It was interesting for me to discover what I did not want to do in Italy, once I’d given myself executive authorization to enjoy my experience there. There are so many manifestations of pleasure in Italy, and I didn’t have time to sample them all. You have to kind of declare a pleasure major here, or you’ll get overwhelmed. That being the case, I didn’t get into fashion, or opera, or cinema, or fancy automobiles, or skiing in the Alps. I didn’t even want to look at that much art. I am a bit ashamed to admit this, but I did not visit a single museum during my entire four months in Italy. (Oh, man—it’s even worse than that. I have to confess that I did go to one museum: the National Museum of Pasta, in Rome.) I found that all I really wanted was to eat beautiful food and to speak as much beautiful Italian as possible. That was it. So I declared a double major, really—in speaking and in eating (with a concentration on gelato).

The amount of pleasure this eating and speaking brought to me was inestimable, and yet so simple. I passed a few hours once in the middle of October that might look like nothing much to the outside observer, but which I will always count amongst the happiest of my life. I found a market near my apartment, only a few streets over from me, which I’d somehow never noticed before. There I approached a tiny vegetable stall with one Italian woman and her son selling a choice assortment of their produce—such as rich, almost algae-green leaves of spinach, tomatoes so red and bloody they looked like a cow’s organs, and champagne-colored grapes with skins as tight as a showgirl’s leotard.

I selected a bunch of thin, bright asparagus. I was able to ask the woman, in comfortable Italian, if I could possibly just take half this asparagus home? There was only one of me, I explained to her—I didn’t need much. She promptly took the asparagus from my hands and halved it. I asked her if I could find this market every day in the same place, and she said, yes, she was here every day, from 7:00 AM. Then her son, who was very cute, gave me a sly look and said, “Well, she tries to be here at seven . . .” We all laughed. This whole conversation was conducted in Italian—a language I could not speak a word of only a few months earlier.

I walked home to my apartment and soft-boiled a pair of fresh brown eggs for my lunch. I peeled the eggs and arranged them on a plate beside the seven stalks of the asparagus (which were so slim and snappy they didn’t need to be cooked at all). I put some olives on the plate, too, and the four knobs of goat cheese I’d picked up yesterday from the formaggeria down the street, and two slices of pink, oily salmon. For dessert—a lovely peach, which the woman at the market had given to me for free and which was still warm from the Roman sunlight. For the longest time I couldn’t even touch this food because it was such a masterpiece of lunch, a true expression of the art of making something out of nothing. Finally, when I had fully absorbed the prettiness of my meal, I went and sat in a patch of sunbeam on my clean wooden floor and ate every bite of it, with my fingers, while reading my daily newspaper article in Italian. Happiness inhabited my every molecule.

Until—as often happened during those first months of travel, whenever I would feel such happiness—my guilt alarm went off. I heard my ex-husband’s voice speaking disdainfully in my ear: So this is what you gave up everything for? This is why you gutted our entire life together? For a few stalks of asparagus and an Italian newspaper?

I replied aloud to him. “First of all,” I said, “I’m very sorry, but this isn’t your business anymore. And secondly, to answer your question . . . yes.”

22

One obvious topic still needs to be addressed concerning my whole pursuit of pleasure thing in Italy: What about sex?

To answer that question simply: I don’t want to have any while I’m here.

To answer it more thoroughly and honestly—of course, sometimes I do desperately want to have some, but I’ve decided to sit this particular game out for a while. I don’t want to get involved with anybody. Of course I do miss being kissed because I love kissing. (I complain about this so much to Sofie that the other day she finally said in exasperation, “For God’s sake, Liz—if it gets bad enough, I’ll kiss you.”) But I’m not going to do anything about it for now. When I get lonely these days, I think: So be lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person’s body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.

It’s a kind of emergency life-saving policy, more than anything else. I got started early in life with the pursuit of sexual and romantic pleasure. I barely had an adolescence before I had my first boyfriend, and I have consistently had a boy or a man (or sometimes both) in my life ever since I was fifteen years old. That was—oh, let’s see—about nineteen years ago, now. That’s almost two solid decades I have been entwined in some kind of drama with some kind of guy. Each overlapping the next, with never so much as a week’s breather in between. And I can’t help but think that’s been something of a liability on my path to maturity.

Moreover, I have boundary issues with men. Or maybe that’s not fair to say. To have issues with boundaries, one must have boundaries in the first place, right? But I disappear into the person I love. I am the permeable membrane. If I love you, you can have everything. You can have my time, my devotion, my ass, my money, my family, my dog, my dog’s money, my dog’s time— everything. If I love you, I will carry for you all your pain, I will assume for you all your debts (in every definition of the word), I will protect you from your own insecurity, I will project upon you all sorts of good qualities that you have never actually cultivated in yourself and I will buy Christmas presents for your entire family. I will give you the sun and the rain, and if they are not available, I will give you a sun check and a rain check. I will give you all this and more, until I get so exhausted and depleted that the only way I can recover my energy is by becoming infatuated with someone else.

I do not relay these facts about myself with pride, but this is how it’s always been.

Some time after I’d left my husband, I was at a party and a guy I barely knew said to me, “You know, you seem like a completely different person, now that you’re with this new boyfriend. You used to look like your husband, but now you look like David. You even dress like him and talk like him. You know how some people look like their dogs? I think maybe you always look like your men.”

Dear God, I could use a little break from this cycle, to give myself some space to discover what I look like and talk like when I’m not trying to merge with someone. And also, let’s be honest—it might be a generous public service for me to leave intimacy alone for a while. When I scan back on my romantic record, it doesn’t look so good. It’s been one catastrophe after another. How many more different types of men can I keep trying to love, and continue to fail? Think of it this way—if you’d had ten serious traffic accidents in a row, wouldn’t they eventually take your driver’s license away? Wouldn’t you kind of want them to?

There’s a final reason I’m hesitant to get involved with someone else. I still happen to be in love with David, and I don’t think that’s fair to the next guy. I don’t even know if David and I are totally broken up yet. We were still hanging around each other a lot before I left for Italy, though we hadn’t slept together in a long time. But we were still admitting that we both harbored hopes that maybe someday . . .

I don’t know.

This much I do know—I’m exhausted by the cumulative consequences of a lifetime of hasty choices and chaotic passions. By the time I left for Italy, my body and my spirit were depleted. I felt like the soil on some desperate sharecropper’s farm, sorely overworked and needing a fallow season. So that’s why I’ve quit.

Believe me, I am conscious of the irony of going to Italy in pursuit of pleasure during a period of self-imposed celibacy. But I do think abstinence is the right thing for me at the moment. I was especially sure of it the night I could hear my upstairs neighbor (a very pretty Italian girl with an amazing collection of high-heeled boots) having the longest, loudest, flesh-smackingest, bed-thumpingest, back-breakingest session of lovemaking I’d ever heard, in the company of the latest lucky visitor to her apartment. This slam-dance went on for well over an hour, complete with hyperventilating sound effects and wild animal calls. I lay there only one floor below them, alone and tired in my bed, and all I could think was, That sounds like an awful lot of work . . .

Of course sometimes I really do become overcome with lust. I walk past an average of about a dozen Italian men a day whom I could easily imagine in my bed. Or in theirs. Or wherever. To my taste, the men in Rome are ridiculously, hurtfully, stupidly beautiful. More beautiful even than Roman women, to be honest. Italian men are beautiful in the same way as French women, which is to say—no detail spared in the quest for perfection. They’re like show poodles. Sometimes they look so good I want to applaud. The men here, in their beauty, force me to call upon romance novel rhapsodies in order to describe them. They are “devilishly attractive,” or “cruelly handsome,” or “surprisingly muscular.”

However, if I may admit something not entirely flattering to myself, these Romans on the street aren’t really giving me any second looks. Or even many first looks, for that matter. I found this kind of alarming at first. I’d been to Italy once before, back when I was nineteen, and what I remember is being constantly harassed by men on the street. And in the pizzerias. And at the movies. And in the Vatican. It was endless and awful. It used to be a real liability about traveling in Italy, something that could almost even spoil your appetite. Now, at the age of thirty-four, I am apparently invisible. Sure, sometimes a man will speak to me in a friendly way, “You look beautiful today, signorina,” but it’s not all that common and it never gets aggressive. And while it’s certainly nice, of course, to not get pawed by a disgusting stranger on the bus, one does have one’s feminine pride, and one must wonder, What has changed here? Is it me? Or is it them?

So I ask around, and everybody agrees that, yes, there’s been a true shift in Italy in the last ten to fifteen years. Maybe it’s a victory of feminism, or an evolution of culture, or the inevitable modernizing effects of having joined the European Union. Or maybe it’s just simple embarrassment on the part of young men about the infamous lewdness of their fathers and grandfathers. Whatever the cause, though, it seems that Italy has decided as a society that this sort of stalking, pestering behavior toward women is no longer acceptable. Not even my lovely young friend Sofie gets harassed on the streets, and those milkmaid-looking Swedish girls used to really get the worst of it.

In conclusion—it seems Italian men have earned themselves the Most Improved Award.

Which is a relief, because for a while there I was afraid it was me. I mean, I was afraid maybe I wasn’t getting any attention because I was no longer nineteen years old and pretty. I was afraid that maybe my friend Scott was correct last summer when he said, “Ah, don’t worry, Liz—those Italian guys won’t bother you anymore. It ain’t like France, where they dig the old babes.”

23

Yesterday afternoon I went to the soccer game with Luca Spaghetti and his friends. We were there to watch Lazio play. There are two soccer teams in Rome—Lazio and Roma. The rivalry between the teams and their fans is immense, and can divide otherwise happy families and peaceful neighborhoods into civil war zones. It’s important that you choose early in life whether you are a Lazio fan or a Roma fan, because this will determine, to a large part, whom you hang out with every Sunday afternoon for the rest of time.

Luca has a group of about ten close friends who all love each other like brothers. Except that half of them are Lazio fans and half of them are Roma fans. They can’t really help it; they were all born into families where the loyalty was already established. Luca’s grandfather (who I hope is known as Nonno Spaghetti) gave him his first sky-blue Lazio jersey when the boy was just a toddler. Luca, likewise, will be a Lazio fan until he dies.

“We can change our wives,” he said. “We can change our jobs, our nationalities and even our religions, but we can never change our team.”

By the way, the word for “fan” in Italian is tifoso. Derived from the word for typhus. In other words—one who is mightily fevered.

My first soccer game with Luca Spaghetti was, for me, a delirious banquet of Italian language. I learned all sorts of new and interesting words in that stadium which they don’t teach you in school. There was an old man sitting behind me, stringing together such a gorgeous flower-chain of curses as he screamed down at the players on the field. I don’t know all that much about soccer, but I sure didn’t waste any time asking Luca inane questions about what was going on in the game. All I kept demanding was, “Luca, what did the guy behind me just say? What does cafone mean?” And Luca— never taking his eyes from the field—would reply, “Asshole. It means asshole.”

I would write it down. Then shut my eyes and listen to some more of the old man’s rant, which went something like:

Dai, dai, dai, Albertini, dai . . . va bene, va bene, ragazzo mio, perfetto, bravo, bravo . . . Dai! Dai! Via! Via! Nella porta! Eccola, eccola, eccola, mio bravo ragazzo, caro mio, eccola, eccola, ecco—AAAHHH-HHHHHH!!! VAFFANCULO!!! FIGLIO DI MIGNOTTA!! STRONZO! CAFONE! TRADI-TORE! Madonna . . . Ah, Dio mio, perché, perché, perché, questo è stupido, è una vergogna, la vergogna . . . Che casino, che bordello . . . NON HAI UN CUORE, ALBERTINI! FAI FINTA! Guarda, non è successo niente . . . Dai, dai, ah. . . . Molto migliore, Albertini, molto migliore, sì sì sì, eccola, bello, bravo, anima mia, ah, ottimo, eccola adesso . . . nella porta, nella porta, nell—VAFFANCULO!!!!!!!

Which I can attempt to translate as:

Come on, come on, come on, Albertini, come on . . . OK, OK, my boy, perfect, brilliant, brilliant . . . Come on! Come on! Go! Go! In the goal! There it is, there it is, there it is, my brilliant boy, my dear, there it is, there it is, there—AHHHH! GO FUCK YOURSELF! YOU SON OF A BITCH! SHITHEAD! ASSHOLE! TRAITOR! . . . Mother of God . . . Oh my God, why, why, why, this is stupid, this is shameful, the shame of it . . . What a mess . . . [Author’s note: Unfortunately there’s no good way to translate into English the fabulous Italian expressions che casino and che bordello, which literally mean “what a casino,” and “what a whorehouse,” but essentially mean “what a friggin’ mess.”] . . . YOU DON’T HAVE A HEART, ALBERTINI!!!! YOU’RE A FAKER! Look, nothing happened . . . Come on, come on, hey, yes . . . Much better, Albertini, much better, yes yes yes, there it is, beautiful, brilliant, oh, excellent, there it is now . . . in the goal, in the goal, in the—FUUUUUCK YOUUUUUUU!!!

Oh, it was such an exquisite and lucky moment in my life to be sitting right in front of this man. I loved every word out of his mouth. I wanted to lean my head back into his old lap and let him pour his eloquent curses into my ears forever. And it wasn’t just him! The whole stadium was full of such soliloquies. At such high fervor! Whenever there was some grave miscarriage of justice on the field, the entire stadium would rise to its feet, every man waving his arms in outrage and cursing, as if all 20,000 of them had just been in a traffic altercation. The Lazio players were no less dramatic than their fans, rolling on the ground in pain like death scenes from Julius Caesar, totally playing to the back row, then jumping up on their feet two seconds later to lead another attack on the goal.

Lazio lost, though.

Needing to be cheered up after the game, Luca Spaghetti asked his friends, “Should we go out?”

I assumed this meant, “Should we go out to a bar?” That’s what sports fans in America would do if their team had just lost. They’d go to a bar and get good and drunk. And not just Americans would do this—so would the English, the Australians, the Germans . . . everyone, right? But Luca and his friends didn’t go out to a bar to cheer themselves up. They went to a bakery. A small, innocuous bakery hidden in a basement in a nondescript district in Rome. The place was crowded that Sunday night. But it always is crowded after the games. The Lazio fans always stop here on their way home from the stadium to stand in the street for hours, leaning up against their motorcycles, talking about the game, looking macho as anything, and eating cream puffs.

I love Italy.

24

I am learning about twenty new Italian words a day. I’m always studying, flipping through my index cards while I walk around the city, dodging local pedestrians. Where am I getting the brain space to store these words? I’m hoping that maybe my mind has decided to clear out some old negative thoughts and sad memories and replace them with these shiny new words.

I work hard at Italian, but I keep hoping it will one day just be revealed to me, whole, perfect. One day I will open my mouth and be magically fluent. Then I will be a real Italian girl, instead of a total American who still can’t hear someone call across the street to his friend Marco without wanting instinctively to yell back “Polo!” I wish that Italian would simply take up residence within me, but there are so many glitches in this language. Like, why are the Italian words for “tree” and “hotel” (albero vs. albergo) so very similar? This causes me to keep accidentally telling people that I grew up on “a Christmas hotel farm” instead of the more accurate and slightly less surreal description: “Christmas tree farm.” And then there are words with double or even triple meanings. For instance: tasso. Which can mean either interest rate, badger, or yew tree. Depending on the context, I suppose. Most upsetting to me is when I stumble on Italian words that are actually—I hate to say it—ugly. I take this as almost a personal affront. I’m sorry, but I didn’t come all the way to Italy to learn how to say a word like schermo (screen).

Still, overall it’s so worthwhile. It’s mostly a pure pleasure. Giovanni and I have such a good time teaching each other idioms in English and Italian. We were talking the other evening about the phrases one uses when trying to comfort someone who is in distress. I told him that in English we sometimes say, “I’ve been there.” This was unclear to him at first—I’ve been where? But I explained that deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope.

“So sadness is a place?” Giovanni asked.

“Sometimes people live there for years,” I said.

In return, Giovanni told me that empathizing Italians say L’ho provato sulla mia pelle, which means “I have experienced that on my own skin.” Meaning, I have also been burned or scarred in this way, and I know exactly what you’re going through.

So far, though, my favorite thing to say in all of Italian is a simple, common word:

Attraversiamo.

It means, “Let’s cross over.” Friends say it to each other constantly when they’re walking down the sidewalk and have decided it’s time to switch to the other side of the street. Which is to say, this is literally a pedestrian word. Nothing special about it. Still, for some reason, it goes right through me. The first time Giovanni said it to me, we were walking near the Colosseum. I suddenly heard him speak that beautiful word, and I stopped dead, demanding, “What does that mean? What did you just say?”

“Attraversiamo.”

He couldn’t understand why I liked it so much. Let’s cross the street? But to my ear, it’s the perfect combination of Italian sounds. The wistful ah of introduction, the rolling trill, the soothing s, that lingering “ee-ah-moh” combo at the end. I love this word. I say it all the time now. I invent any excuse to say it. It’s making Sofie nuts. Let’s cross over! Let’s cross over! I’m constantly dragging her back and forth across the crazy traffic of Rome. I’m going to get us both killed with this word.

Giovanni’s favorite word in English is half-assed.

Luca Spaghetti’s is surrender.

25

There’s a power struggle going on across Europe these days. A few cities are competing against each other to see who shall emerge as the great twenty-first-century European metropolis. Will it be London? Paris? Berlin? Zurich? Maybe Brussels, center of the young union? They all strive to outdo one another culturally, architecturally, politically, fiscally. But Rome, it should be said, has not bothered to join the race for status. Rome doesn’t compete. Rome just watches all the fussing and striving, completely unfazed, exuding an air like: Hey—do whatever you want, but I’m still Rome. I am inspired by the regal self-assurance of this town, so grounded and rounded, so amused and monumental, knowing that she is held securely in the palm of history. I would like to be like Rome when I am an old lady.

I take myself on a six-hour walk through town today. This is easy to do, especially if you stop frequently to fuel up on espresso and pastries. I start at my apartment door, then wander through the cosmopolitan shopping center that is my neighborhood. (Though I wouldn’t exactly call this a neighborhood, not in the traditional sense. I mean, if it is a neighborhood, then my neighbors are those just-plain-regular-folk with names like the Valentinos, the Guccis and the Armanis.) This has always been an upscale district. Rubens, Tennyson, Stendhal, Balzac, Liszt, Wagner, Thackeray, Byron, Keats—they all stayed here. I live in what they used to call “The English Ghetto,” where all the posh aristocrats rested on their European grand tours. One London touring club was actually called “The Society of Dilettanti”—imagine advertising that you’re a dilettante! Oh, the glorious shamelessness of it . . .

I walk over to the Piazza del Popolo, with its grand arch, carved by Bernini in honor of the historic visit of Queen Christina of Sweden (who was really one of history’s neutron bombs. Here’s how my Swedish friend Sofie describes the great queen: “She could ride, she could hunt, she was a scholar, she became a Catholic and it was a huge scandal. Some say she was a man, but at least she was probably a lesbian. She dressed in pants, she went on archaeological excavations, she collected art and she refused to leave an heir”). Next to the arch is a church where you can walk in for free and see two paintings by Caravaggio depicting the martyrdom of Saint Peter and the conversion of Saint Paul (so overcome by grace that he has fallen to the ground in holy rapture; not even his horse can believe it). Those Caravaggio paintings always make me feel weepy and overwhelmed, but I cheer myself up by moving to the other side of the church and enjoying a fresco which features the happiest, goofiest, giggliest little baby Jesus in all of Rome.

I start walking south again. I pass the Palazzo Borghese, a building that has known many famous tenants, including Pauline, Napoleon’s scandalous sister, who kept untold numbers of lovers there. She also liked to use her maids as footstools. (One always hopes that one has read this sentence wrong in one’s Companion Guide to Rome, but, no—it is accurate. Pauline also liked to be carried to her bath, we are told, by “a giant Negro.”) Then I stroll along the banks of the great, swampy, rural-looking Tiber, all the way down to the Tiber Island, which is one of my favorite quiet places in Rome. This island has always been associated with healing. A Temple of Aesculapius was built there after a plague in 291 BC; in the Middle Ages a hospital was constructed there by a group of monks called the Fatebenefratelli (which can groovily be translated as “The Do-Good Brothers”); and there is a hospital on the island even to this day.

I cross over the river to Trastevere—the neighborhood that claims to be inhabited by the truest Romans, the workers, the guys who have, over the centuries, built all the monuments on the other side of the Tiber. I eat my lunch in a quiet trattoria here, and I linger over my food and wine for many hours because nobody in Trastevere is ever going to stop you from lingering over your meal if that’s what you would like to do. I order an assortment of bruschette, some spaghetti cacio e pepe (that simple Roman specialty of pasta served with cheese and pepper) and then a small roast chicken, which I end up sharing with the stray dog who has been watching me eat my lunch the way only a stray dog can.

Then I walk back over the bridge, through the old Jewish ghetto, a sorely tearful place that survived for centuries until it was emptied by the Nazis. I head back north, past the Piazza Navona with its mammoth fountain honoring the four great rivers of Planet Earth (proudly, if not totally accurately, including the sluggish Tiber in that list). Then I go have a look at the Pantheon. I try to look at the Pantheon every chance I get, since I am here in Rome after all, and an old proverb says that anyone who goes to Rome without seeing the Pantheon “goes and comes back an ass.”

On my way back home I take a little detour and stop at the address in Rome I find most strangely affecting—the Augusteum. This big, round, ruined pile of brick started life as a glorious mausoleum, built by Octavian Augustus to house his remains and the remains of his family for all of eternity. It must have been impossible for the emperor to have imagined at the time that Rome would ever be anything but a mighty Augustus-worshipping empire. How could he possibly have foreseen the collapse of the realm? Or known that, with all the aqueducts destroyed by barbarians and with the great roads left in ruin, the city would empty of citizens, and it would take almost twenty centuries before Rome ever recovered the population she had boasted during her height of glory?

Augustus’s mausoleum fell to ruins and thieves during the Dark Ages. Somebody stole the emperor’s ashes—no telling who. By the twelfth century, though, the monument had been renovated into a fortress for the powerful Colonna family, to protect them from assaults by various warring princes. Then the Augusteum was transformed somehow into a vineyard, then a Renaissance garden, then a bullring (we’re in the eighteenth century now), then a fireworks depository, then a concert hall. In the 1930s, Mussolini seized the property and restored it down to its classical foundations, so that it could someday be the final resting place for his remains. (Again, it must have been impossible back then to imagine that Rome could ever be anything but a Mussolini-worshipping empire.) Of course, Mussolini’s fascist dream did not last, nor did he get the imperial burial he’d anticipated.

Today the Augusteum is one of the quietest and loneliest places in Rome, buried deep in the ground. The city has grown up around it over the centuries. (One inch a year is the general rule of thumb for the accumulation of time’s debris.) Traffic above the monument spins in a hectic circle, and nobody ever goes down there—from what I can tell—except to use the place as a public bathroom. But the building still exists, holding its Roman ground with dignity, waiting for its next incarnation.

I find the endurance of the Augusteum so reassuring, that this structure has had such an erratic career, yet always adjusted to the particular wildness of the times. To me, the Augusteum is like a person who’s led a totally crazy life—who maybe started out as a housewife, then unexpectedly became a widow, then took up fan-dancing to make money, ended up somehow as the first female dentist in outer space, and then tried her hand at national politics—yet who has managed to hold an intact sense of herself throughout every upheaval.

I look at the Augusteum, and I think that perhaps my life has not actually been so chaotic, after all. It is merely this world that is chaotic, bringing changes to us all that nobody could have anticipated. The Augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve. Yesterday I might have been a glorious monument to somebody, true enough—but tomorrow I could be a fireworks depository. Even in the Eternal City, says the silent Augusteum, one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.

26

I had shipped ahead a box of books to myself, right before I left New York to move to Italy. The box was guaranteed to arrive at my Roman apartment within four to six days, but I think the Italian post office must have misread that instruction as “forty-six days,” for two months have passed now, and I have seen no sign of my box. My Italian friends tell me to put the box out of my mind completely. They say that the box may arrive or it may not arrive, but such things are out of our hands.

“Did someone maybe steal it?” I ask Luca Spaghetti. “Did the post office lose it?”

He covers his eyes. “Don’t ask these questions,” he says. “You’ll only make yourself upset.”

The mystery of my missing box prompts a long discussion one night between me, my American friend Maria and her husband, Giulio. Maria thinks that in a civilized society one should be able to rely on such things as the post office delivering one’s mail in a prompt manner, but Giulio begs to differ. He submits that the post office belongs not to man, but to the fates, and that delivery of mail is not something anybody can guarantee. Maria, annoyed, says this is only further evidence of the Protestant-Catholic divide. This divide is best proven, she says, by the fact that Italians—including her own husband—can never make plans for the future, not even a week in advance. If you ask a Protestant from the American Midwest to commit to a dinner date next week, that Protestant, believing that she is the captain of her own destiny, will say, “Thursday night works fine for me.” But if you ask a Catholic from Calabria to make the same commitment, he will only shrug, turn his eyes to God, and ask, “How can any of us know whether we will be free for dinner next Thursday night, given that everything is in God’s hands and none of us can know our fate?”

Still, I go to the post office a few times to try to track down my box, to no avail. The Roman postal employee is not at all happy to have her phone call to her boyfriend interrupted by my presence. And my Italian—which has been getting better, honestly—fails me in such stressful circumstances. As I try to speak logically about my missing box of books, the woman looks at me like I’m blowing spit bubbles.

“Maybe it will be here next week?” I ask her in Italian.

She shrugs: “Magari.”

Another untranslatable bit of Italian slang, meaning something between “hopefully” and “in your dreams, sucker.”

Ah, maybe it’s for the best. I can’t even remember now what books I’d packed in the box in the first place. Surely it was some stuff I thought I should study, if I were to truly understand Italy. I’d packed that box full of all sorts of due-diligence research material about Rome that just seems unimportant now that I’m here. I think I even loaded the complete unabridged text of Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire into that box. Maybe I’m happier without it, after all. Given that life is so short, do I really want to spend one-ninetieth of my remaining days on earth reading Edward Gibbon?

27

I met a young Australian girl last week who was backpacking through Europe for the first time in her life. I gave her directions to the train station. She was heading up to Slovenia, just to check it out. When I heard her plans, I was stricken with such a dumb spasm of jealousy, thinking, I want to go to Slovenia! How come I never get to travel anywhere?

Now, to the innocent eye it might appear that I already am traveling. And longing to travel while you are already traveling is, I admit, a kind of greedy madness. It’s kind of like fantasizing about having sex with your favorite movie star while you’re having sex with your other favorite movie star. But the fact that this girl asked directions from me (clearly, in her mind, a civilian) suggests that I am not technically traveling in Rome, but living here. However temporary it may be, I am a civilian. When I ran into the girl, in fact, I was just on my way to pay my electricity bill, which is not something travelers worry about. Traveling-to-a-place energy and living-in-a-place energy are two fundamentally different energies, and something about meeting this Australian girl on her way to Slovenia just gave me such a jones to hit the road.

And that’s why I called my friend Sofie and said, “Let’s go down to Naples for the day and eat some pizza!”

Immediately, just a few hours later, we are on the train, and then—like magic—we are there. I instantly love Naples. Wild, raucous, noisy, dirty, balls-out Naples. An anthill inside a rabbit warren, with all the exoticism of a Middle Eastern bazaar and a touch of New Orleans voodoo. A tripped-out, dangerous and cheerful nuthouse. My friend Wade came to Naples in the 1970s and was mugged . . . in a museum. The city is all decorated with the laundry that hangs from every window and dangles across every street; everybody’s fresh-washed undershirts and brassieres flapping in the wind like Tibetan prayer flags. There is not a street in Naples in which some tough little kid in shorts and mismatched socks is not screaming up from the sidewalk to some other tough little kid on a rooftop nearby. Nor is there a building in this town that doesn’t have at least one crooked old woman seated at her window, peering suspiciously down at the activity below.

The people here are so insanely psyched to be from Naples, and why shouldn’t they be? This is a city that gave the world pizza and ice cream. The Neapolitan women in particular are such a gang of tough-voiced, loud-mouthed, generous, nosy dames, all bossy and annoyed and right up in your face and just trying to friggin’ help you for chrissake, you dope—why they gotta do everything around here? The accent in Naples is like a friendly cuff on the ear. It’s like walking through a city of short-order cooks, everybody hollering at the same time. They still have their own dialect here, and an ever-changing liquid dictionary of local slang, but somehow I find that the Neapolitans are the easiest people for me to understand in Italy. Why? Because they want you to understand, damn it. They talk loud and emphatically, and if you can’t understand what they’re actually saying out of their mouths, you can usually pick up the inference from the gesture. Like that punk little grammar-school girl on the back of her older cousin’s motorbike, who flipped me the finger and a charming smile as she drove by, just to make me understand, “Hey, no hard feelings, lady. But I’m only seven, and I can already tell you’re a complete moron, but that’s cool—I think you’re halfway OK despite yourself and I kinda like your dumb-ass face. We both know you would love to be me, but sorry—you can’t. Anyhow, here’s my middle finger, enjoy your stay in Naples, and ciao!”

As in every public space in Italy, there are always boys, teenagers and grown men playing soccer, but here in Naples there’s something extra, too. For instance, today I found kids—I mean, a group of eight-year-old boys—who had gathered up some old chicken crates to create makeshift chairs and a table, and they were playing poker in the piazza with such intensity I feared one of them might get shot.

Giovanni and Dario, my Tandem Exchange twins, are originally from Naples. I cannot picture it. I cannot imagine shy, studious, sympathetic Giovanni as a young boy amongst this—and I don’t use the word lightly—mob. But he is Neapolitan, no question about it, because before I left Rome he gave me the name of a pizzeria in Naples that I had to try, because, Giovanni informed me, it sold the best pizza in Naples. I found this a wildly exciting prospect, given that the best pizza in Italy is from Naples, and the best pizza in the world is from Italy, which means that this pizzeria must offer . . . I’m almost too superstitious to say it . . . the best pizza in the world? Giovanni passed along the name of the place with such seriousness and intensity, I almost felt I was being inducted into a secret society. He pressed the address into the palm of my hand and said, in gravest confidence, “Please go to this pizzeria. Order the margherita pizza with double mozzarella. If you do not eat this pizza when you are in Naples, please lie to me later and tell me that you did.”

So Sofie and I have come to Pizzeria da Michele, and these pies we have just ordered—one for each of us—are making us lose our minds. I love my pizza so much, in fact, that I have come to believe in my delirium that my pizza might actually love me, in return. I am having a relationship with this pizza, almost an affair. Meanwhile, Sofie is practically in tears over hers, she’s having a metaphysical crisis about it, she’s begging me, “Why do they even bother trying to make pizza in Stockholm? Why do we even bother eating food at all in Stockholm?”

Pizzeria da Michele is a small place with only two rooms and one non-stop oven. It’s about a fifteen-minute walk from the train station in the rain, don’t even worry about it, just go. You need to get there fairly early in the day because sometimes they run out of dough, which will break your heart. By 1:00 PM, the streets outside the pizzeria have become jammed with Neapolitans trying to get into the place, shoving for access like they’re trying to get space on a lifeboat. There’s not a menu. They have only two varieties of pizza here—regular and extra cheese. None of this new age southern California olives-and-sun-dried-tomato wannabe pizza twaddle. The dough, it takes me half my meal to figure out, tastes more like Indian nan than like any pizza dough I ever tried. It’s soft and chewy and yielding, but incredibly thin. I always thought we only had two choices in our lives when it came to pizza crust—thin and crispy, or thick and doughy. How was I to have known there could be a crust in this world that was thin and doughy? Holy of holies! Thin, doughy, strong, gummy, yummy, chewy, salty pizza paradise. On top, there is a sweet tomato sauce that foams up all bubbly and creamy when it melts the fresh buffalo mozzarella, and the one sprig of basil in the middle of the whole deal somehow infuses the entire pizza with herbal radiance, much the same way one shimmering movie star in the middle of a party brings a contact high of glamour to everyone around her. It’s technically impossible to eat this thing, of course. You try to take a bite off your slice and the gummy crust folds, and the hot cheese runs away like topsoil in a landslide, makes a mess of you and your surroundings, but just deal with it.

The guys who make this miracle happen are shoveling the pizzas in and out of the wood-burning oven, looking for all the world like the boilermen in the belly of a great ship who shovel coal into the raging furnaces. Their sleeves are rolled up over their sweaty forearms, their faces red with exertion, one eye squinted against the heat of the fire and a cigarette dangling from the lips. Sofie and I each order another pie—another whole pizza each—and Sofie tries to pull herself together, but really, the pizza is so good we can barely cope.

A word about my body. I am gaining weight every day, of course. I am doing rude things to my body here in Italy, taking in such ghastly amounts of cheese and pasta and bread and wine and chocolate and pizza dough. (Elsewhere in Naples, I’d been told, you can actually get something called chocolate pizza. What kind of nonsense is that? I mean, later I did go find some, and it’s delicious, but honestly—chocolate pizza?) I’m not exercising, I’m not eating enough fiber, I’m not taking any vitamins. In my real life, I have been known to eat organic goat’s milk yoghurt sprinkled with wheat germ for breakfast. My real-life days are long gone. Back in America, my friend Susan is telling people I’m on a “No Carb Left Behind” tour. But my body is being such a good sport about all this. My body is turning a blind eye to my misdoings and my overindulgences, as if to say, “OK, kid, live it up, I recognize that this is just temporary. Let me know when your little experiment with pure pleasure is over, and I’ll see what I can do about damage control.”

Still, when I look at myself in the mirror of the best pizzeria in Naples, I see a bright-eyed, clear-skinned, happy and healthy face. I haven’t seen a face like that on me for a long time.

“Thank you,” I whisper. Then Sofie and I run out in the rain to look for pastries.

28

It is this happiness, I suppose (which is really a few months old by now), that gets me to thinking upon my return to Rome that I need to do something about David. That maybe it’s time for us to end our story forever. We were already separated, that was official, but there was still a window of hope left open that perhaps someday (maybe after my travels, maybe after a year apart) we could give things another try. We loved each other. That was never the question. It’s just that we couldn’t figure out how to stop making each other desperately, shriekingly, soul-punishingly miserable.

Last spring David had offered this crazy solution to our woes, only half in jest: “What if we just acknowledged that we have a bad relationship, and we stuck it out, anyway? What if we admitted that we make each other nuts, we fight constantly and hardly ever have sex, but we can’t live without each other, so we deal with it? And then we could spend our lives together—in misery, but happy to not be apart.”

Let it be a testimony to how desperately I love this guy that I have spent the last ten months giving that offer serious consideration.

The other alternative in the backs of our minds, of course, was that one of us might change. He might become more open and affectionate, not withholding himself from anyone who loves him on the fear that she will eat his soul. Or I might learn how to . . . stop trying to eat his soul.

So many times I had wished with David that I could behave more like my mother does in her marriage—independent, strong, self-sufficient. A self-feeder. Able to exist without regular doses of romance or flattery from my solitary farmer of a father. Able to cheerfully plant gardens of daisies among the inexplicable stone walls of silence that my dad sometimes builds up around himself. My dad is quite simply my favorite person in the world, but he is a bit of an odd case. An ex-boyfriend of mine once described him this way: “Your father only has one foot on this earth. And really, really long legs . . .”

What I grew up watching in my household was a mother who would receive her husband’s love and affection whenever he thought to offer it, but would then step aside and take care of herself whenever he drifted off into his own peculiar universe of low-grade oblivious neglect. This is how it looked to me, anyway, taking into account that nobody (and especially not the children) ever knows the secrets of a marriage. What I believed I grew up seeing was a mother who asked nothing of anybody. This was my mom, after all—a woman who had taught herself how to swim as an adolescent, alone in a cold Minnesota lake, with a book she’d borrowed from the local library entitled How to Swim. To my eye, there was nothing this woman could not do on her own.

But then I’d had a revelatory conversation with my mother, not long before I’d left for Rome. She’d come into New York to have one last lunch with me, and she’d asked me frankly—breaking all the rules of communication in our family’s history—what had happened between me and David. Further disregarding the Gilbert Family Standard Communications Rulebook, I actually told her. I told her everything. I told her how much I loved David, but how lonely and heartsick it made me to be with this person who was always disappearing from the room, from the bed, from the planet.

“He sounds kind of like your father,” she said. A brave and generous admission.

“The problem is,” I said, “I’m not like my mother. I’m not as tough as you, Mom. There’s a constant level of closeness that I really need from the person I love. I wish I could be more like you, then I could have this love story with David. But it just destroys me to not be able to count on that affection when I need it.”

Then my mother shocked me. She said, “All those things that you want from your relationship, Liz? I have always wanted those things, too.”

In that moment, it was as if my strong mother reached across the table, opened her fist and finally showed me the handful of bullets she’d had to bite over the decades in order to stay happily married (and she is happily married, all considerations weighed) to my father. I had never seen this side of her before, not ever. I had never imagined what she might have wanted, what she might have been missing, what she might have decided not to fight for in the larger scheme of things. Seeing all this, I could feel my worldview start to make a radical shift.

If even she wants what I want, then . . . ?

Continuing with this unprecedented string of intimacies, my mother said, “You have to understand how little I was raised to expect that I deserved in life, honey. Remember—I come from a different time and place than you do.”

I closed my eyes and saw my mother, ten years old on the family farm in Minnesota, working like a hired hand, raising her younger brothers, wearing the clothes of her older sister, saving dimes to get herself out of there . . .

“And you have to understand how much I love your father,” she concluded.

My mother has made choices in her life, as we all must, and she is at peace with them. I can see her peace. She did not cop out on herself. The benefits of her choices are massive—a long, stable marriage to a man she still calls her best friend; a family that has extended now into grandchildren who adore her; a certainty in her own strength. Maybe some things were sacrificed, and my dad made his sacrifices, too—but who amongst us lives without sacrifice?

And the question now for me is, What are my choices to be? What do I believe that I deserve in this life? Where can I accept sacrifice, and where can I not? It has been so hard for me to imagine living a life without David in it. Even just to imagine that there will never be another road trip with my favorite traveling companion, that I will never again pull up at his curb with the windows down and Springsteen playing on the radio, a lifetime supply of banter and snacks between us, and an ocean destination looming down the highway. But how can I accept that bliss when it comes with this dark underside—bone-crushing isolation, corrosive insecurity, insidious resentment and, of course, the complete dismantling of self that inevitably occurs when David ceases to giveth, and commences to taketh away. I can’t do it anymore. Something about my recent joy in Naples has made me certain that I not only can find happiness without David, but must. No matter how much I love him (and I do love him, in stupid excess), I have to say good-bye to this person now. And I have to make it stick.

So I write him an e-mail.

It’s November. We haven’t had any communication since July. I’d asked him not to get in touch with me while I was traveling, knowing that my attachment to him was so strong it would be impossible for me to focus on my journey if I were also tracking his. But now I’m entering his life again with this e-mail.

I tell him that I hope he’s well, and I report that I am well. I make a few jokes. We always were good with the jokes. Then I explain that I think we need to put an end to this relationship for good. That maybe it’s time to admit that it will never happen, that it should never happen. The note isn’t overly dramatic. Lord knows we’ve had enough drama together already. I keep it short and simple. But there’s one more thing I need to add. Holding my breath, I type, “If you want to look for another partner in your life, of course you have nothing but my blessings.” My hands are shaking. I sign off with love, trying to keep as cheerful a tone as possible.

I feel like I just got hit in the chest with a stick.

I don’t sleep much that night, imagining him reading my words. I run back to the Internet café a few times throughout the next day, looking for a response. I’m trying to ignore the part of me that is dying to find that he has replied: “COME BACK! DON’T GO! I’LL CHANGE!” I’m trying to disregard the girl in me who would happily drop this whole grand idea of traveling around the world in simple exchange for the keys to David’s apartment. But around ten o’clock that night, I finally get my answer. A wonderfully written e-mail, of course. David always wrote wonderfully. He agrees that, yes, it’s time we really said good-bye forever. He’s been thinking along the same lines himself, he says. He couldn’t be more gracious in his response, and he shares his own feelings of loss and regret with that high tenderness he was sometimes so achingly capable of reaching. He hopes that I know how much he adores me, beyond even his ability to find words to express it. “But we are not what the other one needs,” he says. Still, he is certain that I will find great love in my life someday. He’s sure of it. After all, he says, “beauty attracts beauty.”

Which is a lovely thing to say, truly. Which is just about the loveliest thing that the love of your life could ever possibly say, when he’s not saying, “COME BACK! DON’T GO! I’LL CHANGE!”

I sit there staring at the computer screen in silence for a long, sad time. It’s all for the best, I know it is. I’m choosing happiness over suffering, I know I am. I’m making space for the unknown future to fill up my life with yet-to-come surprises. I know all this. But still . . .

It’s David. Lost to me now.

I drop my face in my hands for a longer and even sadder time. Finally I look up, only to see that one of the Albanian women who work at the Internet café has paused from her night-shift mopping of the floor to lean against the wall and watch me. We hold our tired gazes on each other for a moment. Then I give her a grim shake of my head and say aloud, “This blows ass.” She nods sympathetically. She doesn’t understand, but of course, in her way, she understands completely.

My cell phone rings.

It’s Giovanni. He sounds confused. He says he’s been waiting for me for over an hour in the Piazza Fiume, which is where we always meet on Thursday nights for language exchange. He’s bewildered, because normally he’s the one who’s late or who forgets to show up for our appointments, but he got there right on time tonight for once and he was pretty sure—didn’t we have a date?

I’d forgotten. I tell him where I am. He says he’ll come pick me up in his car. I’m not in the mood for seeing anybody, but it’s too hard to explain this over the telefonino, given our limited language skills. I go wait outside in the cold for him. A few minutes later, his little red car pulls up and I climb in. He asks me in slangy Italian what’s up. I open my mouth to answer and collapse into tears. I mean—wailing. I mean—that terrible, ragged breed of bawling my friend Sally calls “double-pumpin’ it,” when you have to inhale two desperate gasps of oxygen with every sob. I never even saw this grief-quake coming, got totally blindsided by it.

Poor Giovanni! He asks in halting English if he did something wrong. Am I mad at him, maybe? Did he hurt my feelings? I can’t answer, but only shake my head and keep howling. I’m so mortified with myself and so sorry for dear Giovanni, trapped here in this car with this sobbing, incoherent old woman who is totally a pezzi—in pieces.

I finally manage to rasp out an assurance that my distress has nothing to do with him. I choke forth an apology for being such a mess. Giovanni takes charge of the situation in a manner far beyond his years. He says, “Do not apologize for crying. Without this emotion, we are only robots.” He gives me some tissues from a box in the back of the car. He says, “Let’s drive.”

He’s right—the front of this Internet café is far too public and brightly lit a place to fall apart. He drives for a bit, then pulls the car over in the center of the Piazza della Repubblica, one of Rome’s more noble open spaces. He parks in front of that gorgeous fountain with the bodacious naked nymphs cavorting so pornographically with their phallic flock of stiff-necked giant swans. This fountain was built fairly recently, by Roman standards. According to my guidebook, the women who modeled for the nymphs were a pair of sisters, two popular burlesque dancers of their day. They gained a fair bit of notoriety when the fountain was completed; the church tried for months to prevent the thing from being unveiled because it was too sexy. The sisters lived well into old age, and even as late as the 1920s these two dignified old ladies could be seen walking together every day into the piazza to have a look at “their” fountain. And every year, once a year, for as long as he lived, the French sculptor who had captured them in marble during their prime would come to Rome and take the sisters out to lunch, where they would reminisce together about the days when they were all so young and beautiful and wild.

So Giovanni parks there, and waits for me to get a hold of myself. All I can do is press the heels of my palms against my eyes, trying to push the tears back in. We have never once had a personal conversation, me and Giovanni. All these months, all these dinners together, all we have ever talked about is philosophy and art and culture and politics and food. We know nothing of each other’s private lives. He does not even know that I am divorced or that I have left love behind in America. I do not know a thing about him except that he wants to be a writer and that he was born in Naples. My crying, though, is about to force a whole new level of conversation between these two people. I wish it wouldn’t. Not under these dreadful circumstances.

He says, “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand. Did you lose something today?”

But I’m still having trouble figuring out how to talk. Giovanni smiles and says encouragingly, “Parla come mangi.” He knows this is one of my favorite expressions in Roman dialect. It means, “Speak the way you eat,” or, in my personal translation: “Say it like you eat it.” It’s a reminder—when you’re making a big deal out of explaining something, when you’re searching for the right words—to keep your language as simple and direct as Roman food. Don’t make a big production out of it. Just lay it on the table.

I take a deep breath and offer a heavily abridged (yet somehow totally complete) Italian-language version of my situation:

“It’s about a love story, Giovanni. I had to say good-bye to someone today.”

Then my hands are slapped over my eyes again, tears spraying through my clamped fingers. Bless his heart, Giovanni doesn’t try to put a reassuring arm around me, nor does he express the slightest discomfort about my explosion of sadness. Instead, he just sits through my tears in silence, until I’ve calmed down. At which point he speaks with perfect empathy, choosing each word with care (as his English teacher, I was so proud of him that night!), saying slowly and clearly and kindly: “I understand, Liz. I have been there.”

29

My sister’s arrival in Rome a few days later helped nudge my attention away from lingering sadness over David and bring me back up to speed. My sister does everything fast, and energy twists up around her in miniature cyclones. She’s three years older than me and three inches taller than me. She’s an athlete and a scholar and a mother and a writer. The whole time she was in Rome, she was training for a marathon, which means she would wake up at dawn and run eighteen miles in the time it generally takes me to read one article in the newspaper and drink two cappuccinos. She actually looks like a deer when she runs. When she was pregnant with her first child, she swam across an entire lake one night in the dark. I wouldn’t join her, and I wasn’t even pregnant. I was too scared. But my sister doesn’t really get scared. When she was pregnant with her second child, a midwife asked if Catherine had any unspoken fears about anything that could go wrong with the baby—such as genetic defects or complications during the birth. My sister said, “My only fear is that he might grow up to become a Republican.”

That’s my sister’s name—Catherine. She’s my one and only sibling. When we were growing up in rural Connecticut, it was just the two of us, living in a farmhouse with our parents. No other kids nearby. She was mighty and domineering, the commander of my whole life. I lived in awe and fear of her; nobody else’s opinion mattered but hers. I cheated at card games with her in order to lose, so she wouldn’t get mad at me. We were not always friends. She was annoyed by me, and I was scared of her, I believe, until I was twenty-eight years old and got tired of it. That was the year I finally stood up to her, and her reaction was something along the lines of, “What took you so long?”

We were just beginning to hammer out the new terms of our relationship when my marriage went into a skid. It would have been so easy for Catherine to have gained victory from my defeat. I’d always been the loved and lucky one, the favorite of both family and destiny. The world had always been a more comfortable and welcoming place for me than it was for my sister, who pressed so sharply against life and who was hurt by it fairly hard sometimes in return. It would have been so easy for Catherine to have responded to my divorce and depression with a: “Ha! Look at Little Mary Sunshine now!” Instead, she held me up like a champion. She answered the phone in the middle of the night whenever I was in distress and made comforting noises. And she came along with me when I went searching for answers as to why I was so sad. For the longest time, my therapy was almost vicariously shared by her. I’d call her after every session with a debriefing of everything I’d realized in my therapist’s office, and she’d put down whatever she was doing and say, “Ah . . . that explains a lot.” Explains a lot about both of us, that is.

Now we speak to each other on the phone almost every day—or at least we did, before I moved to Rome. Before either of us gets on an airplane now, the one always calls the other and says, “I know this is morbid, but I just wanted to tell you that I love you. You know . . . just in case . . .” And the other one always says, “I know . . . just in case.”

She arrives in Rome prepared, as ever. She brings five guidebooks, all of which she has read already, and she has the city pre-mapped in her head. She was completely oriented before she even left Philadelphia. And this is a classic example of the differences between us. I am the one who spent my first weeks in Rome wandering about, 90 percent lost and 100 percent happy, seeing everything around me as an unexplainable beautiful mystery. But this is how the world kind of always looks to me. To my sister’s eyes, there is nothing which cannot be explained if one has access to a proper reference library. This is a woman who keeps The Columbia Encyclopedia in her kitchen next to the cookbooks—and reads it, for pleasure.

There’s a game I like to play with my friends sometimes called “Watch This!” Whenever anybody’s wondering about some obscure fact (for instance: “Who was Saint Louis?”) I will say, “Watch this!” then pick up the nearest phone and dial my sister’s number. Sometimes I’ll catch her in the car, driving her kids home from school in the Volvo, and she will muse: “Saint Louis . . . well, he was a hair-shirt-wearing French king, actually, which is interesting because . . .”

So my sister comes to visit me in Rome—in my new city—and then shows it to me. This is Rome, Catherine-style. Full of facts and dates and architecture that I do not see because my mind does not work in that way. The only thing I ever want to know about any place or any person is the story, this is the only thing I watch for— never for aesthetic details. (Sofie came to my apartment a month after I’d moved into the place and said, “Nice pink bathroom,” and this was the first time I’d noticed that it was, indeed, pink. Bright pink, from floor to ceiling, bright pink tile everywhere—I honestly hadn’t seen it before.) But my sister’s trained eye picks up the Gothic, or Romanesque, or Byzantine features of a building, the pattern of the church floor, or the dim sketch of the unfinished fresco hidden behind the altar. She strides across Rome on her long legs (we used to call her “Catherine-of-the-Three-Foot-Long-Femurs”) and I hasten after her, as I have since toddlerhood, taking two eager steps to her every one.

“See, Liz?” she says, “See how they just slapped that nineteenth-century façade over that brickwork? I bet if we turn the corner we’ll find . . . yes! . . . see, they did use the original Roman monoliths as supporting beams, probably because they didn’t have the manpower to move them . . . yes, I quite like the jumble-sale quality of this basilica. . . .”

Catherine carries the map and her Michelin Green Guide, and I carry our picnic lunch (two of those big softball-sized rolls of bread, spicy sausage, pickled sardines wrapped around meaty green olives, a mushroom pâté that tastes like a forest, balls of smoked mozzarella, peppered and grilled, arugula, cherry tomatoes, pecorino cheese, mineral water and a split of cold white wine), and while I wonder when we’re going to eat, she wonders aloud, “Why don’t people talk more about the Council of Trent?”

She takes me into dozens of churches in Rome, and I can’t keep them straight—St. This and St. That, and St. Somebody of the Barefoot Penitents of Righteous Misery . . . but just because I cannot remember the names or details of all these buttresses and cornices is not to say that I do not love to be inside these places with my sister, whose cobalt eyes miss nothing. I don’t remember the name of the church that had those frescoes that looked so much like American WPA New Deal heroic murals, but I do remember Catherine pointing them out to me and saying, “You gotta love those Franklin Roosevelt popes up there . . .” I also remember the morning we woke early and went to mass at St. Susanna, and held each other’s hands as we listened to the nuns there chanting their daybreak Gregorian hymns, both of us in tears from the echoing haunt of their prayers. My sister is not a religious person. Nobody in my family really is. (I’ve taken to calling myself the “white sheep” of the family.) My spiritual investigations interest my sister mostly from a point of intellectual curiosity. “I think that kind of faith is so beautiful,” she whispers to me in the church, “but I can’t do it, I just can’t . . .”

Here’s another example of the difference in our worldviews. A family in my sister’s neighborhood was recently stricken with a double tragedy, when both the young mother and her three-year-old son were diagnosed with cancer. When Catherine told me about this, I could only say, shocked, “Dear God, that family needs grace.” She replied firmly, “That family needs casseroles,” and then proceeded to organize the entire neighborhood into bringing that family dinner, in shifts, every single night, for an entire year. I do not know if my sister fully recognizes that this is grace.

We walk out of St. Susanna, and she says, “Do you know why the popes needed city planning in the Middle Ages? Because basically you had two million Catholic pilgrims a year coming from all over the Western World to make that walk from the Vatican to St. John Lateran—sometimes on their knees—and you had to have amenities for those people.”

My sister’s faith is in learning. Her sacred text is the Oxford English Dictionary. As she bows her head in study, fingers speeding across the pages, she is with her God. I see my sister in prayer again later that same day—when she drops to her knees in the middle of the Roman Forum, clears away some litter off the face of the soil (as though erasing a blackboard), then takes up a small stone and draws for me in the dirt a blueprint of a classic Romanesque basilica. She points from her drawing to the ruin before her, leading me to understand (even visually challenged me can understand!) what that building once must have looked like eighteen centuries earlier. She sketches with her finger in the empty air the missing arches, the nave, the windows long gone. Like Harold with his Purple Crayon, she fills in the absent cosmos with her imagination and makes whole the ruined.

In Italian there is a seldom-used tense called the passato remoto, the remote past. You use this tense when you are discussing things in the far, far distant past, things that happened so long ago they have no personal impact whatsoever on you anymore—for example, ancient history. But my sister, if she spoke Italian, would not use this tense to discuss ancient history. In her world, the Roman Forum is not remote, nor is it past. It is exactly as present and close to her as I am.

She leaves the next day.

“Listen,” I say, “be sure to call me when your plane lands safely, OK? Not to be morbid, but . . .”

“I know, sweetie,” she says. “I love you, too.”

30

I am so surprised sometimes to notice that my sister is a wife and a mother, and I am not. Somehow I always thought it would be the opposite. I thought it would be me who would end up with a houseful of muddy boots and hollering kids, while Catherine would be living by herself, a solo act, reading alone at night in her bed. We grew up into different adults than anyone might have foretold when we were children. It’s better this way, though, I think. Against all predictions, we’ve each created lives that tally with us. Her solitary nature means she needs a family to keep her from loneliness; my gregarious nature means I will never have to worry about being alone, even when I am single. I’m happy that she’s going back home to her family and also happy that I have another nine months of traveling ahead of me, where all I have to do is eat and read and pray and write.

I still can’t say whether I will ever want children. I was so astonished to find that I did not want them at thirty; the remembrance of that surprise cautions me against placing any bets on how I will feel at forty. I can only say how I feel now—grateful to be on my own. I also know that I won’t go forth and have children just in case I might regret missing it later in life; I don’t think this is a strong enough motivation to bring more babies onto the earth. Though I suppose people do reproduce sometimes for that reason—for insurance against later regret. I think people have children for all manner of reasons—sometimes out of a pure desire to nurture and witness life, sometimes out of an absence of choice, sometimes in order to hold on to a partner or create an heir, sometimes without thinking about it in any particular way. Not all the reasons to have children are the same, and not all of them are necessarily unselfish. Not all the reasons not to have children are the same, either, though. Nor are all those reasons necessarily selfish.

I say this because I’m still working out that accusation, which was leveled against me many times by my husband as our marriage was collapsing—selfishness. Every time he said it, I agreed completely, accepted the guilt, bought everything in the store. My God, I hadn’t even had the babies yet, and I was already neglecting them, already choosing myself over them. I was already a bad mother. These babies—these phantom babies—came up a lot in our arguments. Who would take care of the babies? Who would stay home with the babies? Who would financially support the babies? Who would feed the babies in the middle of the night? I remember saying once to my friend Susan, when my marriage was becoming intolerable, “I don’t want my children growing up in a household like this.” Susan said, “Why don’t you leave those so-called children out of the discussion? They don’t even exist yet, Liz. Why can’t you just admit that you don’t want to live in unhappiness anymore? That neither of you does. And it’s better to realize it now, by the way, than in the delivery room when you’re at five centimeters.”

I remember going to a party in New York around that time. A couple, a pair of successful artists, had just had a baby, and the mother was celebrating a gallery opening of her new paintings. I remember watching this woman, the new mother, my friend, the artist, as she tried to be hostess to this party (which was in her loft) at the same time as taking care of her infant and trying to discuss her work professionally. I never saw somebody look so sleep-deprived in my life. I can never forget the image of her standing in her kitchen after midnight, elbows-deep in a sink full of dishes, trying to clean up after this event. Her husband (I am sorry to report it, and I fully realize this is not at all representational of every husband) was in the other room, feet literally on the coffee table, watching TV. She finally asked him if he would help clean the kitchen, and he said, “Leave it, hon—we’ll clean up in the morning.” The baby started crying again. My friend was leaking breast milk through her cocktail dress.

Almost certainly, other people who attended this party came away with different images than I did. Any number of the other guests could have felt great envy for this beautiful woman with her healthy new baby, for her successful artistic career, for her marriage to a nice man, for her lovely apartment, for her cocktail dress. There were people at this party who would probably have traded lives with her in an instant, given the chance. This woman herself probably looks back on that evening—if she ever thinks of it at all—as one tiring but totally worth-it night in her overall satisfying life of motherhood and marriage and career. All I can say for myself, though, is that I spent that whole party trembling in panic, thinking, If you don’t recognize that this is your future, Liz, then you are out of your mind. Do not let it happen.

But did I have a responsibility to have a family? Oh, Lord— responsibility. That word worked on me until I worked on it, until I looked at it carefully and broke it down into the two words that make its true definition: the ability to respond. And what I ultimately had to respond to was the reality that every speck of my being was telling me to get out of my marriage. Somewhere inside me an early-warning system was forecasting that if I kept trying to white-knuckle my way through this storm, I would end up getting cancer. And that if I brought children into the world anyway, just because I didn’t want to deal with the hassle or shame of revealing some impractical facts about myself—this would be an act of grievous irresponsibility.

In the end, though, I was most guided by something my friend Sheryl said to me that very night at that very party, when she found me hiding in the bathroom of our friend’s fancy loft, shaking in fear, splashing water on my face. Sheryl didn’t know then what was going on in my marriage. Nobody did. And I didn’t tell her that night. All I could say was, “I don’t know what to do.” I remember her taking me by the shoulders and looking me in the eye with a calm smile and saying simply, “Tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth.”

So that’s what I tried to do.

Getting out of a marriage is rough, though, and not just for the legal/financial complications or the massive lifestyle upheaval. (As my friend Deborah once advised me wisely: “Nobody ever died from splitting up furniture.”) It’s the emotional recoil that kills you, the shock of stepping off the track of a conventional lifestyle and losing all the embracing comforts that keep so many people on that track forever. To create a family with a spouse is one of the most fundamental ways a person can find continuity and meaning in American (or any) society. I rediscover this truth every time I go to a big reunion of my mother’s family in Minnesota and I see how everyone is held so reassuringly in their positions over the years. First you are a child, then you are a teenager, then you are a young married person, then you are a parent, then you are retired, then you are a grandparent—at every stage you know who you are, you know what your duty is and you know where to sit at the reunion. You sit with the other children, or teenagers, or young parents, or retirees. Until at last you are sitting with the ninety-year-olds in the shade, watching over your progeny with satisfaction. Who are you? No problem—you’re the person who created all this. The satisfaction of this knowledge is immediate, and moreover, it’s universally recognized. How many people have I heard claim their children as the greatest accomplishment and comfort of their lives? It’s the thing they can always lean on during a metaphysical crisis, or a moment of doubt about their relevancy—If I have done nothing else in this life, then at least I have raised my children well.

But what if, either by choice or by reluctant necessity, you end up not participating in this comforting cycle of family and continuity? What if you step out? Where do you sit at the reunion? How do you mark time’s passage without the fear that you’ve just frittered away your time on earth without being relevant? You’ll need to find another purpose, another measure by which to judge whether or not you have been a successful human being. I love children, but what if I don’t have any? What kind of person does that make me?

Virginia Woolf wrote, “Across the broad continent of a woman’s life falls the shadow of a sword.” On one side of that sword, she said, there lies convention and tradition and order, where “all is correct.” But on the other side of that sword, if you’re crazy enough to cross it and choose a life that does not follow convention, “all is confusion. Nothing follows a regular course.” Her argument was that the crossing of the shadow of that sword may bring a far more interesting existence to a woman, but you can bet it will also be more perilous.

I’m lucky that at least I have my writing. This is something people can understand. Ah, she left her marriage in order to preserve her art. That’s sort of true, though not completely so. A lot of writers have families. Toni Morrison, just to name an example, didn’t let the raising of her son stop her from winning a little trinket we call the Nobel Prize. But Toni Morrison made her own path, and I must make mine. The Bhagavad Gita—that ancient Indian Yogic text— says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else’s life with perfection. So now I have started living my own life. Imperfect and clumsy as it may look, it is resembling me now, thoroughly.

Anyway, I bring all this up only to admit that—in comparison to my sister’s existence, to her home and to her good marriage and to her children—I’m looking pretty unstable these days. I don’t even have an address, and that’s kind of a crime against normality at this ripe old age of thirty-four. Even at this very moment, all my belongings are stored in Catherine’s home and she’s given me a temporary bedroom on the top floor of her house (which we call “The Maiden Aunt’s Quarters,” as it includes a garret window through which I can stare out at the moors while dressed in my old wedding gown, grieving my lost youth). Catherine seems to be fine with this arrangement, and it’s certainly convenient for me, but I’m wary of the danger that if I drift about this world randomly for too long, I may someday become The Family Flake. Or it may have already happened. Last summer, my five-year-old niece had a little friend over to my sister’s house to play. I asked the child when her birthday was. She told me it was January 25.

“Uh-oh!” I said. “You’re an Aquarius! I’ve dated enough Aquarians to know that they are trouble.”

Both the five-year-olds looked at me with bewilderment and a bit of fearful uncertainty. I had a sudden horrifying image of the woman I might become if I’m not careful: Crazy Aunt Liz. The divorcée in the muumuu with the dyed orange hair who doesn’t eat dairy but smokes menthols, who’s always just coming back from her astrology cruise or breaking up with her aroma-therapist boyfriend, who reads the Tarot cards of kindergarteners and says things like, “Bring Aunty Liz another wine cooler, baby, and I’ll let you wear my mood ring. . . .”

Eventually I may have to become a more solid citizen again, I’m aware of this.

But not yet . . . please. Not just yet.

31

Over the next six weeks, I travel to Bologna, to Florence, to Venice, to Sicily, to Sardinia, once more down to Naples, then over to Calabria. These are short trips, mostly—a week here, a weekend there—just the right amount of time to get the feel for a place, to look around, to ask people on the street where the good food is and then to go eat it. I drop out of my Italian language school, having come to feel that it was interfering with my efforts to learn Italian, since it was keeping me stuck in the classroom instead of wandering around Italy, where I could practice with people in person.

These weeks of spontaneous travel are such a glorious twirl of time, some of the loosest days of my life, running to the train station and buying tickets left and right, finally beginning to flex my freedom for real because it has finally sunk in that I can go wherever I want. I don’t see my friends in Rome for a while. Giovanni tells me over the phone, “Sei una trottola” (“You’re a spinning top”). One night in a town somewhere on the Mediterranean, in a hotel room by the ocean, the sound of my own laughter actually wakes me up the middle of my deep sleep. I am startled. Who is that laughing in my bed? The realization that it is only me just makes me laugh again.

I can’t remember now what I was dreaming. I think maybe it had something to do with boats.

32

Florence is just a weekend, a quick train ride up on a Friday morning to visit my Uncle Terry and Aunt Deb, who have flown in from Connecticut to visit Italy for the first time in their lives, and to see their niece, of course. It is evening when they arrive, and I take them on a walk to look at the Duomo, always such an impressive sight, as evidenced by my uncle’s reaction:

“Oy vey!” he says, then pauses and adds, “Or maybe that’s the wrong word for praising a Catholic church . . .”

We watch the Sabines getting raped right there in the middle of the sculpture garden with nobody doing a damn thing to stop it, and pay our respects to Michelangelo, to the science museum, to the views from the hillsides around town. Then I leave my aunt and uncle to enjoy the rest of their vacation without me, and I go on alone to wealthy, ample Lucca, that little Tuscan town with its celebrated butcher shops, where the finest cuts of meat I’ve seen in all of Italy are displayed with a “you know you want it” sensuality in shops across town. Sausages of every imaginable size, color and derivation are stuffed like ladies’ legs into provocative stockings, swinging from the ceilings of the butcher shops. Lusty buttocks of hams hang in the windows, beckoning like Amsterdam’s high-end hookers. The chickens look so plump and contented even in death that you imagine they offered themselves up for sacrifice proudly, after competing among themselves in life to see who could become the moistest and the fattest. But it’s not just the meat that’s wonderful in Lucca; it’s the chestnuts, the peaches, the tumbling displays of figs, dear God, the figs . . .

The town is famous, too, of course, for having been the birthplace of Puccini. I know I should probably be interested in this, but I’m much more interested in the secret a local grocer has shared with me—that the best mushrooms in town are served in a restaurant across from Puccini’s birthplace. So I wander through Lucca, asking directions in Italian, “Can you tell me where is the house of Puccini?” and a kind civilian finally leads me right to it, and then is probably very surprised when I say “Grazie,” then turn on my heel and march in the exact opposite direction of the museum’s entrance, entering a restaurant across the street and waiting out the rain over my serving of risotto ai funghi.

I don’t recall now if it was before or after Lucca that I went to Bologna—a city so beautiful that I couldn’t stop singing, the whole time I was there: “My Bologna has a first name! It’s P-R-E-T-T-Y.” Traditionally Bologna—with its lovely brick architecture and famous wealth—has been called “The Red, The Fat and The Beautiful.” (And, yes, that was an alternate title for this book.) The food is definitely better here than in Rome, or maybe they just use more butter. Even the gelato in Bologna is better (and I feel somewhat disloyal saying that, but it’s true). The mushrooms here are like big thick sexy tongues, and the prosciutto drapes over pizzas like a fine lace veil draping over a fancy lady’s hat. And of course there is the Bolognese sauce, which laughs disdainfully at any other idea of a ragù.

It occurs to me in Bologna that there is no equivalent in English for the term buon appetito. This is a pity, and also very telling. It occurs to me, too, that the train stops of Italy are a tour through the names of the world’s most famous foods and wines: next stop, Parma . . . next stop, Bologna . . . next stop, approaching Montepulciano . . . Inside the trains there is food, too, of course— little sandwiches and good hot chocolate. If it’s raining outside, it’s even nicer to snack and speed along. For one long ride, I share a train compartment with a good-looking young Italian guy who sleeps for hours through the rain as I eat my octopus salad. The guy wakes up shortly before we arrive in Venice, rubs his eyes, looks me over carefully from foot to head and pronounces under his breath: “Carina.” Which means: Cute.

“Grazie mille,” I tell him with exaggerated politeness. A thousand thanks.

He’s surprised. He didn’t realize I spoke Italian. Neither did I, actually, but we talk for about twenty minutes and I realize for the first time that I do. Some line has been crossed and I’m actually speaking Italian now. I’m not translating; I’m talking. Of course, there’s a mistake in every sentence, and I only know three tenses, but I can communicate with this guy without much effort. Me la cavo, is how you would say it in Italian, which basically means, “I can get by,” but comes from the same verb you use to talk about uncorking a bottle of wine, meaning, “I can use this language to extract myself from tight situations.”

He’s hitting on me, this kid! It’s not entirely unflattering. He’s not entirely unattractive. Though he’s not remotely uncocky, either. At one point he says to me in Italian, meaning to be complimentary, of course, “You’re not too fat, for an American woman.”

I reply in English, “And you’re not too greasy, for an Italian man.”

“Come?”

I repeat myself, in slightly modified Italian: “And you’re so gracious, just like all Italian men.”

I can speak this language! The kid thinks I like him, but it’s the words I’m flirting with. My God—I have decanted myself! I have uncorked my tongue, and Italian is pouring forth! He wants me to meet him later in Venice, but I don’t have the first interest in him. I’m just lovesick over the language, so I let him slide away. Anyhow, I’ve already got a date in Venice. I’m meeting my friend Linda there.

Crazy Linda, as I like to call her, even though she isn’t, is coming to Venice from Seattle, another damp and gray town. She wanted to come see me in Italy, so I invited her along on this leg of my trip because I refuse—I absolutely decline—to go to the most romantic city on earth by myself, no, not now, not this year. I could just picture myself all alone, in the butt end of a gondola, getting dragged through the mist by a crooning gondolier as I . . . read a magazine? It’s a sad image, rather like the idea of humping up a hill all by yourself on a bicycle-built-for-two. So Linda will provide me with company, and good company, at that.

I met Linda (and her dreadlocks, and her piercings) in Bali almost two years ago, when I went for that Yoga retreat. Since then, we’ve done a trip to Costa Rica together, too. She’s one of my favorite traveling companions, an unflappable and entertaining and surprisingly organized little pixie in tight red crushed-velvet pants. Linda is the owner of one of the world’s more intact psyches, with an incomprehension for depression and a self-esteem that has never even considered being anything but high. She said to me once, while regarding herself in a mirror, “Admittedly, I am not the one who looks fantastic in everything, but still I cannot help loving myself.” She’s got this ability to shut me up when I start fretting over metaphysical questions, such as, “What is the nature of the universe?” (Linda’s reply: “My only question is: Why ask?”) Linda would like to someday grow her dreadlocks so long she could weave them into a wire-supported structure on the top of her head “like a topiary” and maybe store a bird there. The Balinese loved Linda. So did the Costa Ricans. When she’s not taking care of her pet lizards and ferrets, she is managing a software development team in Seattle and making more money than any of us.

So we find each other there in Venice, and Linda frowns at our map of the city, turns it upside down, locates our hotel, orients herself and announces with characteristic humility: “We are the mayors of this town’s ass.”

Her cheer, her optimism—they in no way match this stinky, slow, sinking, mysterious, silent, weird city. Venice seems like a wonderful city in which to die a slow and alcoholic death, or to lose a loved one, or to lose the murder weapon with which the loved one was lost in the first place. Seeing Venice, I’m grateful that I chose to live in Rome instead. I don’t think I would have gotten off the antidepressants quite so quick here. Venice is beautiful, but like a Bergman movie is beautiful; you can admire it, but you don’t really want to live in it.

The whole town is peeling and fading like those suites of rooms that once-rich families will barricade away in the backs of their mansions when it gets too expensive to keep the maintenance up and it’s easier to just nail the doors shut and forget about the dying treasures on the other side—this is Venice. Greasy streams of Adriatic backwash nudge up against the long-suffering foundations of these buildings, testing the endurance of this fourteenth-century science fair experiment—Hey, what if we built a city that sits in water all the time?

Venice is spooky under its grainy November skies. The city creaks and sways like a fishing pier. Despite Linda’s initial confidence that we can govern this town, we get lost every day, and most especially at night, taking wrong turns toward dark corners that dead-end dangerously and directly into canal water. One foggy night, we pass an old building that seems to actually be groaning in pain. “Not to worry,” chirps Linda. “That’s just Satan’s hungry maw.” I teach her my favorite Italian word—attraversiamo (“let’s cross over”)—and we backtrack nervously out of there.

The beautiful young Venetian woman who owns the restaurant near where we are staying is miserable with her fate. She hates Venice. She swears that everyone who lives in Venice regards it as a tomb. She’d fallen in love once with a Sardinian artist, who’d promised her another world of light and sun, but had left her, instead, with three children and no choice but to return to Venice and run the family restaurant. She is my age but looks even older than I do, and I can’t imagine the kind of man who could do that to a woman so attractive. (“He was powerful,” she says, “and I died of love in his shadow.”) Venice is conservative. The woman has had some affairs here, maybe even with some married men, but it always ends in sorrow. The neighbors talk about her. People stop speaking when she walks into the room. Her mother begs her to wear a wedding ring just for appearances—saying, Darling, this is not Rome, where you can live as scandalously as you like. Every morning when Linda and I come for breakfast and ask our sorrowful young/old Venetian proprietress about the weather report for the day, she cocks the fingers of her right hand like a gun, puts it to her temple, and says, “More rain.”

Yet I don’t get depressed here. I can cope with, and even somehow enjoy, the sinking melancholy of Venice, just for a few days. Somewhere in me I am able to recognize that this is not my melancholy; this is the city’s own indigenous melancholy, and I am healthy enough these days to be able to feel the difference between me and it. This is a sign, I cannot help but think, of healing, of the coagulation of my self. There were a few years there, lost in borderless despair, when I used to experience all the world’s sadness as my own. Everything sad leaked through me and left damp traces behind.

Anyhow, it’s hard to be depressed with Linda babbling beside me, trying to get me to buy a giant purple fur hat, and asking of the lousy dinner we ate one night, “Are these called Mrs. Paul’s Veal Sticks?” She is a firefly, this Linda. In Venice in the Middle Ages there was once a profession for a man called a codega—a fellow you hired to walk in front of you at night with a lit lantern, showing you the way, scaring off thieves and demons, bringing you confidence and protection through the dark streets. This is Linda—my temporary, special-order, travel-sized Venetian codega.

33

I step off the train a few days later to a Rome full of hot, sunny, eternal disorder, where—immediately upon walking out into the street—I can hear the soccer-stadium-like cheers of a nearby mani-festazione, another labor demonstration. What they are striking about this time, my taxi driver cannot tell me, mainly because, it seems, he doesn’t care. “ ’Sti cazzi,” he says about the strikers. (Literal translation: “These balls,” or, as we might say: “I don’t give a shit.”) It’s nice to be back. After the staid sobriety of Venice, it’s nice to be back where I can see a man in a leopard-skin jacket walking past a pair of teenagers making out right in the middle of the street. The city is so awake and alive, so dolled-up and sexy in the sunshine.

I remember something that my friend Maria’s husband, Giulio, said to me once. We were sitting in an outdoor café, having our conversation practice, and he asked me what I thought of Rome. I told him I really loved the place, of course, but somehow knew it was not my city, not where I’d end up living for the rest of my life. There was something about Rome that didn’t belong to me, and I couldn’t quite figure out what it was. Just as we were talking, a helpful visual aid walked by. It was the quintessential Roman woman—a fantastically maintained, jewelry-sodden forty-something dame wearing four-inch heels, a tight skirt with a slit as long as your arm, and those sunglasses that look like race cars (and probably cost as much). She was walking her little fancy dog on a gem-studded leash, and the fur collar on her tight jacket looked as if it had been made out of the pelt of her former little fancy dog. She was exuding an unbelievably glamorous air of: “You will look at me, but I will refuse to look at you.” It was hard to imagine she had ever, even for ten minutes of her life, not worn mascara. This woman was in every way the opposite of me, who dresses in a style my sister refers to as “Stevie Nicks Goes to Yoga Class in Her Pajamas.”

I pointed that woman out to Giulio, and I said, “See, Giulio— that is a Roman woman. Rome cannot be her city and my city, too. Only one of us really belongs here. And I think we both know which one.”

Giulio said, “Maybe you and Rome just have different words.”

“What do you mean?”

He said, “Don’t you know that the secret to understanding a city and its people is to learn—what is the word of the street?”

Then he went on to explain, in a mixture of English, Italian and hand gestures, that every city has a single word that defines it, that identifies most people who live there. If you could read people’s thoughts as they were passing you on the streets of any given place, you would discover that most of them are thinking the same thought. Whatever that majority thought might be—that is the word of the city. And if your personal word does not match the word of the city, then you don’t really belong there.

“What’s Rome’s word?” I asked.

“SEX,” he announced.

“But isn’t that a stereotype about Rome?”

“No.”

“But surely there are some people in Rome thinking about other things than sex?”

Giulio insisted: “No. All of them, all day, all they are thinking about is SEX.”

“Even over at the Vatican?”

“That’s different. The Vatican isn’t part of Rome. They have a different word over there. Their word is POWER.”

“You’d think it would be FAITH.”

“It’s POWER,” he repeated. “Trust me. But the word in Rome— it’s SEX.”

Now if you are to believe Giulio, that little word—SEX—cobbles the streets beneath your feet in Rome, runs through the fountains here, fills the air like traffic noise. Thinking about it, dressing for it, seeking it, considering it, refusing it, making a sport and game out of it—that’s all anybody is doing. Which would make a bit of sense as to why, for all its gorgeousness, Rome doesn’t quite feel like my hometown. Not at this moment in my life. Because SEX isn’t my word right now. It has been at other times of my life, but it isn’t right now. Therefore, Rome’s word, as it spins through the streets, just bumps up against me and tumbles off, leaving no impact. I’m not participating in the word, so I’m not fully living here. It’s a kooky theory, impossible to prove, but I sort of like it.

Giulio asked, “What’s the word in New York City?”

I thought about this for a moment, then decided. “It’s a verb, of course. I think it’s ACHIEVE.”

(Which is subtly but significantly different from the word in Los Angeles, I believe, which is also a verb: SUCCEED. Later, I will share this whole theory with my Swedish friend Sofie, and she will offer her opinion that the word on the streets of Stockholm is CONFORM, which depresses both of us.)

I asked Giulio, “What’s the word in Naples?” He knows the south of Italy well.

“FIGHT,” he decides. “What was the word in your family when you were growing up?”

That one was difficult. I was trying to think of a single word that somehow combines both FRUGAL and IRREVERENT. But Giulio was already on to the next and most obvious question: “What’s your word?”

Now that, I definitely could not answer.

And still, after a few weeks of thinking about it, I can’t answer it any better now. I know some words that it definitely isn’t. It’s not MARRIAGE, that’s evident. It’s not FAMILY (though this was the word of the town I’d lived in for a few years with my husband, and since I did not fit with that word, this was a big cause of my suffering). It’s not DEPRESSION anymore, thank heavens. I’m not concerned that I share Stockholm’s word of CONFORM. But I don’t feel that I’m entirely inhabiting New York City’s ACHIEVE anymore, either, though that had indeed been my word all throughout my twenties. My word might be SEEK. (Then again, let’s be honest—it might just as easily be HIDE.) Over the last months in Italy, my word has largely been PLEASURE, but that word doesn’t match every single part of me, or I wouldn’t be so eager to get myself to India. My word might be DEVOTION, though this makes me sound like more of a goody-goody than I am and doesn’t take into account how much wine I’ve been drinking.

I don’t know the answer, and I suppose that’s what this year of journeying is about. Finding my word. But one thing I can say with all assurance—it ain’t SEX.

Or so I claim, anyhow. You tell me, then, why today my feet led me almost of their own accord to a discreet boutique off the Via Condotti, where—under the expert tutelage of the silky young Italian shop girl—I spent a few dreamy hours (and a transcontinental airline ticket’s worth of money) buying enough lingerie to keep a sultan’s consort outfitted for 1,001 nights. I bought bras of every shape and formation. I bought filmy, flimsy camisoles and sassy bits of panty in every color of the Easter basket, and slips that came in creamy satins and hush-now-baby silks, and handmade little bits of string and things and basically just one velvety, lacy, crazy valentine after another.

I have never owned things like this in my life. So why now? As I was walking out of the store, hauling my cache of tissue-wrapped naughties under my arm, I suddenly thought of the anguished demand I’d heard a Roman soccer fan yell the other night at the Lazio game, when Lazio’s star player Albertini at a critical moment had passed the ball right into the middle of nowhere, for no reason whatsoever, totally blowing the play.

“Per chi???” the fan had shouted in near-madness. “Per chi???”

For WHOM??? For whom are you passing this ball, Albertini? Nobody’s there!

Out on the street after my delirious hours of lingerie shopping, I remembered this line and repeated it to myself in a whisper: “Per chi?”

For whom, Liz? For whom all this decadent sexiness? Nobody’s there. I had only a few weeks left in Italy and absolutely no intention of knocking boots with anyone. Or did I? Had I finally been affected by the word on the streets in Rome? Was this some final effort to become Italian? Was this a gift to myself, or was it a gift for some as yet not even imagined lover? Was this an attempt to start healing my libido after the sexual self-confidence disaster of my last relationship?

I asked myself, “You gonna bring all this stuff to India?”

34

Luca Spaghetti’s birthday falls this year on America’s Thanksgiving Day, so he wants to do a turkey for his birthday party. He’s never eaten a big, fat, roasted American Thanksgiving turkey, though he’s seen them in pictures. He thinks it should be easy to replicate such a feast (especially with the help of me, a real American). He says we can use the kitchen of his friends Mario and Simona, who have a nice big house in the mountains outside Rome, and who always host Luca’s birthday parties.

So here was Luca’s plan for the festivities—he would pick me up at around seven o’clock at night, after he’d finished work, and then we would drive north out of Rome for an hour or so to his friends’ house (where we would meet the other attendees of the birthday party) and we’d drink some wine and all get to know each other, and then, probably around 9:00 PM, we would commence to roasting a twenty-pound turkey . . .

I had to do some explaining to Luca about how much time it takes to roast a twenty-pound turkey. I told him his birthday feast would probably be ready to eat, at that rate, around dawn the next day. He was destroyed. “But what if we bought a very small turkey? A just-born turkey?”

I said, “Luca—let’s make it easy and have pizza, like every other good dysfunctional American family does on Thanksgiving.”

But he’s still sad about it. Though there’s a general sadness around Rome right now, anyway. The weather has turned cold. The sanitation workers and the train employees and the national airline all went on strike on the same day. A study has just been released saying that 36 percent of Italian children have an allergy to the gluten needed to make pasta, pizza and bread, so there goes Italian culture. Even worse, I recently saw an article with the shocking headline: “Insoddisfatte 6 Donne su 10!” Meaning that six out of ten Italian women are sexually unsatisfied. Moreover, 35 percent of Italian men are reporting difficulty maintaining un’erezione, leaving researchers feeling very perplessi indeed, and making me wonder if SEX should be allowed to be Rome’s special word anymore, after all.

In more serious bad news, nineteen Italian soldiers have recently been killed in The Americans’ War (as it is called here) in Iraq—the largest number of military deaths in Italy since World War II. The Romans were shocked by these deaths and the city closed down the day the boys were buried. The wide majority of Italians want nothing to do with George Bush’s war. The involvement was the decision of Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister (more commonly referred to around these parts as l’idiota). This intellect-free, soccer-club-owning businessman, with his oily film of corruption and sleaze, who regularly embarrasses his fellow citizens by making lewd gestures in the European parliament, who has mastered the art of speaking l’aria fritta (“fried air”), who expertly manipulates the media (not difficult when you own it), and who generally behaves not at all like a proper world leader but rather like a Waterbury mayor (that’s an inside joke for Connecticut residents only—sorry), has now engaged the Italians in a war they see as none of their business whatsoever.

“They died for freedom,” Berlusconi said at the funeral of the nineteen Italian soldiers, but most Romans have a different opinion: They died for George Bush’s personal vendetta. In this political climate, one might think it would be difficult to be a visiting American. Indeed, when I came to Italy, I expected to encounter a certain amount of resentment, but have received instead empathy from most Italians. In any reference to George Bush, people only nod to Berlusconi, saying, “We understand how it is—we have one, too.”

We’ve been there.

It is odd, then, that Luca would want to use this birthday to celebrate an American Thanksgiving, given these circumstances, but I do like the idea of it. Thanksgiving is a nice holiday, something an American can freely be proud of, our one national festival that has remained relatively uncommodified. It’s a day of grace and thanks and community and—yes—pleasure. It might be what we all need right now.

My friend Deborah has come to Rome from Philadelphia for the weekend, to celebrate the holiday with me. Deborah’s an internationally respected psychologist, a writer and a feminist theorist, but I still think of her as my favorite regular customer, back from the days when I was a diner waitress in Philly and she would come in for lunch and drink Diet Coke with no ice and say clever things to me over the counter. She really classed up that joint. We’ve been friends now for over fifteen years. Sofie will be coming to Luca’s party, too. Sofie and I have been friends for about fifteen weeks. Everybody is always welcome on Thanksgiving. Especially when it also happens to be Luca Spaghetti’s birthday.

We drive out of tired, stressed-out Rome late in the evening, up into the mountains. Luca loves American music, so we’re blasting the Eagles and singing “Take it . . . to the limit . . . one more time!!!!!!” which adds an oddly Californian sound track to our drive through olive groves and ancient aqueducts. We arrive at the house of Luca’s old friends Mario and Simona, parents of the twin twelve-year-old girls Giulia and Sara. Paolo—a friend of Luca’s whom I’d met before at soccer games—is there, too, along with his girlfriend. Of course, Luca’s own girlfriend, Giuliana, is there, as well, having driven up earlier in the evening. It’s an exquisite house, hidden away in a grove of olive and clementine and lemon trees. The fireplace is lit. The olive oil is homemade.

No time to roast a twenty-pound turkey, obviously, but Luca sautés up some lovely cuts of turkey breast and I preside over a whirlwind group effort to make a Thanksgiving stuffing, as best as I can remember the recipe, made from the crumbs of some high-end Italian bread, with necessary cultural substitutions (dates instead of apricots; fennel instead of celery). Somehow it comes out great. Luca had been worried about how the conversation would proceed tonight, given that half the guests can’t speak English and the other half can’t speak Italian (and only Sofie can speak Swedish), but it seems to be one of those miracle evenings where everyone can understand each other perfectly, or at least your neighbor can help translate when the odd word gets lost.

I lose count of how many bottles of Sardinian wine we drink before Deborah introduces to the table the suggestion that we follow a nice American custom here tonight by joining hands and— each in turn—saying what we are most grateful for. In three languages, then, this montage of gratitude comes forth, one testimony at a time.

Deborah starts by saying she is grateful that America will soon get a chance to pick a new president. Sofie says (first in Swedish, then in Italian, then in English) that she is grateful for the benevolent hearts of Italy and for these four months she’s been allowed to experience such pleasure in this country. The tears begin when Mario—our host—weeps in open gratitude as he thanks God for the work in his life that has enabled him to have this beautiful home for his family and friends to enjoy. Paolo gets a laugh when he says that he, too, is grateful that America will soon have the chance to elect a new president. We fall into a silence of collective respect for little Sara, one of the twelve-year-old twins, when she bravely shares that she is grateful to be here tonight with such nice people because she’s been having a hard time at school lately— some of the other students are being mean to her—“so thank you for being sweet to me tonight and not mean to me, like they are.” Luca’s girlfriend says she is grateful for the years of loyalty Luca has shown to her, and for how warmly he has taken care of her family through difficult times. Simona—our hostess—cries even more openly than her husband had, as she expresses her gratitude that a new custom of celebration and thankfulness has been brought into her home by these strangers from America, who are not really strangers at all, but friends of Luca’s and therefore friends of peace.

When it comes my turn to speak, I begin “Sono grata . . .” but then find I cannot say my real thoughts. Namely, that I am so grateful to be free tonight from the depression that had been gnawing at me like a rat over the years, a depression that had chewed such perforations in my soul that I would not, at one time, have been able to enjoy even such a lovely night as this. I don’t mention any of this because I don’t want to alarm the children. Instead, I say a simpler truth—that I am grateful for old and new friends. That I am grateful, most especially tonight, for Luca Spaghetti. That I hope he has a happy thirty-third birthday, and I hope he lives a long life, in order to stand as an example to other men of how to be a generous, loyal and loving human being. And that I hope nobody minds that I’m crying as I say all this, though I don’t think they do mind, since everyone else is crying, too.

Luca is so clutched by emotion that he cannot find words except to say to all of us: “Your tears are my prayers.”

The Sardinian wine keeps on coming. And while Paolo washes the dishes and Mario puts his tired daughters to bed and Luca plays the guitar and everyone sings drunken Neil Young songs in various accents, Deborah the American feminist psychologist says quietly to me, “Look around at these good Italian men. See how open they are to their feelings and how lovingly they participate in their families. See the regard and the respect they hold for the women and children in their lives. Don’t believe what you read in the papers, Liz. This country is doing very well.”

Our party doesn’t end until almost dawn. We could have roasted that twenty-pound turkey, after all, and eaten it for breakfast. Luca Spaghetti drives me and Deborah and Sofie all the way back home. We try to help him stay awake as the sun comes up by singing Christmas carols. Silent night, sainted night, holy night, we sing over and over in every language we know, as we all head back into Rome together.

35

I couldn’t hold out. None of my pants, after almost four months in Italy, fit me anymore. Not even the new clothes I just bought last month (when I’d already outgrown my “Second Month in Italy” pants) fit me anymore. I can’t afford to buy a new wardrobe every few weeks, and I am aware that soon I will be in India, where the pounds will just melt away, but still—I cannot walk in these pants anymore. I can’t stand it.

Which all makes sense, given that I recently stepped on a scale in a fancy Italian hotel and learned that I have gained twenty-three pounds in my four months of Italy—a truly admirable statistic. About fifteen pounds of that I actually needed to gain because I had become so skeletal during these last hard years of divorce and depression. The next five pounds, I just gained for fun. As for the final three? Just to prove a point, I suppose.

But so it is that I find myself shopping for an item of clothing I will always keep in my life as a cherished souvenir: “My Last Month in Italy Jeans.” The young lady in the shop is nice enough to keep bringing me bigger and bigger sizes, handing them through the curtain one after another without commentary, only asking with concern each time if this is closer to a fit. Several times, I have needed to poke my head out of this curtain and ask, “Excuse me— do you have a pair that is slightly bigger?” Until the nice young lady finally gives me a pair of jeans with a waist measurement that verily hurts my eyes to witness. I step out of the dressing room, presenting myself to the salesgirl.

She doesn’t blink. She looks at me like an art curator trying to assess the value of a vase. A rather large vase.

“Carina,” she decides finally. Cute.

I ask her in Italian if she could please tell me honestly whether these jeans are causing me to resemble a cow.

No, signorina, I am told. You do not resemble a cow.

“Do I resemble a pig, then?”

No, she assures me with great seriousness. Nor do I resemble a pig in the least.

“Perhaps a buffalo?”

This is becoming good vocabulary practice. I’m also trying to get a smile out of the salesclerk, but she’s too intent on remaining professional.

I try one more time: “Maybe I resemble a buffalo mozzarella?”

Okay, maybe, she concedes, smiling only slightly. Maybe you do look a little like a buffalo mozzarella . . .

36

I have only a week left here. I’m planning to go back to America for Christmas before flying to India, not only because I can’t stand the thought of spending Christmas without my family but also because the next eight months of my journey—India and Indonesia— require a complete repacking of gear. Very little of the stuff you need when you are living in Rome is the same stuff you need when you are wandering around India.

And maybe it’s in preparation for my trip to India that I decide to spend this last week traveling through Sicily—the most third-world section of Italy, and therefore not a bad place to go if you need to prepare yourself to experience extreme poverty. Or maybe I only want to go to Sicily because of what Goethe said: “Without seeing Sicily one cannot get a clear idea of what Italy is.”

But it’s not easy getting to or around Sicily. I have to use all my finding-out skills to find a train that runs on Sunday all the way down the coast and then to find the correct ferryboat to Messina (a scary and suspicious Sicilian port town that seems to howl from behind barricaded doors, “It’s not my fault I’m ugly! I’ve been earthquaked and carpet-bombed and raped by the Mafia, too!”) Once I’ve arrived in Messina, I have to find a bus station (grimy as a smoker’s lung) and find the man whose job it is to sit there in the ticket booth, mourning his life, and see if he will please sell me a ticket to the coastal town of Taormina. Then I rattle along the cliffs and beaches of Sicily’s stupendous and hard-edged east coast until I get to Taormina, and then I have to find a taxi and then I have to find a hotel. Then I have to find the right person of whom to ask my favorite question in Italian: “Where is the best food in this town?” In Taormina, that person turns out to be a sleepy policeman. He gives me one of the greatest things anyone can ever give me in life—a tiny piece of paper with the name of an obscure restaurant written on it, a hand-drawn map of how to find the place.

Which turns out to be a little trattoria where the friendly elderly proprietress is getting ready for her evening’s customers by standing on a table in her stocking feet, trying not to knock over the Christmas crèche as she polishes the restaurant windows. I tell her that I don’t need to see the menu but could she just bring me the best food possible because this is my first night in Sicily. She rubs her hands together in pleasure and yells something in Sicilian dialect to her even-more-elderly mother in the kitchen, and within the space of twenty minutes I am busily eating the hands-down most amazing meal I’ve eaten yet in all of Italy. It’s pasta, but a shape of pasta I’ve never before seen—big, fresh, sheets of pasta folded ravioli-like into the shape (if not exactly the size) of the pope’s hat, stuffed with a hot, aromatic puree of crustaceans and octopus and squid, served tossed like a hot salad with fresh cockles and strips of julienned vegetables, all swimming in an olivey, oceany broth. Followed by the rabbit, stewed in thyme.

But Syracuse, the next day, is even better. The bus coughs me up on a street corner here in the cold rain, late in the day. I love this town immediately. There are three thousand years of history under my feet in Syracuse. It’s a place of such ancient civilization that it makes Rome look like Dallas. Myth says that Daedalus flew here from Crete and that Hercules once slept here. Syracuse was a Greek colony that Thucydides called “a city not in the least inferior to Athens itself.” Syracuse is the link between ancient Greece and ancient Rome. Many great playwrights and scientists of antiquity lived here. Plato thought it would be the ideal location for a utopian experiment where perhaps “by some divine fate” rulers might become philosophers, and philosophers might become rulers. Historians say that rhetoric was invented in Syracuse, and also (and this is just a minor thing) plot.

I walk through the markets of this crumbly town and my heart tumbles with a love I can’t answer or explain as I watch an old guy in a black wool hat gut a fish for a customer (he has stuck his cigarette in his lips for safekeeping the way a seamstress keeps her pins in her mouth as she sews; his knife works with devotional perfection on the fillets). Shyly, I ask this fisherman where I should eat tonight, and I leave our conversation clutching yet another little piece of paper, directing me to a little restaurant with no name, where—as soon as I sit down that night—the waiter brings me airy clouds of ricotta sprinkled with pistachio, bread chunks floating in aromatic oils, tiny plates of sliced meats and olives, a salad of chilled oranges tossed in a dressing of raw onion and parsley. This is before I even hear about the calamari house specialty.

“No town can live peacefully, whatever its laws,” Plato wrote, “when its citizens . . . do nothing but feast and drink and tire themselves out in the cares of love.”

But is it such a bad thing to live like this for just a little while? Just for a few months of one’s life, is it so awful to travel through time with no greater ambition than to find the next lovely meal? Or to learn how to speak a language for no higher purpose than that it pleases your ear to hear it? Or to nap in a garden, in a patch of sunlight, in the middle of the day, right next to your favorite fountain? And then to do it again the next day?

Of course, one can’t live like this forever. Real life and wars and traumas and mortality will interfere eventually. Here in Sicily with its dreadful poverty, real life is never far from anyone’s mind. The Mafia has been the only successful business in Sicily for centuries (running the business of protecting citizens from itself), and it still keeps its hand down everybody’s pants. Palermo—a city Goethe once claimed was possessed of an impossible-to-describe beauty— may now be the only city in Western Europe where you can still find yourself picking your steps through World War II rubble, just to give a sense of development here. The town has been systematically uglified beyond description by the hideous and unsafe apartment blocks the Mafia constructed in the 1980s as money-laundering operations. I asked one Sicilian if those buildings were made from cheap concrete and he said, “Oh, no—this is very expensive concrete. In each batch, there are a few bodies of people who were killed by the Mafia, and that costs money. But it does make the concrete stronger to be reinforced with all those bones and teeth.”

In such an environment, is it maybe a little shallow to be thinking only about your next wonderful meal? Or is it perhaps the best you can do, given the harder realities? Luigi Barzini, in his 1964 masterwork The Italians (written when he’d finally grown tired of foreigners writing about Italy and either loving it or hating it too much) tried to set the record straight on his own culture. He tried to answer the question of why the Italians have produced the greatest artistic, political and scientific minds of the ages, but have still never become a major world power. Why are they the planet’s masters of verbal diplomacy, but still so inept at home government? Why are they so individually valiant, yet so collectively unsuccessful as an army? How can they be such shrewd merchants on the personal level, yet such inefficient capitalists as a nation?

His answers to these questions are more complex than I can fairly encapsulate here, but have much to do with a sad Italian history of corruption by local leaders and exploitation by foreign dominators, all of which has generally led Italians to draw the seemingly accurate conclusion that nobody and nothing in this world can be trusted. Because the world is so corrupted, misspoken, unstable, exaggerated and unfair, one should trust only what one can experience with one’s own senses, and this makes the senses stronger in Italy than anywhere in Europe. This is why, Barzini says, Italians will tolerate hideously incompetent generals, presidents, tyrants, professors, bureaucrats, journalists and captains of industry, but will never tolerate incompetent “opera singers, conductors, ballerinas, courtesans, actors, film directors, cooks, tailors . . .” In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible. Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real.

To devote yourself to the creation and enjoyment of beauty, then, can be a serious business—not always necessarily a means of escaping reality, but sometimes a means of holding on to the real when everything else is flaking away into . . . rhetoric and plot. Not too long ago, authorities arrested a brotherhood of Catholic monks in Sicily who were in tight conspiracy with the Mafia, so who can you trust? What can you believe? The world is unkind and unfair. Speak up against this unfairness and in Sicily, at least, you’ll end up as the foundation of an ugly new building. What can you do in such an environment to hold a sense of your individual human dignity? Maybe nothing. Maybe nothing except, perhaps, to pride yourself on the fact that you always fillet your fish with perfection, or that you make the lightest ricotta in the whole town?

I don’t want to insult anyone by drawing too much of a comparison between myself and the long-suffering Sicilian people. The tragedies in my life have been of a personal and largely self-created nature, not epically oppressive. I went through a divorce and a depression, not a few centuries of murderous tyranny. I had a crisis of identity, but I also had the resources (financial, artistic and emotional) with which to try to work it out. Still, I will say that the same thing which has helped generations of Sicilians hold their dignity has helped me begin to recover mine—namely, the idea that the appreciation of pleasure can be an anchor of one’s humanity. I believe this is what Goethe meant by saying that you have to come here, to Sicily, in order to understand Italy. And I suppose this is what I instinctively felt when I decided that I needed to come here, to Italy, in order to understand myself.

It was in a bathtub back in New York, reading Italian words aloud from a dictionary, that I first started mending my soul. My life had gone to bits and I was so unrecognizable to myself that I probably couldn’t have picked me out of a police lineup. But I felt a glimmer of happiness when I started studying Italian, and when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grab onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt—this is not selfishness, but obligation. You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight.

I came to Italy pinched and thin. I did not know yet what I deserved. I still maybe don’t fully know what I deserve. But I do know that I have collected myself of late—through the enjoyment of harmless pleasures—into somebody much more intact. The easiest, most fundamentally human way to say it is that I have put on weight. I exist more now than I did four months ago. I will leave Italy noticeably bigger than when I arrived here. And I will leave with the hope that the expansion of one person—the magnification of one life—is indeed an act of worth in this world. Even if that life, just this one time, happens to be nobody’s but my own.

INDIA

Or

‘Congratulations to Meet You.’

Or

Thirty-six Tales About the

Pursuit of Devotion

37

When I was growing up, my family kept chickens. We always had about a dozen of them at any given time and whenever one died off—taken away by hawk or fox or by some obscure chicken illness—my father would replace the lost hen. He’d drive to a nearby poultry farm and return with a new chicken in a sack. The thing is, you must be very careful when introducing a new chicken to the general flock. You can’t just toss it in there with the old chickens, or they will see it as an invader. What you must do instead is to slip the new bird into the chicken coop in the middle of the night while the others are asleep. Place her on a roost beside the flock and tiptoe away. In the morning, when the chickens wake up, they don’t notice the newcomer, thinking only, “She must have been here all the time since I didn’t see her arrive.” The clincher of it is, awaking within this flock, the newcomer herself doesn’t even remember that she’s a newcomer, thinking only, “I must have been here the whole time . . .”

This is exactly how I arrive in India.

My plane lands in Mumbai around 1:30 AM. It is December 30. I find my luggage, then find the taxi that will take me hours and hours out of the city to the Ashram, located in a remote rural village. I doze on the drive through nighttime India, sometimes waking to look out the window, where I can see strange haunted shapes of thin women in saris walking alongside the road with bundles of firewood on their heads. At this hour? Buses with no headlights pass us, and we pass oxcarts. The banyan trees spread their elegant roots throughout the ditches.

We pull up to the front gate of the Ashram at 3:30 AM, right in front of the temple. As I’m getting out of the taxi, a young man in Western clothes and a wool hat steps out of the shadows and introduces himself—he is Arturo, a twenty-four-year-old journalist from Mexico and a devotee of my Guru, and he’s here to welcome me. As we’re exchanging whispered introductions, I can hear the first familiar bars of my favorite Sanskrit hymn coming from inside. It’s the morning arati, the first morning prayer, sung every day at 3:30 AM as the Ashram wakes. I point to the temple, asking Arturo, “May I . . . ?” and he makes a be-my-guest gesture. So I pay my taxi driver, tuck my backpack behind a tree, slip off my shoes, kneel and touch my forehead to the temple step and then ease myself inside, joining the small gathering of mostly Indian women who are singing this beautiful hymn.

This is the hymn I call “The Amazing Grace of Sanskrit,” filled with devotional longing. It is the one devotional song I have memorized, not so much from effort as from love. I begin to sing the familiar words in Sanskrit, from the simple introduction about the sacred teachings of Yoga to the rising tones of worship (“I adore the cause of the universe . . . I adore the one whose eyes are the sun, the moon and fire . . . you are everything to me, O god of gods . . .”) to the last gemlike summation of all faith (“This is perfect, that is perfect, if you take the perfect from the perfect, the perfect remains”).

The women finish singing. They bow in silence, then move out a side door across a dark courtyard and into a smaller temple, barely lit by one oil lamp and perfumed with incense. I follow them. The room is filled with devotees—Indian and Western—wrapped in woolen shawls against the predawn cold. Everyone is seated in meditation, roosted there, you might say, and I slip in beside them, the new bird in the flock, completely unnoticed. I sit cross-legged, place my hands on my knees, close my eyes.

I have not meditated in four months. I have not even thought about meditating in four months. I sit there. My breath quiets. I say the mantra to myself once very slowly and deliberately, syllable by syllable.

Om.

Na.

Mah.

Shi.

Va.

Ya.

Om Namah Shivaya.

I honor the divinity that resides within me.

Then I repeat it again. Again. And again. It’s not so much that I’m meditating as unpacking the mantra carefully, the way you would unpack your grandmother’s best china if it had been stored in a box for a long time, unused. I don’t know if I fall asleep or if I drop into some kind of spell or even how much time passes. But when the sun finally comes up that morning in India and everyone opens their eyes and looks around, Italy feels ten thousand miles away from me now, and it is as if I have been here in this flock forever.

38

‘‘Why do we practice Yoga?”

I had a teacher once ask that question during a particularly challenging Yoga class, back in New York. We were all bent into these exhausting sideways triangles, and the teacher was making us hold the position longer than any of us would have liked.

“Why do we practice Yoga?” he asked again. “Is it so we can become a little bendier than our neighbors? Or is there perhaps some higher purpose?”

Yoga, in Sanskrit, can be translated as “union.” It originally comes from the root word yuj, which means “to yoke,” to attach yourself to a task at hand with ox-like discipline. And the task at hand in Yoga is to find union—between mind and body, between the individual and her God, between our thoughts and the source of our thoughts, between teacher and student, and even between ourselves and our sometimes hard-to-bend neighbors. In the West, we’ve mainly come to know Yoga through its now-famous pretzel-like exercises for the body, but this is only Hatha Yoga, one limb of the philosophy. The ancients developed these physical stretches not for personal fitness, but to loosen up their muscles and minds in order to prepare them for meditation. It is difficult to sit in stillness for many hours, after all, if your hip is aching, keeping you from contemplating your intrinsic divinity because you are too busy contemplating, “Wow . . . my hip really aches.”

But Yoga can also mean trying to find God through meditation, through scholarly study, through the practice of silence, through devotional service or through mantra—the repetition of sacred words in Sanskrit. While some of these practices tend to look rather Hindu in their derivation, Yoga is not synonymous with Hinduism, nor are all Hindus Yogis. True Yoga neither competes with nor precludes any other religion. You may use your Yoga—your disciplined practices of sacred union—to get closer to Krishna, Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha or Yahweh. During my time at the Ashram, I met devotees who identified themselves as practicing Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus and even Muslims. I have met others who would rather not talk about their religious affiliation at all, for which, in this contentious world, you can hardly blame them.

The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which I’m going to over-simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment. Different schools of thought over the centuries have found different explanations for man’s apparently inherently flawed state. Taoists call it imbalance, Buddism calls it ignorance, Islam blames our misery on rebellion against God, and the Judeo-Christian tradition attributes all our suffering to original sin. Freudians say that unhappiness is the inevitable result of the clash between our natural drives and civilization’s needs. (As my friend Deborah the psychologist explains it: “Desire is the design flaw.”) The Yogis, however, say that human discontentment is a simple case of mistaken identity. We’re miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentments and mortality. We wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature. We have failed to recognize our deeper divine character. We don’t realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme Self who is eternally at peace. That supreme Self is our true identity, universal and divine. Before you realize this truth, say the Yogis, you will always be in despair, a notion nicely expressed in this exasperated line from the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus: “You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not.”

Yoga is the effort to experience one’s divinity personally and then to hold on to that experience forever. Yoga is about self-mastery and the dedicated effort to haul your attention away from your endless brooding over the past and your nonstop worrying about the future so that you can seek, instead, a place of eternal presence from which you may regard yourself and your surroundings with poise. Only from that point of even-mindedness will the true nature of the world (and yourself) be revealed to you. True Yogis, from their seat of equipoise, see all this world as an equal manifestation of God’s creative energy—men, women, children, turnips, bedbugs, coral: it’s all God in disguise. But the Yogis believe a human life is a very special opportunity, because only in a human form and only with a human mind can God-realization ever occur. The turnips, the bedbugs, the coral—they never get a chance to find out who they really are. But we do have that chance.

“Our whole business therefore in this life,” wrote Saint Augustine, rather Yogically, “is to restore to health the eye of the heart whereby God may be seen.”

Like all great philosophical ideas, this one is simple to understand but virtually impossible to imbibe. OK—so we are all one, and divinity abides within us all equally. No problem. Understood. But now try living from that place. Try putting that understanding into practice twenty-four hours a day. It’s not so easy. Which is why in India it is considered a given that you need a teacher for your Yoga. Unless you were born one of those rare shimmering saints who come into life already fully actualized, you’re going to need some guidance along your journey toward enlightenment. If you’re lucky enough, you will find a living Guru. This is what pilgrims have been coming to India to seek for ages. Alexander the Great sent an ambassador to India in the fourth century BC, with a request to find one of these famous Yogis and return with him to court. (The ambassador did report finding a Yogi, but couldn’t convince the gentleman to travel.) In the first century AD, Apollonius of Tyrana, another Greek ambassador, wrote of his journey through India: “I saw Indian Brahmans living upon the earth and yet not on it, and fortified without fortifications, and possessing nothing, yet having the richness of all men.” Gandhi himself always wanted to study with a Guru, but never, to his regret, had the time or opportunity to find one. “I think there is a great deal of truth,” he wrote, “in the doctrine that true knowledge is impossible without a Guru.”

A great Yogi is anyone who has achieved the permanent state of enlightened bliss. A Guru is a great Yogi who can actually pass that state on to others. The word Guru is composed of two Sanskrit syllables. The first means “darkness,” the second means “light.” Out of the darkness and into the light. What passes from the master into the disciple is something called mantravirya: “The potency of the enlightened consciousness.” You come to your Guru, then, not only to receive lessons, as from any teacher, but to actually receive the Guru’s state of grace.

Such transfers of grace can occur in even the most fleeting of encounters with a great being. I once went to see the great Vietnamese monk, poet and peacemaker Thich Nhat Hanh speak in New York. It was a characteristically hectic weeknight in the city, and as the crowd pushed and shoved its way into the auditorium, the very air in the place was whisked into a nerve-racking urgency of everyone’s collective stress. Then the monk came on stage. He sat in stillness for a good while before he began to speak, and the audience— you could feel it happening, one row of high-strung New Yorkers at a time—became colonized by his stillness. Soon, there was not a flutter in the place. In the space of maybe ten minutes, this small Vietnamese man had drawn every single one of us into his silence. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that he drew us each into our own silence, into that peace which we each inherently possessed, but had not yet discovered or claimed. His ability to bring forth this state in all of us, merely by his presence in the room—this is divine power. And this is why you come to a Guru: with the hope that the merits of your master will reveal to you your own hidden greatness.

The classical Indian sages wrote that there are three factors which indicate whether a soul has been blessed with the highest and most auspicious luck in the universe:

1. To have been born a human being, capable of conscious inquiry.

2. To have been born with—or to have developed—a yearning to understand the nature of the universe.

3. To have found a living spiritual master.

There is a theory that if you yearn sincerely enough for a Guru, you will find one. The universe will shift, destiny’s molecules will get themselves organized and your path will soon intersect with the path of the master you need. It was only one month after my first night of desperate prayer on my bathroom floor—a night spent tearfully begging God for answers—that I found mine, having walked into David’s apartment and encountered a photograph of this stunning Indian woman. Of course, I was more than a bit ambivalent about the concept of having a Guru. As a general rule, Westerners aren’t comfortable with that word. We have a kind of sketchy recent history with it. In the 1970s a number of wealthy, eager, susceptible young Western seekers collided with a handful of charismatic but dubious Indian Gurus. Most of the chaos has settled down now, but the echoes of mistrust still resonate. Even for me, even after all this time, I still find myself sometimes balking at the word Guru. This is not a problem for my friends in India; they grew up with the Guru principle, they’re relaxed with it. As one young Indian girl told me, “Everybody in India almost has a Guru!” I know what she meant to say (that almost everyone in India has a Guru) but I related more to her unintentional statement, because that’s how I feel sometimes— like I almost have a Guru. Sometimes I just can’t seem to admit it because, as a good New Englander, skepticism and pragmatism are my intellectual heritage. Anyhow, it’s not like I consciously went shopping for a Guru. She just arrived. And the first time I saw her, it was as though she looked at me through her photograph—those dark eyes smoldering with intelligent compassion—and she said, “You called for me and now I’m here. So do you want to do this thing, or not?”

Setting aside all nervous jokes and cross-cultural discomforts, I must always remember what I replied that night: a straightforward and bottomless YES.

39

One of my first roommates at the Ashram was a middle-aged African-American devout Baptist and meditation instructor from South Carolina. My other roommates, over time, would include an Argentinean dancer, a Swiss homeopath, a Mexican secretary, an Australian mother of five, a young Bangladeshi computer programmer, a pediatrician from Maine and a Filipino accountant. Others would come and go, too, as devotees cycled in and out of their residencies.

This Ashram is not a place you can casually drop by and visit. First of all, it’s not wildly accessible. It’s located far away from Mumbai, on a dirt road in a rural river valley near a pretty and scrappy little village (composed of one street, one temple, a handful of shops and a population of cows who wander about freely, sometimes walking into the tailor’s shop and lying down there). One evening I noticed a naked sixty-watt lightbulb hanging from a wire on a tree in the middle of town; this is the town’s one streetlamp. The Ashram essentially creates the local economy, such as it is, and also stands as the town’s pride. Outside the walls of the Ashram, it is all dust and poverty. Inside, it’s all irrigated gardens, beds of flowers, hidden orchids, birdsong, mango trees, jackfruit trees, cashew trees, palm trees, magnolias, banyans. The buildings are nice, though not extravagant. There’s a simple dining hall, cafeteria-style. There’s a comprehensive library of spiritual writings from the world’s religious traditions. There are a few temples for different types of gatherings. There are two meditation “caves”—dark and silent basements with comfortable cushions, open all day and night, to be used only for meditation practice. There’s a covered outdoor pavilion, where Yoga classes are held in the morning, and there’s a kind of a park with an oval walking path around it, where students can jog for exercise. I’m sleeping in a concrete dormitory.

During my stay at the Ashram, there were never more than a few hundred residents at any time. If the Guru herself had been in residence, those numbers would have swollen considerably, but she was never in India when I was there. I’d sort of expected that; she’d been spending a fair bit of time lately in America, but you never knew when she might show up anywhere by surprise. It’s not considered essential to be in her literal presence in order to keep up your studies with her. There is, of course, the irreplaceable high of actually being around a living Yogic master, and I’ve experienced that before. But many longtime devotees agree that it can also sometimes be a distraction—if you’re not careful, you can get all caught up in the celebrity buzz of excitement that surrounds the Guru and lose the focus of your true intention. Whereas, if you just go to one of her Ashrams and discipline yourself to keep to the austere schedule of practices, you will sometimes find that it is easier to communicate with your teacher from within these private meditations than to push your way through crowds of eager students and get a word in edgewise in person.

There are some long-term paid staffers at the Ashram, but most of the work here is done by the students themselves. Some of the local villagers also work here on salary. Other locals are devotees of the Guru and live here as students. One teenage Indian boy around the Ashram somehow really provoked my fascination. There was something about his (pardon the word, but . . . ) aura that was so compelling to me. For one thing, he was incredibly skinny (though this is a fairly typical sight around here; if there’s anything in this world skinnier than an Indian teenage boy, I’d be afraid to see it). He dressed the way the computer-interested boys in my junior high school used to dress for band concerts—dark trousers and an ironed white button-down shirt that was far too big for him, his thin, stemlike neck sticking out of the opening like a single daisy popping out of a giant flowerpot. His hair was always combed neatly with water. He wore an older man’s belt wrapped almost twice around what had to be a sixteen-inch waist. He wore the same clothes every day. This was his only outfit, I realized. He must have been washing his shirt by hand every night and ironing it in the mornings. (Though this attention to polite dress is also typical around here; the Indian teenagers with their starched outfits quickly shamed me out of my wrinkled peasant dresses and put me into tidier, more modest clothes.) So what was it about this kid? Why was I so moved every time I saw his face—a face so drenched with luminescence it looked like he’d just come back from a long vacation in the Milky Way? I finally asked another Indian teenager who he was. She replied matter-of-factly: “This is the son of one of the local shopkeepers. His family is very poor. The Guru invited him to stay here. When he plays the drums, you can hear God’s voice.”

There is one temple in the Ashram that is open to the general public, where many Indians come throughout the day to pay tribute to a statue of the Siddha Yogi (or “perfected master”) who established this lineage of teaching back in the 1920s and who is still revered across India as a great saint. But the rest of the Ashram is for students only. It’s not a hotel or a tourist location. It’s more like a university. You must apply to come here, and in order to be accepted for a residency, you must show that you’ve been studying this Yoga seriously for a good long while. A minimum stay of one month is required. (I’ve decided to stay here for six weeks, and then to travel around India on my own, exploring other temples, Ashrams and devotional sites.)

The students here are about equally divided between Indians and Westerners (and the Westerners are about evenly divided between Americans and Europeans). Courses are taught in both Hindi and English. On your application, you must write an essay, gather references, and answer questions about your mental and physical health, about any possible history of drug or alcohol abuse and also about your financial stability. The Guru doesn’t want people to use her Ashram as an escape from whatever bedlam they may have created in their real lives; this will not benefit anyone. She also has a general policy that if your family and loved ones for some reason deeply object to the idea of your following a Guru and living in an Ashram, then you shouldn’t do it, it’s not worth it. Just stay home in your normal life and be a good person. There’s no reason to make a big dramatic production over this.

The level of this woman’s practical sensibilities are always comforting to me.

To come here, then, you must demonstrate that you are also a sensible and practical human being. You must show that you can work because you’ll be expected to contribute to the overall operation of the place with about five hours a day of seva, or “selfless service.” The Ashram management also asks, if you have gone through a major emotional trauma in the last six months (divorce; death in the family) that you please postpone your visit to another time because chances are you won’t be able to concentrate on your studies, and, if you have a meltdown of some sort, you’ll only bring distraction to your fellow students. I just made the post-divorce cutoff myself. And when I think of the mental anguish I was going through right after I left my marriage, I have no doubt that I would have been a great drain on everyone at this Ashram had I come here at that moment. Far better to have rested first in Italy, gotten my strength and health back, and then showed up. Because I will need that strength now.

They want you to come here strong because Ashram life is rigorous. Not just physically, with days that begin at 3:00 AM and end at 9:00 PM, but also psychologically. You’re going to be spending hours and hours a day in silent meditation and contemplation, with little distraction or relief from the apparatus of your own mind. You will be living in close quarters with strangers, in rural India. There are bugs and snakes and rodents. The weather can be extreme—sometimes torrents of rain for weeks on end, sometimes 100 degrees in the shade before breakfast. Things can get deeply real around here, very fast.

My Guru always says that only one thing will happen when you come to the Ashram—that you will discover who you really are. So if you’re hovering on the brink of madness already, she’d really rather you didn’t come at all. Because, frankly, nobody wants to have to carry you out of this place with a wooden spoon clenched between your teeth.

40

My arrival coincides nicely with the arrival of a new year. I have barely one day to get myself oriented to the Ashram, and then it is already New Year’s Eve. After dinner, the small courtyard starts to fill with people. We all sit on the ground—some of us on the cool marble floor and some on grass mats. The Indian women have all dressed as though for a wedding. Their hair is oiled and dark and braided down their backs. They are wearing their finest silk saris and gold bracelets, and each woman has a brightly jeweled bindi in the center of her forehead, like a dim echo of the starlight above us. The plan is to chant outside in this courtyard until midnight, until the year changes over.

Chanting is a word I do not love for a practice that I love dearly. To me, the word chant connotes a kind of dronelike and scary monotony, like something male druids would do around a sacrificial fire. But when we chant here at the Ashram, it’s a kind of angelic singing. Generally, it’s done in a call-and-response manner. A handful of young men and women with the loveliest voices begin by singing one harmonious phrase, and the rest of us repeat it. It’s a meditative practice—the effort is to hold your attention on the music’s progression and blend your voice together with your neighbor’s voice so that eventually all are singing as one. I’m jetlagged and afraid it will be impossible for me to stay awake until midnight, much less to find the energy to sing for so long. But then this evening of music begins, with a single violin in the shadows playing one long note of longing. Then comes the harmonium, then the slow drums, then the voices . . .

I’m sitting in the back of the courtyard with all the mothers, the Indian women who are so comfortably cross-legged, their children sleeping across them like little human lap rugs. The chant tonight is a lullaby, a lament, an attempt at gratitude, written in a raga (a tune) that is meant to suggest compassion and devotion. We are singing in Sanskrit, as always (an ancient language that is extinct in India, except for prayer and religious study), and I’m trying to become a vocal mirror for the voices of the lead singers, picking up their inflections like little strings of blue light. They pass the sacred words to me, I carry the words for a while, then pass the words back, and this is how we are able to sing for miles and miles of time without tiring. All of us are swaying like kelp in the dark sea current of night. The children around me are wrapped in silks, like gifts.

I’m so tired, but I don’t drop my little blue string of song, and I drift into such a state that I think I might be calling God’s name in my sleep, or maybe I am only falling down the well shaft of this universe. By 11:30, though, the orchestra has picked up the tempo of the chant and kicked it up into sheer joy. Beautifully dressed women in jingly bracelets are clapping and dancing and attempting to tambourine with their whole bodies. The drums are slamming, rhythmic, exciting. As the minutes pass, it feels to me like we are collectively pulling the year 2004 toward us. Like we have roped it with our music, and now we are hauling it across the night sky like it’s a massive fishing net, brimming with all our unknown destinies. And what a heavy net it is, indeed, carrying as it does all the births, deaths, tragedies, wars, love stories, inventions, transformations and calamities that are destined for all of us this coming year. We keep singing and we keep hauling, hand-over-hand, minute-by-minute, voice after voice, closer and closer. The seconds drop down to midnight and we sing with our biggest effort yet and in this last brave exertion we finally pull the net of the New Year over us, covering both the sky and ourselves with it. God only knows what the year might contain, but now it is here, and we are all beneath it.

This is the first New Year’s Eve I can ever remember in my life where I haven’t known any of the people I was celebrating with. In all this dancing and singing, there is nobody for me to embrace at midnight. But I wouldn’t say that anything about this night has been lonely.

No, I would definitely not say that.

41

We are all given work here, and it turns out that my work assignment is to scrub the temple floors. So that’s where you can find me for several hours a day now—down on my knees on the cold marble with a brush and a bucket, working away like a fairy-tale stepsister. (By the way, I’m aware of the metaphor—the scrubbing clean of the temple that is my heart, the polishing of my soul, the everyday mundane effort that must be applied to spiritual practice in order to purify the self, etc., etc.)

My fellow floor-scrubbers are mainly a bunch of Indian teenagers. They always give teenagers this job because it requires high physical energy but not enormous reserves of responsibility; there’s a limit to how much damage you can do if you mess up. I like my coworkers. The girls are fluttery little butterflies who seem so much younger than American eighteen-year-old girls, and the boys are serious little autocrats who seem so much older than American eighteen-year-old boys. Nobody’s supposed to talk in the temples, but these are teenagers, so there’s a constant chatter going on all the time as we’re working. It’s not all idle gossip. One of the boys spends all day scrubbing beside me, lecturing me earnestly on how to best perform my work here: “Take seriously. Make punctual. Be cool and easy. Remember—everything you do, you do for God. And everything God does, He do for you.”

It’s tiring physical labor, but my daily hours of work are considerably easier than my daily hours of meditation. The truth is, I don’t think I’m good at meditation. I know I’m out of practice with it, but honestly I was never good at it. I can’t seem to get my mind to hold still. I mentioned this once to an Indian monk, and he said, “It’s a pity you’re the only person in the history of the world who ever had this problem.” Then the monk quoted to me from the Bhagavad Gita, the most sacred ancient text of Yoga: “Oh Krishna, the mind is restless, turbulent, strong and unyielding. I consider it as difficult to subdue as the wind.”

Meditation is both the anchor and the wings of Yoga. Meditation is the way. There’s a difference between meditation and prayer, though both practices seek communion with the divine. I’ve heard it said that prayer is the act of talking to God, while meditation is the act of listening. Take a wild guess as to which comes easier for me. I can prattle away to God about all my feelings and my problems all the livelong day, but when it comes time to descend into silence and listen . . . well, that’s a different story. When I ask my mind to rest in stillness, it is astonishing how quickly it will turn (1) bored, (2) angry, (3) depressed, (4) anxious or (5) all of the above.

Like most humanoids, I am burdened with what the Buddhists call the “monkey mind”—the thoughts that swing from limb to limb, stopping only to scratch themselves, spit and howl. From the distant past to the unknowable future, my mind swings wildly through time, touching on dozens of ideas a minute, unharnessed and undisciplined. This in itself is not necessarily a problem; the problem is the emotional attachment that goes along with the thinking. Happy thoughts make me happy, but—whoop!—how quickly I swing again into obsessive worry, blowing the mood; and then it’s the remembrance of an angry moment and I start to get hot and pissed off all over again; and then my mind decides it might be a good time to start feeling sorry for itself, and loneliness follows promptly. You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.

The other problem with all this swinging through the vines of thought is that you are never where you are. You are always digging in the past or poking at the future, but rarely do you rest in this moment. It’s something like the habit of my dear friend Susan, who—whenever she sees a beautiful place—exclaims in near panic, “It’s so beautiful here! I want to come back here someday!” and it takes all of my persuasive powers to try to convince her that she is already here. If you’re looking for union with the divine, this kind of forward/backward whirling is a problem. There’s a reason they call God a presence—because God is right here, right now. In the present is the only place to find Him, and now is the only time.

But to stay in the present moment requires dedicated one-pointed focus. Different meditation techniques teach one-pointedness in different ways—for instance, by focusing your eyes on a single point of light, or by observing the rise and fall of your breath. My Guru teaches meditation with the help of a mantra, sacred words or syllables to be repeated in a focused manner. Mantra has a dual function. For one thing, it gives the mind something to do. It’s as if you’ve given the monkey a pile of 10,000 buttons and said, “Move these buttons, one at time, into a new pile.” This is a considerably easier task for the monkey than if you just plopped him in a corner and asked him not to move. The other purpose of mantra is to transport you to another state, rowboatlike, through the choppy waves of the mind. Whenever your attention gets pulled into a cross-current of thought, just return to the mantra, climb back into the boat and keep going. The great Sanskrit mantras are said to contain unimaginable powers, the ability to row you, if you can stay with one, all the way to the shorelines of divinity.

Among my many, many problems with meditation is that the mantra I have been given—Om Namah Shivaya—doesn’t sit comfortably in my head. I love the sound of it and I love the meaning of it, but it does not glide me into meditation. It never has, not in the two years I’ve been practicing this Yoga. When I try to repeat Om Namah Shivaya in my head, it actually gets stuck in my throat, making my chest clench tightly, making me nervous. I can never match the syllables to my breathing.

I end up asking my roommate Corella about this one night. I’m shy to admit to her how much trouble I have keeping my mind focused on mantra repetition, but she is a meditation teacher. Maybe she can help me. She tells me that her mind used to wander during meditation, too, but that now her practice is the great, easy, transformative joy of her life.

“Seems I just sit down and shut my eyes,” she says, “and all I have to do is think of the mantra and I vanish right into heaven.”

Hearing this, I am nauseated with envy. Then again, Corella has been practicing Yoga for almost as many years as I’ve been alive. I ask her if she can show me how exactly she uses Om Namah Shivaya in her meditation practice. Does she take one inhale for every syllable? (When I do this, it feels really interminable and annoying.) Or is it one word for every breath? (But the words are all different lengths! So how do you even it out?) Or does she say the whole mantra once on the inhale, then once again on the exhale? (Because when I try to do that, it gets all speeded up and I get anxious.)

“I don’t know,” Corella says. “I just kind of . . . say it.”

“But do you sing it?” I push, desperate now. “Do you put a beat on it?”

“I just say it.”

“Can you maybe speak aloud for me the way you say it in your head when you’re meditating?”

Indulgently, my roommate closes her eyes and starts saying the mantra aloud, the way it appears in her head. And, indeed, she’s just . . . saying it. She says it quietly, normally, smiling slightly. She says it a few times, in fact, until I get restless and cut her off.

“But don’t you get bored?” I ask.

“Ah,” says Corella and opens her eyes, smiling. She looks at her watch. “Ten seconds have passed, Liz. Bored already, are we?”

42

The following morning, I arrive right on time for the 4:00 am meditation session which always starts the day here. We are meant to sit for an hour in silence, but I log the minutes as if they are miles— sixty brutal miles that I have to endure. By mile/minute fourteen, my nerves have started to go, my knees are breaking down and I’m overcome with exasperation. Which is understandable, given that the conversations between me and my mind during meditation generally go something like this:

Me: OK, we’re going to meditate now. Let’s draw our attention to our breath and focus on the mantra. Om Namah Shivaya. Om Namah Shiv—

Mind: I can help you out with this, you know!

Me: OK, good, because I need your help. Let’s go. Om Namah Shivaya. Om Namah Shi—

Mind: I can help you think of nice meditative images. Like—hey, here’s a good one. Imagine you are a temple. A temple on an island! And the island is in the ocean!

Me: Oh, that is a nice image.

Mind: Thanks. I thought of it myself.

Me: But what ocean are we picturing here?

Mind: The Mediterranean. Imagine you’re one of those Greek islands, with an old Greek temple on it. No, never mind, that’s too touristy. You know what? Forget the ocean. Oceans are too dangerous. Here’s a better idea— imagine you’re an island in a lake, instead.

Me: Can we meditate now, please? Om Namah Shiv—

Mind: Yes! Definitely! But try not to picture that the lake is covered with . . . what are those things called—

Me: Jet Skis?

Mind: Yes! Jet Skis! Those things consume so much fuel! They’re really a menace to the environment. Do you know what else uses a lot of fuel? Leaf blowers. You wouldn’t think so, but—

Me: OK, but let’s MEDITATE now, please? Om Namah—

Mind: Right! I definitely want to help you meditate! And that’s why we’re going to skip the image of an island on a lake or an ocean, because that’s obviously not working. So let’s imagine that you’re an island in . . . a river!

Me: Oh, you mean like Bannerman Island, in the Hudson River?

Mind: Yes! Exactly! Perfect. Therefore, in conclusion, let’s meditate on this image—envision that you are an island in a river. All the thoughts that float by as you’re meditating, these are just the river’s natural currents and you can ignore them because you are an island.

Me: Wait, I thought you said I was a temple.

Mind: That’s right, sorry. You’re a temple on an island. In fact, you are both the temple and the island.

Me: Am I also the river?

Mind: No, the river is just the thoughts.

Me: Stop! Please stop! YOU’RE MAKING ME CRAZY!!!

Mind (wounded): Sorry. I was only trying to help.

Me: Om Namah Shivaya . . . Om Namah Shivaya . . . Om Namah Shivaya . . .

Here there is a promising eight-second pause in thoughts. But then—

Mind: Are you mad at me now?

—and then with a big gasp, like I am coming up for air, my mind wins, my eyes fly open and I quit. In tears. An Ashram is supposed to be a place where you come to deepen your meditation, but this is a disaster. The pressure is too much for me. I can’t do it. But what should I do? Run out of the temple crying after fourteen minutes, every day?

This morning, though, instead of fighting it, I just stopped. I gave up. I let myself slump against the wall behind me. My back hurt, I had no strength, my mind was quivering. My posture collapsed like a bridge crumbling down. I took the mantra off the top of my head (where it had been pressing down on me like an invisible anvil) and set it on the floor beside me. And then I said to God, “I’m really sorry, but this is the closest I could get to you today.”

The Lakota Sioux say that a child who cannot sit still is a half-developed child. And an old Sanskrit text says, “By certain signs you can tell when meditation is being rightly performed. One of them is that a bird will sit on your head, thinking you are an inert thing.” This has not exactly happened to me yet. But for the next forty minutes or so, I tried to stay as quiet as possible, trapped in that meditation hall and ensnared in my own shame and inadequacy, watching the devotees around me as they sat in their perfect postures, their perfect eyes closed, their smug faces emanating calmness as they surely transported themselves into some perfect heaven. I was full of a hot, powerful sadness and would have loved to burst into the comfort of tears, but tried hard not to, remembering something my Guru once said—that you should never give yourself a chance to fall apart because, when you do, it becomes a tendency and it happens over and over again. You must practice staying strong, instead.

But I didn’t feel strong. My body ached in diminished worthlessness. I wondered who is the “me” when I am conversing with my mind, and who is the “mind.” I thought about the relentless thought-processing, soul-devouring machine that is my brain, and wondered how on earth I was ever going to master it. Then I remembered that line from Jaws and couldn’t help smiling:

“We’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

43

Dinnertime. I’m sitting alone, trying to eat slowly. My Guru is always encouraging us to practice discipline when it comes to eating. She encourages us to eat in moderation and without desperate gulps, to not extinguish the sacred fires of our bodies by dumping too much food into our digestive tracts too fast. (My Guru, I’m fairly certain, has never been to Naples.) When students come to her complaining that they’re having trouble meditating, she always asks how their digestion has been lately. It only stands to reason that you’ll have trouble gliding lightly into transcendence when your guts are struggling to churn through a sausage calzone, a pound of buffalo wings and half a coconut cream pie. Which is why they don’t serve that kind of stuff here. The food at the Ashram is vegetarian, light and healthy. But still delicious. Which is why it’s difficult for me not to wolf it down like a starving orphan. Plus, meals are served buffet-style, and it never has been easy for me to resist taking a second or third turn at-bat when beautiful food is just lying out there in the open, smelling good and costing nothing.

So I’m sitting at the dinner table all by myself, making an effort to restrain my fork, when I see a man walk over with his dinner tray, looking for an open chair. I nod to him that he is welcome to join me. I haven’t seen this guy around here yet. He must be a new arrival. The stranger’s got a cool, ain’t-no-big-hurry kind of walk, and he moves with the authority of a border town sheriff, or maybe a lifelong high-rolling poker player. He looks like he’s in his fifties, but walks like he’s lived a few centuries longer than that. He’s got white hair and a white beard and a plaid flannel shirt. Wide shoulders and giant hands that look like they could do some damage, but a totally relaxed face.

He sits down across from me and drawls, “Man, they got mosquitoes ’round this place big enough to rape a chicken.”

Ladies and Gentlemen, Richard from Texas has arrived.

44

Among the many jobs that Richard from Texas has held in his life— and I know I’m leaving a lot of them out—are oil-field worker; eighteen-wheeler truck driver; the first authorized dealer of Birkenstocks in the Dakotas; sack-shaker in a midwestern landfill (I’m sorry, but I really don’t have time to explain what a “sack-shaker” is); highway construction worker; used-car salesman; soldier in Vietnam; “commodities broker” (that commodity generally being Mexican narcotics); junkie and alcoholic (if you can call this a profession); then reformed junkie and alcoholic (a much more respectable profession); hippie farmer on a commune; radio voiceover announcer; and, finally, successful dealer in high-end medical equipment (until his marriage fell apart and he gave the whole business to his ex and got left “scratchin’ my broke white ass again”). Now he renovates old houses in Austin.

“Never did have much of a career path,” he says. “Never could do anything but the hustle.”

Richard from Texas is not a guy who worries about a lot of stuff. I wouldn’t call him a neurotic person, no sir. But I am a bit neurotic, and that’s why I’ve come to adore him. Richard’s presence at this Ashram becomes my great and amusing sense of security. His giant ambling confidence hushes down all my inherent nervousness and reminds me that everything really is going to be OK. (And if not OK, then at least comic.) Remember the cartoon rooster Foghorn Leghorn? Well, Richard is kind of like that, and I become his chatty little sidekick, the Chickenhawk. In Richard’s own words: “Me and Groceries, we steady be laughin’ the whole damn time.”

Groceries.

That’s the nickname Richard has given me. He bestowed it upon me the first night we met, when he noticed how much I could eat. I tried to defend myself (“I was purposefully eating with discipline and intention!”) but the name stuck.

Maybe Richard from Texas doesn’t seem like a typical Yogi. Though my time in India has cautioned me against deciding what a typical Yogi is. (Don’t get me started on the dairy farmer from rural Ireland I met here the other day, or the former nun from South Africa.) Richard came to this Yoga through an ex-girlfriend, who drove him up from Texas to the Ashram in New York to hear the Guru speak. Richard says, “I thought the Ashram was the weirdest thing I ever saw, and I was wondering where the room was where you have to give ’em all your money and turn over the deed to your house and car, but that never did happen . . .”

After that experience, which was about ten years ago, Richard found himself praying all the time. His prayer was always the same. He kept begging God, “Please, please, please open my heart.” That was all he wanted—an open heart. And he would always finish the prayer for an open heart by asking God, “And please send me a sign when the event has occurred.” Now he says, recollecting that time, “Be careful what you pray for, Groceries, cuz you just might get it.” After a few months of praying constantly for an open heart, what do you think Richard got? That’s right—emergency open-heart surgery. His chest was literally cracked open, his ribs cleaved away from each other to allow some daylight to finally reach into his heart, as though God were saying, “How’s that for a sign?” So now Richard is always cautious with his prayers, he tells me. “Whenever I pray for anything these days, I always wrap it up by saying, ‘Oh, and God? Please be gentle with me, OK?’”

“What should I do about my meditation practice?” I ask Richard one day, as he’s watching me scrub the temple floors. (He’s lucky— he works in the kitchen, doesn’t even have to show up there until an hour before dinner. But he likes watching me scrub the temple floors. He thinks it’s funny.)

“Why do you have to do anything about it, Groceries?”

“Because it stinks.”

“Says who?”

“I can’t get my mind to sit still.”

“Remember what the Guru teaches us—if you sit down with the pure intention to meditate, whatever happens next is none of your business. So why are you judging your experience?”

“Because what’s happening in my meditations cannot be the point of this Yoga.”

“Groceries, baby—you got no idea what’s happening in there.”

“I never see visions, I never have transcendent experiences—”

“You wanna see pretty colors? Or you wanna know the truth about yourself? What’s your intention?”

“All I seem to do is argue with myself when I try to meditate.”

“That’s just your ego, trying to make sure it stays in charge. This is what your ego does. It keeps you feeling separate, keeps you with a sense of duality, tries to convince you that you’re flawed and broken and alone instead of whole.”

“But how does that serve me?”

“It doesn’t serve you. Your ego’s job isn’t to serve you. Its only job is to keep itself in power. And right now, your ego’s scared to death cuz it’s about to get downsized. You keep up this spiritual path, baby, and that bad boy’s days are numbered. Pretty soon your ego will be out of work, and your heart’ll be making all the decisions. So your ego’s fighting for its life, playing with your mind, trying to assert its authority, trying to keep you cornered off in a holding pen away from the rest of the universe. Don’t listen to it.”

“How do you not listen to it?”

“Ever try to take a toy away from a toddler? They don’t like that, do they? They start kicking and screaming. Best way to take a toy away from a toddler is distract the kid, give him something else to play with. Divert his attention. Instead of trying to forcefully take thoughts out of your mind, give your mind something better to play with. Something healthier.”

“Like what?”

“Like love, Groceries. Like pure divine love.”

45

Going into that meditation cave every day is supposed to be this time of divine communion, but I’ve been walking in there lately flinching the way my dog used to flinch when she walked into the vet’s office (knowing that no matter how friendly everybody might be acting now, this whole thing was going to end with a sharp poke with a medical instrument). But after my last conversation with Richard from Texas, I’m trying a new approach this morning. I sit down to meditate and I say to my mind, “Listen—I understand you’re a little frightened. But I promise, I’m not trying to annihilate you. I’m just trying to give you a place to rest. I love you.”

The other day a monk told me, “The resting place of the mind is the heart. The only thing the mind hears all day is clanging bells and noise and argument, and all it wants is quietude. The only place the mind will ever find peace is inside the silence of the heart. That’s where you need to go.”

I’m trying a different mantra, too. It’s one I’ve had luck with in the past. It’s simple, just two syllables:

Ham-sa.

In Sanskrit it means “I am That.”

The Yogis say that Ham-sa is the most natural mantra, the one we are all given by God before birth. It is the sound of our own breath. Ham on the inhale, sa on the exhale. (Ham, by the way, is pronounced softly, openly, like hahhhm, not like the meat you put on a sandwich. And sa rhymes with “Ahhhh . . .”) As long as we live, every time we breathe in or out, we are repeating this mantra. I am That. I am divine, I am with God, I am an expression of God, I am not separate, I am not alone, I am not this limited illusion of an individual. I’ve always found Ham-sa easy and relaxing. Easier to meditate with than Om Namah Shivaya, the—how would you say this—“official” mantra of this Yoga. But I was talking to this monk the other day and he told me to go ahead and use Ham-sa if it helped my meditation. He said, “Meditate on whatever causes a revolution in your mind.”

So I’ll sit with it here today.

Ham-sa.

I am That.

Thoughts come, but I don’t pay much attention to them, other than to say to them in an almost motherly manner, “Oh, I know you jokers . . . go outside and play now . . . Mommy’s listening to God.” Ham-sa.

I am That.

I fall asleep for a while. (Or whatever. In meditation, you can never really be sure if what you think is sleep is actually sleep; sometimes it’s just another level of consciousness.) When I awake, or whatever, I can feel this soft blue electrical energy pulsing through my body, in waves. It’s a little alarming, but also amazing. I don’t know what to do, so I just speak internally to this energy. I say to it, “I believe in you,” and it magnifies, volumizes, in response. It’s frighteningly powerful now, like a kidnapping of the senses. It’s humming up from the base of my spine. My neck feels like it wants to stretch and twist, so I let it, and then I’m sitting there in the strangest position—perched upright like a good Yogi, but with my left ear pressed hard against my left shoulder. I don’t know why my head and neck want to do this, but I’m not going to argue with them; they are insistent. The pounding blue energy keeps pitching through my body, and I can hear a sort of thrumming sound in my ears, and it’s so mighty now that I actually can’t deal with it anymore. It scares me so much that I say to it, “I’m not ready yet!” and snap open my eyes. It all goes away. I’m back in a room again, back in my surroundings. I look at my watch. I’ve been here—or somewhere—for almost an hour.

I am panting, literally panting.

46

To understand what that experience was, what happened in there (by which I mean both “in the meditation cave” and “in me”) brings up a topic rather esoteric and wild—namely, the subject of kundalini shakti.

Every religion in the world has had a subset of devotees who seek a direct, transcendent experience with God, excusing themselves from fundamentalist scriptural or dogmatic study in order to personally encounter the divine. The interesting thing about these mystics is that, when they describe their experiences, they all end up describing exactly the same occurrence. Generally, their union with God occurs in a meditative state, and is delivered through an energy source that fills the entire body with euphoric, electric light. The Japanese call this energy ki, the Chinese Buddhists call it chi, the Balinese call it taksu, the Christians call it The Holy Spirit, the Kalahari Bushmen call it num (their holy men describe it as a snakelike power that ascends the spine and blows a hole in the head through which the gods then enter). The Islamic Sufi poets called that God-energy “The Beloved,” and wrote devotional poems to it. The Australian aborigines describe a serpent in the sky that descends into the medicine man and gives him intense, otherworldly powers. In the Jewish tradition of Kabbalah this union with the divine is said to occur through stages of spiritual ascension, with energy that runs up the spine along a series of invisible meridians.

Saint Teresa of Avila, that most mystical of Catholic figures, described her union with God as a physical ascension of light through seven inner “mansions” of her being, after which she burst into God’s presence. She used to go into meditative trances so deep that the other nuns couldn’t feel her pulse anymore. She would beg her fellow nuns not to tell anyone what they had witnessed, as it was “a most extraordinary thing and likely to arouse considerable talk.” (Not to mention a possible interview with the Inquisitor.) The most difficult challenge, the saint wrote in her memoirs, was to not stir up the intellect during meditation, for any thoughts of the mind—even the most fervent prayers—will extinguish the fire of God. Once the troublesome mind “begins to compose speeches and dream up arguments, especially if these are clever, it will soon imagine it is doing important work.” But if you can surpass those thoughts, Teresa explained, and ascend toward God, “it is a glorious bewilderment, a heavenly madness, in which true wisdom is acquired.” Unknowingly echoing the poems of the Persian Sufi mystic Hafiz, who demanded why, with a God so wildly loving, are we not all screaming drunks, Teresa cried out in her autobiography that, if these divine experiences were mere madness, then “I beseech you, Father, let us all be mad!”

Then, in the next sentences of her book, it’s like she catches her breath. Reading Saint Teresa today, you can almost feel her coming out of that delirious experience, then looking around at the political climate of medieval Spain (where she lived under one of the most repressive religious tyrannies of history) and soberly, dutifully, apologizing for her excitement. She writes, “Forgive me if I have been very bold,” and reiterates that all her idiot babbling should be ignored because, of course, she is just a woman and a worm and despicable vermin, etc., etc. You can almost see her smoothing back her nun’s skirts and tucking away those last loose strands of hair— her divine secret a blazing, hidden bonfire.

In Indian Yogic tradition, this divine secret is called kundalini shakti and is depicted as a snake who lies coiled at the base of the spine until it is released by a master’s touch or by a miracle, and which then ascends up through seven chakras, or wheels (which you might also call the seven mansions of the soul), and finally through the head, exploding into union with God. These chakras do not exist in the gross body, say the Yogis, so don’t look for them there; they exist only in the subtle body, in the body that the Buddhist teachers are referring to when they encourage their students to pull forth a new self from the physical body the way you pull a sword from its sheath. My friend Bob, who is both a student of Yoga and a neuroscientist, told me that he was always agitated by this idea of the chakras, that he wanted to actually see them in a dissected human body in order to believe they existed. But after a particularly transcendent meditative experience, he came away with a new understanding of it. He said, “Just as there exists in writing a literal truth and a poetic truth, there also exists in a human being a literal anatomy and a poetic anatomy. One, you can see; one, you cannot. One is made of bones and teeth and flesh; the other is made of energy and memory and faith. But they are both equally true.”

I like it when science and devotion find places of intersection. I found an article in The New York Times recently about a team of neurologists who had wired up a volunteer Tibetan monk for experimental brain-scanning. They wanted to see what happens to a transcendent mind, scientifically speaking, during moments of enlightenment. In the mind of a normal thinking person, an electrical storm of thoughts and impulses whirls constantly, registering on a brain scan as yellow and red flashes. The more angry or impassioned the subject becomes, the hotter and deeper those red flashes burn. But mystics across time and cultures have all described a stilling of the brain during meditation, and say that the ultimate union with God is a blue light which they can feel radiating from the center of their skulls. In Yogic tradition, this is called “the blue pearl,” and it is the goal of every seeker to find it. Sure enough, this Tibetan monk, monitored during meditation, was able to quiet his mind so completely that no red or yellow flashes could be seen. In fact, all the neurological energy of this gentleman pooled and collected at last into the center of his brain—you could see it happening right there on the monitor—into a small, cool, blue pearl of light. Just like the Yogis have always described.

This is the destination of the kundalini shakti.

In mystical India, as in many shamanistic traditions, kundalini shakti is considered a dangerous force to play around with if you are unsupervised; the inexperienced Yogi could quite literally blow his mind with it. You need a teacher—a Guru—to guide you on this path, and ideally a safe place—an Ashram—from which to practice. It is said to be the Guru’s touch (either literally in person, or through a more supernatural encounter, like a dream) which releases the bound kundalini energy from its coil at the base of the spine and allows it to begin journeying upward toward God. This moment of release is called shaktipat, divine initiation, and it is the greatest gift of an enlightened master. After that touch, the student might still labor for years toward enlightenment, but the journey has at least begun. The energy has been freed.

I received shaktipat initiation two years ago, when I met my Guru for the first time, back in New York. It was during a weekend retreat at her Ashram in the Catskills. To be honest, I felt nothing special afterward. I was kind of hoping for a dazzling encounter with God, maybe some blue lightning or a prophetic vision, but I searched my body for special effects and felt only vaguely hungry, as usual. I remember thinking that I probably didn’t have enough faith to ever experience anything really wild like unleashed kundalini shakti. I remember thinking that I was too brainy, not intuitive enough, and that my devotional path was probably going to be more intellectual than esoteric. I would pray, I would read books, I would think interesting thoughts, but I would probably never ascend into the kind of divine meditative bliss Saint Teresa describes. But that was OK. I still loved devotional practice. It’s just that kundalini shakti wasn’t for me.

The next day, though, something interesting did happen. We were all gathered with the Guru once more. She led us into meditation, and in the middle of it all, I fell asleep (or whatever the state was) and had a dream. In this dream, I was on a beach, at the ocean. The waves were massive and terrifying and they were building fast. Suddenly, a man appeared beside me. It was my Guru’s own master—a great charismatic Yogi I will refer to here only as “Swamiji” (which is Sanskrit for “beloved monk”). Swamiji had died in 1982. I knew him only from photographs around the Ashram. Even through these photographs—I must admit—I’d always found the guy to be a little too scary, a little too powerful, a little too much on fire for my taste. I’d been dodging the idea of him for a long time, and generally avoiding his gaze as it stared down at me from the walls. He seemed overwhelming. He wasn’t my kind of Guru. I’d always preferred my lovely, compassionate, feminine living master to this deceased (but still fierce) character.

But now Swamiji was in my dream, standing beside me on the beach in all his power. I was terrified. He pointed to the approaching waves and said sternly, “I want you to figure out a way to stop that from happening.” Panicked, I whipped out a notebook and tried to draw inventions that would stop the ocean waves from advancing. I drew massive seawalls and canals and dams. All my designs were so stupid and pointless, though. I knew I was way out of my league here (I’m not an engineer!) but I could feel Swamiji watching me, impatient and judgmental. Finally I gave up. None of my inventions were clever or strong enough to keep those waves from breaking.

That’s when I heard Swamiji laugh. I looked up at this tiny Indian man in his orange robes, and he was veritably busting a gut in laughter, bent over double in delight, wiping mirthful tears from his eyes.

“Tell me, dear one,” he said, and he pointed out toward the colossal, powerful, endless, rocking ocean. “Tell me, if you would be so kind—how exactly were you planning on stopping that?”

47

Two nights in a row now I’ve had dreams of a snake entering my room. I’ve read that this is spiritually auspicious (and not just in Eastern religions; Saint Ignatius had serpent visions all throughout his mystical experiences), but it doesn’t make the snakes any less vivid or scary. I’ve been waking up sweating. Even worse, once I am awake, my mind has been two-timing me again, betraying me into a state of panic like I haven’t felt since the worst of the divorce years. My thoughts keep flying back to my failed marriage, and to all the attendant shame and anger of that event. Worse, I’m again dwelling on David. I’m arguing with him in my mind, I’m mad and lonely and remembering every hurtful thing he ever said or did to me. Plus I can’t stop thinking about all our happiness together, the thrilling delirium when times were good. It’s all I can do not to jump out of this bed and call him from India in the middle of the night and just—I don’t know what—just hang up on him, probably. Or beg him to love me again. Or read him such a ferocious indictment on all his character flaws.

Why is all this stuff coming up again now?

I know what they would say, all the old-timers at this Ashram. They would say this is perfectly normal, that everyone goes through this, that intense meditation brings everything up, that you’re just clearing out all your residual demons . . . but I’m in such an emotional state I can’t stand it and I don’t want to hear anyone’s hippie theories. I recognize that everything is coming up, thank you very much. Like vomit it’s coming up.

Somehow I manage to fall asleep again, lucky me, and I have another dream. No snakes this time, but a rangy, evil dog who chases me and says, “I will kill you. I will kill you and eat you!”

I wake up crying and shaking. I don’t want to disturb my roommates, so I go hide in the bathroom. The bathroom, always the bathroom! Heaven help me, but there I am in a bathroom again, in the middle of the night again, weeping my heart out on the floor in loneliness. Oh, cold world—I have grown so weary of you and all your horrible bathrooms.

When the crying doesn’t stop, I go get myself a notebook and a pen (last refuge of a scoundrel) and I sit once more beside the toilet. I open to a blank page and scrawl my now-familiar plea of desperation:

“I NEED YOUR HELP.”

Then a long exhale of relief comes as, in my own handwriting, my own constant friend (who is it?) commences loyally to my own rescue:

“I’m right here. It’s OK. I love you. I will never leave you . . .”

48

The next morning’s meditation is a disaster. Desperate, I beg my mind to please step aside and let me find God, but my mind stares at me with steely power and says, “I will never let you pass me by.”

That whole next day, in fact, I’m so hateful and angry that I fear for the life of anyone who crosses my path. I snap at this poor German woman because she doesn’t speak English well and she can’t understand when I tell her where the bookstore is. I’m so ashamed of my rage that I go hide in (yet another!) bathroom and cry, and then I’m so mad at myself for crying as I remember my Guru’s counsel not to fall apart all the time or else it becomes a habit . . . but what does she know about it? She’s enlightened. She can’t help me. She doesn’t understand me.

I don’t want anyone to talk to me. I can’t tolerate anyone’s face right now. I even manage to dodge Richard from Texas for a while, but he eventually finds me at dinner and sits down—brave man—in my black smoke of self-loathing.

“What’s got you all wadded up?” he drawls, toothpick in mouth, as usual.

“Don’t ask,” I say, but then I start talking and tell him every bit of it, concluding with, “And worst of all, I can’t stop obsessing over David. I thought I was over him, but it’s all coming up again.”

He says, “Give it another six months, you’ll feel better.”

“I’ve already given it twelve months, Richard.”

“Then give it six more. Just keep throwin’ six months at it till it goes away. Stuff like this takes time.”

I exhale hotly through my nose, bull-like.

“Groceries,” Richard says, “listen to me. Someday you’re gonna look back on this moment of your life as such a sweet time of grieving. You’ll see that you were in mourning and your heart was broken, but your life was changing and you were in the best possible place in the world for it—in a beautiful place of worship, surrounded by grace. Take this time, every minute of it. Let things work themselves out here in India.”

“But I really loved him.”

“Big deal. So you fell in love with someone. Don’t you see what happened? This guy touched a place in your heart deeper than you thought you were capable of reaching, I mean you got zapped, kiddo. But that love you felt, that’s just the beginning. You just got a taste of love. That’s just limited little rinky-dink mortal love. Wait till you see how much more deeply you can love than that. Heck, Groceries—you have the capacity to someday love the whole world. It’s your destiny. Don’t laugh.”

“I’m not laughing.” I was actually crying. “And please don’t laugh at me now, but I think the reason it’s so hard for me to get over this guy is because I seriously believed David was my soul mate.”

“He probably was. Your problem is you don’t understand what that word means. People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that’s holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave. And thank God for it. Your problem is, you just can’t let this one go. It’s over, Groceries. David’s purpose was to shake you up, drive you out of that marriage that you needed to leave, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light could get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you had to transform your life, then introduce you to your spiritual master and beat it. That was his job, and he did great, but now it’s over. Problem is, you can’t accept that this relationship had a real short shelf life. You’re like a dog at the dump, baby—you’re just lickin’ at an empty tin can, trying to get more nutrition out of it. And if you’re not careful, that can’s gonna get stuck on your snout forever and make your life miserable. So drop it.”

“But I love him.”

“So love him.”

“But I miss him.”

“So miss him. Send him some love and light every time you think about him, and then drop it. You’re just afraid to let go of the last bits of David because then you’ll really be alone, and Liz Gilbert is scared to death of what will happen if she’s really alone. But here’s what you gotta understand, Groceries. If you clear out all that space in your mind that you’re using right now to obsess about this guy, you’ll have a vacuum there, an open spot—a doorway. And guess what the universe will do with that doorway? It will rush in—God will rush in—and fill you with more love than you ever dreamed. So stop using David to block that door. Let it go.”

“But I wish me and David could—”

He cuts me off. “See, now that’s your problem. You’re wishin’ too much, baby. You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone oughtta be.”

This line gives me the first laugh of the day.

Then I ask Richard, “So how long will it be before all this grieving passes?”

“You want an exact date?”

“Yes.”

“Somethin’ you can circle on your calendar?”

“Yes.”

“Lemme tell you something, Groceries—you got some serious control issues.”

My rage at this statement consumes me like fire. Control issues? ME? I actually consider slapping Richard for this insult. And then, from right down inside the intensity of my offended outrage comes the truth. The immediate, obvious, laughable truth.

He’s totally right.

The fire passes out of me, fast as it came.

“You’re totally right,” I say.

“I know I’m right, baby. Listen, you’re a powerful woman and you’re used to getting what you want out of life, and you didn’t get what you wanted in your last few relationships and it’s got you all jammed up. Your husband didn’t behave the way you wanted him to and David didn’t either. Life didn’t go your way for once. And nothing pisses off a control freak more than life not goin’ her way.”

“Don’t call me a control freak, please.”

“You have got control issues, Groceries. Come on. Nobody ever told you this before?”

(Well . . . yeah. But the thing about divorcing someone is that you kind of stop listening to all the mean stuff they say about you after a while.)

So I buck up and admit it. “OK, I think you’re probably right. Maybe I do have a problem with control. It’s just weird that you noticed. Because I don’t think it’s that obvious on the surface. I mean—I bet most people can’t see my control issues when they first look at me.”

Richard from Texas laughs so hard he almost loses his toothpick.

“They can’t? Honey—Ray Charles could see your control issues!”

“OK, I think I’m done with this conversation now, thank you.”

“You gotta learn how to let go, Groceries. Otherwise you’re gonna make yourself sick. Never gonna have a good night’s sleep again. You’ll just toss and turn forever, beatin’ on yourself for being such a fiasco in life. What’s wrong with me? How come I screw up all my relationships? Why am I such a failure? Lemme guess—that’s probably what you were up at all hours doin’ to yourself again last night.”

“All right, Richard, that’s enough,” I say. “I don’t want you walking around inside my head anymore.”

“Shut the door, then,” says my big Texas Yogi.

49

When I was nine years old, going on ten, I experienced a true metaphysical crisis. Maybe this seems young for such a thing, but I was always a precocious child. It all happened over the summer between fourth and fifth grade. I was going to be turning ten years old in July, and there was something about the transition from nine to ten— from single digit to double digits—that shocked me into a genuine existential panic, usually reserved for people turning fifty. I remember thinking that life was passing me by so fast. It seemed like only yesterday I was in kindergarten, and here I was, about to turn ten. Soon I would be a teenager, then middle-aged, then elderly, then dead. And everyone else was aging in hyperspeed, too. Everybody was going to be dead soon. My parents would die. My friends would die. My cat would die. My older sister was almost in high school already; I could remember her going off to first grade only moments ago, it seemed, in her little knee socks, and now she was in high school? Obviously it wouldn’t be long before she was dead. What was the point of all this?

The strangest thing about this crisis was that nothing in particular had spurred it. No friend or relative had died, giving me my first taste of mortality, nor had I read or seen anything particular about death; I hadn’t even read Charlotte’s Web yet. This panic I was feeling at age ten was nothing less than a spontaneous and full-out realization of mortality’s inevitable march, and I had no spiritual vocabulary with which to help myself manage it. We were Protestants, and not even devout ones, at that. We said grace only before Christmas and Thanksgiving dinner and went to church sporadically. My dad chose to stay home on Sunday mornings, finding his devotional practice in farming. I sang in the choir because I liked singing; my pretty sister was the angel in the Christmas pageant. My mother used the church as a headquarters from which to organize good works of volunteer service for the community. But even in that church, I don’t remember there being a lot of talking about God. This was New England, after all, and the word God tends to make Yankees nervous.

My sense of helplessness was overwhelming. What I wanted to do was pull some massive emergency brake on the universe, like the brakes I’d seen on the subways during our school trip to New York City. I wanted to call a time out, to demand that everybody just STOP until I could understand everything. I suppose this urge to force the entire universe to stop in its tracks until I could get a grip on myself might have been the beginning of what my dear friend Richard from Texas calls my “control issues.” Of course, my efforts and worry were futile. The closer I watched time, the faster it spun, and that summer went by so quickly that it made my head hurt, and at the end of every day I remember thinking, “Another one gone,” and bursting into tears.

I have a friend from high school who now works with the mentally handicapped, and he says his autistic patients have a particularly heartbreaking awareness of time’s passage, as if they never got the mental filter that allows the rest of us to forget about mortality every once in a while and just live. One of Rob’s patients always asks him the date at the beginning of every day, and at the end of the day will ask, “Rob—when will it be February fourth again?” And before Rob can answer, the guy shakes his head in sorrow and says, “I know, I know, never mind . . . not until next year, right?”

I know this feeling all too intimately. I know the sad longing to delay the end of another February 4. This sadness is one of the great trials of the human experiment. As far as we know, we are the only species on the planet who have been given the gift—or curse, perhaps—of awareness about our own mortality. Everything here eventually dies; we’re just the lucky ones who get to think about this fact every day. How are you going to cope with this information? When I was nine, I couldn’t do a thing with it except cry. Later, over the years, my hypersensitive awareness of time’s speed led me to push myself to experience life at a maximum pace. If I were going to have such a short visit on earth, I had to do everything possible to experience it now. Hence all the traveling, all the romances, all the ambition, all the pasta. My sister had a friend who used to think that Catherine had two or three younger sisters, because she was always hearing stories about the sister who was in Africa, the sister who was working on a ranch in Wyoming, the sister who was the bartender in New York, the sister who was writing a book, the sister who was getting married—surely this could not all be the same person? Indeed, if I could have split myself into many Liz Gilberts, I would willingly have done so, in order to not miss a moment of life. What am I saying? I did split myself into many Liz Gilberts, all of whom simultaneously collapsed in exhaustion on a bathroom floor in the suburbs one night, somewhere around the age of thirty.

I should say here that I’m aware not everyone goes through this kind of metaphysical crisis. Some of us are hardwired for anxiety about mortality, while some of us just seem more comfortable with the whole deal. You meet lots of apathetic people in this world, of course, but you also meet some people who seem to be able to gracefully accept the terms upon which the universe operates and who genuinely don’t seem troubled by its paradoxes and injustices. I have a friend whose grandmother used to tell her, “There’s no trouble in this world so serious that it can’t be cured with a hot bath, a glass of whiskey and the Book of Common Prayer.” For some people, that’s truly enough. For others, more drastic measures are required.

And now I will mention my friend the dairy farmer from Ireland—on the surface, a most unlikely character to meet in an Indian Ashram. But Sean is one of those people like me who were born with the itch, the mad and relentless urge to understand the workings of existence. His little parish in County Cork didn’t seem to have any of these answers, so he left the farm in the 1980s to go traveling through India, looking for inner peace through Yoga. A few years later, he returned home to the dairy farm in Ireland. He was sitting in the kitchen of the old stone house with his father—a lifelong farmer and a man of few words—and Sean was telling him all about his spiritual discoveries in the exotic East. Sean’s father listened with mild interest, watching the fire in the hearth, smoking his pipe. He didn’t speak at all until Sean said, “Da—this meditation stuff, it’s crucial for teaching serenity. It can really save your life. It teaches you how to quiet your mind.”

His father turned to him and said kindly, “I have a quiet mind already, son,” then resumed his gaze on the fire.

But I don’t. Nor does Sean. Many of us don’t. Many of us look into the fire and see only inferno. I need to actively learn how to do what Sean’s father, it seems, was born knowing—how to, as Walt Whitman once wrote, stand “apart from the pulling and hauling . . . amused, complacent, compassionate, idle, unitary . . . both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it all.” Instead of being amused, though, I’m only anxious. Instead of watching, I’m always probing and interfering. The other day in prayer I said to God, “Look—I understand that an unexamined life is not worth living, but do you think I could someday have an unexamined lunch?”

Buddhist lore has a story about the moments that followed the Buddha’s transcendence into enlightenment. When—after thirty-nine days of meditation—the veil of illusion finally fell away and the true workings of the universe were revealed to the great master, he was reported to have opened his eyes and said immediately, “This cannot be taught.” But then he changed his mind, decided that he would go out into the world, after all, and attempt to teach the practice of meditation to a small handful of students. He knew there would be only a meager percentage of people who would be served by (or interested in) his teachings. Most of humanity, he said, have eyes that are so caked shut with the dust of deception they will never see the truth, no matter who tries to help them. A few others (like Sean’s Da, perhaps) are so naturally clear-eyed and calm already that they need no instruction or assistance whatsoever. But then there are those whose eyes are just slightly caked with dust, and who might, with the help of the right master, be taught to see more clearly someday. The Buddha decided he would become a teacher for the benefit of that minority—“for those of little dust.”

I dearly hope that I am one of these mid-level dust-caked people, but I don’t know. I only know that I have been driven to find inner peace with methods that might seem a bit drastic for the general populace. (For instance, when I told one friend back in New York City that I was going to India to live in an Ashram and search for divinity, he sighed and said, “Oh, there’s a part of me that so wishes I wanted to do that . . . but I really have no desire for it whatsoever.”) I don’t know that I have much of a choice, though. I have searched frantically for contentment for so many years in so many ways, and all these acquisitions and accomplishments—they run you down in the end. Life, if you keep chasing it so hard, will drive you to death. Time—when pursued like a bandit—will behave like one; always remaining one county or one room ahead of you, changing its name and hair color to elude you, slipping out the back door of the motel just as you’re banging through the lobby with your newest search warrant, leaving only a burning cigarette in the ashtray to taunt you. At some point you have to stop because it won’t. You have to admit that you can’t catch it. That you’re not supposed to catch it. At some point, as Richard keeps telling me, you gotta let go and sit still and allow contentment to come to you.

Letting go, of course, is a scary enterprise for those of us who believe that the world revolves only because it has a handle on the top of it which we personally turn, and that if we were to drop this handle for even a moment, well—that would be the end of the universe. But try dropping it, Groceries. This is the message I’m getting. Sit quietly for now and cease your relentless participation. Watch what happens. The birds do not crash dead out of the sky in mid-flight, after all. The trees do not wither and die, the rivers do not run red with blood. Life continues to go on. Even the Italian post office will keep limping along, doing its own thing without you—why are you so sure that your micromanagement of every moment in this whole world is so essential? Why don’t you let it be?

I hear this argument and it appeals to me. I believe in it, intellectually. I really do. But then I wonder—with all my restless yearning, with all my hyped-up fervor and with this stupidly hungry nature of mine—what should I do with my energy, instead?

That answer arrives, too:

Look for God, suggests my Guru. Look for God like a man with his head on fire looks for water.

50

The next morning in meditation, all my caustic old hateful thoughts come up again. I’m starting to think of them as irritating telemarketers, always calling at the most inopportune moments. What I’m alarmed to find in meditation is that my mind is actually not that interesting a place, after all. In actuality I really only think about a few things, and I think about them constantly. I believe the official term is “brooding.” I brood about my divorce, and all the pain of my marriage, and all the mistakes I made, and all the mistakes my husband made, and then (and there’s no return from this dark topic) I start brooding about David . . .

Which is getting embarrassing, to be quite honest. I mean—here I am in this sacred place of study in the middle of India, and all I can think about is my ex-boyfriend? What am I, in eighth grade?

And then I remember a story my friend Deborah the psychologist told me once. Back in the 1980s, she was asked by the city of Philadelphia if she could volunteer to offer psychological counseling to a group of Cambodian refugees—boat people—who had recently arrived in the city. Deborah is an exceptional psychologist, but she was terribly daunted by this task. These Cambodians had suffered the worst of what humans can inflict on each other—genocide, rape, torture, starvation, the murder of their relatives before their eyes, then long years in refugee camps and dangerous boat trips to the West where people died and corpses were fed to sharks—what could Deborah offer these people in terms of help? How could she possibly relate to their suffering?

“But don’t you know,” Deborah reported to me, “what all these people wanted to talk about, once they could see a counselor?”

It was all: I met this guy when I was living in the refugee camp, and we fell in love. I thought he really loved me, but then we were separated on different boats, and he took up with my cousin. Now he’s married to her, but he says he really loves me, and he keeps calling me, and I know I should tell him to go away, but I still love him and I can’t stop thinking about him. And I don’t know what to do . . .

This is what we are like. Collectively, as a species, this is our emotional landscape. I met an old lady once, almost one hundred years old, and she told me, “There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me? And Who’s in charge?” Everything else is somehow manageable. But these two questions of love and control undo us all, trip us up and cause war, grief and suffering. And both of them, unfortunately (or maybe obviously), are what I’m dealing with at this Ashram. When I sit in my silence and look at my mind, it is only questions of longing and control that emerge to agitate me, and this agitation is what keeps me from evolving forward.

When I tried this morning, after an hour or so of unhappy thinking, to dip back into my meditation, I took a new idea with me: compassion. I asked my heart if it could please infuse my soul with a more generous perspective on my mind’s workings. Instead of thinking that I was a failure, could I perhaps accept that I am only a human being—and a normal one, at that? The thoughts came up as usual—OK, so it will be—and then the attendant emotions rose, too. I began feeling frustrated and judgmental about myself, lonely and angry. But then a fierce response boiled up from somewhere in the deepest caverns of my heart, and I told myself, “I will not judge you for these thoughts.”

My mind tried to protest, said, “Yeah, but you’re such a failure, you’re such a loser, you’ll never amount to anything—”

But suddenly it was like a lion was roaring from within my chest, drowning all this claptrap out. A voice bellowed in me like nothing I had ever heard before. It was so internally, eternally loud that I actually clamped my hand over my mouth because I was afraid that if I opened my mouth and let this sound out, it would shake the foundations of buildings as far away as Detroit.

And this is what it roared:

YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW STRONG MY LOVE IS!!!!!!!!!

The chattering, negative thoughts in my mind scattered in the wind of this statement like birds and jackrabbits and antelopes— they hightailed it out of there, terrified. Silence followed. An intense, vibrating, awed silence. The lion in the giant savannah of my heart surveyed his newly quiet kingdom with satisfaction. He licked his great chops once, closed his yellow eyes and went back to sleep.

And then, in that regal silence, finally—I began to meditate on (and with) God.

51

Richard from Texas has some cute habits. Whenever he passes me in the Ashram and notices by my distracted face that my thoughts are a million miles away, he says, “How’s David doing?”

“Mind your own business,” I always say. “You don’t know what I’m thinking about, mister.”

Of course, he’s always right.

Another habit he has is to wait for me when I come out of the meditation hall because he likes to see how wigged out and spazzy I look when I crawl out of there. Like I’ve been wrestling alligators and ghosts. He says he’s never watched anybody fight so hard against herself. I don’t know about that, but it’s true that what goes on in that dark meditation room for me can get pretty intense. The most fierce experiences come when I let go of some last fearful reserve and permit a veritable turbine of energy to unleash itself up my spine. It amuses me now that I ever dismissed these ideas of the kundalini shakti as mere myth. When this energy rides through me, it rumbles like a diesel engine in low gear, and all it asks of me is this one simple request—Would you kindly turn yourself inside out, so that your lungs and heart and offal will be on the outside and the whole universe will be on the inside? And emotionally, will you do the same? Time gets all screwy in this thunderous space, and I am taken— numbed, dumbed and stunned—to all sorts of worlds, and I experience every intensity of sensation: fire, cold, hatred, lust, fear . . . When it’s all over, I wobble to my feet and stagger out into the daylight in such a state—ravenously hungry, desperately thirsty, randier than a sailor on a three-day shore leave. Richard is usually there waiting for me, ready to start laughing. He always teases me with the same line when he sees my confounded and exhausted face: “Think you’ll ever amount to anything, Groceries?”

But this morning in meditation, after I heard the lion roar YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW STRONG MY LOVE IS, I came out of that meditation cave like a warrior queen. Richard didn’t even have time to ask if I thought I’d ever amount to anything in this life before I looked him eye to eye and said, “I already have, mister.”

“Check you out,” Richard said. “This is cause for celebration. Come on, kiddo—I’ll take you into town, buy you a Thumbs-Up.”

Thumbs-Up is an Indian soft drink, sort of like Coca-Cola, but with about nine times the corn syrup and triple that of caffeine. I think it might have methamphetamines in it, too. It makes me see double. A few times a week, Richard and I wander into town and share one small bottle of Thumbs-Up—a radical experience after the purity of vegetarian Ashram food—always being careful not to actually touch the bottle with our lips. Richard’s rule about traveling in India is a sound one: “Don’t touch anything but yourself.” (And, yes, that was also a tentative title for this book.)

We have our favorite visits in town, always stopping to pay respects to the temple, and to say hello to Mr. Panicar, the tailor, who shakes our hands and says, “Congratulations to meet you!” every time. We watch the cows mill about enjoying their sacred status (I think they actually abuse the privilege, lying right in the middle of the road just to drive home the point that they are holy), and we watch the dogs scratch themselves like they’re wondering how the heck they ever ended up here. We watch the women doing road work, busting up rocks under the sweltering sun, swinging sledgehammers, barefoot, looking so strangely beautiful in their jewel-colored saris and their necklaces and bracelets. They give us dazzling smiles which I can’t begin to understand—how can they be happy doing this rough work under such terrible conditions? Why don’t they all faint and die after fifteen minutes in the boiling heat with those sledgehammers? I ask Mr. Panicar the tailor about it and he says it’s like this with the villagers, that people in this part of the world were born to this kind of hard labor and work is all they are used to.

“Also,” he adds casually, “we don’t live very long around here.”

It is a poor village, of course, but not desperate by the standards of India; the presence (and charity) of the Ashram and some Western currency floating around makes a significant difference. Not that there’s so much to buy here, though Richard and I like to look around in all the shops that sell the beads and the little statues. There are some Kashmiri guys—very shrewd salesmen, indeed— who are always trying to unload their wares on us. One of them really came after me today, asking if madam would perhaps like to buy a fine Kashmiri rug for her home? This made Richard laugh. He enjoys, among other sports, making fun of me for being homeless.

“Save your breath, brother,” he said to the rug salesman. “This old girl ain’t got any floors to put a rug on.”

Undaunted, the Kashmiri salesman suggested, “Then perhaps madam would like to hang a rug on her wall?”

“See, now,” said Richard, “that’s the thing—she’s a little short on walls these days, too.”

“But I have a brave heart!” I piped up, in my own defense.

“And other sterling qualities,” added Richard, tossing me a bone for once in his life.

52

The biggest obstacle in my Ashram experience is not meditation, actually. That’s difficult, of course, but not murderous. There’s something even harder for me here. The murderous thing is what we do every morning after meditation and before breakfast (my God, but these mornings are long)—a chant called the Gurugita. Richard calls it “The Geet.” I have so much trouble with The Geet. I do not like it at all, never have, not since the first time I heard it sung at the Ashram in upstate New York. I love all the other chants and hymns of this Yogic tradition, but the Gurugita feels long, tedious, sonorous and insufferable. That’s just my opinion, of course; other people claim to love it, though I can’t fathom why.

The Gurugita is 182 verses long, for crying out loud (and sometimes I do), and each verse is a paragraph of impenetrable Sanskrit. Together with the preamble chant and the wrap-up chorus, the entire ritual takes about an hour and half to perform. This is before breakfast, remember, and after we have already had an hour of meditation and a twenty-minute chanting of the first morning hymn. The Gurugita is basically the reason you have to get up at 3:00 AM around here.

I don’t like the tune, and I don’t like the words. Whenever I tell anyone around the Ashram this, they say, “Oh, but it’s so sacred!” Yes, but so is the Book of Job, and I don’t choose to sing the thing aloud every morning before breakfast.

The Gurugita does have an impressive spiritual lineage; it’s an excerpt from a holy ancient scripture of Yoga called the Skanda Purana, most of which has been lost, and little of which has been translated out of Sanskrit. Like much of Yogic scripture, it’s written in the form of a conversation, an almost Socratic dialogue. The conversation is between the goddess Parvati and the almighty, all-encompassing god Shiva. Parvati and Shiva are the divine embodiment of creativity (the feminine) and consciousness (the masculine). She is the generative energy of the universe; he is its formless wisdom. Whatever Shiva imagines, Parvati brings to life. He dreams it; she materializes it. Their dance, their union (their Yoga), is both the cause of the universe and its manifestation.

In the Gurugita, the goddess is asking the god for the secrets of worldly fulfillment, and he is telling her. It bugs me, this hymn. I had hoped my feelings about the Gurugita would change during my stay at the Ashram. I’d hoped that putting it in an Indian context would cause me to learn how to love the thing. In fact, the opposite has happened. Over the few weeks that I’ve been here, my feelings about the Gurugita have shifted from simple dislike to solid dread. I’ve started skipping it and doing other things with my morning that I think are much better for my spiritual growth, like writing in my journal, or taking a shower, or calling my sister back in Pennsylvania and seeing how her kids are doing.

Richard from Texas always busts me for skipping out. “I noticed you were absent from The Geet this morning,” he’ll say, and I’ll say, “I am communicating with God in other ways,” and he’ll say, “By sleeping in, you mean?”

But when I try to go to the chant, all it does is agitate me. I mean, physically. I don’t feel like I’m singing it so much as being dragged behind it. It makes me sweat. This is very odd because I tend to be one of life’s chronically cold people, and it’s cold in this part of India in January before the sun comes up. Everyone else sits in the chant huddled in wool blankets and hats to stay warm, and I’m peeling layers off myself as the hymn drones on, foaming like an overworked farm horse. I come out of the temple after the Gurugita and the sweat rises off my skin in the cold morning air like fog—like horrible, green, stinky fog. The physical reaction is mild compared to the hot waves of emotion that rock me as I try to sing the thing. And I can’t even sing it. I can only croak it. Resentfully.

Did I mention that it has 182 verses?

So a few days ago, after a particularly yucky session of chanting, I decided to seek advice from my favorite teacher around here—a monk with a wonderfully long Sanskrit name which translates as “He Who Dwells in the Heart of the Lord Who Dwells Within His Own Heart.” This monk is American, in his sixties, smart and educated. He used to be a classical theater professor at NYU, and he still carries himself with a rather venerable dignity. He took his monastic vows almost thirty years ago. I like him because he’s no-nonsense and funny. In a dark moment of confusion about David, I’d once confided my heartache to this monk. He listened respectfully, offered up the most compassionate advice he could find, and then said, “And now I’m kissing my robes.” He lifted a corner of his saffron robes and gave a loud smack. Thinking this was probably some super-arcane religious custom, I asked what he was doing. He said, “Same thing I always do whenever anyone comes to me for relationship advice. I’m just thanking God I’m a monk and I don’t have to deal with this stuff anymore.”

So I knew I could trust him to let me speak frankly about my problems with the Gurugita. We went for a walk in the gardens together one night after dinner, and I told him how much I disliked the thing and asked if he could please excuse me from having to sing it anymore. He immediately started laughing. He said, “You don’t have to sing it if you don’t want to. Nobody around here is ever going to make you do anything you don’t want to do.”

“But people say it’s a vital spiritual practice.”

“It is. But I’m not going to tell you that you’re going to go to hell if you don’t do it. The only thing I’ll tell you is that your Guru has been very clear about this—the Gurugita is the one essential text of this Yoga, and maybe the most important practice you can do, next to meditation. If you’re staying at the Ashram, she expects you to get up for the chant every morning.”

“It’s not that I mind getting up early in the morning . . .”

“What is it, then?”

I explained to the monk why I had come to dread the Gurugita, how tortuous it feels.

He said, “Wow—look at you. Even just talking about it you’re getting all bent out of shape.”

It was true. I could feel cold, clammy sweat accumulating in my armpits. I asked, “Can’t I use that time to do other practices, instead? I find sometimes that if I go to the meditation cave during the Gurugita I can get a nice vibe going for meditation.”

“Ah—Swamiji would’ve yelled at you for that. He would’ve called you a chanting thief for riding on the energy of everyone else’s hard work. Look, the Gurugita isn’t supposed to be a fun song to sing. It has a different function. It’s a text of unimaginable power. It is a mighty purifying practice. It burns away all your junk, all your negative emotions. And I think it’s probably having a positive effect on you if you’re experiencing such strong emotions and physical reactions while you’re chanting it. This stuff can be painful, but it’s awfully beneficial.”

“How do you keep the motivation to stay with it?”

“What’s the alternative? To quit whenever something gets challenging? To futz around your whole life, miserable and incomplete?”

“Did you really just say ‘futz around’?”

“Yes. Yes, I did.”

“What should I do?”

“You have to decide for yourself. But my advice—since you asked—is that you stick to chanting the Gurugita while you’re here, especially because you’re having such an extreme reaction to it. If something is rubbing so hard against you, you can be sure it’s working on you. This is what the Gurugita does. It burns away the ego, turns you into pure ash. It’s supposed to be arduous, Liz. It has power beyond what can be rationally understood. You’re only staying at the Ashram another week, right? And then you’re free to go traveling and have fun. So just chant the thing seven more times, then you never have to do it again. Remember what our Guru says—be a scientist of your own spiritual experience. You’re not here as a tourist or a journalist; you’re here as a seeker. So explore it.”

“So you’re not letting me off the hook?”

“You can let yourself off the hook anytime you want, Liz. That’s the divine contract of a little something we call free will.”

53

So I went to the chant the next morning, all full of resolve, and the Gurugita kicked me down a twenty-foot flight of cement stairs—or anyway, that’s how it felt. The following day it was even worse. I woke up in a fury, and before I even got to the temple I was already sweating, boiling, teeming. I kept thinking: “It’s only an hour and a half—you can do anything for an hour and a half. For God’s sake, you have friends who were in labor for fourteen hours . . .” But still, I could not have been less comfortable in this chair if I had been stapled to it. I kept feeling fireballs of, like, menopausal heat pulsing over me, and I thought I might faint, or bite somebody in my fury.

My anger was giant. It took in everyone in this world, but it was most specifically directed at Swamiji—my Guru’s master, who had instituted this ritual chanting of the Gurugita in the first place. This was not my first difficult encounter with the great and now-deceased Yogi. He was the one who had come to me in my dream on the beach, demanding to know how I intended to stop the tide, and I always felt like he was riding me.

Swamiji had been, all throughout his life, relentless, a spiritual firebrand. Like Saint Francis of Assisi, Swamiji had been born into a wealthy family and had been expected to enter the family business. But when he was just a young boy, he met a holy man in a small village near his, and had been deeply touched by the experience. Still in his teens, Swamiji left home in a loincloth and spent years making pilgrimages to every holy spot in India, searching for a true spiritual master. He was said to have met over sixty saints and Gurus, never finding the teacher he wanted. He starved, wandered on foot, slept outside in Himalayan snowstorms, suffered from malaria, dysentery—and called these the happiest years of his life, just searching for somebody who would show God to him. Over those years, Swamiji became a Hatha Yogi, an expert in ayurvedic medicine and cooking, an architect, a gardener, a musician and a swordfighter (this I love). By his middle years, he had still not found a Guru, until one day he encountered a naked, mad sage who told him to go back home, back to the village where he had met the holy man as a child, and to study with that great saint.

Swamiji obeyed, returned home, and became the holy man’s most devoted student, finally achieving enlightenment through his master’s guidance. Ultimately, Swamiji would become a Guru himself. Over time, his Ashram in India grew from three rooms on a barren farm to the lush garden it is today. Then he got the inspiration to go traveling and incite a worldwide meditation revolution. He came to America in 1970 and blew everybody’s mind. He gave divine initiation—shaktipat—to hundreds and thousands of people a day. He had a power that was immediate and transformative. The Reverend Eugene Callender (a respected civil rights leader, a colleague of Martin Luther King Jr. and still the pastor of a Baptist church in Harlem) remembers meeting Swamiji in the 1970s and dropping on his knees before the Indian man in amazement and thinking to himself, “There’s no time for shuckin’ and jivin’ now, this is it . . . This man knows everything there is to know about you.”

Swamiji demanded enthusiasm, commitment, self-control. He was always scolding people for being jad, the Hindi word for “inert.” He brought ancient concepts of discipline to the lives of his often rebellious young Western followers, commanding them to stop wasting their own (and everyone else’s) time and energy with their freewheeling hippie nonsense. He would throw his walking stick at you one minute, hug you the next. He was complicated, often controversial, but truly world-changing. The reason we have access now in the West to many ancient Yogic scriptures is that Swamiji presided over the translation and revitalization of philosophical texts that had long been forgotten even in much of India.

My Guru was Swamiji’s most devoted student. She was literally born to be his disciple; her Indian parents were amongst his earliest followers. When she was only a child, she would often chant for eighteen hours a day, tireless in her devotion. Swamiji recognized her potential, and he took her on when she was still a teenager to be his translator. She traveled all over the world with him, paying such close attention to her Guru, she said later, that she could even feel him speaking to her with his knees. She became his successor in 1982, still in her twenties.

All true Gurus are alike in the fact that they exist in a constant state of self-realization, but external characteristics differ. The apparent differences between my Guru and her master are vast— she’s a feminine, multilingual, university-educated and savvy professional woman; he was a sometimes-capricious, sometimes-kingly South Indian old lion. For a nice New England girl like me, it is easy to follow my living teacher, who is so reassuring in her propriety— exactly the kind of Guru you could take home to meet Mom and Dad. But Swamiji . . . he was such a wild card. And from the first time I came to this Yogic path and saw photographs of him, and heard stories about him, I’ve thought, “I’m just going to stay clear of this character. He’s too big. He makes me nervous.”

But now that I am here in India, here in the Ashram that was his home, I’m finding that all I want is Swamiji. All I feel is Swamiji. The only person I talk to in my prayers and meditations is Swamiji. It’s the Swamiji channel, round the clock. I am in the furnace of Swamiji here and I can feel him working on me. Even in his death, there’s something so earthy and present about him. He’s the master I need when I’m really struggling, because I can curse him and show him all my failures and flaws and all he does is laugh. Laugh, and love me. His laughter makes me angrier and the anger motivates me to act. And I never feel him closer to me than when I’m struggling through the Gurugita, with its unfathomable Sanskrit verses. I’m arguing with Swamiji the whole time in my head, making all kinds of blowhard proclamations, like, “You better be doing something for me because I’m doing this for you! I better see some results here! This better be purifying!” Yesterday, I got so incensed when I looked down at my chanting book and realized we were only on Verse Twenty-five and I was already burning in discomfort, already sweating (and not like a person sweats, either, but rather like a cheese sweats), that I actually expelled a loud: “You gotta be kidding me!” and a few women turned and looked at me in alarm, expecting, no doubt, to see my head start spinning demonically on my neck.

Every once in a while I recall that I used to live in Rome and spend my leisurely mornings eating pastries and drinking cappuccino and reading the newspaper.

That sure was nice.

Though it seems very far away now.

54

This morning, I overslept. Which is to say—sloth that I am, I dozed until the ungodly hour of 4:15 AM. I woke up only minutes before the Gurugita was to begin, motivated myself reluctantly to get out of bed, splashed some water on my face, dressed and—feeling so crusty and cranky and resentful—went to leave my room in the predawn pitch-black . . . only to find that my roommate had left the room before me and had locked me in.

This was a really difficult thing for her to have done. It’s not that big a room and it’s hard not to notice that your roommate is still sleeping in the next bed. And she’s a really responsible, practical woman—a mother of five from Australia. This is not her style. But she did it. She literally padlocked me in the room.

My first thought, was: If there were ever a good excuse not to go to the Gurugita, this would be it. My second thought, though? Well—it wasn’t even a thought. It was an action.

I jumped out the window.

To be specific, I crawled outside over the railing, gripping it with my sweaty palms and dangling there from two stories up over the darkness for a moment, only then asking myself the reasonable question, “Why are you jumping out of this building?” My reply came with a fierce, impersonal determination: I have to get to the Gurugita. Then I let go and dropped backward maybe twelve or fifteen feet through the dark air to the concrete sidewalk below, hitting something on the way down that peeled a long strip of skin off my right shin, but I didn’t care. I picked myself up and ran barefoot, my pulse slamming in my ears, all the way to the temple, found a seat, opened up my prayer book just as the chant was beginning and—bleeding down my leg the whole while—I started to sing the Gurugita.

It was only after a few verses that I caught my breath and was able to think my normal, instinctive morning thought: I don’t want to be here. After which I heard Swamiji burst out laughing in my head, saying: That’s funny—you sure act like somebody who wants to be here.

And I replied to him, OK, then. You win.

I sat there, singing and bleeding and thinking that it was maybe time for me to change my relationship with this particular spiritual practice. The Gurugita is meant to be a hymn of pure love, but something had been stopping me short from offering up that love in sincerity. So as I chanted each verse I realized that I needed to find something—or somebody—to whom I could devote this hymn, in order to find a place of pure love within me. By Verse Twenty, I had it: Nick.

Nick, my nephew, is an eight-year-old boy, skinny for his age, scarily smart, frighteningly astute, sensitive and complex. Even minutes after his birth, amid all the squalling newborns in the nursery, he alone was not crying, but looking around with adult, worldly and worried eyes, looking as though he’d done all this before so many times and wasn’t sure how excited he felt about having to do it again. This is a child for whom life is never simple, a child who hears and sees and feels everything intensely, a child who can be overcome by emotion so fast sometimes that it unnerves us all. I love this boy so deeply and protectively. I realized—doing the math on the time difference between India and Pennsylvania—that it was nearing his bedtime back home. So I sang the Gurugita to my nephew Nick, to help him sleep. Sometimes he has trouble sleeping because he cannot still his mind. So each devotional word of this hymn, I dedicated to Nick. I filled the song with everything I wished I could teach him about life. I tried to reassure him with every line about how the world is hard and unfair sometimes, but that it’s all OK because he is so loved. He is surrounded by souls who would do anything to help him. And not only that—he has wisdom and patience of his own, buried deep inside his being, which will only reveal themselves over time and will always carry him through any trial. He is a gift from God to all of us. I told him this fact through this old Sanskrit scripture, and soon I noticed that I was weeping cool tears. But before I could wipe the tears away the Gurugita was over. The hour and a half was finished. It felt like ten minutes had passed. I realized what had happened—that Nicky had carried me through it. The little soul I’d wanted to help had actually been helping me.

I walked to the front of the temple and bowed flat on my face in gratitude to my God, to the revolutionary power of love, to myself, to my Guru and to my nephew—briefly understanding on a molecular level (not an intellectual level) that there was no difference whatsoever between any of these words or any of these ideas or any of these people. Then I slid into the meditation cave, where I skipped breakfast and sat for almost two hours, humming with stillness.

Needless to say, I never missed the Gurugita again, and it became the most holy of my practices at the Ashram. Of course Richard from Texas went to great lengths to tease me about having jumped out of the dormitory, being sure to say to me every night after dinner, “See you at The Geet tomorrow morning, Groceries. And, hey—try using the stairs this time, OK?” And, of course, I called my sister the next week and she said that—for reasons nobody could understand—Nick suddenly wasn’t having trouble falling asleep anymore. And naturally I was reading in the library a few days later from a book about the Indian saint Sri Ramakrishna, and I stumbled upon a story about a seeker who once came to see the great master and admitted to him that she feared she was not a good enough devotee, feared that she did not love God enough. And the saint said, “Is there nothing you love?” The woman admitted that she adored her young nephew more than anything on earth. The saint said, “There, then. He is your Krishna, your beloved. In your service to your nephew, you are serving God.”

But all this is inconsequential. The really amazing thing happened the same day I’d jumped out of the building. That afternoon, I ran into Delia, my roommate. I told her that she had padlocked me into our room. She was aghast. She said, “I can’t imagine why I would’ve done that! Especially because you’ve been on my mind all morning. I had this really vivid dream about you last night. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it all day.”

“Tell me,” I said.

“I dreamt that you were on fire,” Delia said, “and that your bed was on fire, too. I jumped up to try to help you, but by the time I got there, you were nothing but white ash.”

55

It was then I decided I needed to stay here at the Ashram. This was so totally not my original plan. My original plan had been to stay here for just six weeks, have a bit of transcendental experience, then continue traveling all over India . . . um . . . looking for God. I had maps and guidebooks and hiking boots and everything! I had specific temples and mosques and holy men I was all lined up to meet. I mean—it’s India! There’s so much to see and experience here. I’ve got a lot of mileage to cover, temples to explore, elephants and camels to ride. And I’d be devastated to miss the Ganges, the great Rajasthani desert, the nutty Mumbai movie houses, the Himalayas, the old tea plantations, the Calcutta rickshaws racing against each other like the chariot scene from Ben-Hur. And I was even planning on meeting the Dalai Lama in March, up in Daramsala. I was hoping he could teach me about God.

But to stay put, to immobilize myself in a small Ashram in a tiny little village in the middle of nowhere—no, this was not my plan.

On the other hand, the Zen masters always say that you cannot see your reflection in running water, only in still water. So something was telling me it would be spiritually negligent to run off now, when so much was happening right here in this small, cloistered place where every minute of the day is organized to facilitate self-exploration and devotional practice. Did I really need to get on a bunch of trains and pick up intestinal parasites and hang around backpackers right now? Couldn’t I do that later? Couldn’t I meet the Dalai Lama some other time? Won’t the Dalai Lama always be there? (And, if he should die, heaven forbid, won’t they just find another one?) Don’t I already have a passport that looks like a tattooed circus lady? Is more travel really going to bring me any closer to revelatory contact with divinity?

I didn’t know what to do. I spent a day wavering over the decision. As usual, Richard from Texas had the last word.

“Stay put, Groceries,” he said. “Forget about sightseeing—you got the rest of your life for that. You’re on a spiritual journey, baby. Don’t cop out and only go halfway to your potential. You got a personal invitation from God here—you really gonna turn that away?”

“But what about all those beautiful things to see in India?” I asked. “Isn’t it kind of a pity to travel halfway around the world just to stay in a little Ashram the whole time?”

“Groceries, baby, listen your friend Richard. You go set your lily-white ass down in that meditation cave every day for the next three months and I promise you this—you’re gonna start seeing some stuff that’s so damn beautiful it’ll make you wanna throw rocks at the Taj Mahal.”

56

Here’s what I caught myself thinking about in meditation this morning.

I was wondering where I should live once this year of traveling has ended. I don’t want to move back to New York just out of reflex. Maybe a new town, instead. Austin is supposed to be nice. And Chicago has all that beautiful architecture. Horrible winters, though. Or maybe I’ll live abroad. I’ve heard good things about Sydney . . . If I lived somewhere cheaper than New York, maybe I could afford an extra bedroom and then I could have a special meditation room! That’d be nice. I could paint it gold. Or maybe a rich blue. No, gold. No, blue . . .

Finally noticing this train of thought, I was aghast. I thought: Here you are in India, in an Ashram in one of the holiest pilgrimage sites on earth. And instead of communing with the divine, you’re trying to plan where you’ll be meditating a year from now in a home that doesn’t yet exist in a city yet to be determined. How about this, you spastic fool—how about you try to meditate right here, right now, right where you actually are?

I pulled my attention back to the silent repetition of the mantra.

A few moments later, I paused to take back that mean comment about calling myself a spastic fool. I decided maybe that wasn’t very loving.

Still, I thought in the next moment, a gold meditation room would be nice.

I opened my eyes and sighed. Is this really the best I can do?

So, that evening, I tried something new. I’d recently met a woman at the Ashram who’d been studying Vipassana meditation. Vipassana is an ultra-orthodox, stripped-down and very intensive Buddhist meditation technique. Basically, it’s just sitting. An introductory Vipassana course lasts for ten days, during which time you sit for ten hours a day in stretches of silence that last two to three hours at a time. It’s the Extreme Sports version of transcendence. Your Vipassana master won’t even give you a mantra; this is considered a kind of cheating. Vipassana meditation is the practice of pure regarding, witnessing your mind and offering your complete consideration to your thought patterns, but allowing nothing to move you from your seat.

It’s physically grueling too. You are forbidden to shift your body at all once you have been seated, no matter how severe your discomfort. You just sit there and tell yourself, “There’s no reason I need to move at all during the next two hours.” If you are feeling discomfort then you are supposed to meditate upon that discomfort, watching the effect that physical pain has on you. In our real lives, we are constantly hopping around to adjust ourselves around discomfort—physical, emotional and psychological—in order to evade the reality of grief and nuisance. Vipassana meditation teaches that grief and nuisance are inevitable in this life, but if you can plant yourself in stillness long enough, you will, in time, experience the truth that everything (both uncomfortable and lovely) does eventually pass.

“The world is afflicted with death and decay, therefore the wise do not grieve, knowing the terms of the world,” says an old Buddhist teaching. In other words: Get used to it.

I don’t think Vipassana is necessarily the path for me. It’s far too austere for my notions of devotional practice, which generally revolve around compassion and love and butterflies and bliss and a friendly God (what my friend Darcey calls “Slumber Party Theology”). There isn’t even any talk about “God” in Vipassana, since the notion of God is considered by some Buddhists to be the final object of dependency, the ultimate fuzzy security blanket, the last thing to be abandoned on the path to pure detachment. Now, I have my own personal issues with the very word detachment, having met spiritual seekers who already seem to live in a state of complete emotional disconnect from other human beings and who, when they talk about the sacred pursuit of detachment, make me want to shake them and holler, “Buddy, that is the last thing you need to practice!”

Still, I can see where cultivating a measure of intelligent detachment in your life can be a valuable instrument of peace. And after reading about Vipassana meditation in the library one afternoon, I got to thinking about how much time I spend in my life crashing around like a great gasping fish, either squirming away from some uncomfortable distress or flopping hungrily toward ever more pleasure. And I wondered whether it might serve me (and those who are burdened with the task of loving me) if I could learn to stay still and endure a bit more without always getting dragged along on the potholed road of circumstance.

All these questions came back to me this evening, when I found a quiet bench in one of the Ashram gardens and decided to sit in meditation for an hour—Vipassana-style. No movement, no agitation, not even mantra—just pure regarding. Let’s see what comes up. Unfortunately, I had forgotten about what “comes up” at dusk in India: mosquitoes. As I soon as I sat down on that bench in the lovely gloaming, I could hear the mosquitoes coming at me, brushing against my face and landing—in a group assault—on my head, ankles, arms. And then their fierce little burns. I didn’t like this. I thought, “This is a bad time of day to practice Vipassana meditation.”

On the other hand—when is it a good time of day, or life, to sit in detached stillness? When isn’t there something buzzing about, trying to distract you and get a rise out of you? So I made a decision (inspired again by my Guru’s instruction that we are to become scientists of our own inner experience). I presented myself with an experiment—what if I sat through this for once? Instead of slapping and griping, what if I sat through the discomfort, just for one hour of my long life?

So I did it. In stillness, I watched myself get eaten by mosquitoes. To be honest, part of me was wondering what this little macho experiment was meant to prove, but another part of me well knew—it was a beginner’s attempt at self-mastery. If I could sit through this nonlethal physical discomfort, then what other discomforts might I someday be able to sit through? What about emotional discomforts, which are even harder for me to endure? What about jealousy, anger, fear, disappointment, loneliness, shame, boredom?

The itch was maddening at first but eventually it just melded into a general burning feeling and I rode that heat to a mild euphoria. I allowed the pain to lose its specific associations and become pure sensation—neither good nor bad, just intense—and that intensity lifted me out of myself and into meditation. I sat there for two hours. A bird might very well have landed on my head; I wouldn’t have noticed.

Let me be clear about one thing. I recognize that this experiment wasn’t the most stoic act of fortitude in the history of mankind, and I’m not asking for a Congressional Medal of Honor here. But there was something mildly thrilling for me about realizing that in my thirty-four years on earth I have never not slapped at a mosquito when it was biting me. I’ve been a puppet to this and to millions of other small and large signals of pain or pleasure throughout my life. Whenever something happens, I always react. But here I was—disregarding the reflex. I was doing something I’d never done before. A small thing, granted, but how often do I get to say that? And what will I be able to do tomorrow that I cannot yet do today?

When it was all over, I stood up, walked to my room and assessed the damage. I counted about twenty mosquito bites. But within a half an hour, all the bites had diminished. It all goes away.

Eventually, everything goes away.

57

The search for God is a reversal of the normal, mundane worldly order. In the search for God, you revert from what attracts you and swim toward that which is difficult. You abandon your comforting and familiar habits with the hope (the mere hope!) that something greater will be offered you in return for what you’ve given up. Every religion in the world operates on the same common understandings of what it means to be a good disciple—get up early and pray to your God, hone your virtues, be a good neighbor, respect yourself and others, master your cravings. We all agree that it would be easier to sleep in, and many of us do, but for millennia there have been others who choose instead to get up before the sun and wash their faces and go to their prayers. And then fiercely try to hold on to their devotional convictions throughout the lunacy of another day.

The devout of this world perform their rituals without guarantee that anything good will ever come of it. Of course there are plenty of scriptures and plenty of priests who make plenty of promises as to what your good works will yield (or threats as to the punishments awaiting you if you lapse), but to even believe all this is an act of faith, because nobody amongst us is shown the endgame. Devotion is diligence without assurance. Faith is a way of saying, “Yes, I pre-accept the terms of the universe and I embrace in advance what I am presently incapable of understanding.” There’s a reason we refer to “leaps of faith”—because the decision to consent to any notion of divinity is a mighty jump from the rational over to the unknowable, and I don’t care how diligently scholars of every religion will try to sit you down with their stacks of books and prove to you through scripture that their faith is indeed rational; it isn’t. If faith were rational, it wouldn’t be—by definition—faith. Faith is belief in what you cannot see or prove or touch. Faith is walking face-first and full-speed into the dark. If we truly knew all the answers in advance as to the meaning of life and the nature of God and the destiny of our souls, our belief would not be a leap of faith and it would not be a courageous act of humanity; it would just be . . . a prudent insurance policy.

I’m not interested in the insurance industry. I’m tired of being a skeptic, I’m irritated by spiritual prudence and I feel bored and parched by empirical debate. I don’t want to hear it anymore. I couldn’t care less about evidence and proof and assurances. I just want God. I want God inside me. I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on water.

58

My prayers are becoming more deliberate and specific. It has occurred to me that it’s not much use to send prayers out to the universe that are lazy. Every morning before meditation, I kneel in the temple and talk for a few minutes to God. I found during the beginning of my stay here at the Ashram that I was often dull-witted during those divine conversations. Tired, confused and bored, my prayers sounded the same. I remember kneeling down one morning, touching my forehead to the floor and muttering to my creator, “Oh, I dunno what I need . . . but you must have some ideas . . . so just do something about it, would you?”

Similar to the way I have oftentimes spoken to my hairdresser.

And, I’m sorry, but that’s a little lame. You can imagine God regarding that prayer with an arched eyebrow, and sending back this message: “Call me again when you decide to get serious about this.”

Of course God already knows what I need. The question is—do I know? Casting yourself at God’s feet in helpless desperation is all well and good—heaven knows, I’ve done it myself plenty of times— but ultimately you’re likely to get more out of the experience if you can take some action on your end. There’s a wonderful old Italian joke about a poor man who goes to church every day and prays before the statue of a great saint, begging, “Dear saint—please, please, please . . . give me the grace to win the lottery.” This lament goes on for months. Finally the exasperated statue comes to life, looks down at the begging man and says in weary disgust, “My son—please, please, please . . . buy a ticket.”

Prayer is a relationship; half the job is mine. If I want transformation, but can’t even be bothered to articulate what, exactly, I’m aiming for, how will it ever occur? Half the benefit of prayer is in the asking itself, in the offering of a clearly posed and well-considered intention. If you don’t have this, all your pleas and desires are boneless, floppy, inert; they swirl at your feet in a cold fog and never lift. So now I take the time every morning to search myself for specificity about what I am truly asking for. I kneel there in the temple with my face on that cold marble for as long as it takes me to formulate an authentic prayer. If I don’t feel sincere, then I will stay there on the floor until I do. What worked yesterday doesn’t always work today. Prayers can become stale and drone into the boring and familiar if you let your attention stagnate. In making an effort to stay alert, I am assuming custodial responsibility for the maintenance of my own soul.

Destiny, I feel, is also a relationship—a play between divine grace and willful self-effort. Half of it you have no control over; half of it is absolutely in your hands, and your actions will show measurable consequence. Man is neither entirely a puppet of the gods, nor is he entirely the captain of his own destiny; he’s a little of both. We gallop through our lives like circus performers balancing on two speeding side-by-side horses—one foot is on the horse called “fate,” the other on the horse called “free will.” And the question you have to ask every day is—which horse is which? Which horse do I need to stop worrying about because it’s not under my control, and which do I need to steer with concentrated effort?

There is so much about my fate that I cannot control, but other things do fall under my jurisdiction. There are certain lottery tickets I can buy, thereby increasing my odds of finding contentment. I can decide how I spend my time, whom I interact with, whom I share my body and life and money and energy with. I can select what I eat and read and study. I can choose how I’m going to regard unfortunate circumstances in my life—whether I will see them as curses or opportunities (and on the occasions when I can’t rise to the most optimistic viewpoint, because I’m feeling too damn sorry for myself, I can choose to keep trying to change my outlook). I can choose my words and the tone of voice in which I speak to others. And most of all, I can choose my thoughts.

This last concept is a radically new idea for me. Richard from Texas brought it to my attention recently, when I was complaining about my inability to stop brooding. He said, “Groceries, you need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select what clothes you’re gonna wear every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. That’s the only thing you should be trying to control. Drop everything else but that. Because if you can’t learn to master your thinking, you’re in deep trouble forever.”

On first glance, this seems a nearly impossible task. Control your thoughts? Instead of the other way around? But imagine if you could? This is not about repression or denial. Repression and denial set up elaborate games to pretend that negative thoughts and feelings are not occurring. What Richard is talking about is instead admitting to the existence of negative thoughts, understanding where they came from and why they arrived, and then—with great forgiveness and fortitude—dismissing them. This is a practice that fits hand-in-glove with any psychological work you do during therapy. You can use the shrink’s office to understand why you have these destructive thoughts in the first place; you can use spiritual exercises to help overcome them. It’s a sacrifice to let them go, of course. It’s a loss of old habits, comforting old grudges and familiar vignettes. Of course this all takes practice and effort. It’s not a teaching that you can hear once and then expect to master immediately. It’s constant vigilance and I want to do it. I need to do it, for my strength. Devo farmi le ossa is how they say it in Italian. “I need to make my bones.”

So I’ve started being vigilant about watching my thoughts all day, and monitoring them. I repeat this vow about 700 times a day: “I will not harbor unhealthy thoughts anymore.” Every time a diminishing thought arises, I repeat the vow. I will not harbor unhealthy thoughts anymore. The first time I heard myself say this, my inner ear perked up at the word “harbor,” which is a noun as well as a verb. A harbor, of course, is a place of refuge, a port of entry. I pictured the harbor of my mind—a little beat-up, perhaps, a little storm-worn, but well situated and with a nice depth. The harbor of my mind is an open bay, the only access to the island of my Self (which is a young and volcanic island, yes, but fertile and promising). This island has been through some wars, it is true, but it is now committed to peace, under a new leader (me) who has instituted new policies to protect the place. And now—let the word go out across the seven seas—there are much, much stricter laws on the books about who may enter this harbor.

You may not come here anymore with your hard and abusive thoughts, with your plague ships of thoughts, with your slave ships of thoughts, with your warships of thoughts—all these will be turned away. Likewise, any thoughts that are filled with angry or starving exiles, with malcontents and pamphleteers, mutineers and violent assassins, desperate prostitutes, pimps and seditious stowaways— you may not come here anymore, either. Cannibalistic thoughts, for obvious reasons, will no longer be received. Even missionaries will be screened carefully, for sincerity. This is a peaceful harbor, the entryway to a fine and proud island that is only now beginning to cultivate tranquillity. If you can abide by these new laws, my dear thoughts, then you are welcome in my mind—otherwise, I shall turn you all back toward the sea from whence you came.

That is my mission, and it will never end.

59

I’ve made good friends with this seventeen-year-old Indian girl named Tulsi. She works with me scrubbing the temple floors every day. Every evening we take a walk through the gardens of the Ashram together and talk about God and hip-hop music, two subjects for which Tulsi feels equivalent devotion. Tulsi is just about the cutest little bookworm of an Indian girl you ever saw, even cuter since one lens of her “specs” (as she calls her eyeglasses) broke last week in a cartoonish spiderweb design, which hasn’t stopped her from wearing them. Tulsi is so many interesting and foreign things to me at once—a teenager, a tomboy, an Indian girl, a rebel in her family, a soul who is so crazy about God that it’s almost like she’s got a schoolgirl crush on Him. She also speaks a delightful, lilting English—the kind of English you can find only in India—which includes such colonial words as “splendid!” and “nonsense!” and sometimes produces eloquent sentences like: “It is beneficial to walk on the grass in the morning when the dew has already been accumulated, for it lowers naturally and pleasantly the body’s temperature.” When I told her once that I was going to Mumbai for the day, Tulsi said, “Please stand carefully, as you will find there are many speeding buses everywhere.”

She’s exactly half my age, and practically half my size.

Tulsi and I have been talking a lot about marriage lately during our walks. Soon she will turn eighteen, and this is the age when she will be regarded as a legitimate marriage prospect. It will happen like this—after her eighteenth birthday, she will be required to attend family weddings dressed in a sari, signaling her womanhood. Some nice Amma (“Aunty”) will come and sit beside her, start asking questions and getting to know her: “How old are you? What’s your family background? What does your father do? What universities are you applying to? What are your interests? When is your birthday?” Next thing you know, Tulsi’s dad will get a big envelope in the mail with a photo of this woman’s grandson who is studying computer sciences in Delhi, along with the boy’s astrology charts and his university grades and the inevitable question, “Would your daughter care to marry him?”

Tulsi says, “It sucks.”

But it means so much to the family, to see their children wedded off successfully. Tulsi has an aunt who just shaved her head as a gesture of thanks to God because her oldest daughter—at the Jurassic age of twenty-eight—finally got married. And this was a difficult girl to marry off, too; she had a lot of strikes against her. I asked Tulsi what makes an Indian girl difficult to marry off, and she said there are any number of reasons.

“If she has a bad horoscope. If she’s too old. If her skin is too dark. If she’s too educated and you can’t find a man with a higher position than hers, and this is a widespread problem these days because a woman cannot be more educated than her husband. Or if she’s had an affair with someone and the whole community knows about it, oh, it would be quite difficult to find a husband after that . . .”

I quickly ran through the list, trying to see how marriageable I would appear in Indian society. I don’t know whether my horoscope is good or bad, but I’m definitely too old and I’m way too educated, and my morals have been publicly demonstrated to be quite tarnished . . . I’m not a very appealing prospect. At least my skin is fair. I have only this in my favor.

Tulsi had to go to another cousin’s wedding last week, and she was saying (in very un-Indian fashion) how much she hates weddings. All that dancing and gossip. All that dressing up. She would rather be at the Ashram scrubbing floors and meditating. Nobody else in her family can understand this; her devotion to God is way beyond anything they consider normal. Tulsi said, “In my family, they have already given up on me as too different. I have established a reputation for being someone who, if you tell her to do one thing, will almost certainly do the other. I also have a temper. And I’m not dedicated to my studies, except that now I will be, because now I’m going to college and I can decide for myself what I’m interested in. I want to study psychology, just as our Guru did when she attended college. I’m considered a difficult girl. I have a reputation for needing to be told a good reason to do something before I will do it. My mother understands this about me and always tries to give good reasons, but my father doesn’t. He gives reasons, but I don’t think they’re good enough. Sometimes I wonder what I’m doing in my family because I don’t resemble them at all.”

Tulsi’s cousin who got married last week is only twenty-one, and her older sister is next on the marriage list at age twenty, which means there will be huge pressure after that for Tulsi herself to find a husband. I asked her if she wanted to ever get married and she said:

“Noooooooooooooooooooooo . . .”

. . . and the word drew out longer than the sunset we were watching over the gardens.

“I want to roam!” she said. “Like you.”

“You know, Tulsi, I couldn’t always roam like this. I was married once.”

She frowned at me through her cracked specs, studying me with a quizzical look, almost as if I’d just told her I’d once been a brunette and she was trying to imagine it. In the end, she pronounced: “You, married? I cannot picture this.”

“But it’s true—I was.”

“Are you the one who ended the marriage?”

“Yes.”

She said, “I think it’s most commendable that you ended your marriage. You seem splendidly happy now. But as for me—how did I get here? Why was I born an Indian girl? It’s outrageous! Why did I come into this family? Why must I attend so many weddings?”

Then Tulsi ran around in a frustrated circle, shouting (quite loudly for Ashram standards): “I want to live in Hawaii!!!”

60

Richard from Texas was married once, too. He had two sons, both of whom are grown men now, both close to their dad. Sometimes Richard mentions his ex-wife in some anecdote or other, and he always seems to speak of her with fondness. I get a bit envious whenever I hear this, imagining how lucky Richard is to still be friends with his former spouse, even after separating. This is an odd side effect of my terrible divorce; whenever I hear of couples splitting amicably, I get jealous. It’s worse than that—I’ve actually come to think that it’s really romantic when a marriage ends civilly. Like, “Aw . . . how sweet . . . they must’ve really loved each other . . .”

So I asked Richard one day about it. I said, “It seems like you have fond feelings toward your ex-wife. Are you two still close?”

“Nah,” he said casually. “She thinks I changed my name to Motherfucker.”

Richard’s lack of concern about this impressed me. My own ex-spouse happens to think I changed my name too, and it breaks my heart. One of the hardest things about this divorce was the fact that my ex-husband never forgave me for leaving, that it didn’t matter how many bushels of apologies or explanations I laid at his feet, how much blame I assumed, or how many assets or acts of contrition I was willing to offer him in exchange for departing—he certainly was never going to congratulate me and say, “Hey, I was so impressed with your generosity and honesty and I just want to tell you it’s been a great pleasure being divorced by you.” No. I was unredeemable. And this unredeemed dark hole was still inside me. Even in moments of happiness and excitement (especially in moments of happiness and excitement) I could never forget it for long. I am still hated by him. And that felt like it would never change, never release.

I was talking about all this one day with my friends at the Ashram— the newest member of whom is a plumber from New Zealand, a guy I’d met because he’d heard I was a writer and he sought me out to tell me that he was one, too. He’s a poet who had recently published a terrific memoir in New Zealand called A Plumber’s Progress about his own spiritual journey. The plumber/poet from New Zealand, Richard from Texas, the Irish dairy farmer, Tulsi the Indian teenage tomboy and Vivian, an older woman with wispy white hair and incandescently humorous eyes (who used to be a nun in South Africa)—this was my circle of close friends here, a most vibrant crowd of characters whom I never would have expected to meet at an Ashram in India.

So, during lunch one day, we were all having this conversation together about marriage, and the plumber/poet from New Zealand said, “I see marriage as an operation that sews two people together, and divorce is a kind of amputation that can take a long time to heal. The longer you were married, or the rougher the amputation, the harder it is to recover.”

Which would explain the postdivorce, postamputation sensations I’ve had for a few years now, of still swinging that phantom limb around, constantly knocking stuff off the shelves.

Richard from Texas was wondering if I was planning on allowing my ex-husband to dictate for the rest of my life how I felt about myself, and I said I wasn’t too sure about that, actually—so far, my ex still seemed to have a pretty strong vote, and to be honest I was still halfway waiting for the man to forgive me, to release me and allow me to go forth in peace.

The dairy farmer from Ireland observed, “Waiting for that day to arrive is not exactly a rational use of your time.”

“What can I say, guys? I do a lot with guilt. Kind of like the way other women do a lot with beige.”

The former Catholic nun (who oughtta know about guilt, after all) wouldn’t hear of it. “Guilt’s just your ego’s way of tricking you into thinking that you’re making moral progress. Don’t fall for it, my dear.”

“What I hate about the way my marriage ended,” I said, “is that it’s so unresolved. It’s just an open wound that never goes away.”

“If you insist,” said Richard. “If that’s how you’ve decided to think about it, don’t let me spoil your party.”

“One of these days this has to end,” I said. “I just wish I knew how.”

When lunch ended, the plumber/poet from New Zealand slipped me a note. It said to meet him after dinner; he wanted to show me something. So after dinner that night I met him over by the meditation caves, and he told me to follow him, that he had a gift for me. He walked me across the Ashram, then led me to a building I’d never been inside before, unlocked a door and took me up a back set of stairs. He knew of this place, I guessed, because he fixes all the air-conditioning units, and some of them are located up there. At the top of the stairs there was a door which he had to unlock with a combination; he did this swiftly, from memory. Then we were up on a gorgeous rooftop, tiled in ceramic chips that glittered in the evening twilight like the bottom of a reflecting pool. He took me across that roof to a little tower, a minaret, really, and showed me another narrow set of stairs, leading to the tippity-top of the tower. He pointed to the tower and said, “I’m going to leave you now. You’re going to go up there. Stay up there until it’s finished.”

“Until what’s finished?” I asked.

The plumber just smiled, handed me a flashlight, “for getting down safely when it’s over,” and also handed me a folded piece of paper. Then he left.

I climbed to the top of the tower. I was now standing at the tallest place in the Ashram, with a view overlooking the entirety of this river valley in India. Mountains and farmland stretched out as far as I could see. I had a feeling this was not a place students were normally allowed to hang out, but it was so lovely up there. Maybe this is where my Guru watches the sun go down, when she’s in residence here. And the sun was going down right now. The breeze was warm. I unfolded the piece of paper the plumber/poet had given me.

He had typed:

INSTRUCTIONS FOR FREEDOM

1. Life’s metaphors are God’s instructions.

2. You have just climbed up and above the roof. There is nothing between you and the Infinite. Now, let go.

3. The day is ending. It’s time for something that was beautiful to turn into something else that is beautiful. Now, let go.

4. Your wish for resolution was a prayer. Your being here is God’s response. Let go, and watch the stars come out—on the outside and on the inside.

5. With all your heart, ask for grace, and let go.

6. With all your heart, forgive him, FORGIVE YOURSELF, and let him go.

7. Let your intention be freedom from useless suffering. Then, let go.

8. Watch the heat of day pass into the cool night. Let go.

9. When the karma of a relationship is done, only love remains. It’s safe. Let go.

10. When the past has passed from you at last, let go. Then climb down and begin the rest of your life. With great joy.

For the first few minutes, I couldn’t stop laughing. I could see over the whole valley, over the umbrella of the mango trees, and the wind was blowing my hair around like a flag. I watched the sun go down, and then I lay down on my back and watched the stars come out. I sang a small little prayer in Sanskrit, and repeated it every time I saw a new star emerge in the darkening sky, almost like I was calling forth the stars, but then they started popping out too fast and I couldn’t keep up with them. Soon the whole sky was a glitzy show of stars. The only thing between me and God was . . . nothing.

Then I shut my eyes and I said, “Dear Lord, please show me everything I need to understand about forgiveness and surrender.”

What I had wanted for so long was to have an actual conversation with my ex-husband, but this was obviously never going to happen. What I had been craving was a resolution, a peace summit, from which we could emerge with a united understanding of what had occurred in our marriage, and a mutual forgiveness for the ugliness of our divorce. But months of counseling and mediation had only made us more divided and locked our positions solid, turning us into two people who were absolutely incapable of giving each other any release. Yet it’s what we both needed, I was sure of it. And I was sure of this, too—that the rules of transcendence insist that you will not advance even one inch closer to divinity as long as you cling to even one last seductive thread of blame. As smoking is to the lungs, so is resentment to the soul; even one puff of it is bad for you. I mean, what kind of prayer is this to imbibe—“Give us this day our daily grudge”? You might just as well hang it up and kiss God goodbye if you really need to keep blaming somebody else for your own life’s limitations. So what I asked of God that night on the Ashram roof was—given the reality that I would probably never speak to my ex-husband again—might there be some level upon which we could communicate? Some level on which we could forgive?

I lay up there, high above the world, and I was all alone. I dropped into meditation and waited to be told what to do. I don’t know how many minutes or hours passed before I knew what to do. I realized I’d been thinking about all this too literally. I’d been wanting to talk to my ex-husband? So talk to him. Talk to him right now. I’d been waiting to be offered forgiveness? Offer it up personally, then. Right now. I thought of how many people go to their graves unforgiven and unforgiving. I thought of how many people have had siblings or friends or children or lovers disappear from their lives before precious words of clemency or absolution could be passed along. How do the survivors of terminated relationships ever endure the pain of unfinished business? From that place of meditation, I found the answer—you can finish the business yourself, from within yourself. It’s not only possible, it’s essential.

And then, to my surprise, still in meditation, I did an odd thing. I invited my ex-husband to please join me up here on this rooftop in India. I asked him if he would be kind enough to meet me up here for this farewell event. Then I waited until I felt him arrive. And he did arrive. His presence was suddenly absolute and tangible. I could practically smell him.

I said, “Hi, sweetie.”

I almost started to cry right then, but quickly realized I didn’t need to. Tears are part of this bodily life, and the place where these two souls were meeting that night in India had nothing to do with the body. The two people who needed to talk to each other up there on the roof were not even people anymore. They wouldn’t even be talking. They weren’t even ex-spouses, not an obstinate midwesterner and a high-strung Yankee, not a guy in his forties and a woman in her thirties, not two limited people who had argued for years about sex and money and furniture—none of this was relevant. For the purposes of this meeting, at the level of this reunion, they were just two cool blue souls who already understood everything. Unbound by their bodies, unbound by the complex history of their past relationship, they came together above this roof (above me, even) in infinite wisdom. Still in meditation, I watched these two cool blue souls circle each other, merge, divide again and regard each other’s perfection and similarity. They knew everything. They knew everything long ago and they will always know everything. They didn’t need to forgive each other; they were born forgiving each other.

The lesson they were teaching me in their beautiful turning was, “Stay out of this, Liz. Your part of this relationship is over. Let us work things out from now on. You go on with your life.”

Much later I opened my eyes, and I knew it was over. Not just my marriage and not just my divorce, but all the unfinished bleak hollow sadness of it . . . it was over. I could feel that I was free. Let me be clear—it’s not that I would never again think about my ex-husband, or never again have any emotions attached to the memory of him. It’s just that this ritual on the rooftop had finally given me a place where I could house those thoughts and feelings whenever they would arise in the future—and they will always arise. But when they do show up again, I can just send them back here, back to this rooftop of memory, back to the care of those two cool blue souls who already and always understand everything.

This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don’t have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down. We all need such places of ritual safekeeping. And I do believe that if your culture or tradition doesn’t have the specific ritual you’re craving, then you are absolutely permitted to make up a ceremony of your own devising, fixing your own broken-down emotional systems with all the do-it-yourself resourcefulness of a generous plumber/poet. If you bring the right earnestness to your homemade ceremony, God will provide the grace. And that is why we need God.

So I stood up and did a handstand on my Guru’s roof, to celebrate the notion of liberation. I felt the dusty tiles under my hands. I felt my own strength and balance. I felt the easy night breeze on the palms of my bare feet. This kind of thing—a spontaneous handstand— isn’t something a disembodied cool blue soul can do, but a human being can do it. We have hands; we can stand on them if we want to. That’s our privilege. That’s the joy of a mortal body. And that’s why God needs us. Because God loves to feel things through our hands.

61

Richard from Texas left today. Flew back to Austin. I took the drive with him to the airport, and we were both sad. We stood for a long time on the sidewalk before he went inside.

“What am I gonna do when I don’t have Liz Gilbert to kick around anymore?” He sighed. Then he said, “You’ve had a good experience at the Ashram, haven’t you? You look all different from a few months back, like maybe you chucked out some of that sorrow you been hauling around.”

“I’m feeling really happy these days, Richard.”

“Well, just remember—all your misery will be waiting for you at the door upon your exit, should you care to pick it up again when you leave.”

“I won’t pick it up again.”

“Good girl.”

“You’ve helped me a lot,” I told him. “I think of you as an angel with hairy hands and cruddy toenails.”

“Yeah, my toenails never really did recover from Vietnam, poor things.”

“It could’ve been worse.”

“It was worse for a lot of guys. At least I got to keep my legs. Nope, I got a pretty cushy incarnation in this lifetime, kiddo. So did you—never forget that. Next lifetime you might come back as one of those poor Indian women busting up rocks by the side of the road, find out life ain’t so much fun. So appreciate what you got now, OK? Keep cultivating gratitude. You’ll live longer. And, Groceries? Do me a favor? Move ahead with your life, will ya?”

“I am.”

“What I mean is—find somebody new to love someday. Take the time you need to heal, but don’t forget to eventually share your heart with someone. Don’t make your life a monument to David or to your ex-husband.”

“I won’t,” I said. And I knew suddenly that it was true—I wouldn’t. I could feel all this old pain of lost love and past mistakes attenuating before my eyes, diminishing at last through the famous healing powers of time, patience and the grace of God.

And then Richard spoke again, snapping my thoughts back quickly to the world’s more basic realities: “After all, baby, remember what they say—sometimes the best way to get over someone is to get under someone else.”

I laughed. “OK, Richard, that’ll do. Now you can go back to Texas.”

“Might as well,” he said, casting a gaze around this desolate Indian airport parking lot. “Cuz I ain’t gettin’ any prettier just standing around here.”

62

On my ride back to the Ashram, after seeing Richard off at the airport, I decide that I’ve been talking too much. To be honest, I’ve been talking too much my whole life, but I’ve really been talking too much during my stay at the Ashram. I have another two months here, and I don’t want to waste the greatest spiritual opportunity of my life by being all social and chatty the whole time. It’s been amazing for me to discover that even here, even in a sacred environment of spiritual retreat on the other side of the world, I have managed to create a cocktail-party-like vibe around me. It’s not just Richard I’ve been talking to constantly—though we did do the most gabbing—I’m always yakking with somebody. I’ve even found myself—in an Ashram, mind you!—creating appointments to see acquaintances, having to say to somebody, “I’m sorry, I can’t hang out with you at lunch today because I promised Sakshi I would eat with her . . . maybe we could make a date for next Tuesday.”

This has been the story of my life. It’s how I am. But I’ve been thinking lately that this is maybe a spiritual liability. Silence and solitude are universally recognized spiritual practices, and there are good reasons for this. Learning how to discipline your speech is a way of preventing your energies from spilling out of you through the rupture of your mouth, exhausting you and filling the world with words, words, words instead of serenity, peace and bliss. Swamiji, my Guru’s master, was a stickler about silence in the Ashram, heavily enforcing it as a devotional practice. He called silence the only true religion. It’s ridiculous how much I’ve been talking at this Ashram, the one place in the world where silence should—and can—reign.

So I’m not going to be the Ashram social bunny anymore, I’ve decided. No more scurrying, gossiping, joking. No more spotlight-hogging or conversation-dominating. No more verbal tap-dancing for pennies of affirmation. It’s time to change. Now that Richard is gone, I’m going to make the remainder of my stay a completely quiet experience. This will be difficult, but not impossible, because silence is universally respected at the Ashram. The whole community will support it, recognizing your decision as a disciplined act of devotion. In the bookstore they even sell little badges you can wear which read, “I am in Silence.”

I’m going to buy four of those little badges.

On the drive back to the Ashram, I really let myself dip into a fantasy about just how silent I am going to become now. I will be so silent that it will make me famous. I imagine myself becoming known as That Quiet Girl. I’ll just keep to the Ashram schedule, take my meals in solitude, meditate for endless hours every day and scrub the temple floors without making a peep. My only interaction with others will be to smile beatifically at them from within my self-contained world of stillness and piety. People will talk about me. They’ll ask, “Who is That Quiet Girl in the Back of the Temple, always scrubbing the floors, down on her knees? She never speaks. She’s so elusive. She’s so mystical. I can’t even imagine what her voice sounds like. You never even hear her coming up behind you on the garden path when she’s out walking . . . she moves as silently as the breeze. She must be in a constant state of meditative communion with God. She’s the quietest girl I’ve ever seen.”

63

The next morning I was down on my knees in the temple, scrubbing the marble floor again, emanating (I imagined) a holy radiance of silence, when an Indian teenage boy came looking for me with a message—that I needed to report to the Seva Office immediately. Seva is the Sanskrit term for the spiritual practice of selfless service (for instance, the scrubbing of a temple floor). The Seva Office administers all the work assignments for the Ashram. So I wandered over there, very curious as to why I’d been summoned, and the nice lady at the desk asked me, “Are you Elizabeth Gilbert?”

I smiled at her with the warmest piety and nodded. Silently.

Then she told me that my work detail had been changed. Due to a special request from management, I was no longer to be part of the floor-scrubbing team. They had a new position in mind for me at the Ashram.

And the title of my new job was—if you will kindly dig this—“Key Hostess.”

64

This was so obviously another one of Swamiji’s jokes.

You wanted to be The Quiet Girl in the Back of the Temple? Well, guess what . . .

But this is what always happens at the Ashram. You make some big grandiose decision about what you need to do, or who you need to be, and then circumstances arise that immediately reveal to you how little you understood about yourself. I don’t know how many times Swamiji said it during his lifetime, and I don’t know how many more times my Guru has repeated it since his death, but it seems I have not quite yet absorbed the truth of their most insistent statement:

“God dwells within you, as you.”

AS you.

If there is one holy truth of this Yoga, that line encapsulates it. God dwells within you as you yourself, exactly the way you are. God isn’t interested in watching you enact some performance of personality in order to comply with some crackpot notion you have about how a spiritual person looks or behaves. We all seem to get this idea that, in order to be sacred, we have to make some massive, dramatic change of character, that we have to renounce our individuality. This is a classic example of what they call in the East “wrong-thinking.” Swamiji used to say that every day renunciants find something new to renounce, but it is usually depression, not peace, that they attain. Constantly he was teaching that austerity and renunciation— just for their own sake—are not what you need. To know God, you need only to renounce one thing—your sense of division from God. Otherwise, just stay as you were made, within your natural character.

So what is my natural character? I love studying in this Ashram, but my dream of finding divinity by gliding silently through the place with a gentle, ethereal smile—who is that person? That’s probably someone I saw on a TV show. The reality is, it’s a little sad for me to admit that I will never be that character. I’ve always been so fascinated by these wraith-like, delicate souls. Always wanted to be the quiet girl. Probably precisely because I’m not. It’s the same reason I think that thick, dark hair is so beautiful—precisely because I don’t have it, because I can’t have it. But at some point you have to make peace with what you were given and if God wanted me to be a shy girl with thick, dark hair, He would have made me that way, but He didn’t. Useful, then, might be to accept how I was made and embody myself fully therein.

Or, as Sextus, the ancient Pythagorian philospher, said, “The wise man is always similar to himself.”

This doesn’t mean I cannot be devout. It doesn’t mean I can’t be thoroughly tumbled and humbled with God’s love. This does not mean I cannot serve humanity. It doesn’t mean I can’t improve myself as a human being, honing my virtues and working daily to minimize my vices. For instance, I’m never going to be a wallflower, but that doesn’t mean I can’t take a serious look at my talking habits and alter some aspects for the better—working within my personality. Yes, I like talking, but perhaps I don’t have to curse so much, and perhaps I don’t always have to go for the cheap laugh, and maybe I don’t need to talk about myself quite so constantly. Or here’s a radical concept—maybe I can stop interrupting others when they are speaking. Because no matter how creatively I try to look at my habit of interrupting, I can’t find another way to see it than this: “I believe that what I am saying is more important than what you are saying.” And I can’t find another way to see that than: “I believe that I am more important than you.” And that must end.

All these changes would be useful to make. But even so, even with reasonable modifications to my speaking habits, I probably won’t ever be known as That Quiet Girl. No matter how pretty a picture that is and no matter how hard I try. Because let’s be really honest about who we’re dealing with here. When the woman at the Ashram Seva Center gave me my new job assignment of Key Hostess, she said, “We have a special nickname for this position, you know. We call it ‘Little Suzy Creamcheese,’ because whoever does the job needs to be social and bubbly and smiling all the time.”

What could I say?

I just stuck out a hand to shake, bade a silent farewell to all my wishful old delusions and announced, “Madam—I’m your girl.”

65

What I will be hosting, to be exact, is a series of retreats to be held at the Ashram this spring. During each retreat, about a hundred devotees will come here from all over the world for a period of a week to ten days, to deepen their meditation practices. My role is to take care of these people during their stay here. For most of the retreat, the participants will be in silence. For some of them, it will be the first time they’ve experienced silence as a devotional practice, and it can be intense. However, I will be the one person in the Ashram they are allowed to talk to if something is going wrong.

That’s right—my job officially requires me to be the speech-magnet.

I will listen to the problems of the retreat participants and then try to find solutions for them. Maybe they’ll need to change roommates because of a snoring situation, or maybe they’ll need to speak to the doctor because of India-related digestive trouble—I’ll try to solve it. I’ll need to know everybody’s name, and where they are from. I’ll be walking around with a clipboard, taking notes and following up. I’m Julie McCoy, your Yogic cruise director.

And, yes, the position does come with a beeper.

As the retreats begin, it is so quickly evident how much I am made for this job. I’m sitting there at the Welcome Table with my Hello, My Name Is badge, and these people are arriving from thirty different countries, and some of them are old-timers but many of them have never been to India. It’s over 100 degrees already at 10:00 AM, and most of these people have been flying all night in coach. Some of them walk into this Ashram looking like they just woke up in the trunk of a car—like they have no idea at all what they’re doing here. Whatever desire for transcendence drove them to apply for this spiritual retreat in the first place, they’ve long ago forgotten it, probably somewhere around the time their luggage got lost in Kuala Lumpur. They’re thirsty, but don’t know yet if they can drink the water. They’re hungry, but don’t know what time lunch is, or where the cafeteria can be found. They’re dressed all wrong, wearing synthetics and heavy boots in the tropical heat. They don’t know if there’s anyone here who speaks Russian.

I can speak a teensy bit of Russian . . .

I can help them. I am so equipped to help. All the antennas I’ve ever sprouted throughout my lifetime that have taught me how to read what people are feeling, all the intuition I developed growing up as the supersensitive younger child, all the listening skills I learned as a sympathetic bartender and an inquisitive journalist, all the proficiency of care I mastered after years of being somebody’s wife or girlfriend—it was all accumulated so that I could help ease these good people into the difficult task they’ve taken on. I see them coming in from Mexico, from the Philippines, from Africa, from Denmark, from Detroit and it feels like that scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind where Richard Dreyfuss and all those other seekers have been pulled to the middle of Wyoming for reasons they don’t understand at all, drawn by the arrival of the spaceship. I am so consumed by wonder at their bravery. These people have left their families and lives behind for a few weeks to go into silent retreat amidst a crowd of perfect strangers in India. Not everybody does this in their lifetime.

I love all these people, automatically and unconditionally. I even love the pain-in-the-ass ones. I can see through their neuroses and recognize that they’re just horribly afraid of what they’re going to face when they go into silence and meditation for seven days. I love the Indian man who comes to me in outrage, reporting that there’s a four-inch statue of the Indian god Ganesh in his room which has one foot missing. He’s furious, thinks this is a terrible omen and wants that statue removed—ideally by a Brahman priest, during a “traditionally appropriate” cleansing ceremony. I comfort him and listen to his anger, then send my teenage tomboy friend Tulsi over to the guy’s room to get rid of the statue while he’s at lunch. The next day I pass the man a note, telling him that I hope he’s feeling better now that the broken statue is gone, and reminding him that I’m here if he needs anything else whatsoever; he rewards me with a giant, relieved smile. He’s just afraid. The French woman who has a near panic attack about her wheat allergies—she’s afraid, too. The Argentinean man who wants a special meeting with the entire staff of the Hatha Yoga department in order to be counseled on how to sit properly during meditation so his ankle doesn’t hurt; he’s just afraid. They’re all afraid. They’re going into silence, deep into their own minds and souls. Even for an experienced meditator, nothing is more unknown than this territory. Anything can happen in there. They’ll be guided during this retreat by a wonderful woman, a monk in her fifties, whose every gesture and word is the embodiment of compassion, but they’re still afraid because—as loving as this monk may be—she cannot go with them where they are going. Nobody can.

As the retreat was beginning, I happened to get a letter in the mail from a friend of mine in America who is a wildlife filmmaker for National Geographic. He told me he’d just been to a fancy dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, honoring members of the Explorers’ Club. He said it was amazing to be in the presence of such incredibly courageous people, all of whom have risked their lives so many times to discover the world’s most remote and dangerous mountain ranges, canyons, rivers, ocean depths, ice fields and volcanoes. He said that so many of them were missing bits of themselves— toes and noses and fingers lost over the years to sharks, frostbite and other dangers.

He wrote, “You have never seen so many brave people gathered in one place at the same time.”

I thought to myself, You ain’t seen nothin’, Mike.

66

The topic of the retreat, and its goal, is the turiya state—the elusive fourth level of human consciousness. During the typical human experience, say the Yogis, most of us are always moving between three different levels of consciousness—waking, dreaming or deep dreamless sleep. But there is a fourth level, too. This fourth level is the witness of all the other states, the integral awareness that links the other three levels together. This is the pure consciousness, an intelligent awareness that can—for example—report your dreams back to you in the morning when you wake up. You were gone, you were sleeping, but somebody was watching over your dreams while you slept—who was that witness? And who is the one who is always standing outside the mind’s activity, observing its thoughts? It’s simply God, say the Yogis. And if you can move into that state of witness-consciousness, then you can be present with God all the time. This constant awareness and experience of the God-presence within can only happen on a fourth level of human consciousness, which is called turiya.

Here’s how you can tell if you’ve reached the turiya state—if you’re in a state of constant bliss. One who is living from within turiya is not affected by the swinging moods of the mind, nor fearful of time or harmed by loss. “Pure, clean, void, tranquil, breathless, selfless, endless, undecaying, steadfast, eternal, unborn, independent, he abides in his own greatness,” say the Upanishads, the ancient Yogic scriptures, describing anyone who has reached the turiya state. The great saints, the great Gurus, the great prophets of history—they were all living in the turiya state, all the time. As for the rest of us, most of us have been there, too, if only for fleeting moments. Most of us, even if only for two minutes in our lives, have experienced at some time or another an inexplicable and random sense of complete bliss, unrelated to anything that was happening in the outside world. One instant, you’re just a regular Joe, schlepping through your mundane life, and then suddenly—what is this?—nothing has changed, yet you feel stirred by grace, swollen with wonder, overflowing with bliss. Everything—for no reason whatsoever—is perfect.

Of course, for most of us this state passes as fast as it came. It’s almost like you are shown your inner perfection as a tease and then you tumble back to “reality” very quickly, collapsing into a heap upon all your old worries and desires once again. Over the centuries, people have tried to hold on to that state of blissful perfection through all sorts of external means—through drugs and sex and power and adrenaline and the accumulation of pretty things—but it doesn’t keep. We search for happiness everywhere, but we are like Tolstoy’s fabled beggar who spent his life sitting on a pot of gold, begging for pennies from every passerby, unaware that his fortune was right under him the whole time. Your treasure—your perfection— is within you already. But to claim it, you must leave the busy commotion of the mind and abandon the desires of the ego and enter into the silence of the heart. The kundalini shakti—the supreme energy of the divine—will take you there.

This is what everyone has come here for.

When I initially wrote that sentence, what I meant by it was: “This is why these one hundred retreat participants from all over the world have come to this Ashram in India.” But actually, the Yogic saints and philosophers would have agreed with the broadness of my original statement: “This is what everyone has come here for.” According to the mystics, this search for divine bliss is the entire purpose of a human life. This is why we all chose to be born, and this is why all the suffering and pain of life on earth is worthwhile—just for the chance to experience this infinite love. And once you have found this divinity within, can you hold it? Because if you can . . . bliss.

I spend the entire retreat in the back of the temple, watching over the participants as they meditate in the half-dark and total quiet. It is my job to be concerned about their comfort, paying careful attention to see if anyone is in trouble or need. They’ve all taken vows of silence for the duration of the retreat, and every day I can feel them descending deeper into that silence until the entire Ashram is saturated with their stillness. Out of respect to the retreat participants, we are all tiptoeing through our days now, even eating our meals in silence. All traces of chatter are gone. Even I am quiet. There is a middle-of-the-night silence around here now, the hushed timelessness you generally only experience around 3:00 AM when you’re totally alone—yet it’s carried through the broad daylight and held by the whole Ashram.

As these hundred souls meditate, I have no idea what they’re thinking or feeling, but I know what they want to experience, and I find myself in a constant state of prayer to God on their behalf, making odd bargains for them like, Please give these wonderful people any blessings you might have originally set aside for me. It’s not my intention to go into meditation at the same time the retreat participants are meditating; I’m supposed to be keeping an eye on them, not worrying about my own spiritual journey. But I find myself every day lifted on the waves of their collective devotional intention, much the same way that certain scavenging birds can ride the thermal heat waves which rise off the earth, taking them much higher in the air than they ever could have flown on their own wing-power. So it’s probably not surprising that this is when it happens. One Thursday afternoon in the back of the temple, right in the midst of my Key Hostess duties, wearing my name-tag and everything— I am suddenly transported through the portal of the universe and taken to the center of God’s palm.

67

As a reader and seeker, I always get frustrated at this moment in somebody else’s spiritual memoirs—that moment in which the soul excuses itself from time and place and merges with the infinite. From the Buddha to Saint Teresa to the Sufi mystics to my own Guru—so many great souls over the centuries have tried to express in so many words what it feels like to become one with the divine, but I’m never quite satisfied by these descriptions. Often you will see the maddening adjective indescribable used to describe the event. But even the most eloquent reporters of the devotional experience— like Rumi, who wrote about having abandoned all effort and tied himself to God’s sleeve, or Hafiz, who said that he and God had become like two fat men living in a small boat—“we keep bumping into each other and laughing”—even these poets leave me behind. I don’t want to read about it; I want to feel it, too. Sri Ramana Maharshi, a beloved Indian Guru, used to give long talks on the transcendental experience to his pupils and then always wrap it up with this instruction: “Now go find out.”

So now I have found out. And I don’t want to say that what I experienced that Thursday afternoon in India was indescribable, even though it was. I’ll try to explain anyway. Simply put, I got pulled through the wormhole of the Absolute, and in that rush I suddenly understood the workings of the universe completely. I left my body, I left the room, I left the planet, I stepped through time and I entered the void. I was inside the void, but I also was the void and I was looking at the void, all at the same time. The void was a place of limitless peace and wisdom. The void was conscious and it was intelligent. The void was God, which means that I was inside God. But not in a gross, physical way—not like I was Liz Gilbert stuck inside a chunk of God’s thigh muscle. I just was part of God. In addition to being God. I was both a tiny piece of the universe and exactly the same size as the universe. (“All know that the drop merges into the ocean, but few know that the ocean merges into the drop,” wrote the sage Kabir—and I can personally attest now that this is true.)

It wasn’t hallucinogenic, what I was feeling. It was the most basic of events. It was heaven, yes. It was the deepest love I’d ever experienced, beyond anything I could have previously imagined, but it wasn’t euphoric. It wasn’t exciting. There wasn’t enough ego or passion left in me to create euphoria and excitement. It was just obvious. Like when you’ve been looking at an optical illusion for a long time, straining your eyes to decode the trick, and suddenly your cognizance shifts and there—now you can clearly see it!—the two vases are actually two faces. And once you’ve seen through the optical illusion, you can never not see it again.

“So this is God,” I thought. “Congratulations to meet you.”

The place in which I was standing can’t be described like an earthly location. It was neither dark nor light, neither big nor small. Nor was it a place, nor was I technically standing there, nor was I exactly “I” anymore. I still had my thoughts, but they were so modest, quiet and observatory. Not only did I feel unhesitating compassion and unity with everything and everybody, it was vaguely and amusingly strange for me to wonder how anybody could ever feel anything but that. I also felt mildly charmed by all my old ideas about who I am and what I’m like. I’m a woman, I come from America, I’m talkative, I’m a writer—all this felt so cute and obsolete. Imagine cramming yourself into such a puny box of identity when you could experience your infinitude instead.

I wondered, “Why have I been chasing happiness my whole life when bliss was here the entire time?”

I don’t know how long I hovered in this magnificent ether of union before I had a sudden urgent thought: “I want to hold on to this experience forever!” And that’s when I started to tumble out of it. Just those two little words—I want!—and I began to slide back to earth. Then my mind started to really protest—No! I don’t want to leave here!—and I slid further still.

I want!

I don’t want!

I want!

I don’t want!

With each repetition of those desperate thoughts, I could feel myself falling through layer after layer of illusion, like an action-comedy hero crashing through a dozen canvas awnings during his fall from a building. This return of useless longing was bringing me back again into my own small borders, my own mortal confines, my limited comic-strip world. I watched my ego return the way you watch a Polaroid photo develop, instant-by-instant getting clearer—there’s the face, there are the lines around the mouth, there are the eyebrows—yes, now it is finished: there is a picture of regular old me. I felt a tremor of panic, mildly heartbroken to have lost this divine experience. But exactly parallel to that panic I could also sense a witness, a wiser and older me, who just shook her head and smiled, knowing this: If I believed that this state of bliss was something that could be taken away from me, then I obviously didn’t understand it yet. And therefore, I was not yet ready to inhabit it completely. I would have to practice more. At that moment of realization, that’s when God let me go, let me slide through His fingers with this last compassionate, unspoken message:

You may return here once you have fully come to understand that you are always here.

68

The retreat ended two days later, and everyone came out of silence. I got so many hugs from people, thanking me for having helped them.

“Oh, no! Thank you,” I kept saying, frustrated at how inadequate those words sounded, how impossible it was to express ample gratitude for their having lifted me to such a towering height.

Another one hundred seekers arrived a week later for another retreat, and the teachings and the brave endeavors inward and the all-encompassing silence were all repeated, with new souls in practice. I watched over them, too, and tried to help in every possible way and glided back into turiya a few times with them, too. I could only laugh later when many of them came out of their meditations to tell me that I had appeared to them during the retreat as a “silent, gliding, ethereal presence.” So this was the Ashram’s final joke on me? Once I had learned to accept my loud, chatty, social nature and fully embrace my inner Key Hostess—only then could I become The Quiet Girl in the Back of the Temple, after all?

In my final weeks there, the Ashram was imbibed with a somewhat melancholy last-days-of-summer-camp feeling. Every morning, it seemed, some more people and some more luggage got on a bus and left. There were no new arrivals. It was almost May, the beginning of the hottest season in India, and the place would be slowing down for a while. There would be no more retreats, so I was relocated for work again, now placed in the Office of Registration, where I had the bittersweet job of officially “departing” all my friends off the computer once they had left the Ashram.

I shared the office with a funny former Madison Avenue hairdresser. We’d do our morning prayers together all alone, just the two of us singing our hymn to God.

“Think we could pick up the tempo on this hymn today?” asked the hairdresser one morning. “And maybe raise it to a higher octave? So I don’t sound like a spiritual version of Count Basie?”

I’m getting a lot of time alone here now. I’m spending about four or five hours every day in the meditation caves. I can sit in my own company for hours at a time now, at ease in my own presence, undisturbed by my own existence on the planet. Sometimes my meditations are surreal and physical experiences of shakti—all spine-twisting, blood-boiling wildness. I try to give in to it with as little resistance as possible. Other times I experience a sweet, quiet contentment, and that is fine, too. The sentences still form in my mind, and thoughts still do their little show-off dance, but I know my thought patterns so well now that they don’t bother me anymore. My thoughts have become like old neighbors, kind of bothersome but ultimately rather endearing—Mr. and Mrs. Yakkity-Yak and their three dumb children, Blah, Blah and Blah. But they don’t agitate my home. There’s room for all of us in this neighborhood.

As for whatever other changes may have occurred within me during these last few months, perhaps I can’t even feel them yet. My friends who have been studying Yoga for a long time say you don’t really see the impact that an Ashram has had on you until you leave the place and return to your normal life. “Only then,” said the former nun from South Africa, “will you start to notice how your interior closets have all been rearranged.” Of course at the moment, I’m not entirely sure what my normal life is. I mean, I’m maybe about to go move in with an elderly medicine man in Indonesia—is that my normal life? It may be, who knows? In any case, though, my friends say that the changes appear only later. You may find that lifelong obsessions are gone, or that nasty, indissoluble patterns have finally shifted. Petty irritations that once maddened you are no longer problems, whereas abysmal old miseries you once endured out of habit will no longer be tolerated now for even five minutes. Poisonous relationships get aired out or disposed of, and brighter, more beneficial people start arriving into your world.

Last night I couldn’t sleep. Not out of anxiety, but out of thrilled anticipation. I got dressed and went out for a walk through the gardens. The moon was lusciously ripe and full, and it hovered right above me, spilling a pewtery light all around. The air was perfumed with jasmine and also the intoxicating scent from this heady, flowery bush they have around here which only blossoms in the night. The day had been humid and hot, and now it was only slightly less humid and hot. The warm air shifted around me and I realized: “I’m in India!”

I’m in my sandals and I’m in India!

I took off at a run, galloping away from the path and down into the meadow, just tearing across that moonlit bath of grass. My body felt so alive and healthy from all these months of Yoga and vegetarian food and early bedtimes. My sandals on the soft dewy grass made this sound: shippa-shippa-shippa-shippa, and that was the only sound in the whole valley. I was so exultant I ran straight to the clump of eucalyptus trees in the middle of the park (where they say an ancient temple used to stand, honoring the god Ganesh—the remover of obstacles) and I threw my arms around one of those trees, which was still warm from the day’s heat, and I kissed it with such passion. I mean, I kissed that tree with all my heart, not even thinking at the time that this is the worst nightmare of every American parent whose child has ever run away to India to find herself—that she will end up having orgies with trees in the moonlight.

But it was pure, this love that I was feeling. It was godly. I looked around the darkened valley and I could see nothing that was not God. I felt so deeply, terribly happy. I thought to myself, “Whatever this feeling is—this is what I have been praying for. And this is also what I have been praying to.”

69

By the way, I found my word.

I found it in the library, of course, bookworm that I am. I’d been wondering about my word ever since that afternoon back in Rome when my Italian friend Giulio had told me that Rome’s word is SEX, and had asked me what mine was. I didn’t know the answer then, but kind of figured my word would show up eventually, and that I’d recognize it when I saw it.

So I saw it during my last week at the Ashram. I was reading through an old text about Yoga, when I found a description of ancient spiritual seekers. A Sanskrit word appeared in the paragraph: ANTEVASIN. It means “one who lives at the border.” In ancient times this was a literal description. It indicated a person who had left the bustling center of worldly life to go live at the edge of the forest where the spiritual masters dwelled. The antevasin was not one of the villagers anymore—not a householder with a conventional life. But neither was he yet a transcendent—not one of those sages who live deep in the unexplored woods, fully realized. The antevasin was an in-betweener. He was a border-dweller. He lived in sight of both worlds, but he looked toward the unknown. And he was a scholar.

When I read this description of the antevasin, I got so excited I gave a little bark of recognition. That’s my word, baby! In the modern age, of course, that image of an unexplored forest would have to be figurative, and the border would have to be figurative, too. But you can still live there. You can still live on that shimmering line between your old thinking and your new understanding, always in a state of learning. In the figurative sense, this is a border that is always moving—as you advance forward in your studies and realizations, that mysterious forest of the unknown always stays a few feet ahead of you, so you have to travel light in order to keep following it. You have to stay mobile, movable, supple. Slippery, even. Which is funny, because just the day before, my friend the poet/plumber from New Zealand had left the Ashram, and on his way out the door, he’d handed me a friendly little good-bye poem about my journey. I remembered this verse:

Elizabeth, betwixt and between

Italian phrases and Bali dreams,

Elizabeth, between and betwixt,

Sometimes as slippery as a fish . . .

I’ve spent so much time these last years wondering what I’m supposed to be. A wife? A mother? A lover? A celibate? An Italian? A glutton? A traveler? An artist? A Yogi? But I’m not any of these things, at least not completely. And I’m not Crazy Aunt Liz, either. I’m just a slippery antevasin—betwixt and between—a student on the ever-shifting border near the wonderful, scary forest of the new.

70

I believe that all the world’s religions share, at their core, a desire to find a transporting metaphor. When you want to attain communion with God, what you’re really trying to do is move away from the worldly into the eternal (from the village to the forest, you might say, keeping with the theme of the antevasin) and you need some kind of magnificent idea to convey you there. It has be a big one, this metaphor—really big and magic and powerful, because it needs to carry you across a mighty distance. It has to be the biggest boat imaginable.

Religious rituals often develop out of mystical experimentation. Some brave scout goes looking for a new path to the divine, has a transcendent experience and returns home a prophet. He or she brings back to the community tales of heaven and maps of how to get there. Then others repeat the words, the works, the prayers, or the acts of this prophet, in order to cross over, too. Sometimes this is successful—sometimes the same familiar combination of syllables and devotional practices repeated generation after generation might carry many people to the other side. Sometimes it doesn’t work, though. Inevitably even the most original new ideas will eventually harden into dogma or stop working for everybody.

The Indians around here tell a cautionary fable about a great saint who was always surrounded in his Ashram by loyal devotees. For hours a day, the saint and his followers would meditate on God. The only problem was that the saint had a young cat, an annoying creature, who used to walk through the temple meowing and purring and bothering everyone during meditation. So the saint, in all his practical wisdom, commanded that the cat be tied to a pole outside for a few hours a day, only during meditation, so as to not disturb anyone. This became a habit—tying the cat to the pole and then meditating on God—but as years passed, the habit hardened into religious ritual. Nobody could meditate unless the cat was tied to the pole first. Then one day the cat died. The saint’s followers were panic-stricken. It was a major religious crisis—how could they meditate now, without a cat to tie to a pole? How would they reach God? In their minds, the cat had become the means.

Be very careful, warns this tale, not to get too obsessed with the repetition of religious ritual just for its own sake. Especially in this divided world, where the Taliban and the Christian Coalition continue to fight out their international trademark war over who owns the rights to the word God and who has the proper rituals to reach that God, it may be useful to remember that it is not the tying of the cat to the pole that has ever brought anyone to transcendence, but only the constant desire of an individual seeker to experience the eternal compassion of the divine. Flexibility is just as essential for divinity as is discipline.

Your job, then, should you choose to accept it, is to keep searching for the metaphors, rituals and teachers that will help you move ever closer to divinity. The Yogic scriptures say that God responds to the sacred prayers and efforts of human beings in any way whatsoever that mortals choose to worship—just so long as those prayers are sincere. As one line from the Upanishads suggests: “People follow different paths, straight or crooked, according to their temperament, depending on which they consider best, or most appropriate— and all reach You, just as rivers enter the ocean.”

The other objective of religion, of course, is to try to make sense of our chaotic world and explain the inexplicabilities we see playing out here on earth every day: the innocent suffer, the wicked are rewarded—what are we to make of all this? The Western tradition says, “It’ll all get sorted out after death, in heaven and hell.” (All justice to be doled out, of course, by what James Joyces used to call the “Hangman God”—a paternal figure who sits upon His strict seat of judgment punishing the evil and rewarding the good.) Over in the East, though, the Upanishads shrug away any attempt to make sense of the world’s chaos. They’re not even so sure that the world is chaotic, but suggest that it may only appear so to us, because of our limited vision. These texts do not promise justice or revenge for anybody, though they do say that there are consequences for every action—so choose your behavior accordingly. You might not see those consequences any time soon, though. Yoga takes the long view, always. Furthermore, the Upanishads suggest that so-called chaos may have an actual divine function, even if you personally can’t recognize it right now: “The gods are fond of the cryptic and dislike the evident.” The best we can do, then, in response to our incomprehensible and dangerous world, is to practice holding equilibrium internally—no matter what insanity is transpiring out there.

Sean, my Yogic Irish dairy farmer, explained it to me this way. “Imagine that the universe is a great spinning engine,” he said. “You want to stay near the core of the thing—right in the hub of the wheel—not out at the edges where all the wild whirling takes place, where you get can frayed and crazy. The hub of calmness—that’s your heart. That’s where God lives within you. So stop looking for answers in the world. Just keep coming back to that center and you’ll always find peace.”

Nothing has ever made more sense to me, spiritually speaking, than this idea. It works for me. And if I ever find anything that works better, I assure you—I will use it.

I have many friends in New York who are not religious people. Most, I would say. Either they fell away from the spiritual teachings of their youth or they never grew up with any God to begin with. Naturally, some of them are a bit freaked out by my newfound efforts to reach holiness. Jokes are made, of course. As my friend Bobby quipped once while he was trying to fix my computer: “No offense to your aura, but you still don’t know shit about downloading software.” I roll with the jokes. I think it’s all funny, too. Of course it is.

What I’m seeing in some of my friends, though, as they are aging, is a longing to have something to believe in. But this longing chafes against any number of obstacles, including their intellect and common sense. Despite all their intellect, though, these people still live in a world that careens about in a series of wild and devastating and completely nonsensical lurches. Great and horrible experiences of either suffering or joy occur in the lives of all these people, just as with the rest of us, and these mega-experiences tend to make us long for a spiritual context in which to express either lament or gratitude, or to seek understanding. The problem is—what to worship, whom to pray to?

I have a dear friend whose first child was born right after his beloved mother died. After this confluence of miracle and loss, my friend felt a desire to have some kind of sacred place to go, or some ritual to perform, in order to sort through all the emotion. My friend was a Catholic by upbringing, but couldn’t stomach returning to the church as an adult. (“I can’t buy it anymore,” he said, “knowing what I know.”) Of course, he’d be embarrassed to become a Hindu or a Buddhist or something wacky like that. So what could he do? As he told me, “You don’t want to go cherry-picking a religion.”

Which is a sentiment I completely respect except for the fact that I totally disagree. I think you have every right to cherry-pick when it comes to moving your spirit and finding peace in God. I think you are free to search for any metaphor whatsoever which will take you across the worldly divide whenever you need to be transported or comforted. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about. It’s the history of mankind’s search for holiness. If humanity never evolved in its exploration of the divine, a lot of us would still be worshipping golden Egyptian statues of cats. And this evolution of religious thinking does involve a fair bit of cherry-picking. You take whatever works from wherever you can find it, and you keep moving toward the light.

The Hopi Indians thought that the world’s religions each contained one spiritual thread, and that these threads are always seeking each other, wanting to join. When all the threads are finally woven together they will form a rope that will pull us out of this dark cycle of history and into the next realm. More contemporarily, the Dalai Lama has repeated the same idea, assuring his Western students repeatedly that they needn’t become Tibetan Buddhists in order to be his pupils. He welcomes them to take whatever ideas they like out of Tibetan Buddhism and integrate these ideas into their own religious practices. Even in the most unlikely and conservative of places, you can find sometimes this glimmering idea that God might be bigger than our limited religious doctrines have taught us. In 1954, Pope Pius XI, of all people, sent some Vatican delegates on a trip to Libya with these written instructions: “Do NOT think that you are going among Infidels. Muslims attain salvation, too. The ways of Providence are infinite.”

But doesn’t that make sense? That the infinite would be, indeed . . . infinite? That even the most holy amongst us would only be able to see scattered pieces of the eternal picture at any given time? And that maybe if we could collect those pieces and compare them, a story about God would begin to emerge that resembles and includes everyone? And isn’t our individual longing for transcendence all just part of this larger human search for divinity? Don’t we each have the right to not stop seeking until we get as close to the source of wonder as possible? Even if it means coming to India and kissing trees in the moonlight for a while?

That’s me in the corner, in other words. That’s me in the spotlight. Choosing my religion.

71

My flight leaves India at four in the morning, which is typical of how India works. I decide not to go to sleep at all that night, but to spend the whole evening in one of the meditation caves, in prayer. I’m not a late-night person by nature, but something in me wants to stay awake for these last hours at the Ashram. There are many things in my life I’ve stayed up all night to do—to make love, to argue with someone, to drive long distances, to dance, to cry, to worry (and sometimes all those things, in fact, in the course of one night)—but I’ve never sacrificed sleep for a night of exclusive prayer. Why not now?

I pack my bag and leave it by the temple gate, so I can be ready to grab it and go when the taxi arrives before dawn. And then I walk up the hill, I go into the meditation cave and I sit. I’m alone in there, but I sit where I can see the big photograph of Swamiji, my Guru’s master, the founder of this Ashram, the long-gone lion who is somehow still here. I close my eyes and let the mantra come. I climb down that ladder into my own hub of stillness. When I get there, I can feel the world halt, the way I always wanted it to halt when I was nine years old and panicking about the relentlessness of time. In my heart, the clock stops and the calendar pages quit flying off the wall. I sit in silent wonder at all I understand. I am not actively praying. I have become a prayer.

I can sit here all night.

In fact, I do.

I don’t know what alerts me when it’s time to go meet my taxi, but after several hours of stillness, something gives me a nudge, and when I look at my watch it’s exactly time to go. I have to fly to Indonesia now. How funny and strange. So I stand up and bow before the photograph of Swamiji—the bossy, the marvelous, the fiery. And then I slide a piece of paper under the carpet, right below his image. On the paper are the two poems I wrote during my four months in India. These are the first real poems I’ve ever written. A plumber from New Zealand encouraged me to try poetry for once—that’s why it happened. One of these poems I wrote after having been here only a month. The other, I just wrote this morning.

In the space between the two poems, I have found acres of grace.

72

Two Poems from an Ashram in India

First

All this talk of nectar and bliss is starting to piss me off.

I don’t know about you, my friend,

but my path to God ain’t no sweet waft of incense.

It’s a cat set loose in a pigeon pen,

and I’m the cat—but also them who yell like hell when they get pinned.

My path to God is a worker’s uprising,

won’t be peace till they unionize.

Their picket is so fearsome

the National Guard won’t go near them.

My path was beaten unconscious before me,

by a small brown man I never got to see,

who chased God through India, shin-deep in mud,

barefoot and famined, malarial blood,

sleeping in doorways, under bridges—a hobo.

(Which is short for “homeward bound,” you know)

And he now chases me, saying: “Got it yet, Liz?

What HOMEWARD means? What BOUND really is?”

Second

However.

If they’d let me wear pants made out of the fresh-mown grass from this place,

I’d do it.

If they’d let me make out

with every single Eucalyptus tree in Ganesh’s Grove,

I swear, I’d do it.

I’ve sweated out dew these days,

worked out the dregs,

rubbed my chin on tree bark,

mistaking it for my master’s leg.

I can’t get far enough in.

If they’d let me eat the soil of this place

served on a bed of birds’ nests,

I’d finish only half my plate,

Then sleep all night on the rest.

INDONESIA

Or

‘Even in My Underpants I Feel Different.’

Or

Thirty-six Tales About the

Pursuit of Balance

73

I’ve never had less of a plan in my life than I do upon arrival in Bali. In all my history of careless travels, this is the most carelessly I’ve ever landed anyplace. I don’t know where I’m going to live, I don’t know what I’m going to do, I don’t know what the exchange rate is, I don’t know how to get a taxi at the airport—or even where to ask that taxi to take me. Nobody is expecting my arrival. I have no friends in Indonesia, or even friends-of-friends. And here’s the problem about traveling with an out-of-date guidebook, and then not reading it anyway: I didn’t realize that I’m actually not allowed to stay in Indonesia for four months, even if I want to. I find this out only upon entry into the country. Turns out I’m allowed only a one-month tourist visa. It hadn’t occurred to me that the Indonesian government would be anything less than delighted to host me in their country for just as long as I pleased to stay.

As the nice immigration official is stamping my passport with permission to stay in Bali for only and exactly thirty days, I ask him in my most friendly manner if I can please remain longer.

“No,” he says, in his most friendly manner. The Balinese are famously friendly.

“See, I’m supposed to stay here for three or four months,” I tell him.

I don’t mention that it’s a prophecy—that my staying here for three or four months was predicted two years ago by an elderly and quite possibly demented Balinese medicine man, during a ten-minute palm-reading. I’m not sure how to explain this.

But what did that medicine man tell me, now that I think of it? Did he actually say that I would come back to Bali and spend three or four months living with him? Did he really say “living with” him? Or did he just want me to drop by again sometime if I was in the neighborhood and give him another ten bucks for another palm-reading? Did he say I would come back, or that I should come back? Did he really say, “See you later, alligator”? Or was it, “In a while, crocodile”?

I haven’t had any communication with the medicine man since that one evening. I wouldn’t know how to contact him, anyway. What might his address be? “Medicine Man, On His Porch, Bali, Indonesia”? I don’t know whether he’s dead or alive. I remember that he seemed exceedingly old two years ago when we met; anything could have happened to him since then. All I have for sure is his name—Ketut Liyer—and the memory that he lives in a village just outside the town of Ubud. But I don’t remember the name of the village.

Maybe I should have thought all this through better.

74

But Bali is a fairly simple place to navigate. It’s not like I’ve landed in the middle of the Sudan with no idea of what to do next. This is an island approximately the size of Delaware and it’s a popular tourist destination. The whole place has arranged itself to help you, the Westerner with the credit cards, get around with ease. English is spoken here widely and happily. (Which makes me feel guiltily relieved. My brain synapses are so overloaded by my efforts to learn modern Italian and ancient Sanskrit during these last few months that I just can’t take on the task of trying to learn Indonesian or, even more difficult, Balinese—a language more complex than Martian.) It’s really no trouble being here. You can change your money at the airport, find a taxi with a nice driver who will suggest to you a lovely hotel—none of this is hard to arrange. And since the tourism industry collapsed in the wake of the terrorist bombing here two years ago (which happened a few weeks after I’d left Bali the first time), it’s even easier to get around now; everyone is desperate to help you, desperate for work.

So I take a taxi to the town of Ubud, which seems like a good place to start my journey. I check into a small and pretty hotel there on the fabulously named Monkey Forest Road. The hotel has a sweet swimming pool and a garden crammed with tropical flowers with blossoms bigger than volleyballs (tended to by a highly organized team of hummingbirds and butterflies). The staff is Balinese, which means they automatically start adoring you and complimenting you on your beauty as soon as you walk in. The room has a view of the tropical treetops and there’s a breakfast included every morning with piles of fresh tropical fruit. In short, it’s one of the nicest places I’ve ever stayed and it’s costing me less than ten dollars a day. It’s good to be back.

Ubud is in the center of Bali, located in the mountains, surrounded by terraced rice paddies and innumerable Hindu temples, with rivers that cut fast through deep canyons of jungle and volcanoes visible on the horizon. Ubud has long been considered the cultural hub of the island, the place where traditional Balinese painting, dance, carving, and religious ceremonies thrive. It isn’t near any beaches, so the tourists who come to Ubud are a self-selecting and rather classy crowd; they would prefer to see an ancient temple ceremony than to drink piña coladas in the surf. Regardless of what happens with my medicine man prophecy, this could be a lovely place to live for a while. The town is sort of like a small Pacific version of Santa Fe, only with monkeys walking around and Balinese families in traditional dress all over the place. There are good restaurants and nice little bookstores. I could feasibly spend my whole time here in Ubud doing what nice divorced American women have been doing with their time ever since the invention of the YWCA—signing up for one class after another: batik, drumming, jewelry-making, pottery, traditional Indonesian dance and cooking . . . Right across the road from my hotel there’s even something called “The Meditation Shop”—a small storefront with a sign advertising open meditation sessions every night from 6:00 to 7:00. May peace prevail on earth, reads the sign. I’m all for it.

By the time I unpack my bags it’s still early afternoon, so I decide to take myself for a walk, get reoriented to this town I haven’t seen in two years. And then I’ll try to figure out how to start finding my medicine man. I imagine this will be a difficult task, might take days or even weeks. I’m not sure where to start with my search, so I stop at the front desk on my way out and ask Mario if he can help me.

Mario is one of the guys who work at this hotel. I already made friends with him when I checked in, largely on account of his name. Not too long ago I was traveling in a country where many men were named Mario, but not one of them was a small, muscular, energetic Balinese fellow wearing a silk sarong and a flower behind his ear. So I had to ask, “Is your name really Mario? That doesn’t sound very Indonesian.”

“Not my real name,” he said. “My real name is Nyoman.”

Ah—I should have known. I should have known that I would have a 25 percent chance of guessing Mario’s real name. In Bali, if I may digress, there are only four names that the majority of the population give to their children, regardless of whether the baby is a boy or a girl. The names are Wayan (pronounced “Why-Ann”), Made (“mah-DAY”), Nyoman and Ketut. Translated, these names mean simply First, Second, Third and Fourth, and they connote birth order. If you have a fifth child, you start the name cycle all over again, so that the fifth child is really known as something like: “Wayan to the Second Power.” And so forth. If you have twins, you name them in the order they came out. Because there are basically only four names in Bali (higher-caste elites have their own selection of names) it’s totally possible (indeed, quite common) that two Wayans would marry each other. And then their firstborn would be named, of course: Wayan.

This gives a slight indication of how important family is in Bali, and how important your placement in that family is. You would think this system could become complicated, but somehow the Balinese work it out. Understandably and necessarily, nicknaming is popular. For instance, one of the most successful businesswomen in Ubud is a lady named Wayan who has a busy restaurant called Café Wayan, and so she is known as “Wayan Café”— meaning, “The Wayan who owns Café Wayan.” Somebody else might be known as “Fat Made,” or “Nyoman-Rental-Car” or “Stupid-Ketut-Who-Burned-Down-His-Uncle’s-House.” My new Balinese friend Mario got around the problem by simply naming himself Mario.

“Why Mario?”

“Because I love everything Italian,” he said.

When I told him that I’d recently spent four months in Italy, he found this fact so stupendously amazing that he came out from behind his desk and said, “Come, sit, talk.” I came, I sat, we talked. And that’s how we became friends.

So this afternoon I decide to start my search for my medicine man by asking my new friend Mario if by any chance he knows a man by the name of Ketut Liyer.

Mario frowns, thinking.

I wait for him to say something like, “Ah, yes! Ketut Liyer! Old medicine man who died just last week—so sad when venerable old medicine man passes away . . .”

Mario asks me to repeat the name, and this time I write it down, assuming I’m pronouncing something wrong. Sure enough, Mario brightens in recognition. “Ketut Liyer!”

Now I wait for him to say something like, “Ah, yes! Ketut Liyer! Insane person! Arrested last week for being a crazy man . . .”

But he says instead, “Ketut Liyer is famous healer.”

“Yes! That’s him!”

“I know him. I go in his house. Last week I take my cousin, she needs cure for her baby crying all night. Ketut Liyer fixes it. One time I took American girl like you to Ketut Liyer’s house. Girl wanted magic to make her more beautiful to men. Ketut Liyer draw magic painting, for help her be more beautiful. I tease her after that. Every day I tell her, ‘Painting working! Look how beautiful you are! Painting working!’”

Remembering the image Ketut Liyer had drawn for me a few years ago, I tell Mario that I’d gotten a magic picture myself from the medicine man once.

Mario laughs. “Painting working for you, too!”

“My picture was to help me find God,” I explain.

“You don’t want to be more beautiful to men?” he asks, understandably confused.

I say, “Hey, Mario—do you think you could take me to visit Ketut Liyer someday? If you’re not too busy?”

“Not now,” he says.

Just as I’m starting to feel disappointed, he adds, “But maybe in five minutes?”

75

So this is how it comes to pass that—the very afternoon I have arrived in Bali—I’m suddenly on the back of a motorbike, clutching my new friend Mario the Italian-Indonesian, who is speeding me through the rice terraces toward Ketut Liyer’s home. For all that I’ve thought about this reunion with the medicine man over the last two years, I actually have no idea what I’m going to say to him when I arrive. And of course we don’t have an appointment. So we show up unannounced. I recognize the sign outside his door, same as last time, saying: “Ketut Liyer—painter.” It’s a typical, traditional Balinese family compound. A high stone wall surrounds the entire property, there’s a courtyard in the middle and a temple in the back. Several generations live out their lives together in the various interconnected small homes within these walls. We enter without knocking (no door, anyway) to the riotous dismay of a some typical Balinese watchdogs (skinny, angry) and there in the courtyard is Ketut Liyer the elderly medicine man, wearing his sarong and his golf shirt, looking precisely the same as he did two years ago when I first met him. Mario says something to Ketut, and I’m not exactly fluent in Balinese, but it sounds like a general introduction, something along the lines of, “Here’s a girl from America—go for it.”

Ketut turns his mostly toothless smile upon me with the force of a compassionate fire hose, and this is so reassuring: I had remembered correctly, he is extraordinary. His face is a comprehensive encyclopedia of kindness. He shakes my hand with an excited and powerful grip.

“I am very happy to meet you,” he says.

He has no idea who I am.

“Come, come,” he says, and I’m ushered to the porch of his little house, where woven bamboo mats serve as furniture. It looks exactly as it did two years ago. We both sit down. With no hesitation, he takes my palm in his hand—assuming that, like most of his Western visitors, a palm-reading is what I’ve come for. He gives me a quick reading, which I am reassured to see is an abridged version of exactly what he said to me last time. (He may not remember my face, but my destiny, to his practiced eye, is unchanged.) His English is better than I remembered, and also better than Mario’s. Ketut speaks like the wise old Chinamen in classic kung fu movies, a form of English you could call “Grasshopperese,” because you could insert the endearment “Grasshopper” into the middle of any sentence and it sounds very wise. “Ah—you have very lucky good fortune, Grasshopper . . .”

I wait for a pause in Ketut’s predictions, then interrupt to remind him that I had been here to see him already, two years ago.

He looks puzzled. “Not first time in Bali?”

“No, sir.”

He thinks hard. “You girl from California?”

“No,” I say, my spirits tumbling deeper. “I’m the girl from New York.”

Ketut says to me (and I’m not sure what this has to do with anything), “I am not so handsome anymore, lost many teeth. Maybe I will go to dentist someday, get new teeth. But too afraid of dentist.” He opens his deforested mouth and shows me the damage. Indeed, he has lost most of his teeth on the left side of his mouth and on the right side it’s all broken, hurtful-looking yellow stubs. He fell down, he tells me. That’s how his teeth got knocked out.

I tell him I’m sorry to hear it, then try again, speaking slowly. “I don’t think you remember me, Ketut. I was here two years ago with an American Yoga teacher, a woman who lived in Bali for many years.”

He smiles, elated. “I know Ann Barros!”

“That’s right. Ann Barros is the Yoga teacher’s name. But I’m Liz. I came here asking for your help once because I wanted to get closer to God. You drew me a magic picture.”

He shrugs amiably, couldn’t be less concerned. “Don’t remember,” he says.

This is such bad news it’s almost funny. What am I going to do in Bali now? I don’t know exactly what I’d imagined it would be like to meet Ketut again, but I did hope we’d have some sort of super-karmic tearful reunion. And while it’s true I had feared he might be dead, it hadn’t occurred to me that—if he were still alive—he wouldn’t remember me at all. Although now it seems the height of dumbness to have ever imagined that our first meeting would have been as memorable for him as it was for me. Maybe I should have planned this better, for real.

So I describe the picture he had made for me, the figure with the four legs (“so grounded on earth”) and the missing head (“not looking at the world through the intellect”) and the face in the heart (“looking at the world through the heart”) and he listens to me politely, with modest interest, like we’re discussing somebody else’s life entirely.

I hate to do this because I don’t want to put him on the spot, but it’s got to be said, so I just lay it out there. I say, “You told me I should come back here to Bali. You told me to stay here for three or four months. You said I could help you learn English and you would teach me the things that you know.” I don’t like the way my voice sounds—just the teensiest bit desperate. I don’t mention anything about the invitation he’d once floated for me to live with his family. That seems way out of line, given the circumstances.

He listens to me politely, smiling and shaking his head, like, Isn’t it so funny the things people say?

I almost drop it then. But I’ve come so far, I have to put forth one last effort. I say, “I’m the book writer, Ketut. I’m the book writer from New York.”

And for some reason that does it. Suddenly his face goes translucent with joy, turns bright and pure and transparent. A Roman candle of recognition sparks to life in his mind. “YOU!” he says. “YOU! I remember YOU!” He leans forward, takes my shoulders in his hands and starts to shake me happily, the way a child shakes an unopened Christmas present to try to guess what’s inside. “You came back! You came BACK!”

“I came back! I came back!” I say.

“You, you, you!”

“Me, me, me!”

I’m all tearful now, but trying not to show it. The depth of my relief—it’s hard to explain. It takes even me by surprise. It’s like this—it’s like I was in a car accident, and my car went over a bridge and sank to the bottom of a river and I’d somehow managed to free myself from the sunken car by swimming through an open window and then I’d been frog-kicking and struggling to swim all the way up to the daylight through the cold, green water and I was almost out of oxygen and the arteries were bursting out of my neck and my cheeks were puffed with my last breath and then—GASP!—I broke through to the surface and took in huge gulps of air. And I survived. That gasp, that breaking through—this is what it feels like when I hear the Indonesian medicine man say, “You came back!” My relief is exactly that big.

I can’t believe it worked.

“Yes, I came back,” I say. “Of course I came back.”

“I so happy!” he says. We’re holding hands and he’s wildly excited now. “I do not remember you at first! So long ago we meet! You look different now! So different from two years! Last time, you very sad-looking woman. Now—so happy! Like different person!”

The idea of this—the idea of a person looking so different after a mere two years have passed—seems to incite in him a shiver of giggles.

I give up trying to hide my tearfulness and just let it all spill over. “Yes, Ketut. I was very sad before. But life is better now.”

“Last time you in bad divorce. No good.”

“No good,” I confirm.

“Last time you have too much worry, too much sorrow. Last time, you look like sad old woman. Now you look like young girl. Last time you ugly! Now you pretty!”

Mario bursts into ecstatic applause and pronounces victoriously: “See? Painting working!”

I say, “Do you still want me to help you with your English, Ketut?”

He tells me I can start helping him right now and hops up nimbly, gnome-like. He bounds into his little house and comes back with a pile of letters he’s received from abroad over the last few years (so he does have an address!). He asks me to read the letters aloud to him; he can understand English well, but can’t read much. I’m his secretary already. I’m a medicine man’s secretary. This is fabulous. The letters are from art collectors overseas, from people who have somehow managed to acquire his famous magic drawings and magic paintings. One letter is from a collector in Australia, praising Ketut for his painting skills, saying, “How can you be so clever to paint with such detail?” Ketut answers to me, like giving dictation: “Because I practice many, many years.”

When the letters are finished, he updates me on his life over the last few years. Some changes have occurred. Now he has a wife, for instance. He points across the courtyard at a heavyset woman who’s been standing in the shadow of her kitchen door, glaring at me like she’s not sure if she should shoot me, or poison me first and then shoot me. Last time I was here, Ketut had sadly shown me photographs of his wife who had recently died—a beautiful old Balinese woman who seemed bright and childlike even at her advanced age. I wave across the courtyard to the new wife, who backs away into her kitchen.

“Good woman,” Ketut proclaims toward the kitchen shadows. “Very good woman.”

He goes on to say that he’s been very busy with his Balinese patients, always a lot to do, has to give much magic for new babies, ceremonies for dead people, healing for sick people, ceremonies for marriage. Next time he goes to Balinese wedding, he says, “We can go together! I take you!” The only thing is, he doesn’t have very many Westerners visiting him anymore. Nobody comes to visit Bali since the terrorist bombing. This makes him “feel very confusing in my head.” This also makes him feel “very empty in my bank.” He says, “You come to my house every day to practice English with me now?” I nod happily and he says, “I will teach you Balinese meditation, OK?”

“OK,” I say.

“I think three months enough time to teach you Balinese meditation, find God for you this way,” he says. “Maybe four months. You like Bali?”

“I love Bali.”

“You get married in Bali?”

“Not yet.”

“I think maybe soon. You come back tomorrow?”

I promise to. He doesn’t say anything about my moving in with his family, so I don’t bring it up, stealing one last glance at the scary wife in the kitchen. Maybe I’ll just stay in my sweet hotel the whole time, instead. It’s more comfortable, anyway. Plumbing, and all that. I’ll need a bicycle, though, to come see him every day . . .

So now it’s time to go.

“I am very happy to meet you,” he says, shaking my hand.

I offer up my first English lesson. I teach him the difference between “happy to meet you,” and “happy to see you.” I explain that we only say “Nice to meet you” the first time we meet somebody. After that, we say “Nice to see you,” every time. Because you only meet someone once. But now we will see each other repeatedly, day after day.

He likes this. He gives it a practice round: “Nice to see you! I am happy to see you! I can see you! I am not deaf!”

This makes us all laugh, even Mario. We shake hands, and agree that I will come by again tomorrow afternoon. Until then, he says, “See you later, alligator.”

“In a while, crocodile,” I say.

“Let your conscience be your guide. If you have any Western friend come to Bali, send them to me for palm-reading—I am very empty now in my bank since the bomb. I am an autodidact. I am very happy to see you, Liss!”

“I am very happy to see you, too, Ketut.”

76

Bali is a tiny Hindu island located in the middle of the two-thousand-mile-long Indonesian archipelago that constitutes the most populous Muslim nation on earth. Bali is therefore a strange and wondrous thing; it should not even exist, yet does. The island’s Hinduism was an export from India by way of Java. Indian traders brought the religion east during the fourth century AD. The Javanese kings founded a mighty Hindu dynasty, little of which remains today except the impressive temple ruins at Borobudur. In the sixteenth century, a violent Islamic uprising swept across the region and the Shiva-worshipping Hindu royalty escaped Java, fleeing to Bali in droves during what would be remembered as the Majapahit Exodus. The high-class, high-caste Javanese brought with them to Bali only their royal families, their craftsmen and their priests—and so it is not a wild exaggeration when people say that everyone in Bali is the descendent of either a king, a priest or an artist, and that this is why the Balinese have such pride and brilliance.

The Javanese colonists brought their Hindu caste system with them to Bali, though caste divisions were never as brutally enforced here as they once were in India. Still, the Balinese recognize a complex social hierarchy (there are five divisions of Brahmans alone) and I would have better luck personally decoding the human genome than trying to understand the intricate, interlocking clan system that still thrives here. (The writer Fred B. Eiseman’s many fine essays on Balinese culture go much further into expert detail explaining these subtleties, and it is from his research that I take most of my general information, not only here but throughout this book.) Suffice it to say for our purposes that everyone in Bali is in a clan, that everyone knows which clan he is in, and that everyone knows which clan everyone else is in. And if you get kicked out of your clan for some grave disobedience, you really might as well jump into a volcano, because, honestly, you’re as good as dead.

Balinese culture is one of the most methodical systems of social and religious organization on earth, a magnificent beehive of tasks and roles and ceremonies. The Balinese are lodged, completely held, within an elaborate lattice of customs. A combination of several factors created this network, but basically we can say that Bali is what happens when the lavish rituals of traditional Hinduism are superimposed over a vast rice-growing agricultural society that operates, by necessity, with elaborate communal cooperation. Rice terraces require an unbelievable amount of shared labor, maintenance and engineering in order to prosper, so each Balinese village has a banjar—a united organization of citizens who administer, through consensus, the village’s political and economic and religious and agricultural decisions. In Bali, the collective is absolutely more important than the individual, or nobody eats.

Religious ceremonies are of paramount importance here in Bali (an island, don’t forget, with seven unpredictable volcanoes on it— you would pray, too). It has been estimated that a typical Balinese woman spends one-third of her waking hours either preparing for a ceremony, participating in a ceremony or cleaning up after a ceremony. Life here is a constant cycle of offerings and rituals. You must perform them all, in correct order and with the correct intention, or the entire universe will fall out of balance. Margaret Mead wrote about “the incredible busy-ness” of the Balinese, and it’s true— there is rarely an idle moment in a Balinese compound. There are ceremonies here which must be performed five times a day and others that must be performed once a day, once a week, once a month, once a year, once every ten years, once every hundred years, once every thousand years. All these dates and rituals are kept organized by the priests and holy men, who consult a byzantine system of three separate calendars.

There are thirteen major rites of passage for every human being in Bali, each marked by a highly organized ceremony. Elaborate spiritual appeasement ceremonies are conducted all throughout life, in order to protect the soul from the 108 vices (108—there’s that number again!), which include such spoilers as violence, stealing, laziness and lying. Every Balinese child passes through a momentous puberty ceremony in which the canine teeth, or “fangs,” are filed down to a flat level, for aesthetic improvement. The worst thing you can be in Bali is coarse and animalistic, and these fangs are considered to be reminders of our more brutal natures and therefore must go. It is dangerous in such a close-knit culture for people to be brutal. A village’s entire web of cooperation could be sliced through by one person’s murderous intent. Therefore the best thing you can be in Bali is alus, which means “refined,” or even “prettified.” Beauty is good in Bali, for men and women. Beauty is revered. Beauty is safety. Children are taught to approach all hardship and discomfort with “a shining face,” a giant smile.

The whole idea of Bali is a matrix, a massive and invisible grid of spirits, guides, paths and customs. Every Balinese knows exactly where he or she belongs, oriented within this great, intangible map. Just look at the four names of almost every Balinese citizen—First, Second, Third, Fourth—reminding them all of when they were born in the family, and where they belong. You couldn’t have a clearer social mapping system if you called your kids North, South, East and West. Mario, my new Italian-Indonesian friend, told me that he is only happy when he can maintain himself—mentally and spiritually— at the intersection between a vertical line and horizontal one, in a state of perfect balance. For this, he needs to know exactly where he is located at every moment, both in his relationship to the divine and to his family here on earth. If he loses that balance, he loses his power.

It’s not a ludicrous hypothesis, therefore, to say that the Balinese are the global masters of balance, the people for whom the maintenance of perfect equilibrium is an art, a science and a religion. For me, on a personal search for balance, I had hoped to learn much from the Balinese about holding steady in this chaotic world. But the more I read and see about this culture, the more I realize how far off the grid of balance I’ve fallen, at least from the Balinese perspective. My habit of wandering through this world oblivious to my physical orientation, in addition to my decision to have stepped outside the containing network of marriage and family, makes me— for Balinese purposes—something like a ghost. I enjoy living this way, but it’s a nightmare of a life by the standards of any self-respecting Balinese. If you don’t know where you are or whose clan you belong to, then how can you possibly find balance?

Given all this, I’m not so sure how much of the Balinese world-view I’m going to be able to incorporate into my own worldview, since at the moment I seem to be taking a more modern and Western definition of the word equilibrium. (I’m currently translating it as meaning “equal freedom,” or the equal possibility of falling in any direction at any given time, depending on . . . you know . . . how things go.) The Balinese don’t wait and see “how things go.” That would be terrifying. They organize how things go, in order to keep things from falling apart.

When you are walking down the road in Bali and you pass a stranger, the very first question he or she will ask you is, “Where are you going?” The second question is, “Where are you coming from?” To a Westerner, this can seem like a rather invasive inquiry from a perfect stranger, but they’re just trying to get an orientation on you, trying to insert you into the grid for the purposes of security and comfort. If you tell them that you don’t know where you’re going, or that you’re just wandering about randomly, you might instigate a bit of distress in the heart of your new Balinese friend. It’s far better to pick some kind of specific direction—anywhere—just so everybody feels better.

The third question a Balinese will almost certainly ask you is, “Are you married?” Again, it’s a positioning and orienting inquiry. It’s necessary for them to know this, to make sure that you are completely in order in your life. They really want you to say yes. It’s such a relief to them when you say yes. If you’re single, it’s better not to say so directly. And I really recommend that you not mention your divorce at all, if you happen to have had one. It just makes the Balinese so worried. The only thing your solitude proves to them is your perilous dislocation from the grid. If you are a single woman traveling through Bali and somebody asks you, “Are you married?” the best possible answer is: “Not yet.” This is a polite way of saying, “No,” while indicating your optimistic intentions to get that taken care of just as soon as you can.

Even if you are eighty years old, or a lesbian, or a strident feminist, or a nun, or an eighty-year-old strident feminist lesbian nun who has never been married and never intends to get married, the politest possible answer is still: “Not yet.”

77

In the morning, Mario helps me buy a bicycle. Like a proper almost-Italian, he says, “I know a guy,” and he takes me to his cousin’s shop, where I get a nice mountain bike, a helmet, a lock and a basket for slightly less than fifty American dollars. Now I’m mobile in my new town of Ubud, or at least as mobile as I can safely feel on these roads, which are narrow and winding and badly maintained and crowded with motorcycles, trucks and tourist buses.

In the afternoon, I ride my bike down into Ketut’s village, to hang out with my medicine man for our first day of . . . whatever it is we’re going to be doing together. I’m not sure, to be honest. English lessons? Meditation lessons? Good old-fashioned porch-sitting? I don’t know what Ketut has in mind for me, but I’m just happy to be invited into his life.

He’s got guests when I arrive. It’s a small family of rural Balinese who have brought their one-year-old daughter to Ketut for help. The poor little baby is teething and has been crying for several nights. Dad is a handsome young man in a sarong; he has the muscular calves of a Soviet war hero’s statue. Mom is pretty and shy, looking at me from way below her timidly lowered eyelids. They have brought a tiny offering to Ketut for his services—2,000 rupiah, which is about 25 cents, placed in a handmade basket of palm fronds, slightly bigger than a hotel bar’s ashtray. There is one flower blossom in the basket, along with the money and a few grains of rice. (Their poverty puts them in stark opposition to the richer family from the capital city of Denpesar who will come to see Ketut later in the afternoon, the mother balancing on her head a three-tiered basket filled with fruit and flowers and a roasted duck—a headgear so magnificent and impressive that Carmen Miranda would have bowed down in humility before it.)

Ketut is relaxed and gracious with his company. He listens to the parents explain their baby’s troubles. Then he digs through a small trunk on his porch and pulls out an ancient ledger filled with tiny writing in Balinese Sanskrit. He consults this book like a scholar, looking for some combination of words that will suit him, talking and laughing with the parents the whole time. Then he takes a blank page from a notebook with a picture of Kermit the Frog on it, and writes what he tells me is “a prescription” for the little girl. The child is being tormented by a minor demon, he diagnoses, in addition to the physical discomforts of teething. For the teething, he advises the parents to simply rub the baby’s gums with pressed red onion juice. To appease the demon, they must make an offering of a small killed chicken and a small pig, along with a little bit of cake, mixed with special herbs which their grandmother should definitely have access to from her own medicine garden. (This food won’t be wasted; after the offering ceremony, Balinese families are always allowed to eat their own donations to the gods, since the offering is more metaphysical than literal. The way the Balinese see it, God takes what belongs to God—the gesture—while man takes what belongs to man—the food itself.)

After writing the prescription, Ketut turns his back to us, fills a bowl with water, and keens a spectacular, quietly chilling mantra above it. Then Ketut blesses the baby with the water he has just infused with sacred power. Even at one year old, the child already knows how to receive a holy blessing in the traditional Balinese manner. Her mother holds her, and the baby puts out her little plummy paws to receive the water, sips it once, sips it again and splashes the rest on top of her head—a perfectly executed ritual. She could not be less frightened of this toothless old man who is chanting at her. Then Ketut takes the rest of the holy water and pours it into a small plastic sandwich bag, ties the bag at the top and gives it to the family to use later. The mother carries this plastic bag of water away with her as she leaves; it looks like she has just won a goldfish at the state fair, only she forgot to take the goldfish with her.

Ketut Liyer has given this family about forty minutes of his undivided attention, for the fee of about twenty-five cents. If they hadn’t any money at all, he would have done the same; this is his duty as a healer. He may turn nobody away, or the gods will remove his talent for healing. Ketut gets about ten visitors a day like this, Balinese who need his help or advice on some holy or medical matter. On highly auspicious days, when everyone wants a special blessing, he might have over one hundred visitors.

“Don’t you get tired?”

“But this is my profession,” he tells me. “This is my hobby— medicine man.”

A few more patients come throughout the afternoon, but Ketut and I get some time alone together on the porch, too. I’m so comfortable with this medicine man, as relaxed as with my own grandfather. He gives me my first lesson in Balinese meditation. He tells me that there are many ways to find God but most are too complicated for Westerners, so he will teach me an easy meditation. Which goes, essentially, like this: sit in silence and smile. I love it. He’s laughing even as he’s teaching it to me. Sit and smile. Perfect.

“You study Yoga in India, Liss?” he asks.

“Yes, Ketut.”

“You can do Yoga,” he says, “but Yoga too hard.” Here, he contorts himself in a cramped lotus position and squinches up his face in a comical and constipated-looking effort. Then he breaks free and laughs, asking, “Why they always look so serious in Yoga? You make serious face like this, you scare away good energy. To meditate, only you must smile. Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away dirty energy. Even smile in your liver. Practice tonight at hotel. Not to hurry, not to try too hard. Too serious, you make you sick. You can calling the good energy with a smile. All finish for today. See you later, alligator. Come back tomorrow. I am very happy to see you, Liss. Let your conscience be your guide. If you have Western friends come to visit Bali, bring them to me for palm-reading. I am very empty in my bank since the bomb.”

78

Here is Ketut Liyer’s life story pretty much as he tells it:

“It is nine generations that my family is a medicine man. My father, my grandfather, my great-grandfather, all of them is a medicine man. They all want me to be medicine man because they see I have light. They see I have beautiful and I have intelligent. But I do not want to be medicine man. Too much study! Too much information! And I don’t believe in medicine man! I want to be painter! I want to be artist! I have good talent with this.

“When I was still young man, I meet American man, very rich, maybe even New York City person like you. He like my painting. He wants to buy big painting from me, maybe one meter big, for lot of money. Enough money to be rich. So I start to painting this picture for him. Every day I painting, painting, painting. Even in night I painting. In this day, long time ago, no electric lightbulb like today, so I have lamp. Oil lamp, you understand? Pump lamp, have to pump it to make oil come. And I always make painting every night with oil lamp.

“One night, oil lamp is dark, so I pumping, pumping, pumping and it explode! Makes my arm on fire! I go to hospital for one month with burned arm, it make infection. Infection goes all the way to my heart. The doctor say I must to go to Singapore for cut off my arm, for amputation. This is not my cup of tea. But doctor says I must go to Singapore, have operation to cut arm off. I tell doctor—first I go home to my village.

“That night in village, I got dream. Father, grandfather, great-grandfather— all they come in my dream to my house together and tell me how to heal my burned arm. They tell me make juice from saffron and sandalwood. Put this juice on burn. Then make powder from saffron and sandalwood. Rub this powder on burn. They tell me I must do this, then I not lose my arm. So real this dream, like they in house with me, all of they together.

“I wake up. I don’t know what to do, because sometimes dreams are just joking, you understand? But I make back to my home and I put this saffron and sandalwood juice on my arm. And then I put this saffron and sandalwood powder on my arm. My arm very infected, very ache, made big, very swell. But after juice and powder, become very cool. Became very cold. Start to feel better. In ten days, my arm is good. All heal.

“For that, I start to believe. Now I have dream again, with father, grandfather, great-grandfather. They tell me now I must be medicine man. My soul, I must give it to God. For do this, I must make fast for six days, understand? No food, no water. No drink. No breakfast. Not easy. I so thirsty from fast, I go to rice fields in morning, before sun. I sit in rice field with mouth open and take water from air. How you call this, the water in air in rice field in morning? Dew? Yes. Dew. Only this dew I eat for six days. No other food, only this dew. On number five day, I get unconscious. I see all yellow color everywhere. No, not yellow color—GOLD. I see gold color everywhere, even inside me. Very happy. I understand now. This gold color is God, also inside me. Same thing that is God is same thing inside me. Same-same.

“So now I must be medicine man. Now I have to learn medical books from great-grandfather. These books not made on paper, made on palm leaves. Called lontars. This is Balinese medical encyclopedia. I must learn all different plants on Bali. Not easy. One by one, I learn everything. I learn to take care of people with many problem. One problem is when someone is sick from physical. I help this physical sick with herbs. Other problem is when family is sick, when family always fighting. I help this with harmony, with special magic drawing, also with talking for helping. Put magic drawing in house, no more fighting. Sometimes people sick in love, not find right match. For Balinese and Western, too, always a lot of trouble with love, difficult to find right match. I fix love problem with mantra and with magic drawing, bring love to you. Also, I learn black magic, to help people if bad black magic spell on them. My magic drawing, you put in your house, bring you good energy.

“I still like to be artist, I like make painting when I have time, sell to gallery. My painting, always the same painting—when Bali was paradise, maybe one thousand years ago. Painting of jungle, animals, women with—what is word? Breast. Women with breast. Difficult for me to find time to make painting because of medicine man, but I must be medicine man. It is my profession. It is my hobby. Must help people or God is angry with me. Must deliver baby sometimes, do ceremony for dead man, or do ceremony for tooth-filing or wedding. Sometimes I wake up, three in morning, make painting by electric lightbulb—only time I can make painting for me. I like alone this time of day, good for making painting.

“I do true magic, not joking. Always I tell true, even if bad news. I must do good character always in my life, or I will be in hell. I speak Balinese, Indonesian, little bit Japanese, little bit English, little bit Dutch. During war, many Japanese here. Not so bad for me—I read palms for Japanese, make friendly. Before war, many Dutch here. Now many Western here, all speak English. My Dutch is—how you say? What that word you teach me yesterday? Rusty? Yes—rusty. My Dutch is rusty. Ha!

“I am in fourth caste in Bali, in very low caste like farmer. But I see many people in first caste not so intelligent as me. My name is Ketut Liyer. Liyer is name my grandfather gave me when I was little boy. It means ‘bright light.’ This is me.”

79

I am so free here in Bali, it’s almost ridiculous. The only thing I have to do every day is visit Ketut Liyer for a few hours in the afternoon, which is far short of a chore. The rest of the day gets taken care of in various nonchalant manners. I meditate for an hour every morning using the Yogic techniques my Guru taught me, and then I meditate for an hour every evening with the practices Ketut has taught me (“sit still and smile”). In between, I walk around and ride my bike and sometimes talk to people and eat lunch. I found a quiet little lending library in this town, got myself a library card, and now great, luscious portions of my life are spent reading in the garden. After the intensity of life in the Ashram, and even after the decadent business of zooming all over Italy and eating everything in sight, this is such a new and radically peaceful episode of my life. I have so much free time, you could measure it in metric tons.

Whenever I leave the hotel, Mario and the other staff members at the front desk ask me where I’m going, and every time I return, they ask me where I have been. I can almost imagine that they keep tiny maps in the desk drawer of all their loved ones, with markings indicating where everyone is at every given moment, just to make sure the entire beehive is accounted for at all times.

In the evenings I spin my bicycle high up into the hills and across the acres of rice terraces north of Ubud, with views so splendid and green. I can see the pink clouds reflected in the standing water of the rice paddies, like there are two skies—one up in heaven for the gods, and one down here in the muddy wet, just for us mortals. The other day, I rode up to the heron sanctuary, with its grudging welcome sign (“OK, you can see herons here”), but there were no herons that day, just ducks, so I watched the ducks for a while, then rode on into the next village. Along the way I passed men and women and children and chickens and dogs who all, in their own way, were busy working, but none so busy that they couldn’t stop to greet me.

A few nights ago, on the top of one lovely rise of forest I saw a sign: “Artist’s House for Rent, with Kitchen.” Because the universe is generous, three days later I am living there. Mario helped me move in, and all his friends at the hotel gave me a tearful farewell.

My new house is on a quiet road, surrounded in all directions by rice fields. It’s a little cottagelike place inside ivy-covered walls. It’s owned by an Englishwoman, but she is in London for the summer, so I slide into her home, replacing her in this miraculous space. There is a bright red kitchen here, a pond full of goldfish, a marble terrace, an outdoor shower tiled in shiny mosaics; while I shampoo I can watch the herons nesting in the palm trees. Little secret paths lead through a truly enchanting garden. The place comes with a gardener, so all I have to do is look at the flowers. I don’t know what any of these extraordinary equatorial flowers are called, so I make up names for them. And why not? It’s my Eden, is it not? Soon I’ve given all the plants around here new monikers—daffodil tree, cabbage-palm, prom-dress weed, spiral show-off, tip-toe blossom, melancholy-vine and a spectacular pink orchid I have christened “Baby’s First Handshake.” The unnecessary and superfluous volume of pure beauty around here is not to be believed. I can pick papayas and bananas right off the trees outside my bedroom window. There’s a cat who lives here who is enormously affectionate to me for the half hour every day before I feed him, then moans crazily the rest of the time like he’s having Vietnam War flashbacks. Oddly, I don’t mind this. I don’t mind anything these days. I can’t imagine or remember discontent.

The sound universe is also spectacular around here. In the evenings there’s a cricket orchestra with frogs providing the bass line. In the dead of night the dogs howl about how misunderstood they are. Before dawn the roosters for miles around announce how freaking cool it is to be roosters. (“We are ROOSTERS!” they holler. “We are the only ones who get to be ROOSTERS!”) Every morning around sunrise there is a tropical birdsong competition, and it’s always a ten-way tie for the championship. When the sun comes out the place quiets down and the butterflies get to work. The whole house is covered with vines; I feel like any day it will disappear into the foliage completely and I will disappear with it and become a jungle flower myself. The rent is less than what I used to pay in New York City for taxi fare every month.

The word paradise, by the way, which comes to us from the Persian, means literally “a walled garden.”

80

That said, I must be honest here and relay that it takes me only three afternoons of research in the local library to realize that all my original ideas about Balinese paradise were a bit misguided. I’d been telling people since I first visited Bali two years ago that this small island was the world’s only true utopia, a place that has known only peace and harmony and balance for all time. A perfect Eden with no history of violence or bloodshed ever. I’m not sure where I got this grand idea, but I endorsed it with full confidence.

“Even the policemen wear flowers in their hair,” I would say, as if that proved it.

In reality, though, it turns out Bali has had exactly as bloody and violent and oppressive a history as anywhere else on earth where human beings have ever lived. When the Javanese kings first immigrated here in the sixteenth century, they essentially established a feudal colony, with a strict caste system which—like all self-respecting caste systems—tended not to trouble itself with consideration for those at the bottom. The economy of early Bali was fueled by a lucrative slave trade (which not only preceded European participation in the international slave traffic by several centuries, but also outlived Europe’s trafficking of human lives for a good long while). Internally, the island was constantly at war as rival kings staged attacks (complete with mass rape and murder) on their neighbors. Until the late nineteenth century, the Balinese had a reputation amongst traders and sailors for being vicious fighters. (The word amok, as in “running amok,” is a Balinese word, describing a battle technique of suddenly going insanely wild against one’s enemies in suicidal and bloody hand-to-hand combat; the Europeans were frankly terrified by this practice.) With a well-disciplined army of 30,000, the Balinese defeated their Dutch invaders in 1848, again in 1849 and once more, for good measure, in 1850. They collapsed under Dutch rule only when the rival kings of Bali broke ranks and betrayed each other in bids for power, aligning with the enemy for the promise of good business deals later. So to gauze this island’s history today in a dream of paradise is a bit insulting to reality; it’s not like these people have spent the last millennium just sitting around smiling and singing happy songs.

But in the 1920s and 1930s, when an elite class of Western travelers discovered Bali, all this bloodiness was ignored as the newcomers agreed that this was truly “The Island of the Gods,” where “everyone is an artist” and where humanity lives in an unspoiled state of bliss. It’s been a lingering idea, this dream; most visitors to Bali (myself on my first trip included) still endorse it. “I was furious at God that I was not born Balinese,” said the German photographer George Krauser after visiting Bali in the 1930s. Lured by reports of otherworldly beauty and serenity, some really A-list tourists started visiting the island—artists like Walter Spies, writers like Noël Coward, dancers like Claire Holt, actors like Charlie Chaplin, scholars like Margaret Mead (who, despite all the naked breasts, wisely called Balinese civilization on what it truly was, a society as prim as Victorian England: “Not an ounce of free libido in the whole culture.”)

The party ended in the 1940s when the world went to war. The Japanese invaded Indonesia, and the blissful expatriates in their Balinese gardens with their pretty houseboys were forced to flee. In the struggle for Indonesian independence which followed the war, Bali became just as divided and violent as the rest of the archipelago, and by the 1950s (reports a study called Bali: Paradise Invented) if a Westerner dared visit Bali at all, he might have been wise to sleep with a gun under his pillow. In the 1960s, the struggle for power turned all of Indonesia into a battlefield between Nationalists and Communists. After a coup attempt in Jakarta in 1965, Nationalist soldiers were sent to Bali with the names of every suspected Communist on the island. Over the course of about a week, aided by the local police and village authorities at every step, the Nationalist forces steadily murdered their way through every township. Something like 100,000 corpses choked the beautiful rivers of Bali when the killing spree was over.

The revival of the dream of a fabled Eden came in the late 1960s, when the Indonesian government decided to reinvent Bali for the international tourist market as “The Island of the Gods,” launching a massively successful marketing campaign. The tourists who were lured back to Bali were a fairly high-minded crowd (this was not Fort Lauderdale, after all), and their attention was guided toward the artistic and religious beauty inherent in the Balinese culture. Darker elements of history were overlooked. And have remained overlooked since.

Reading about all this during my afternoons in the local library leaves me somewhat confused. Wait—why did I come to Bali again? To search for the balance between worldly pleasure and spiritual devotion, right? Is this, indeed, the right setting for such a search? Do the Balinese truly inhabit that peaceful balance, more than anyone else in the world? I mean, they look balanced, what with all the dancing and praying and feasting and beauty and smiling, but I don’t know what’s actually going on under there. The policemen really do wear flowers tucked behind their ears, but there’s corruption all over the place in Bali, just like in the rest of Indonesia (as I found out firsthand the other day when I passed a uniformed man a few hundred bucks of under-the-table cash to illegally extend my visa so I could stay in Bali for four months, after all). The Balinese quite literally live off their image of being the world’s most peaceful and devotional and artistically expressive people, but how much of that is intrinsic and how much of that is economically calculated? And how much can an outsider like me ever learn of the hidden stresses that might loiter behind those “shining faces”? It’s the same here as anywhere else—you look at the picture too closely and all the firm lines start to melt away into an indistinct mass of blurry brushstrokes and blended pixels.

For now, all I can say for certain is that I love the house I have rented and that the people in Bali have been gracious to me without exception. I find their art and ceremonies to be beautiful and restorative; they seem to think so, as well. That’s my empirical experience of a place that is probably far more complex than I will ever understand. But whatever the Balinese need to do in order to hold their own balance (and make a living) is entirely up to them. What I’m here to do is work on my own equilibrium, and this still feels, at least for now, like a nourishing climate in which to do that.

81

I don’t know how old my medicine man is. I’ve asked him, but he’s not certain. I seem to remember, when I was here two years ago, the translator saying that he was eighty. But Mario asked him the other day how old he was and Ketut said, “Maybe sixty-five, not sure.” When I asked him what year he was born, he said he didn’t remember being born. I know he was an adult when the Japanese were occupying Bali during World War II, which could make him about eighty now. But when he told me the story about burning his arm as a young man, and I asked him what year that had happened, he said, “I don’t know. Maybe 1920?” So if he was around twenty years old in 1920, then that makes him what now? Maybe a hundred and five? So we can estimate that he’s somewhere between sixty and a hundred and five years old.

I’ve also noticed that his estimation of his age changes by the day, based on how he feels. When he’s really tired, he’ll sigh and say, “Maybe eighty-five today,” but when he’s feeling more upbeat he’ll say, “I think I’m sixty today.” Perhaps this is as good a way of estimating age as any—how old do you feel? What else matters, really? Still, I’m always trying to figure it out. One afternoon I got really simple, and just said, “Ketut—when is your birthday?”

“Thursday,” he said.

“This Thursday?”

“No. Not this Thursday. A Thursday.”

This is a good start . . . but is there no more information than that? A Thursday in what month? In what year? No telling. Anyway, the day of the week that you were born is more important in Bali than the year, which is why, even though Ketut doesn’t know how old he is, he was able to tell me that the patron god of children born on Thursdays is Shiva the Destroyer, and that the day has two guiding animal spirits—the lion and the tiger. The official tree of children born on Thursday is the banyan. The official bird is the peacock. A person born on Thursday is always talking first, interrupting everyone else, can be a little aggressive, tends to be handsome (“a playboy or playgirl,” in Ketut’s words) but has a decent overall character, with an excellent memory and a desire to help other people.

When his Balinese patients come to Ketut with serious health or economic or relationship problems, he always asks on which day of the week they were born, in order to concoct the correct prayers and medicines to help them. Because sometimes, Ketut says, “people are sick in the birthday,” and they need a little astrological adjustment in order to set them in balance again. A local family brought their youngest son to see Ketut the other day. The child was maybe four years old. I asked what the problem was and Ketut translated that the family was concerned about “problems with very aggressive this boy. This boy not take orders. Bad behave. Not pay attention. Everyone in house tired from the boy. Also, sometimes this boy too dizzy.”

Ketut asked the parents if he could hold the child for a moment. They put their son in Ketut’s lap and the boy leaned back against the old medicine man’s chest, relaxed and unafraid. Ketut held him tenderly, placed a palm on the child’s forehead, shut his eyes. He then placed a palm on the boy’s belly, shut his eyes again. He was smiling and speaking gently to the child the whole time. The examination was quickly over. Ketut handed the boy back to his parents, and the people left soon after with a prescription and some holy water. Ketut told me he’d asked the parents about the circumstances of the boy’s birth and had discovered the child had been born under a bad star and on a Saturday—a day of birth which contains elements of potentially bad spirits, like crow spirit, owl spirit, rooster spirit (this is what makes the child a fighter) and puppet spirit (this is what’s causing his dizziness). But it was not all bad news. Being born on Saturday, the boy’s body also contained rainbow spirit and butterfly spirit, and these could be strengthened. A series of offerings would have to be made and the child would be brought into balance once more.

“Why did you hold your hand on the boy’s forehead and stomach?” I asked. “Were you checking for fever?”

“I was check his brain,” Ketut said. “To see if he had evil spirits in his mind.”

“What kind of evil spirits?”

“Liss,” he said. “I am Balinese. I believe from black magic. I believe evil spirits come out rivers and hurt people.”

“Did the boy have evil spirits?”

“No. He is only sick in his birthday. His family will make sacrifice. This will be OK. And you, Liss? You are practice Balinese meditation every night? Keep mind and heart clean?”

“Every night,” I promised.

“You learn to smile even in your liver?”

“Even in my liver, Ketut. Big smile in my liver.”

“Good. This smile will make you beautiful woman. This will give you power of to be very pretty. You can use this power—pretty power!—to get what you want in life.”

“Pretty power!” I repeat the phrase, loving it. Like a meditating Barbie. “I want pretty power!”

“You are still practice Indian meditation, too?”

“Every morning.”

“Good. Don’t forget your Yoga. Beneficial to you. Good for you to keep practice both ways of meditation—Indian and Balinese. Both different, but good in equal way. Same-same. I think about religion, most of it is same-same.”

“Not everybody thinks so, Ketut. Some people like to argue about God.”

“Not necessary,” he said. “I have good idea, for if you meet some person from different religion and he want to make argument about God. My idea is, you listen to everything this man say about God. Never argue about God with him. Best thing to say is, ‘I agree with you.’ Then you go home, pray what you want. This is my idea for people to have peace about religion.”

Ketut keeps his chin lifted all the time, I’ve noticed, his head held a little bit back, sort of quizzical and elegant at the same time. Like a curious old king, he looks at the whole world from above his nose. His skin is lustrous, golden brown. He’s almost totally bald, but makes up for it with exceptionally long and feathery eyebrows which look eager to take flight. Except for his missing teeth and his burnscarred right arm, he seems in perfect health. He told me that he was a dancer in his youth, for the temple ceremonies, and that he was beautiful back then. I believe it. He eats only one meal a day— a typically simple Balinese dish of rice mixed with either duck or fish. He likes to drink one cup of coffee with sugar every day, mostly just to celebrate the fact that he can afford coffee and sugar. You, too, could easily live to a hundred and five on this diet. He keeps his body strong, he says, by meditating every night before sleep and by pulling the healthy energy of the universe into his core. He says that the human body is made of nothing more or less than the five elements of all creation—water (apa), fire (tejo), wind (bayu), sky (akasa) and earth (pritiwi)—and all you have to do is concentrate on this reality during meditation and you will receive energy from all of these sources and you will stay strong. Demonstrating his occasionally very accurate ear for English idiom, he said, “The microcosm becomes the macrocosm. You—microcosm—will become same as universe—macrocosm.”

He was so busy today, crowded with Balinese patients who were stacked up all over his courtyard like cargo crates, all of them with babies or offerings in their laps. He had farmers and businessmen there, fathers and grandmothers. There were parents with babies who weren’t keeping food down, and old men haunted by black magic curses. There were young men tossed by aggression and lust, and young women looking for love matches while suffering children complained about their rashes. Everyone out of balance; everyone needing equilibrium restored.

The mood of the courtyard of Ketut’s home is always one of total patience, though. Sometimes people must wait for three hours before Ketut gets a chance to take care of them, but they never so much as tap their feet or roll their eyes in exasperation. Extraordinary, too, is the way the children wait, leaning up against their beautiful mothers, playing with their own fingers to pass the time. I’m always amused later when it turns out that these same tranquil children have been brought over to see Ketut because the mother and father have decided that the child is “too naughty” and needs a cure. That little girl? That little three-year-old girl who was sitting silently in the hot sun for four straight hours, without com- plaint or snack or toy? She’s naughty? I wish I could say, “People— you want to see naughty, I’ll take you to America, show you some kids that’ll have you believing in Ritalin.” But there’s just a different standard here for good behavior in children.

Ketut treated all the patients obligingly, one after another, seemingly unconcerned by the passage of time, giving all exactly the attention they needed regardless of who was waiting to be seen next. He was so busy he didn’t even get his one meal at lunchtime, but stayed glued to his porch, obliged by his respect for God and his ancestors to sit there for hours on end, healing everyone. By evening, his eyes looked as tired as the eyes of a Civil War field surgeon. His last patient of the day had been a deeply troubled middle-aged Balinese man complaining that he had not slept well in weeks; he was being haunted, he said, by a nightmare of “drowning in two rivers at the same time.”

Until this evening, I still wasn’t sure what my role was in Ketut Liyer’s life. Every day I’ve been asking him if he’s really sure he wants me around, and he keeps insisting that I must come and spend time with him. I feel guilty taking up so much of his day, but he always seems disappointed when I leave at the end of the afternoon. I’m not teaching him any English, not really. Whatever English he already learned however many decades ago has been cemented into his mind by now and there isn’t much space for correction or new vocabulary. It’s all I can do to get him to say, “Nice to see you,” when I arrive, instead of “Nice to meet you.”

Tonight, when his last patient had left and Ketut was exhausted, looking ancient from the weariness of service, I asked him whether I should go now and let him have some privacy, and he replied, “I always have time for you.” Then he asked me to tell him some stories about India, about America, about Italy, about my family. That’s when I realized that I am not Ketut Liyer’s English teacher, nor am I exactly his theological student, but I am the merest and simplest of pleasures for this old medicine man—I am his company. I’m somebody he can talk to because he enjoys hearing about the world and he hasn’t had much of a chance to see it.

In our hours together on this porch, Ketut has asked me questions about everything from how much cars cost in Mexico to what causes AIDS. (I did my best with both topics, though I believe there are experts who could have answered with more substance.) Ketut has never been off the island of Bali in his life. He has spent very little time, actually, off this porch. He once went on a pilgrimage to Mount Agung, the biggest and most spiritually important volcano on Bali, but he said the energy was so powerful there he could scarcely meditate for fear he might be consumed by sacred fire. He goes to the temples for the big important ceremonies and he is invited to his neighbors’ homes to perform weddings or coming-of-age rituals, but most of the time he can be found right here, cross-legged upon this bamboo mat, surrounded by his great-grandfather’s palm-leaf medical encyclopedias, taking care of people, mollifying demons and occasionally treating himself to a cup of coffee with sugar.

“I had a dream from you last night,” he told me today. “I had a dream you are riding your bicycle anywhere.”

Because he paused, I suggested a grammatical correction. “Do you mean, you had a dream that I was riding my bicycle everywhere?”

“Yes! I dream last night you are riding your bicycle anywhere and everywhere. You are so happy in my dream! All over world, you are riding your bicycle. And I following you!”

Maybe he wishes he could . . .

“Maybe you can come see me someday in America, Ketut,” I said.

“Can’t, Liss.” He shook his head, cheerfully resigned to his destiny. “Don’t have enough teeth to travel on airplane.”

82

As for Ketut’s wife, it takes me a while to align myself with her. Nyomo, as he calls her, is big and plump with a stiff-hip limp and teeth stained red by chewing on betel nut tobacco. Her toes are painfully crooked from arthritis. She has a shrewd eye. She was scary to me from the first sight. She’s got that fierce old lady vibe you see sometimes in Italian widows and righteous black churchgoing mamas. She looks like she’d whup your hide for the slightest of misdemeanors. She was blatantly suspicious of me at first—Who is this flamingo traipsing through my house every day? She would stare at me from inside the sooty shadows of her kitchen, unconvinced as to my right to exist. I would smile at her and she’d just keep staring, deciding whether she should chase me out with a broomstick or not.

But then something changed. It was after the whole photocopy incident.

Ketut Liyer has all these piles of old, lined notebooks and ledgers, filled with tiny little handwriting, of ancient Balinese-Sanskrit mysteries about healing. He copied these notes into these notebooks way back in the 1940s or 1950s, sometime after his grandfather died, so he would have all the medical information recorded. This stuff is beyond invaluable. There are volumes of data about rare trees and leaves and plants and all their medicinal properties. He’s got some sixty pages of diagrams about palm-reading, and more notebooks full of astrological data, mantras, spells and cures. The only thing is, these notebooks had been through decades of mildew and mice and they’re shredded almost to bits. Yellow and crumbling and musty, they look like disintegrating piles of autumn leaves. Every time he turns a page, he rips the page.

“Ketut,” I said to him last week, holding up one of his battered notebooks, “I’m not a doctor like you are, but I think this book is dying.”

He laughed. “You think is dying?”

“Sir,” I said gravely, “here is my professional opinion—if this book does not get some help soon, it will be dead within the next six months.”

Then I asked if I could take the notebook into town with me and photocopy it before it died. I had to explain what photocopying was, and promise that I would only keep the notebook for twenty-four hours and that I would do it no harm. Finally, he agreed to let me take it off the porch property with my most passionate assurances that I would be careful with his grandfather’s wisdom. I rode into town to the shop with the Internet computers and photocopiers and I gingerly duplicated every page, then had the new, clean photocopies bound in a nice plastic folder. I brought the old and the new versions of the book back the next day before noon. Ketut was astonished and delighted, so happy because he’s had that notebook, he said, for fifty years. Which might literally mean “fifty years,” or might just mean “a really long time.”

I asked if I could copy the rest of his notebooks, to keep that information safe, too. He held out another limp, broken, shredded, gasping document filled with Balinese Sanskrit and complicated sketches.

“Another patient!” he said.

“Let me heal it!” I replied.

This was another grand success. By the end of the week, I’d photocopied several of the old manuscripts. Every day, Ketut called his wife over and showed her the new copies and he was overjoyed. Her facial expression didn’t change at all, but she studied the evidence thoroughly.

And the next Monday when I came to visit, Nyomo brought me hot coffee, served in a jelly jar. I watched her carry the drink across the courtyard on a china saucer, limping slowly on the long journey from her kitchen to Ketut’s porch. I assumed the coffee was intended for Ketut, but, no—he’d already had his coffee. This was for me. She’d prepared it for me. I tried to thank her but she looked annoyed at my thanks, kind of swatted me away the way she swats away the rooster who always tries to stand on her outdoor kitchen table when she’s preparing lunch. But the next day she brought me a glass of coffee and a bowl of sugar on the side. And the next day it was a glass of coffee, a bowl of sugar and a cold boiled potato. Every day that week, she added a new treat. This was starting to feel like that childhood car trip alphabet-memory game: “I’m going to Grandma’s house, and I’m bringing an apple . . . I’m going to Grandma’s house and I’m bringing an apple and a balloon . . . I’m going to Grandma’s house and I’m bringing an apple, a balloon, a cup of coffee in a jelly glass, a bowl of sugar and a cold potato . . .”

Then, yesterday, I was standing in the courtyard, saying my goodbyes to Ketut, and Nyomo came shuffling past with her broom, sweeping and pretending not to be paying attention to everything that happens in her empire. I had my hands clasped behind my back as I was standing there, and she came up behind me and took one of my hands in hers. She fumbled through my hand like she was trying to untumble the combination on a lock and she found my index finger. Then she wrapped her whole big, hard fist around that finger and gave me this deep, long squeeze. I could feel her love pulsing through her power grip, right up into my arm and all the way down into my guts. Then she dropped my hand and limped away arthritically, saying not a single word, continuing her sweeping as though nothing had happened. While I stood there quietly drowning in two rivers of happiness at the same time.

83

I have a new friend. His name is Yudhi, which is pronounced “You-Day.” He’s Indonesian, originally from Java. I got to know him because he rented my house to me; he’s working for the Englishwoman who owns the place, looking after her property while she’s away in London for the summer. Yudhi is twenty-seven years old and stocky in build and talks kind of like a southern California surfer. He calls me “man” and “dude” all the time. He’s got a smile that could stop crime, and he’s got a long, complicated life story for somebody so young.

He was born in Jakarta; his mother was a housewife, his father an Indonesian fan of Elvis who owned a small air-conditioning and refrigeration business. The family was Christian—an oddity in this part of the world, and Yudhi tells entertaining stories about being mocked by the neighborhood Muslim kids for such shortcomings as “You eat pork!” and “You love Jesus!” Yudhi wasn’t bothered by the teasing; Yudhi, by nature, isn’t bothered by much. His mom, however, didn’t like him hanging around with the Muslim kids, mostly on account of the fact that they were always barefoot, which Yudhi also liked to be, but she thought it was unhygienic, so she gave her son a choice—he could either wear shoes and play outside, or he could stay barefoot and remain indoors. Yudhi doesn’t like wearing shoes, so he spent a big chunk of his childhood and adolescence life in his bedroom, and that’s where he learned how to play the guitar. Barefoot.

The guy has a musical ear like maybe nobody I’ve ever met. He’s beautiful with the guitar, never had lessons but understands melody and harmony like they were the kid sisters he grew up with. He makes these East-West blends of music that combine classical Indonesian lullabies with reggae groove and early-days Stevie Wonder funk—it’s hard to explain, but he should be famous. I never knew anybody who heard Yudhi’s music who didn’t think he should be famous.

Here’s what he always wanted to do most of all—live in America and work in show business. The world’s shared dream. So when Yudhi was still a Javanese teenager, he somehow talked himself into a job (speaking hardly any English yet) on a Carnival Cruise Lines ship, thereby casting himself out of his narrow Jakarta environs and into the big, blue world. The job Yudhi got on the cruise ship was one of those insane jobs for industrious immigrants—living belowdecks, working twelve hours a day, one day off a month, cleaning. His fellow workers were Filipinos and Indonesians. The Indonesians and the Filipinos slept and ate in separate quarters of the boat, never mingling (Muslims vs. Christians, don’t you know), but Yudhi, in typical fashion, befriended everybody and became a kind of emissary between the two groups of Asian laborers. He saw more similarities than differences between these maids and custodians and dishwashers, all of whom were working bottomless hours in order to send a hundred dollars or so a month back to their families at home.

The first time the cruise ship sailed into New York Harbor, Yudhi stayed up all night, perched on the highest deck, watching the city skyline appear over the horizon, heart hammering with excitement. Hours later, he got off the ship in New York and hailed a yellow cab, just like in the movies. When the recent African immigrant driving the taxi asked where he’d like to go, Yudhi said, “Anywhere, man— just drive me around. I want to see everything.” A few months later the ship came to New York City again, and this time Yudhi disembarked for good. His contract was up with the cruise line and he wanted to live in America now.

He ended up in suburban New Jersey, of all places, living for a while with an Indonesian man he’d met on the ship. He got a job in a sandwich shop at the mall—again, ten-to-twelve-hour days of immigrant-style labor, this time working with Mexicans, not Filipinos. He learned better Spanish those first few months than English. In his rare moments of free time, Yudhi would ride the bus into Manhattan and just wander the streets, still so speechlessly infatuated with the city—a town he describes today as “the place which is the most full of love in the entire world.” Somehow (again—that smile) he met up in New York City with a crowd of young musicians from all over the world and he took to playing guitar with them, jamming all night with talented kids from Jamaica, Africa, France, Japan . . . And at one of those gigs, he met Ann—a pretty blonde from Connecticut who played bass. They fell in love. They got married. They found an apartment in Brooklyn and they were surrounded by groovy friends who all went on road trips together down to the Florida Keys. Life was just unbelievably happy. His English was quickly impeccable. He was thinking about going to college.

On September 11, Yudhi watched the towers fall from his rooftop in Brooklyn. Like everyone else he was paralyzed with grief at what had happened—how could somebody inflict such an appalling atrocity on the city that is the most full of love of anywhere in the world? I don’t know how much attention Yudhi was paying when the U.S. Congress subsequently passed the Patriot Act in response to the terrorist threat—legislation which included draconian new immigration laws, many of which were directed against Islamic nations such as Indonesia. One of these provisions demanded that all Indonesian citizens living in America register with the Department of Homeland Security. The telephones started ringing as Yudhi and his young Indonesian immigrant friends tried to figure out what to do—many of them had overstayed their visas and were afraid that registering would get them deported. On the other hand, they were afraid to not register, thereby behaving like criminals. Presumably the fundamentalist Islamic terrorists roaming around America ignored this registration law, but Yudhi decided that he did want to register. He was married to an American and he wanted to update his immigration status and become a legal citizen. He didn’t want to live in hiding.

He and Ann consulted all kinds of lawyers, but nobody knew how to advise them. Before 9/11 there would have been no problems— Yudhi, now married, could just go to the immigration office, update his visa situation and begin the process of gaining citizenship. But now? Who knew? “The laws haven’t been tested yet,” said the immigration lawyers. “The laws will be tested on you.” So Yudhi and his wife had a meeting with a nice immigration official and shared their story. The couple were told that Yudhi was to come back later that same afternoon, for “a second interview.” They should have been wary then; Yudhi was strictly instructed to return without his wife, without a lawyer, and carrying nothing in his pockets. Hoping for the best, he did return alone and empty-handed to the second interview—and that’s when they arrested him.

They took him to a detention center in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where he stayed for weeks amongst a vast crowd of immigrants, all of whom had recently been arrested under the Homeland Security Act, many of whom had been living and working in America for years, most of whom didn’t speak English. Some had been unable to contact their families upon their arrests. They were invisible in the detention center; nobody knew they existed anymore. It took a near-hysterical Ann days to find out where her husband had been taken. What Yudhi remembers most about the detention center was the dozen coal-black, thin and terrified Nigerian men who had been found on a freight ship inside a steel shipping crate; they had been hiding in that container at the bottom of that ship for almost a month before they were discovered, trying to get to America—or anywhere. They had no idea now where they were. Their eyes were so wide, Yudhi said, it looked like they were still being blinded with spotlights.

After a period of detention, the U.S. government sent my Christian friend Yudhi—now an Islamic terrorist suspect, apparently— back to Indonesia. This was last year. I don’t know if he’s ever going to be allowed anywhere near America again. He and his wife are still trying to figure out what to do with their lives now; their dreams hadn’t called for living out their lives in Indonesia.

Unable to cope with Jakarta’s slums after having lived in the first world, Yudhi came to Bali to see if he could make a living here, though he’s having trouble being accepted into this society because he isn’t Balinese—he’s from Java. And the Balinese don’t like the Javanese one bit, thinking of them all as thieves and beggars. So Yudhi encounters more prejudice here—in his own nation of Indonesia—than he ever did back in New York. He doesn’t know what to do next. Maybe his wife, Ann, will come and join him here. Then again—maybe not. What’s here for her? Their young marriage, conducted now entirely by e-mail, is on the rocks. He’s so out of place here, so disoriented. He’s more of an American than he is anything else; Yudhi and I use the same slang, we talk about our favorite restaurants in New York and we like all the same movies. He comes over to my house in the evenings and I get him beers and he plays me the most amazing songs on his guitar. I wish he were famous. If there was any fairness, he would be so famous by now.

He says, “Dude—why is life all crazy like this?”

84

“Ketut, why is life all crazy like this?” I asked my medicine man the next day.

He replied, “Bhuta ia, dewa ia.”

“What does that mean?”

“Man is a demon, man is a god. Both true.”

This was a familiar idea to me. It’s very Indian, very Yogic. The notion is that human beings are born, as my Guru has explained many times, with the equivalent potential for both contraction and expansion. The ingredients of both darkness and light are equally present in all of us, and then it’s up to the individual (or the family, or the society) to decide what will be brought forth—the virtues or the malevolence. The madness of this planet is largely a result of the human being’s difficulty in coming into virtuous balance with himself. Lunacy (both collective and individual) results.

“So what can we do about the craziness of the world?”

“Nothing.” Ketut laughed, but with a dose of kindness. “This is nature of world. This is destiny. Worry about your craziness only— make you in peace.”

“But how should we find peace within ourselves?” I asked Ketut.

“Meditation,” he said. “Purpose of meditation is only happiness and peace—very easy. Today I will teach a new meditation, make you even better person. Is called Four Brothers Meditation.”

Ketut went on to explain that the Balinese believe we are each accompanied at birth by four invisible brothers, who come into the world with us and protect us throughout our lives. When the child is in the womb, her four siblings are even there with her—they are represented by the placenta, the amniotic fluid, the umbilical cord and the yellow waxy substance that protects an unborn baby’s skin. When the baby is born, the parents collect as much of these extraneous birthing materials as possible, placing them in a coconut shell and burying it by the front door of the family’s house. According to the Balinese, this buried coconut is the holy resting place of the four unborn brothers, and that spot is tended to forever, like a shrine.

The child is taught from earliest consciousness that she has these four brothers with her in the world wherever she goes, and that they will always look after her. The brothers inhabit the four virtues a person needs in order to be safe and happy in life: intelligence, friendship, strength and (I love this one) poetry. The brothers can be called upon in any critical situation for rescue and assistance. When you die, your four spirit brothers collect your soul and bring you to heaven.

Today Ketut told me that he’s never taught any Westerner the Four Brothers Meditation yet, but he thinks I am ready for it. First, he taught me the names of my invisible siblings—Ango Patih, Maragio Patih, Banus Patih and Banus Patih Ragio. He instructed me to memorize these names and to ask for the help of my brothers throughout my life, whenever I need them. He says I don’t have to be formal when I speak to them, the way we are formal when we pray to God. I’m allowed to speak to my brothers with familiar affection, because “It just your family!” He tells me to say their names as I’m washing myself in the morning, and they will join me. Say their names again every time before I eat, and I will include my brothers in the enjoyment of the meal. Call on them before I go to sleep, saying, “I am sleeping now, so you must stay awake and protect me,” and my brothers will shield me through the night, stop demons and nightmares.

“That’s good,” I told him, “because I have a problem sometimes with nightmares.”

“What nightmares?”

I explained to the medicine man that I’ve been having the same horrible nightmare since childhood, namely that there is a man with a knife standing next to my bed. This nightmare is so vivid, the man is so real, that it sometimes makes me scream out in fear. It leaves my heart pounding every time (and has never been fun for those who share my bed, either). I’ve been having this nightmare every few weeks for as long as I can remember.

I told this to Ketut, and he told me I had been misunderstanding the vision for years. The man with the knife in my bedroom is not an enemy; he’s just one of my four brothers. He’s the spirit brother who represents strength. He’s not there to attack me, but to guard me while I sleep. I’m probably waking up because I’m sensing the commotion of my spirit brother fighting away some demon who might be trying to hurt me. It is not a knife my brother is carrying, but a kris—a small, powerful dagger. I don’t have to be afraid. I can go back to sleep, knowing I am protected.

“You lucky,” Ketut said. “Lucky you can see him. Sometimes I see my brothers in meditation, but very rare for regular person to see like this. I think you have big spiritual power. I hope maybe someday you become medicine woman.”

“OK,” I said, laughing, “but only if I can have my own TV series.”

He laughed with me, not getting the joke, of course, but loving the idea that people make jokes. Ketut then instructed me that whenever I speak to my four spirit brothers, I must tell them who I am, so they can recognize me. I must use the secret nickname they have for me. I must say, “I am Lagoh Prano.”

Lagoh Prano means “Happy Body.”

I rode my bicycle back home, pushing my happy body up the hills toward my house in the late afternoon sun. On my way through the forest, a big male monkey dropped out of a tree right in front of me and bared his fangs at me. I didn’t even flinch. I said, “Back off, Jack—I got four brothers protecting my ass,” and I just rode right on by him.

85

Although the next day (protective brothers notwithstanding) I did get hit by a bus. It was sort of a smallish bus, but nevertheless it did knock me off my bicycle as I was cruising down the shoulderless road. I got tossed into a cement irrigation ditch. About thirty Balinese people on motorcycles stopped to help me, having witnessed the accident (the bus was long gone), and everyone invited me to their house for tea or offered to drive me to the hospital, they all felt so bad about the whole incident. It wasn’t that serious a wreck, though, considering what it might have been. My bicycle was fine, although the basket was bent and my helmet was cracked. (Better the helmet than the head in such cases.) The worst of the damage was a deep cut on my knee, full of bits of pebbles and dirt, that proceeded—over the next few days in the moist tropical air— to become nastily infected.

I didn’t want to worry him, but a few days later I finally rolled up my pants leg on Ketut Liyer’s porch, peeled off the yellowing bandage, and showed my wound to the old medicine man. He peered at it, concerned.

“Infect,” he diagnosed. “Painful.”

“Yes,” I said.

“You should go see doctor.”

This was a little surprising. Wasn’t he the doctor? But for some reason he didn’t volunteer to help and I didn’t push it. Maybe he doesn’t administer medication to Westerners. Or maybe Ketut just had a secret hidden master plan, because it was my banged-up knee that allowed me, in the end, to meet Wayan. And from that meeting, everything that was meant to happen . . . happened.

86

Wayan Nuriyasih is, like Ketut Liyer, a Balinese healer. There are some differences between them, though. He’s elderly and male; she’s a woman in her late thirties. He’s more of a priestly figure, somewhat more mystical, while Wayan is a hands-on doctor, mixing herbs and medications in her own shop and taking care of patients right there on the premises.

Wayan has a little storefront shop in the center of Ubud called “Traditional Balinese Healing Center.” I’d ridden my bike past it many times on my way down to Ketut’s, noticing it because of all the potted plants outside the place, and because of the blackboard with the curious handwritten advertisement for the “Multivitamin Lunch Special.” But I’d never gone into the place before my knee got messed up. After Ketut sent me to find a doctor, though, I remembered the shop and came by on my bicycle, hoping somebody there might be able to help me deal with the infection.

Wayan’s place is a very small medical clinic and home and restaurant all at the same time. Downstairs there’s a tiny kitchen and a modest public eating area with three tables and few chairs. Upstairs there’s a private area where Wayan gives massages and treatments. There’s one dark bedroom in the back.

I limped into the shop with my sore knee and introduced myself to Wayan the healer—a strikingly attractive Balinese woman with a wide smile and shiny black hair down to her waist. There were two shy young girls hiding behind her in the kitchen who smiled when I waved to them, then ducked away again. I showed Wayan my infected wound and asked if she could help. Soon Wayan had water and herbs boiling up on the stove, and was making me drink jamu— traditional Indonesian homemade medicinal concoctions. She placed hot green leaves on my knee and it started to feel better immediately.

We got to talking. Her English was excellent. Because she is Balinese, she immediately asked me the three standard introductory questions—Where are you going today? Where are you coming from? Are you married?

When I told her I wasn’t married (“Not yet!”) she looked taken aback.

“Never been married?” she asked.

“No,” I lied. I don’t like lying, but I generally have found it’s easier not to mention divorce to the Balinese because they get so upset about it.

“Really never been married?” she asked again, and she was looking at me with great curiosity now.

“Honestly,” I lied. “I’ve never been married.”

“You sure?” This was getting weird.

“I’m totally sure!”

“Not even once?” she asked.

OK, so she can see through me.

“Well,” I confessed, “there was that one time . . .”

And her face cleared like: Yes, I thought as much. She asked, “Divorced?”

“Yes,” I said, ashamed now. “Divorced.”

“I could tell you are divorced.”

“It’s not very common here, is it?”

“But me, too,” said Wayan, entirely to my surprise. “Me too, divorced.”

“You?”

“I did everything I could,” she said. “I try everything before I got a divorce, praying every day. But I had to go away from him.”

Her eyes filled up with tears, and next thing you knew, I was holding Wayan’s hand, having just met my first Balinese divorcée, and I was saying, “I’m sure you did the best you could, sweetie. I’m sure you tried everything.”

“Divorce is too sad,” she said.

I agreed.

I stayed there in Wayan’s shop for the next five hours, talking with my new best friend about her troubles. She cleaned up the infection in my knee as I listened to her story. Wayan’s Balinese husband, she told me, was a man who “drink all the time, always gamble, lose all our money, then beat me when I don’t give him more money for to gamble and to drink.” She said, “He beat me into the hospital many times.” She parted her hair, showed me scars on her head and said, “This is from when he hit me with motorcycle helmet. Always, he was hitting me with this motorcycle helmet when he is drinking, when I don’t make money. He hit me so much, I go unconscious, dizzy, can’t see. I think it is lucky I am healer, my family are healers, because I know how to heal myself after he beats me. I think if I was not healer, I would lose my ears, you know, not be able to hear things anymore. Or maybe lose my eye, not be able to see.” She left him, she told me, after he beat her so severely “that I lose my baby, my second child, the one in my belly.” After which incident their firstborn child, a bright little girl with the nickname of Tutti, said, “I think you should get a divorce, Mommy. Every time you go to the hospital you leave too much work around the house for Tutti.”

Tutti was four years old when she said this.

To exit a marriage in Bali leaves a person alone and unprotected in ways that are almost impossible for a Westerner to imagine. The Balinese family unit, enclosed within the walls of a family compound, is merely everything—four generations of siblings, cousins, parents, grandparents and children all living together in a series of small bungalows surrounding the family temple, taking care of each other from birth to death. The family compound is the source of strength, financial security, health care, day care, education and— most important to the Balinese—spiritual connection.

The family compound is so vital that the Balinese think of it as a single, living person. The population of a Balinese village is traditionally counted not by the number of individuals, but by the number of compounds. The compound is a self-sustaining universe. So you don’t leave it. (Unless, of course, you are a woman, in which case you move only once—out of your father’s family compound and into your husband’s.) When this system works—which it does in this healthy society almost all the time—it produces the most sane, protected, calm, happy and balanced human beings in the world. But when it doesn’t work? As with my new friend Wayan? The outcasts are lost in airless orbit. Her choice was either to stay in the family compound safety net with a husband who kept putting her in the hospital, or to save her own life and leave, which left her with nothing.

Well, not exactly nothing, actually. She did take with her an encyclopedic knowledge of healing, her goodness, her work ethic and her daughter Tutti—whom she had to fight hard to keep. Bali is a patriarchy to the end. In the rare case of a divorce, the children automatically belong to the father. To get Tutti back, Wayan had to hire a lawyer, whom she paid with every single thing she had. I mean—everything. She sold off not only her furniture and jewelry, but also her forks and spoons, her socks and shoes, her old washcloths and half-burned candles—everything went to pay that lawyer. But she did get her daughter back, in the end, after a two-year battle. Wayan is just lucky Tutti was a girl; if she’d been a boy, Wayan never would have seen the kid again. Boys are much more valuable.

For the last few years now, Wayan and Tutti have been living on their own—all alone, in the beehive of Bali!—moving from place to place every few months as money comes and goes, always sleepless with worry about where to go next. Which has been difficult because every time she moves, her patients (mostly Balinese, who are all on hard times themselves these days) have trouble finding her again. Also, with every move, little Tutti has to be pulled out of school. Tutti was always first in her class before, but has slipped since the last move down to twentieth out of fifty children.

In the middle of Wayan’s telling me this story, Tutti herself came charging into the shop, having arrived home from school. She’s eight years old now and a mighty exhibition of charisma and fireworks. This little cherry bomb of a girl (pigtailed and skinny and excited) asked me in lively English if I’d like to eat lunch, and Wayan said, “I forgot! You should have lunch!” and the mother and daughter rushed into their kitchen and—with the help of the two shy young girls hiding back there—produced sometime later the best food I’d tasted yet in Bali.

Little Tutti brought out each course of the meal with a bright-voiced explanation of what was on the plate, wearing a huge grin, generally just being so totally peppy she should’ve been spinning a baton.

“Turmeric juice, for keep clean the kidneys!” she announced.

“Seaweed, for calcium!”

“Tomato salad, for vitamin D!”

“Mixed herbs, for not get malaria!”

I finally said, “Tutti, where did you learn to speak such good English?”

“From a book!” she proclaimed.

“I think you are a very clever girl,” I informed her.

“Thank you!” she said, and did a spontaneous little happy dance. “You are a very clever girl, too!”

Balinese kids aren’t normally like this, by the way. They’re usually all quiet and polite, hiding behind their mother’s skirts. Not Tutti. She was all show-biz. She was all show and tell.

“I will see you my books!” Tutti sang, and hurtled up the stairs to get them.

“She wants to be an animal doctor,” Wayan told me. “What is the word in English?”

“Veterinarian?”

“Yes. Veterinarian. But she has many questions about animals, I don’t know how to answer. She says, ‘Mommy, if somebody brings me a sick tiger, do I bandage its teeth first, so it doesn’t bite me? If a snake gets sick and needs medicine, where is the opening?’ I don’t know where she gets these ideas. I hope she can go to university.”

Tutti careened down the stairs, arms full of books, and zinged herself into her mother’s lap. Wayan laughed and kissed her daughter, all the sadness about the divorce suddenly gone from her face. I watched them, thinking that little girls who make their mothers live grow up to be such powerful women. Already, in the space of one afternoon, I was so in love with this kid. I sent up a spontaneous prayer to God: May Tutti Nuriyasih someday bandage the teeth of a thousand white tigers!

I loved Tutti’s mother, too. But I’d been in their shop now for hours and felt I should leave. Some other tourists had wandered into the place, and were hoping to be served lunch. One of the tourists, a brassy older broad from Australia, was loudly asking if Wayan could please help cure her “god-awful constipation.” I was thinking, Sing it a little louder, honey, and we can all dance to it . . .

“I will come back tomorrow,” I promised Wayan, “and I’ll order the multivitamin lunch special again.”

“Your knee is better now,” Wayan said. “Quickly better. No infection anymore.”

She wiped the last of the green herbal goo off my leg, then sort of jiggled my kneecap around a bit, feeling for something. Then she felt the other knee, closing her eyes. She opened her eyes, grinned and said, “I can tell by your knees that you don’t have much sex lately.”

I said, “Why? Because they’re so close together?”

She laughed. “No—it’s the cartilage. Very dry. Hormones from sex lubricate the joints. How long since sex for you?”

“About a year and a half.”

“You need a good man. I will find one for you. I will pray at the temple for a good man for you, because now you are my sister. Also, if you come back tomorrow, I will clean your kidneys for you.”

“A good man and clean kidneys, too? That sounds like a great deal.”

“I never tell anybody these things before about my divorce,” she told me. “But my life is heavy, too much sad, too much hard. I don’t understand why life is so hard.”

Then I did a strange thing. I took both the healer’s hands in mine and I said with the most powerful conviction, “The hardest part of your life is behind you now, Wayan.”

I left the shop, then, trembling unaccountably, all jammed up with some potent intuition or impulse that I could not yet identify or release.

87

Now my days are divided into natural thirds. I spend my mornings with Wayan at her shop, laughing and eating. I spend my afternoons with Ketut the medicine man, talking and drinking coffee. I spend my evenings in my lovely garden, either hanging out by myself and reading a book, or sometimes talking with Yudhi, who comes over to play his guitar. Every morning, I meditate while the sun comes up over the rice fields, and before bedtime I speak to my four spirit brothers and ask them to watch over me while I sleep.

I’ve been here only a few weeks and I feel a rather mission-accomplished sensation already. The task in Indonesia was to search for balance, but I don’t feel like I’m searching for anything anymore because the balance has somehow naturally come into place. It’s not that I’m becoming Balinese (no more than I ever became Italian or Indian) but only this—I can feel my own peace, and I love the swing of my days between easeful devotional practices and the pleasures of beautiful landscape, dear friends and good food. I’ve been praying a lot lately, comfortably and frequently. Most of the time, I find that I want to pray when I’m on my bicycle, riding home from Ketut’s house through the monkey forest and the rice terraces in the dusky late afternoons. I pray, of course, not to be hit by another bus, or jumped by a monkey or bit by a dog, but that’s just superfluous; most of my prayers are expressions of sheer gratitude for the fullness of my contentment. I have never felt less burdened by myself or by the world.

I keep remembering one of my Guru’s teachings about happiness. She says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you’re fortunate enough. But that’s not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don’t, you will leak away your innate contentment. It’s easy enough to pray when you’re in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments.

Recalling these teachings as I ride my bike so freely in the sunset through Bali, I keep making prayers that are really vows, presenting my state of harmony to God and saying, “This is what I would like to hold on to. Please help me memorize this feeling of contentment and help me always support it.” I’m putting this happiness in a bank somewhere, not merely FDIC protected but guarded by my four spirit brothers, held there as insurance against future trials in life. This is a practice I’ve come to call “Diligent Joy.” As I focus on Diligent Joy, I also keep remembering a simple idea my friend Darcey told me once—that all the sorrow and trouble of this world is caused by unhappy people. Not only in the big global Hitler-’n’-Stalin picture, but also on the smallest personal level. Even in my own life, I can see exactly where my episodes of unhappiness have brought suffering or distress or (at the very least) inconvenience to those around me. The search for contentment is, therefore, not merely a self-preserving and self-benefiting act, but also a generous gift to the world. Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people.

At the moment, the person I’m enjoying the most is Ketut. The old man—truly one of the happiest humans I’ve ever encountered— is giving me his full access, the freedom to ask any lingering questions about divinity, about human nature. I like the meditations he has taught me, the comic simplicity of “smile in your liver” and the reassuring presence of the four spirit brothers. The other day the medicine man told me that he knows sixteen different meditation techniques, and many mantras for all different purposes. Some of them are to bring peace or happiness, some of them are for health, but some of them are purely mystical—to transport him into other realms of consciousness. For instance, he said, he knows one meditation that takes him “to up.”

“To up?” I asked. “What is to up?”

“To seven levels up,” he said. “To heaven.”

Hearing the familiar idea of “seven levels,” I asked him if he meant that his meditation took him up through the seven sacred chakras of the body, which are discussed in Yoga.

“Not chakras,” he said. “Places. This meditation takes me seven places in universe. Up and up. Last place I go is heaven.”

I asked, “Have you been to heaven, Ketut?”

He smiled. Of course he had been there, he said. Easy to go to heaven.

“What is it like?”

“Beautiful. Everything beautiful is there. Every person beautiful is there. Everything beautiful to eat is there. Everything is love there. Heaven is love.”

Then Ketut said he knows another meditation. “To down.” This down meditation takes him seven levels below the world. This is a more dangerous meditation. Not for beginning people, only for a master.

I asked, “So if you go up to heaven in the first meditation, then, in the second meditation you must go down to . . . ?”

“Hell,” he finished the statement.

This was interesting. Heaven and hell aren’t ideas I’ve heard discussed very much in Hinduism. Hindus see the universe in terms of karma, a process of constant circulation, which is to say that you don’t really “end up” anywhere at the end of your life—not in heaven or hell—but just get recycled back to the earth again in another form, in order to resolve whatever relationships or mistakes you left uncompleted last time. When you finally achieve perfection, you graduate out of the cycle entirely and melt into The Void. The notion of karma implies that heaven and hell are only to be found here on earth, where we have the capacity to create them, manufacturing either goodness or evil depending on our destinies and our characters.

Karma is a notion I’ve always liked. Not so much literally. Not necessarily because I believe that I used to be Cleopatra’s bartender— but more metaphorically. The karmic philosophy appeals to me on a metaphorical level because even in one lifetime it’s obvious how often we must repeat our same mistakes, banging our heads against the same old addictions and compulsions, generating the same old miserable and often catastrophic consequences, until we can finally stop and fix it. This is the supreme lesson of karma (and also of Western psychology, by the way)—take care of the problems now, or else you’ll just have to suffer again later when you screw everything up the next time. And that repetition of suffering— that’s hell. Moving out of that endless repetition to a new level of understanding—there’s where you’ll find heaven.

But here Ketut was talking about heaven and hell in a different way, as if they are real places in the universe which he has actually visited. At least I think that’s what he meant.

Trying to get clear on this, I asked, “You have been to hell, Ketut?”

He smiled. Of course he’s been there.

“What’s it like in hell?”

“Same like heaven,” he said.

He saw my confusion and tried to explain. “Universe is a circle, Liss.”

I still wasn’t sure I understood.

He said. “To up, to down—all same, at end.”

I remembered an old Christian mystic notion: As above, so below. I asked. “Then how can you tell the difference between heaven and hell?”

“Because of how you go. Heaven, you go up, through seven happy places. Hell, you go down, through seven sad places. This is why it better for you to go up, Liss.” He laughed.

I asked, “You mean, you might as well spend your life going upward, through the happy places, since heaven and hell—the destinations— are the same thing anyway?”

“Same-same,” he said. “Same in end, so better to be happy on journey.”

I said, “So, if heaven is love, then hell is . . .”

“Love, too,” he said.

I sat with that one for a while, trying to make the math work.

Ketut laughed again, slapped my knee affectionately with his hand.

“Always so difficult for young person to understand this!”

88

So I was hanging out in Wayan’s shop again this morning, and she was trying to figure out how to make my hair grow faster and thicker. Having glorious thick, shiny hair herself that hangs all the way down to her butt, she feels sorry for me with my wispy blond mop. As a healer, of course, she does have a remedy to help thicken my hair, but it won’t be easy. First, I have to find a banana tree and personally cut it down. I have to “throw away the top of the tree,” then carve the trunk and roots (which are still lodged in the earth) into a big, deep bowl “like a swimming pool.” Then I have to put a piece of wood over the top of this hollow, so rainwater and dew don’t get in. Then I will come back in a few days and find that the swimming pool is now filled with the nutrient-rich liquid of the banana root, which I then must collect in bottles and bring to Wayan. She will bless the banana root juice at the temple for me, then rub the juice into my skull every day. Within a few months I will have, like Wayan, thick, shiny hair all the way down to my butt.

“Even if you are bald,” she said, “this will make you have hair.”

As we’re talking, little Tutti—just home from school—is sitting on the floor, drawing a picture of a house. Mostly, houses are what Tutti draws these days. She’s dying to have a house of her own. There’s always a rainbow in the backdrop of her pictures, and a smiling family—father and all.

This is what we do all day in Wayan’s shop. We sit and talk and Tutti draws pictures and Wayan and I gossip and tease each other. Wayan’s got a bawdy sense of humor, always talking about sex, busting me about being single, speculating on the genital endowments of all the men who pass by her shop. She keeps telling me she’s been going to the temple every evening and praying for a good man to show up in my life, to be my lover.

I told her again this morning, “No, Wayan—I don’t need it. My heart’s been broken too many times.”

She said, “I know cure for broken heart.” Authoritatively, and in a doctorly manner, Wayan ticked off on her fingers the six elements of her Fail-Proof Broken-Heart Curing Treatment: “Vitamin E, get much sleep, drink much water, travel to a place far away from the person you loved, meditate and teach your heart that this is destiny.”

“I’ve been doing everything but the vitamin E.”

“So now you cured. And now you need a new man. I bring you one, from praying.”

“Well, I’m not praying for a new man, Wayan. The only thing I’m praying for these days is to have peace with myself.”

Wayan rolled her eyes, like Yeah, right, whatever you claim, you big white weirdo, and said, “That’s because you have bad memory problem. You don’t remember anymore how nice is sex. I used to have bad memory problem, too, when I was married. Every time I saw a handsome man walking down the street, I would forget I had a husband back home.”

She nearly fell over laughing. Then she composed herself and concluded, “Everybody need sex, Liz.”

At this moment, a great-looking woman came walking into the shop, smiling like a lighthouse beam. Tutti leapt up and ran into her arms, shouting, “Armenia! Armenia! Armenia!” Which, as it turned out, was the woman’s name—not some kind of strange nationalist battle cry. I introduced myself to Armenia, and she told me she was from Brazil. She was so dynamic, this woman—so Brazilian. She was gorgeous, elegantly dressed, charismatic and engaging and indeterminate in age, just insistently sexy.

Armenia, too, is a friend of Wayan’s, who comes to the shop frequently for lunch and for various traditional medical and beauty treatments. She sat down and talked with us for about an hour, joining our gossiping, girlish little circle. She’s in Bali for only another week before she has to fly off to Africa, or maybe it’s back to Thailand, to take care of her business. This Armenia woman, it turns out, has had just the teensiest bit of glamorous life. She used to work for the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees. Back in the 1980s she had been sent into the El Salvadoran and Nicaraguan jungles during the height of war as a negotiator of peace, using her beauty and charm and wits to get all the generals and rebels to calm down and listen to reason. (Hello, pretty power!) Now she runs a multinational marketing business called Novica, which supports indigenous artists all over the world by selling their products on the Internet. She speaks about seven or eight languages. She’s got the most fabulous pair of shoes I’ve seen since Rome.

Looking at us both, Wayan said, “Liz—why do you never try to look sexy, like Armenia? You such a pretty girl, you have good capital of nice face, nice body, nice smile. But always you wear this same broken T-shirt, same broken jeans. Don’t you want to be sexy, like her?”

“Wayan,” I said, “Armenia is Brazilian. It’s a completely different situation.”

“How is it different?”

“Armenia,” I said, turning to my new friend. “Can you please try to explain to Wayan what it means to be a Brazilian woman?”

Armenia laughed, but then seemed to consider the question –seriously and answered, “Well, I always tried to look nice and be feminine even in the war zones and refugee camps of Central America. Even in the worst tragedies and crisis, there’s no reason to add to everyone’s misery by looking miserable yourself. That’s my philosophy. This is why I always wore makeup and jewelry into the jungle—nothing too extravagant, but maybe just a nice gold bracelet and some earrings, a little lipstick, good perfume. Just enough to show that I still had my self-respect.”

In a way, Armenia reminds me of those great Victorian-era British lady travelers, who used to say there’s no excuse for wearing clothes in Africa that would be unsuited for an English drawing room. She’s a butterfly, this Armenia. And she couldn’t stay for too long at Wayan’s shop because she had work to do, but that didn’t stop her from inviting me to a party tonight. She knows another Brazilian expat in Ubud, she told me, and he’s hosting a special event at a nice restaurant this evening. He’ll be cooking a feijoada—a traditional Brazilian feast consisting of massive piles of pork and black beans. There will be Brazilian cocktails, as well. Lots of interesting expatriates from all over the world who live here in Bali. Would I care to come? They might all go out dancing later, too. She doesn’t know if I like parties, but . . .

Cocktails? Dancing? Piles of pork?

Of course I’ll come.

89

I can’t remember the last time I got dressed up, but this evening I dug out my one fancy spaghetti-strap dress from the bottom of my backpack and slithered it on. I even wore lipstick. I can’t remember the last time I wore lipstick, but I know it wasn’t anywhere near India. I stopped at Armenia’s house on the way over to the party, and she draped me in some of her fancy jewelry, let me borrow her fancy perfume, let me store my bicycle in her backyard so I could arrive at the party in her fancy car, like a proper adult woman.

The dinner with the expatriates was great fun, and I felt myself revisiting all these long-dormant aspects of my personality. I even got a little bit drunk, which was notable after all the purity of my last few months of praying at the Ashram and sipping tea in my Balinese flower garden. And I was flirting! I hadn’t flirted in ages. I’d only been hanging around with monks and medicine men lately, but suddenly I was dusting off the old sexuality again. Though I couldn’t really tell who I was flirting with. I was kind of spreading it around everywhere. Was I attracted to the witty Australian former journalist sitting next to me? (“We’re all drunks here,” he quipped. “We write references for other drunks.”) Or was it the quiet intellectual German down the table? (He promised to lend me novels from his personal library.) Or was it the handsome older Brazilian man who had cooked this giant feast for all of us in the first place? (I liked his kind brown eyes and his accent. And his cooking, of course. I said something very provocative to him, out of nowhere. He was making a joke at his own expense, saying, “I’m a full catastrophe of a Brazilian man—I can’t dance, I can’t play soccer and I can’t play any musical instruments.” For some reason I replied, “Maybe so. But I have a feeling you could play a very good Casanova.” Time stopped solid for a long, long moment, then, as we looked at each other frankly, like, That was an interesting idea to lay on this table. The boldness of my statement hovered in the air around us like a fragrance. He didn’t deny it. I looked away first, feeling myself blush.)

His feijoada was amazing, anyway. Decadent, spicy and rich— everything you can’t normally get in Balinese food. I ate plate after plate of the pork and decided that it was official: I can never be a vegetarian, not with food like this in the world. And then we went out dancing at this local nightclub, if you can call it a nightclub. It was more like a groovy beach shack, only without the beach. There was a live band of Balinese kids playing good reggae music, and the place was mixed up with revelers of all ages and nationalities, expats and tourists and locals and gorgeous Balinese boys and girls, all dancing freely, unselfconsciously. Armenia hadn’t come along, claiming she had to work the next day, but the handsome older Brazilian man was my host. He wasn’t such a bad dancer as he claimed. Probably he can play soccer, too. I liked having him nearby, opening doors for me, complimenting me, calling me “darling.” Then again, I noticed that he called everyone “darling”—even the hairy male bartender. Still, the attention was nice . . .

It had been so long since I’d been in a bar. Even in Italy I didn’t go to bars, and I hadn’t been out much during the David years, either. I think the last time I’d gone dancing was back when I was married . . . back when I was happily married, come to think of it. Dear God, it had been ages. Out on the dance floor I ran into my friend Stefania, a lively young Italian girl I’d met recently in a meditation class in Ubud, and we danced together, hair flying everywhere, blond and dark, spinning merrily around. Sometime after midnight, the band stopped playing and people mingled.

That’s when I met the guy named Ian. Oh, I really liked this guy. Right away I really liked him. He was very good-looking, in a kind of Sting-meets-Ralph-Fiennes’s-younger-brother sort of way. He was Welsh, so he had that lovely voice. He was articulate, smart, asked questions, spoke to my friend Stefania in the same baby Italian that I speak. It turned out that he was the drummer in this reggae band, that he played bongos. So I made a joke that he was a “bonga-leer,” like those guys in Venice, but with percussion instead of boats, and somehow we hit it off, started laughing and talking.

Felipe came over then—that was the Brazilian’s name, Felipe. He invited us all to go out to this funky local restaurant owned by European expatriates, a wildly permissive place that never closes, he promised, where beer and bullshit are served at all hours. I found myself looking to Ian (did he want to go?) and when he said yes, I said yes, also. So we all went to the restaurant and I sat with Ian and we talked and joked all night, and, oh, I really liked this guy. He was the first man I’d met in a long while who I really liked in that way, as they say. He was a few years older than me, had led a most interesting life with all the good résumé points (liked The Simpsons, traveled all over the world, lived in an Ashram once, mentioned Tolstoy, seemed to be employed, etc.). He’d started his career in the British Army in Northern Ireland as a bomb squad expert, then became an international mine-field detonation guy. Built refugee camps in Bosnia, was now taking a break in Bali to work on music . . . all very alluring stuff.

I could not believe I was still up at 3:30 AM, and not to meditate, either! I was up in the middle of the night and wearing a dress and talking to an attractive man. How terribly radical. At the end of the evening, Ian and I admitted to each other how nice it had been to meet. He asked if I had a phone number and I told him I didn’t, but that I did have e-mail, and he said, “Yeah, but e-mail just feels so . . . ech . . .” So at the end of the night we didn’t exchange anything but a hug. He said, “We’ll see each other again when they”—pointing to the gods up in the sky—“say so.”

Just before dawn, Felipe the handsome older Brazilian man offered me a ride home. As we rode up the twisting back roads he said, “Darling, you’ve been talking to the biggest bullshitter in Ubud all night long.”

My heart sank.

“Is Ian really a bullshitter?” I asked. “Tell me the truth now and save me the trouble later.”

“Ian?” said Felipe. He laughed. “No, darling! Ian is a serious guy. He’s a good man. I meant myself. I’m the biggest bullshitter in Ubud.”

We rode along in silence for a while.

“And I’m just teasing, anyway,” he added.

Then another long silence and he asked, “You like Ian, don’t you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. My head wasn’t clear. I’d been drinking too many Brazilian cocktails. “He’s attractive, intelligent. It’s been a long time since I thought about liking anybody.”

“You’re going to have a wonderful few months here in Bali. You wait and see.”

“But I don’t know how much more socializing I can do, Felipe. I only have the one dress. People will start to notice that I’m wearing the same thing all the time.”

“You’re young and beautiful, darling. You only need the one dress.”

90

Am I young and beautiful?

I thought I was old and divorced.

I can barely sleep at all this night, so unaccustomed to these odd hours, the dance music still thrumming in my head, my hair smelling of cigarettes, my stomach protesting the alcohol. I doze a bit, then wake as the sun comes up, just as I am accustomed to. Only this morning I am not rested and I am not at peace and I’m in no condition whatsoever for meditation. Why am I so agitated? I had a nice night, didn’t I? I got to meet some interesting people, got to dress up and dance around, had flirted with some men . . .

MEN.

The agitation gets more jagged at the thought of that word, turning into a minor panic assailment. I don’t know how to do this anymore. I used to be the biggest and boldest and most shameless of flirts when I was in my teens and twenties. I seem to remember that it was once fun, meeting some guy, spooling him in toward me, spooning out the veiled invitations and the provocations, casting all caution aside and letting the consequences spill how they will.

But now I am feeling only panic and uncertainty. I start blowing the whole evening up into something much huger than it was, imagining myself getting involved with this Welsh guy who hadn’t even given me an e-mail address. I can see all the way into our future already, including the arguments over his smoking habit. I wonder if giving myself to a man again will ruin my journey/writing/life, etc. On the other hand—some romance would be nice. It’s been a long, dry time. (I remember Richard from Texas advising me at one point, vis-à-vis my love life, “You need a droughtbreaker, baby. Gotta go find yo’self a rainmaker.”) Then I imagine Ian zooming over on his motorbike with his handsome bomb-squad torso to make love to me in my garden, and how nice that would be. This not-entirely-unpleasant thought somehow screeches me, however, into a horrible skid about how I just don’t want to go through any heartache again. Then I start to miss David more than I have in months, thinking, Maybe I should call him and see if he wants to try getting together again . . . (Then I receive a very accurate channeling of my old friend Richard, saying, Oh, that’s genius, Groceries—didja get a lobotomy last night, in addition to gettin’ a little tipsy?) It’s never a far leap from ruminating about David to obsessing about the circumstances of my divorce, and so soon I start brooding (just like old times) about my ex-husband, my divorce . . .

I thought we were done with this topic, Groceries.

And then I start thinking about Felipe, for some reason—that handsome older Brazilian man. He’s nice. Felipe. He says I am young and beautiful and that I will have a wonderful time here time in Bali. He’s right, right? I should relax and have some fun, right? But this morning it doesn’t feel fun.

I don’t know how to do this anymore.

91

“What is this life? Do you understand? I don’t.”

This was Wayan talking.

I was back in her restaurant, eating her delicious and nutritious multivitamin lunch special, hoping it would help ease my hangover and my anxiety. Armenia the Brazilian woman was there, too, looking, as always, like she’d just stopped by the beauty parlor on her way home from a weekend at a spa. Little Tutti was sitting on the floor, drawing pictures of houses, as usual.

Wayan had just learned that the lease on her shop was going to come up for renewal at the end of August—only three months from now—and that her rent would be raised. She would probably have to move again because she couldn’t afford to stay here. Except that she only had about fifty dollars in the bank, and no idea where to go. Moving would take Tutti out of school again. They needed a home—a real home. This is no way for a Balinese person to live.

“Why does suffering never end?” Wayan asked. She wasn’t crying, merely posing a simple, unanswerable and weary question. “Why must everything be repeat and repeat, never finish, never resting? You work so hard one day, but the next day, you must only work again. You eat, but the next day, you are already hungry. You find love, then love go away. You are born with nothing—no watch, no T-shirt. You work hard, then you die with nothing—no watch, no T-shirt. You are young, then you are old. No matter how hard you work, you cannot stop getting old.”

“Not Armenia,” I joked. “She doesn’t get old, apparently.”

Wayan said, “But this is because Armenia is Brazilian,” catching on now to how the world works. We all laughed, but it was a fair breed of gallows humor, because there’s nothing funny about Wayan’s situation in the world right now. Here are the facts: Single mom, precocious child, hand-to-mouth business, imminent poverty, virtual homelessness. Where will she go? Can’t live with the ex-husband’s family, obviously. Wayan’s own family are rice farmers way out in the countryside and poor. If she goes and lives with them, it’s the end of her business as a healer in town because her patients won’t be able to reach her and you can pretty much forget about Tutti ever getting enough education to go someday to Animal Doctor College.

Other factors have emerged over time. Those two shy girls I noticed on the first day, hiding in the back of the kitchen? It turns out that these are a pair of orphans Wayan has adopted. They are both named Ketut (just to further confuse this book) and we call them Big Ketut and Little Ketut. Wayan found the Ketuts starving and begging in the marketplace a few months ago. They were abandoned there by a Dickensian character of a woman—possibly a relative— who acts as a sort of begging child pimp, depositing parentless children in various marketplaces across Bali to beg for money, then picking the kids up every night in a van, collecting their proceeds and giving them a shack somewhere in which to sleep. When Wayan first found Big and Little Ketut, they hadn’t eaten for days, had lice and parasites, the works. She thinks the younger one is maybe ten and the older one might be thirteen, but they don’t know their own ages or even their last names. (Little Ketut knows only that she was born the same year as “the big pig” in her village; this hasn’t helped the rest of us establish a timeline.) Wayan has taken them in and cares for them as lovingly as she does her own Tutti. She and the three children all sleep on the same mattress in the one bedroom behind the shop.

How a Balinese single mother facing eviction found it in her heart to take in two extra homeless children is something that reaches far beyond any understanding I’ve ever had about the meaning of compassion.

I want to help them.

That was it. This is what that trembling feeling was, which I’d experienced so profoundly after meeting Wayan for the first time. I wanted to help this single mother with her daughter and her extra orphans. I wanted to valet-park them into a better life. It’s just that I hadn’t been able to figure out how to do it. But today as Wayan and Armenia and I were eating our lunch and weaving our typical conversation of empathy and chops-busting, I looked over at little Tutti and noticed that she was doing something rather odd. She was walking around the shop with a single, small square of pretty cobalt blue ceramic tile resting on the palms of her upturned hands, singing in a chanting sort of way. I watched her for a while, just to see what she was up to. Tutti played with that tile for a long time, tossing it in the air, whispering to it, singing to it, then pushing it along the floor like it was a Matchbox car. Finally she sat upon it in a quiet corner, eyes closed, singing to herself, buried in some mystical, invisible compartment of space all her own.

I asked Wayan what this was all about. She said that Tutti had found the tile outside the construction site of a fancy hotel project down the road and had pocketed it. Ever since Tutti had found the tile, she kept saying to her mother, “Maybe if we have a house someday, it can have a pretty blue floor, like this.” Now, according to Wayan, Tutti often likes to sit perched on that one tiny blue square for hours on end, shutting her eyes and pretending she’s inside her own house.

What can I say? When I heard that story, and looked at that child deep in meditation upon her small blue tile, I was like: OK, that does it.

And I excused myself from the shop to go take care of this intolerable state of affairs once and for all.

92

Wayan once told me that sometimes when she’s healing her patients she becomes an open pipeline for God’s love, and she ceases even thinking about what needs to be done next. The intellect stops, the intuition rises and all she has to do is permit her God-ness to flow through her. She says, “It feels like a wind comes and takes my hands.”

This same wind, maybe, is the thing that blew me out of Wayan’s shop that day, that pushed me out of my hung-over anxiety about whether I was ready to start dating again, and guided me over to Ubud’s local Internet café, where I sat and wrote—in one effortless draft—a fund-raising e-mail to all my friends and family across the world.

I told everyone that my birthday was coming up in July and that soon I would be turning thirty-five. I told them that there was nothing in this world that I needed or wanted, and that I had never been happier in my life. I told them that, if I were home in New York, I would be planning a big stupid birthday party and I would make them all come to this party, and they would have to buy me gifts and bottles of wine and the whole celebration would get ridiculously expensive. Therefore, I explained, a cheaper and more lovely way to help celebrate this birthday would be if my friends and family would care to make a donation to help a woman named Wayan Nuriyasih buy a house in Indonesia for herself and her children.

Then I told the whole story of Wayan and Tutti and the orphans and their situation. I promised that whatever money was donated, I would match the donation from my own savings. Of course I was aware, I explained, that this is a world full of untold suffering and war and that everyone is in need right now, but what are we to do? This little group of people in Bali had become my family, and we must take care of our families wherever we find them. As I wrapped up the mass e-mail, I remembered something my friend Susan had said to me before I left on this world journey nine months ago. She was afraid I would never come home again. She said, “I know how you are, Liz. You’re going to meet somebody and fall in love and end up buying a house in Bali.”

A regular Nostradamus, that Susan.

By the next morning, when I checked my e-mail, $700 had already been pledged. The next day, donations passed what I could afford to match.

I won’t go through the entire drama of the week, or try to explain what it feels like to open e-mails every day from all over the world that all say, “Count me in!” Everyone gave. People whom I personally knew to be broke or in debt gave, without hesitation. One of the first responses I got was from a friend of my hairdresser’s girlfriend, who’d been forwarded the e-mail and wanted to donate $15. My most wise-ass friend John had to make a typically sarcastic comment, of course, about how long and sappy and emotional my letter had been (“Listen—next time you feel the need to cry about spilled milk, make sure it’s condensed, will ya?”), but then he donated money anyway. My friend Annie’s new boyfriend (a Wall Street banker whom I’d never even met) offered to double the final sum of whatever was raised. Then that e-mail started whipping around the world, so that I began to receive donations from perfect strangers. It was a global smothering of generosity. Let’s just wrap up this episode by saying that—a mere seven days after the original plea went out over the wires—my friends and my family and a bunch of strangers all over the world helped me come up with almost $18,000 to buy Wayan Nuriyasih a home of her own.

I knew that it was Tutti who had manifested this miracle, through the potency of her prayers, willing that little blue tile of hers to soften and expand around her and to grow—like one of Jack’s magic beans—into an actual home that would take care of herself and her mother and a pair of orphans forever.

One last thing. I’m embarrassed to admit that it was my friend Bob, not me, who noticed the obvious fact that the word “Tutti” in Italian means “Everybody.” How had I not realized that earlier? After all those months in Rome! I just didn’t see the connection. So it was Bob over in Utah who had to point it out to me. He did so in an e-mail last week, saying, along with his pledge to donate toward the new house, “So that’s the final lesson, isn’t it? When you set out in the world to help yourself, you inevitably end up helping . . . Tutti.”

93

I don’t want to tell Wayan about it, not until all the money has been raised. It’s hard to keep a big secret like this, especially when she’s in such constant worry about her future, but I don’t want to get her hopes up until it is official. So for the whole week, I keep my mouth shut about my plans, and I keep myself occupied having dinner almost every night with Felipe the Brazilian, who doesn’t seem to mind that I own only one nice dress.

I guess I have a crush on him. After a few dinners, I’m fairly certain I have a crush on him. He’s more than he appears, this self-proclaimed “bullshit master” who knows everyone in Ubud and is always the center of the party. I asked Armenia about him. They’ve been friends for a while. I said, “That Felipe—he’s got more depth than the others, doesn’t he? There’s something more to him, isn’t there?” She said, “Oh, yes. He’s a good, kind man. But he’s been through a hard divorce. I think he’s come to Bali to recover.”

Ah—now this is a subject I know nothing about.

But he’s fifty-two years old. This is interesting. Have I truly reached the age where a fifty-two-year-old man is within my realm of dating consideration? I like him, though. He’s got silver hair and he’s balding in an attractively Picassoesque manner. His eyes are warm and brown. He has a gentle face and he smells wonderful. And he is an actual grown man. The adult male of the species—a bit of a novelty in my experience.

He’s been living in Bali for about five years now, working with Balinese silversmiths to make jewelry from Brazilian gemstones for export to America. I like the fact that he was faithfully married for almost twenty years before his marriage deteriorated for its own multicomplicated plethora of reasons. I like the fact that he has already raised children, and that he raised them well, and that they love him. I like that he was the parent who stayed home and tended to his children when they were little, while his Australian wife pursued her career. (A good feminist husband, he says, “I wanted to be on the correct side of social history.”) I like his natural Brazilian over-the-top displays of affection. (When his Australian son was fourteen years old, the boy finally had to say, “Dad, now that I’m fourteen, maybe you shouldn’t kiss me on the mouth anymore when you drop me off at school.”) I like the fact that Felipe speaks four, maybe more, languages fluently. (He keeps claiming he doesn’t speak Indonesian, but I hear him talking it all day long.) I like that he’s traveled through over fifty countries in his life, and that he sees the world as a small and easily managed place. I like the way he listens to me, leaning in, interrupting me only when I interrupt myself to ask if I am boring him, to which he always responds, “I have all the time in the world for you, my lovely little darling.” I like being called “my lovely little darling.” (Even if the waitress gets it, too.)

He said to me the other night, “Why don’t you take a lover while you’re in Bali, Liz?”

To his credit, he didn’t just mean himself, though I believe he might be willing to take on the job. He assured me that Ian—that good-looking Welsh guy—would be a fine match for me, but there are other candidates, too. There’s a chef from New York City, “a great, big, muscular, confident fellow,” whom he thinks I might like. Really there are all sorts of men here, he said, all of them floating through Ubud, expatriates from everywhere, hiding out in this shifting community of the planet’s “homeless and assetless,” many of whom would be happy to see to it, “my lovely darling, that you have a wonderful summer here.”

“I don’t think I’m ready for it,” I told him. “I don’t feel like going through all the effort of romance again, you know? I don’t feel like having to shave my legs every day or having to show my body to a new lover. And I don’t want to have to tell my life story all over again, or worry about birth control. Anyway, I’m not even sure I know how to do it anymore. I feel like I was more confident about sex and romance when I was sixteen than I am now.”

“Of course you were,” Felipe said. “You were young and stupid then. Only the young and stupid are confident about sex and romance. Do you think any of us know what we’re doing? Do you think there’s any way humans can love each other without complication? You should see how it happens in Bali, darling. All these Western men come here after they’ve made a mess of their lives back home, and they decide they’ve had it with Western women, and they go marry some tiny, sweet, obedient little Balinese teenage girl. I know what they’re thinking. They think this pretty little girl will make them happy, make their lives easy. But whenever I see it happen, I always want to say the same thing. Good luck. Because you still have a woman in front of you, my friend. And you are still a man. It’s still two human beings trying to get along, so it’s going to become complicated. And love is always complicated. But still humans must try to love each other, darling. We must get our hearts broken sometimes. This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.”

I said, “My heart was broken so badly last time that it still hurts. Isn’t that crazy? To still have a broken heart almost two years after a love story ends?”

“Darling, I’m southern Brazilian. I can keep a broken heart going for ten years over a woman I never even kissed.”

We talk about our marriages, our divorces. Not in a petty way, but just to commiserate. We compare notes about the bottomless depths of post-divorce depression. We drink wine and eat well together and we tell each other the nicest stories we can remember about former spouses, just to take the sting out of all that conversation about loss.

He says, “Do you want to do something with me this weekend?” and I find myself saying yes, that would be nice. Because it would be nice.

Twice now, dropping me off in front of my house and saying goodnight, Felipe has reached across the car to give me a goodnight kiss, and twice now I’ve done the same thing—allowing myself to be pulled into him, but then ducking my head at the last moment and tucking my cheek up against his chest. There, I let him hold me for a while. Longer than is necessarily merely friendly. I can feel him press his face into my hair, as my face presses somewhere against his sternum. I can smell his soft linen shirt. I really like the way he smells. He has muscular arms, a nice wide chest. He was once a champion gymnast back in Brazil. Of course that was in 1969, which was the year I was born, but still. His body feels strong.

My ducking my head like this whenever he reaches for me is a kind of hiding—I’m avoiding a simple goodnight kiss. But it’s also a kind of not-hiding, too. By letting him hold me at all during those long quiet moments at the end of the evening, I’m letting myself be held.

Which hasn’t happened for a long time.

94

I asked Ketut, my old medicine man, “What do you know about romance?”

He said, “What is this, romance?”

“Never mind.”

“No—what it is? What this word means?”

“Romance.” I defined. “Women and men in love. Or sometimes men and men in love, or women and women in love. Kissing and sex and marriage—all that stuff.”

“I not make sex with too many people in my life, Liss. Only with my wife.”

“You’re right—that’s not too many people. But do you mean your first wife or your second wife?”

“I only have one wife, Liss. She dead now.”

“What about Nyomo?”

“Nyomo not really my wife, Liss. She the wife of my brother.” Seeing my confused expression, he added, “This typical Bali,” and explained. Ketut’s older brother, who is a rice farmer, lives next door to Ketut and is married to Nyomo. They had three children together. Ketut and his wife, on the other hand, were unable to have any children at all, so they adopted one of Ketut’s brother’s sons in order to have an heir. When Ketut’s wife died, Nyomo began living in both family compounds, splitting her time between the two households, taking care of both her husband and his brother, and tending to the two families of her children. She is in every way a wife to Ketut in the Balinese manner (cooking, cleaning, taking care of household religious ceremonies and rituals) except that they don’t have sex together.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Too OLD!” he said. Then he called Nyomo over to relay the question to her, to let her know that the American lady wants to know why they don’t have sex with each other. Nyomo about died laughing at the very thought of it. She came over and punched me in the arm, hard.

“I only had one wife,” Ketut went on. “And now she dead.”

“Do you miss her?”

A sad smile. “It was her time to die. Now I tell you how I find my wife. When I am twenty-seven years, I meet a girl and I love her.”

“What year was that?” I asked, desperate as always to figure out how old he is.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe 1920?”

(Which would make him about a hundred and twelve by now. I think we’re getting closer to solving this . . . )

“I love this girl, Liss. Very beautiful. But not good character, this girl. She only want money. She chase other boy. She never tell truth. I think she had a secret mind inside her other mind, nobody can see inside there. She stop to loving me, go away with other boy. I am very sad. Broken in my heart. I pray and pray to my four spirit brothers, ask why she not anymore love me? Then one of my spirit brothers, he tell me the truth. He say, ‘This is not your true match. Be patient.’ So I be patient and then I find my wife. Beautiful woman, good woman. Always sweet for me. Never once we argue, have always harmony in household, always she smiling. Even when no money at home, always she smiling and saying how happy she is to see me. When she die, I very sad in my mind.”

“Did you cry?”

“Only little bit, in my eyes. But I do meditation, to clean the body from pain. I meditate for her soul. Very sad, but happy, too. I visit her in meditation every day, even to kissing her. She the only woman I ever make sex with. So I do not know . . . what is new word, from today?”

“Romance?”

“Yes, romance. I do not know romance, Liss.”

“So it’s not really your area of expertise, eh?”

“What is this, expertise? What this word means?”

95

I finally sat down with Wayan and told her about the money I’d raised for her house. I explained about my birthday wish, showed her the list of all my friends’ names, and then told her the final amount which had been raised: Eighteen thousand American dollars. At first she was shocked to such an extent that her face looked like a mask of grief. It is strange and true that sometimes intense emotion can cause us to respond to cataclysmic news in exactly the opposite manner logic might dictate. This is the absolute value of human emotion—joyful events can sometimes register on the Richter scale as pure trauma; dreadful grief makes us sometimes burst out laughing. This news I had just handed to Wayan was too much for her to take in, she almost received it as a cause for sorrow, so I sat there with her for a few hours, telling her the story repeatedly and showing her the numbers again and again, until the reality began to sink in.

Her first really articulate response (I mean, even before she burst into tears because she realized she was going to be able to have a garden) was to urgently say, “Please, Liz, you must explain to everyone who helped raise money that this is not Wayan’s house. This is the house of everyone who helped Wayan. If any of these people comes to Bali, they must never stay in a hotel, OK? You tell them they come and stay at my house, OK? Promise to tell them that? We call it Group House . . . the House for Everybody . . .”

Then she realized about the garden, and started to cry.

Slowly, though, happier realizations come to her. It was like she was a pocketbook shaken upside down and emotions were spilling all over the place. If she had a home, she could have a small library, for all her medical books! And a pharmacy for her traditional remedies! And a proper restaurant with real chairs and tables (because she had to sell all her old good chairs and tables to pay the divorce lawyer). If she had a home, she could finally be listed in Lonely Planet, who keep wanting to mention her services, but never can do so, because she never has a permanent address that they can print. If she had a home, Tutti could have a birthday party someday!

Then she got very sober and serious again. “How can I thank you, Liz? I would give you anything. If I had husband I loved, and you needed a man, I would give you my husband.”

“Keep your husband, Wayan. Just make sure Tutti goes to university.”

“What would I do if you never came here?”

But I was always coming here. I thought about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen.

“Where are you going to build your new house, Wayan?” I asked.

Like a Little Leaguer who’s had his eye on a certain baseball glove in the shop window for ages, or a romantic girl who’s been designing her wedding dress since she was thirteen, it turned out that Wayan already knew exactly the piece of land she would like to buy. It was in the center of a nearby village, was connected to municipal water and electricity, had a good school nearby for Tutti, was nicely located in a central place where her patients and customers could find her on foot. Her brothers could help her build the home, she said. She’d all but picked out the paint chips for the master bedroom already.

So we went together to visit a nice French expatriate financial adviser and real estate guy, who was kind enough to suggest the best way to transfer the money. His suggestion was that I keep it easy and just wire the money directly from my bank account into Wayan’s bank account and let her buy whatever land or home she wants, so I don’t have to mess around with owning property in Indonesia. As long as I didn’t wire over amounts bigger than $10,000 at a time, the IRS and CIA wouldn’t suspect me of laundering drug money. Then we went to Wayan’s little bank, and talked to the manager about how to set up a wire transfer. In neat conclusion, the bank manager said, “So, Wayan. When this wire transfer goes through, in just a few days, you should have about 180 million rupiah in your bank account.”

Wayan and I looked at each other and sparked off into a ridiculous riot of laughter. Such an enormous sum! We kept trying to pull ourselves together, since we were in some fancy banker’s office, but we couldn’t stop laughing. We stumbled out of there like drunks, holding on to each other to not fall over.

She said, “Never have I seen a miracle happen so fast! All this time, I was begging God to please help Wayan. And God was begging Liz to please help Wayan, too.”

I added, “And Liz was begging her friends to please help Wayan, too!”

We returned to the shop, found Tutti just home from school. Wayan dropped to her knees, grabbed her girl, and said, “A house! A house! We have a house!” Tutti executed a fabulous fake faint, swooning cartoonishly right to the floor.

While we were all laughing, I noticed the two orphans watching this scene from the background of the kitchen, and I could see them looking at me with something in their faces that resembled . . . fear. As Wayan and Tutti galloped around in joy, I wondered what the orphans were thinking. What were they so afraid of? Being left behind, maybe? Or was I now a scary person to them because I’d produced so much money out of nowhere? (Such an unthinkable amount of money that maybe it’s like black magic?) Or maybe when you’ve had such a fragile life as these kids, any change is a terror.

When there was a lull in the celebration I asked Wayan, just to be sure: “What about Big Ketut and Little Ketut? Is this good news for them, too?”

Wayan looked over at the girls in the kitchen and must have seen the same uneasiness I had seen, because she floated over to them and herded them into her arms and whispered some reassuring words into the crowns of their heads. They seemed to relax into her. Then the phone rang, and Wayan tried to pull away from the orphans to answer it, but the skinny arms of the two Ketuts clung on to their unofficial mother relentlessly, and they buried their heads in her belly and armpits, and even after the longest time they refused—with a fierceness I’d never seen in them before—to let her go.

So I answered the phone, instead.

“Balinese Traditional Healing,” I said. “Stop by today for our giant close-out moving sale!”

96

I went out with Brazilian Felipe again, twice over the weekend. On Saturday I brought him to meet Wayan and the kids, and Tutti made drawings of houses for him while Wayan winked suggestively behind his back and mouthed, “New boyfriend?” and I kept shaking my head, “No, no, no.” (Though I’ll tell you what—I’m not thinking about that cute Welsh guy anymore.) I also brought Felipe to meet Ketut, my medicine man, and Ketut read his palm and pronounced my friend, no fewer than seven times (while fixing me with a penetrating stare), to be “a good man, a very good man, a very, very good man. Not a bad man, Liss—a good man.”

Then on Sunday, Felipe asked me if I’d like to spend a day at the beach. It occurred to me that I’d been living here in Bali for two months already and had not yet seen the beach, which now seemed like sheer idiocy, so I said yes. He picked me up at my house in his jeep and we drove an hour to this hidden little beach in Pedangbai where hardly any tourists ever go. This place that he took me to, it was as good an imitation of paradise as anything I’d ever seen, with blue water and white sand and the shade of palm trees. We talked all day, interrupting our talking only to swim and nap and read, sometimes reading aloud to each other. These Balinese women in a shack behind the beach grilled us freshly caught fish, and we bought cold beers and chilled fruit. Dallying in the waves, we told each other whatever was left of the life story details which we hadn’t yet covered in the past few weeks of evenings spent out together in the quietest restaurants in Ubud, talking over bottles and bottles of wine.

He liked my body, he told me, after the initial viewing at the beach. He told me that Brazilians have a term for exactly my kind of body (of course they do), which is magra-falsa, translating as “fake thin,” meaning that the woman looks slender enough from a distance, but when you get up close, you can see that she’s actually quite round and fleshy, which Brazilians consider a good thing. God bless Brazilians. As we lay out on our towels talking, he would reach over sometimes and brush sand off my nose, or push a mutinying hair out of my face. We talked for about ten solid hours. Then it was dark, so we packed up our things and went for a walk through the not-very-well-lit dirt road main street of this old Balinese fishing village, linked comfortably arm-in-arm under the stars. That’s when Felipe from Brazil asked me in the most natural and relaxed of ways (almost as if he were wondering if we should get a bite to eat), “Should we have an affair together, Liz? What do you think?”

I liked everything about the way this was happening. Not with an action—not with an attempted kiss or a daring move—but with a question. And the correct question, too. I remembered something my therapist had said to me over a year ago before I’d left on this journey. I’d told her that I thought I wanted to remain celibate for this whole year of traveling, but worried, “What if I meet someone I really like? What should I do? Should I get together with him or not? Should I maintain my autonomy? Or treat myself to a romance?” My therapist replied with an indulgent smile, “You know, Liz—all this can be discussed at the time the issue actually arises, with the person in question.”

So here it all was—the time, the place, the issue and the person in question. We proceeded to have a discussion about the idea, which came out easily, during our friendly, linked arm-in-arm walk by the ocean. I said, “I would probably say yes, Felipe, under normal circumstances. Whatever normal circumstances are . . .”

We both laughed. But then I showed him my hesitation. Which was this—that as much as I might enjoy to have my body and heart folded and unfolded for a while in the expert hands of an expat lover, something else inside me has put in a serious request that I donate the entirety of this year of traveling all to myself. That some vital transformation is happening in my life, and this transformation needs time and room in order to finish its process undisturbed. That basically, I’m the cake that just came out of the oven, and it still needs some more time to cool before it can be frosted. I don’t want to cheat myself out of this precious time. I don’t want to lose control of my life again.

Of course Felipe said that he understood, and that I should do whatever’s best for me, and that he hoped I would forgive him for bringing up the question in the first place. (“It had to be asked, my lovely darling, sooner or later.”) He assured me that, whatever I decided, we would still keep our friendship, since it seemed to be so good for both of us, all this time we spent together.

“Although,” he went on, “you do need to let me make my case now.”

“Fair enough,” I said.

“For one thing, if I understand you correctly, this whole year is about your search for balance between devotion and pleasure. I can see where you’ve been doing a lot of devotional practices, but I’m not sure where the pleasure has come in so far.”

“I ate a lot of pasta in Italy, Felipe.”

“Pasta, Liz? Pasta?”

“Good point.”

“For another thing, I think I know what you’re worried about. Some man is going to come into your life and take everything from you again. I won’t do that to you, darling. I’ve been alone for a long time, too, and I’ve lost a great deal in love, just like you have. I don’t want us to take anything from each other. It’s just that I’ve never enjoyed anyone’s company as much as I enjoy yours, and I’d like to be with you. Don’t worry—I’m not going to chase you back to New York when you leave here in September. And as for all those reasons you told me a few weeks ago that you didn’t want to take a lover . . . Well, think of it this way. I don’t care if you shave your legs every day, I already love your body, you’ve already told me your entire life story and you don’t have to worry about birth control— I’ve had a vasectomy.”

“Felipe,” I said, “that’s the most appealing and romantic offer a man has ever made me.”

And it was. But still I said no.

He drove me home. Parked in front of my house, we shared a few sweet, salty, sandy day-at-the-ocean kisses. It was lovely. Of course it was lovely. But still, and again, I said no.

“That’s fine, darling,” he said. “But come over to my house tomorrow night for dinner, and I’ll make you a steak.”

Then he drove off and I went to bed alone.

I have a history of making decisions very quickly about men. I have always fallen in love fast and without measuring risks. I have a tendency not only to see the best in everyone, but to assume that everyone is emotionally capable of reaching his highest potential. I have fallen in love more times than I care to count with the highest potential of a man, rather than with the man himself, and then I have hung on to the relationship for a long time (sometimes far too long) waiting for the man to ascend to his own greatness. Many times in romance I have been a victim of my own optimism.

I married young and quick, from a place of love and hope, but without a lot of discussion over what the realities of marriage would mean. Nobody advised me on my marriage. I had been raised by my parents to be independent, self-providing, self-deciding. By the time I reached the age of twenty-four, it was assumed by everyone that I could make all my own choices, autonomously. Of course the world was not always like this. If I’d been born during any other century of Western patriarchy, I would’ve been considered the property of my father, until which time he passed me over to my husband, to become marital property. I would’ve had precious little say in the major matters of my own life. At one time in history, if a man had been my suitor, my father might have sat that man down with a long list of questions to establish whether this would be an appropriate match. He would have wanted to know, “How will you provide for my daughter? What is your reputation in this community? How is your health? Where will you take her to live? What are your debts and your assets? What are the strengths of your character?” My father would not have just given me away in marriage to anybody for the mere fact that I was in love with the fellow. But in modern life, when I made the decision to marry, my modern father didn’t become involved at all. He would have no more interfered with that decision than he would have told me how to style my hair.

I have no nostalgia for the patriarchy, please believe me. But what I have come to realize is that, when that patriarchic system was (rightfully) dismantled, it was not necessarily replaced by another form of protection. What I mean is—I never thought to ask a suitor the same challenging questions my father might have asked him, in a different age. I have given myself away in love many times, merely for the sake of love. And I’ve given away the farm sometimes in that process. If I am to truly become an autonomous woman, then I must take over that role of being my own guardian. Famously, Gloria Steinem once advised women that they should strive to become like the men they had always wanted to marry. What I’ve only recently realized is that I not only have to become my own husband, but I need to be my own father, too. And this is why I sent myself to bed that night alone. Because I felt it was too soon for me to be receiving a gentleman suitor.

That said, I woke up at 2:00 AM with a heavy sigh and a physical hunger so deep I didn’t have any idea of how to satisfy it. The lunatic cat who lives in my house was howling mournfully for some reason and I told him, “I know exactly how you feel.” I had to do something about my longing, so I got up, went to the kitchen in my nightgown, peeled a pound of potatoes, boiled them up, sliced them, fried them in butter, salted them generously and ate every bite of them—asking my body the whole while if it would please accept the satisfaction of a pound of fried potatoes in lieu of the fulfillment of lovemaking.

My body replied, only after eating every bite of the food: “No deal, babe.”

So I climbed back into bed, sighed in boredom and commenced to . . .

Well. A word about masturbation, if I may. Sometimes it can be a handy (forgive me) tool, but other times it can be so acutely unsatisfying that it only makes you feel worse in the end. After a year and half of celibacy, after a year and a half of calling my own name in my bed-built-for-one, I was getting a little sick of the sport. Still, tonight, in my restless state—what else could I do? The potatoes hadn’t worked. So I had my way with myself yet again. As usual, my mind paged through its backlog of erotic files, looking for the right fantasy or memory that would help get the job done fastest. But nothing was really working tonight—not the firemen, not the pirates, not that pervy old Bill Clinton standby scene that usually does the trick, not even the Victorian gentlemen crowding around me in their drawing room with their task force of nubile young maids. In the end, the only thing that would satisfy was when I reluctantly admitted into my mind the idea of my good friend from Brazil climbing into this bed with me . . . on me . . .

Then I slept. I woke to a quiet blue sky and an even quieter bedroom. Still feeling unsettled and unbalanced, I took a long stretch of my morning and chanted the entire 182 Sanskrit verses of the Gurugita—the great, purifying fundamental hymn of my Ashram in India. Then I meditated for an hour of bone-tingling stillness until I finally felt it again—that specific, constant, clear-sky, unrelated-to-anything, never-shifting, nameless and changeless perfection of my own happiness. That happiness which is better, truly, than anything I have ever experienced anywhere else on this earth, and that includes salty, buttery kisses and even saltier and more buttery potatoes.

I was so glad I had made the decision to stay alone.

97

So I was kind of surprised the next night when—after he’d made me dinner at his house and after we’d sprawled on his couch for several hours and discussed all manner of subjects and after he’d unexpectedly leaned into me for a moment and sunk his face toward my armpit and pronounced how much he loved the marvelous dirty stink of me—Felipe finally put his palm against my cheek and said, “That’s enough, darling. Come to my bed now,” and I did.

Yes, I did come to his bed with him, in that bedroom with its big open windows looking out over the nighttime and the quiet Balinese rice fields. He parted the sheer, white curtain of mosquito netting that surrounded his bed and guided me in there. Then he helped me out of my dress with the tender competence of a man who had obviously spent many comfortable years getting his children ready for bathtime, and he explained to me his terms—that he wanted absolutely nothing from me whatsoever except permission to adore me for as long as I wanted him to. Were those terms acceptable to me?

Having lost my voice somewhere between the couch and the bed, I only nodded. There was nothing left to say. It had been a long, austere season of solitude. I had done well for myself. But Felipe was right—that was enough.

“OK,” he replied, smiling as he moved some pillows out of our way and rolled my body under his. “Let’s get ourselves organized here.”

Which was actually pretty funny because that moment marked an end to all my efforts at organization.

Later, Felipe would tell me how he had seen me that night. He said that I seemed so young, not in the least bit resembling the self-assured woman he’d come to know in the daylight world. He said I seemed terribly young but also open and excited and relieved to be recognized and so tired of being brave. He said it was obvious I hadn’t been touched in such a long time. He found me teeming with need but also grateful to be allowed to express that need. And while I can’t say that I remember all that, I do take his word for it because he seemed to be paying awfully close attention to me.

What I mostly remember about that night is the billowy white mosquito netting that surrounded us. How it looked to me like a parachute. And how I felt like I was now deploying this parachute to escort me out the side exit of the solid, disciplined airplane which had been flying me during these few years out of A Very Hard Time in My Life. But now my sturdy flying machine had become obsolete right there in midair, so I stepped out of that single-minded single-engine airplane and let this fluttering white parachute swing me down through the strange empty atmosphere between my past and my future, and land me safely on this small, bed-shaped island, inhabited only by this handsome shipwrecked Brazilian sailor, who (having been alone himself for far too long) was so happy and so surprised to see me coming that he suddenly forgot all his English and could only manage to repeat these five words every time he looked at my face: beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful and beautiful.

98

We didn’t sleep at all, of course. And then, it was ridiculous—I had to go. I had to go back to my house stupidly early the next morning because I had a date to meet my friend Yudhi. He and I had long ago planned that this was the very week we were going to leave on a big cross-Balinese road trip together. This was an idea we’d come up with one evening at my house when Yudhi said that, aside from his wife and Manhattan, what he most missed about America was driving—just taking off with a car and some friends and going on an adventure across those great distances, on all those fabulous interstate highways. I told him, “OK, so we’ll go on a road trip here in Bali together, American-style.”

This had struck us both as irresistibly comic—there’s no way you can do an American-style road trip in Bali. There are no great distances, first of all, on an island the size of Delaware. And the “highways” are horrible, made surreally dangerous by the dense, mad prevalence of Bali’s version of the American family minivan—a small motorcycle with five people crowded on it, the father driving with one hand while holding the newborn infant with the other (football-like) while Mom sits sidesaddle behind him in her tight sarong with a basket balanced on her head, encouraging her twin toddlers not to fall off the speeding motorbike, which is probably traveling on the wrong side of the road and has no headlight. Helmets are rarely worn but are frequently—and I never did find out why—carried. Imagine scores of these heavily laden motorcycles, all speeding recklessly, all weaving and dodging across each other like some kind of crazy motorized maypole dance, and you have life on the Balinese highways. I don’t know why every single Balinese person hasn’t been killed already in a road accident.

But Yudhi and I decided to do it anyway, to take off for a week, rent a car and drive all over this tiny island, pretending that we are in America and that both of us are free. The idea charmed me when we came up with it last month, but the timing of it now—as I am lying in bed with Felipe and he’s kissing my fingertips and forearms and shoulders, encouraging me to linger—seems unfortunate. But I have to go. And in a way, I do want to go. Not only to spend a week with my friend Yudhi, but also as a repose after my big night with Felipe, to get my head around the new reality that, as they say in the novels: I have taken a lover.

So Felipe drops me off at my house with one last passionate embrace and I have just enough time to shower and pull myself together when Yudhi arrives with our rental car. He takes one look at me and says, “Dude—what time’d you get home last night?”

I say, “Dude—I didn’t get home last night.”

He says, “Duuuuuuude,” and starts laughing, probably remembering the conversation we’d had only about two weeks earlier wherein I’d seriously posited that I might never, actually, have sex again for the rest of my life, ever. He says, “So you gave in, huh?”

“Yudhi,” I replied, “let me tell you a story. Last summer, right before I left the States, I went to visit my grandparents in upstate New York. My grandfather’s wife—his second wife—is this really nice lady named Gale, in her eighties now. She hauled out this old photo album and showed me pictures from the 1930s, when she was eighteen years old and went on a trip to Europe for a year with her two best friends and a guardian. She’s flipping through these pages, showing me these amazing old photographs of Italy, and suddenly we get to this picture of this really cute young Italian guy, in Venice. I go, ‘Gale—who’s the hottie?’ She goes, ‘That’s the son of the people who owned the hotel where we stayed in Venice. He was my boyfriend.’ I go, ‘Your boyfriend ?’ And my grandfather’s sweet wife looks at me all sly and her eyes get all sexy like Bette Davis, and she goes, ‘I was tired of looking at churches, Liz.’”

Yudhi gives me a high five. “Rock on, dude.”

We set off for our fake American road trip across Bali, me and this cool young Indonesian musical genius in exile, the back of our car filled with guitars and beer and the Balinese equivalent of American road trip food—fried rice crackers and dreadfully flavored indigenous candies. The details of our journey are a bit blurry to me now, smudged over my distracting thoughts of Felipe and by the weird haziness that always accompanies a road trip in any country of the world. What I do remember is that Yudhi and I speak American the entire time—a language I hadn’t spoken in so long. I’d been speaking English a lot during this year, of course, but not American, and definitely not the sort of hip-hop American Yudhi likes. So we just indulge it, turning ourselves into MTV-watching adolescents as we drive along, razzing each other like teenagers in Hoboken, calling each other dude and man and sometimes—with great tenderness—homo. A lot of our dialogue revolves around affectionate insults to each other’s mothers.

“Dude, what’d you do with the map?”

“Why don’t you ask your mother what I did with the map?”

“I would, man, but she’s too fat.”

And so forth.

We don’t even penetrate the interior of Bali; we just drive along the coast, and it’s beaches, beaches, beaches for a whole week. Sometimes we take a little fishing boat out to an island, see what’s going on out there. There are so many kinds of beaches in Bali. We hang out one day along the long southern California–style groovy white sand surf of Kuta, then head up to the sinister black rocky beauty of the west coast, then we pass that invisible Balinese dividing line over which regular tourists never seem to go, up to the wild beaches of the north coast where only the surfers dare to tread (and only the crazy ones, at that). We sit on the beach and watch the dangerous waves, watch the lean brown and white Indonesian and Western surf-cats slice across the water like zippers ripping open the backs of the ocean’s blue party dress. We watch the surfers wipe out with bone-breaking hubris against the coral and rocks, only to go back out again to surf another wave, and we gasp and say, “Dude, that is totally MESSED UP.”

Just as intended, we forget for long hours (purely for Yudhi’s benefit) that we are in Indonesia at all as we tool around in this rented car, eating junk food and singing American songs, having pizza everywhere we can find it. When we are overcome by evidence of the Bali-ness of our surroundings, we try to ignore it and pretend we’re back in America. I’ll ask, “What’s the best route to get past this volcano?” and Yudhi will say, “I think we should take I-95,” and I’ll counter, “But that’ll take us right through Boston in the middle of rush-hour traffic . . .” It’s just a game, but it sort of works.

Sometimes we discover calm stretches of blue ocean and we swim all day, permitting each other to start drinking beer at 10:00 AM (“Dude—it’s medicinal”). We make friends with everyone we encounter. Yudhi is the kind of guy who—when he’s walking down the beach and he sees a man building a boat—will stop and say, “Wow! Are you building a boat?” And his curiosity is so perfectly winning that the next thing you know we’ve been invited to come live with the boat-builder’s family for a year.

Weird things happen in the evenings. We stumble on mysterious temple rituals in the middle of nowhere, let ourselves get hypnotized by the chorus of voices, drums and gamelan. We find one small seaside town where all the locals have gathered in a darkened street for a birthday ceremony; Yudhi and I are both pulled out of the crowd (honored strangers) and invited to dance with the prettiest girl in the village. (She’s enveloped in gold and jewels and incense and Egyptian-looking makeup; she’s probably thirteen years old but moves her hips with the soft, sensual faith of a creature who knows she could seduce any god she wanted.) The next day we find a strange family restaurant in the same village where the Balinese proprietor announces that he’s a great chef of Thai food, which he decidedly is not, but we spend the whole day there anyhow, drinking icy Cokes and eating greasy pad thai and playing Milton Bradley board games with the owner’s elegantly effeminate teenage son. (It occurs to us only later that this pretty teenage boy could well have been the beautiful female dancer from the night before; the Balinese are masters of ritual transvestism.)

Every day I call Felipe from whatever outback phone I can find, and he asks, “How many more sleeps until you come back to me?” He tells me, “I’m enjoying falling in love with you, darling. It feels so natural, like it’s something I experience every second week, but actually I haven’t felt this way about anyone in nearly thirty years.”

Not there yet, not yet to that place of a free fall into love, I make hesitant noises, little reminders that I am leaving in a few months. Felipe is unconcerned. He says, “Maybe this is just some stupid romantic South American idea, but I need you to understand— darling, for you, I am even willing to suffer. Whatever pain happens to us in the future, I accept it already, just for the pleasure of being with you now. Let’s enjoy this time. It’s marvelous.”

I tell him, “You know—it’s funny, but I’d been seriously thinking before I met you that I might be alone and celibate forever. I was thinking maybe I would live the life of a spiritual contemplative.”

He says, “Contemplate this, darling . . . ,” and then proceeds to detail with careful specificity the first, second, third, fourth and fifth things he is planning to do with my body when he gets me alone in his bed again. I wobble away from the phone call a little woozy in the knees, amused and bamboozled by all this new passion.

The last day of our road trip, Yudhi and I lounge on a beach someplace for hours, and—as often happens with us—we start talking about New York City again, how great it is, how much we love it. Yudhi misses the city, he says, almost as much as he misses his wife—as if New York is a person, a relative, whom he has lost since he got deported. As we’re talking, Yudhi brushes off a nice clean patch of white sand between our towels and draws a map of Manhattan. He says, “Let’s try to fill in everything we can remember about the city.” We use our fingertips to draw in all the avenues, the major cross-streets, the mess that Broadway makes as it leans crookedly across the island, the rivers, the Village, Central Park. We choose a thin, pretty seashell to stand for the Empire State Building, and another shell is the Chrysler Building. Out of respect, we take two sticks and put the Twin Towers back at the base of the island, back where they belong.

We use this sandy map to show each other our favorite spots in New York. This is where Yudhi bought the sunglasses he’s wearing right now; this is where I bought the sandals I’m wearing. This is where I first had dinner with my ex-husband; this is where Yudhi met his wife. This is the best Vietnamese food in the city, this is the best bagel, this is the best noodle shop (“No way, homo—this is the best noodle shop”). I sketch out my old Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood and Yudhi says, “I know a good diner up there.”

“Tick-Tock, Cheyenne or Starlight?” I ask.

“Tick-Tock, dude.”

“Ever try the egg creams at Tick-Tock?”

He moans, “Oh my God, I know . . .”

I feel his longing for New York so deeply that for a moment I mistake it for my own. His homesickness infects me so completely that I forget for an instant that I am actually free to go back to Manhattan someday, though he is not. He fiddles a bit with the two sticks of the Twin Towers, anchors them more solidly in the sand, then looks out at the hushed, blue ocean and says, “I know it’s beautiful here . . . but do you think I’ll ever see America again?”

What can I tell him?

We slump into silence. Then he pops out of his mouth the yucky Indonesian hard candy he’s been sucking on for the last hour and says, “Dude, this candy tastes like ass. Where’d you get it?”

“From your mother, dude,” I say. “From your mother.”

99

When we return to Ubud, I go straight back to Felipe’s house and don’t leave his bedroom for approximately another month. This is only the faintest of exaggerations. I have never been loved and adored like this before by anyone, never with such pleasure and single-minded concentration. Never have I been so unpeeled, revealed, unfurled and hurled through the event of lovemaking.

One thing I do know about intimacy is that there are certain natural laws which govern the sexual experience of two people, and that these laws cannot be budged any more than gravity can be negotiated with. To feel physically comfortable with someone else’s body is not a decision you can make. It has very little to do with how two people think or act or talk or even look. The mysterious magnet is either there, buried somewhere deep behind the sternum, or it is not. When it isn’t there (as I have learned in the past, with heartbreaking clarity) you can no more force it to exist than a surgeon can force a patient’s body to accept a kidney from the wrong donor. My friend Annie says it all comes down to one simple question: “Do you want your belly pressed against this person’s belly forever—or not?”

Felipe and I, as we discover to our delight, are a perfectly matched, genetically engineered belly-to-belly success story. There are no parts of our bodies which are in any way allergic to any parts of the other’s body. Nothing is dangerous, nothing is difficult, nothing is refused. Everything in our sensual universe is—simply and thoroughly—complemented. And, also . . . complimented.

“Look at you,” Felipe says, taking me to the mirror after we’ve made love again, showing me my nude body and my hair that looks like I just came through a NASA space-training centrifuge. He says, “Look how beautiful you are . . . every line of you is a curve . . . you look like sand dunes . . .”

(Indeed, I do not think my body has looked or felt this relaxed in its life, not since I was maybe six months old and my mother took snapshots of me all blissed-out on a towel on the kitchen counter after a nice bath in the kitchen sink.)

And then he leads me back to the bed, saying, in Portuguese, “Vem, gostosa.”

Come here, my delicious one.

Felipe is also the endearment master. In bed he slips into adoring me in Portuguese, so I have graduated from being his “lovely little darling” to being his queridinha. (Literal translation: “lovely little darling.”) I’ve been too lazy here in Bali to try to learn Indonesian or Balinese, but suddenly Portuguese is coming easily to me. Of course I’m only learning the pillow talk, but that’s a fine use of Portuguese. He says, “Darling, you’re going to get sick of it. You’re going to get bored of how much I touch you, and how many times a day I tell you how beautiful you are.”

Try me, mister.

I’m losing days here, disappearing under his sheets, under his hands. I like the feeling of not knowing what the date is. My nice organized schedule has been blown away by the breeze. I finally do stop by to see my medicine man one afternoon after a long hiatus of no visiting. Ketut sees the truth on my face before I say a word.

“You found boyfriend in Bali,” he says.

“Yes, Ketut.”

“Good. Be careful not get pregnant.”

“I will.”

“He good man?”

“You tell me, Ketut,” I said. “You read his palm. You promised that he was a good man. You said it about seven times.”

“I did? When?”

“Back in June. I brought him here. He was the Brazilian man, older than me. You told me you liked him.”

“Never did,” he insisted, and there was nothing I could do to convince him otherwise. Sometimes Ketut loses things from his recollection, as you would, too, if you were somewhere between sixty-five and a hundred and twelve years old. Most of the time he’s keen and sharp, but other times I feel like I’ve disturbed him out of some other plane of consciousness, out of some other universe. (A few weeks ago he said to me, completely out of nowhere, “You good friend to me, Liss. Loyal friend. Loving friend.” Then he sighed, stared off into space and added mournfully, “Not like Sharon.” Who the hell is Sharon? What did she do to him? When I tried asking him about it, he would give me no answer. Acted suddenly like he didn’t know who I was even referring to. As if I were the one who’d brought up that thieving hussy Sharon in the first place.)

“Why you never bring boyfriend here to meet me?” he asked now.

“I did, Ketut. Really I did. And you told me you liked him.”

“Don’t remember. He a rich man, your boyfriend?”

“No, Ketut. He’s not a rich man. But he has enough money.”

“Medium rich?” The medicine man wants details, spreadsheets.

“He has enough money.”

My answer seemed to irritate Ketut. “You ask this man for money, he can give to you, or not?”

“Ketut, I don’t want money from him. I’ve never taken money from a man.”

“You spend every night with him?”

“Yes.”

“Good. He spoil you?”

“Very much.”

“Good. You still meditate?”

Yes, I do still meditate every day of the week, slithering out of Felipe’s bed and over to the couch, where I can sit in silence and offer up some gratitude for all of this. Outside his porch, the ducks quack their way through the rice paddies, gossiping and splashing all over the place. (Felipe says that these flocks of busy Balinese ducks have always reminded him of Brazilian women strutting down the beaches in Rio; chatting loudly and interrupting each other constantly and waggling their bottoms with such pride.) I am so relaxed now that I kind of slide into meditation like it’s a bath prepared by my lover. Naked in the morning sun, with nothing but a light blanket wrapped over my shoulders, I disappear into grace, hovering over the void like a tiny seashell balanced on a teaspoon.

Why did life ever seem difficult?

I call my friend Susan back in New York City one day, and listen as she confides to me, over the typical urban police sirens wailing in the background, the latest details of her latest broken heart. My voice comes out in the cool, smooth tones of a late-nite, jazz-radio DJ, as I tell her how she just has to let go, man, how she’s gotta learn that everything is just perfect as it is already, that the universe provides, baby, that it’s all peace and harmony out there . . .

I can almost hear her rolling her eyes as she says over the sirens, “Spoken like a woman who already had four orgasms today.”

100

But all the fun and games caught up with me after a few weeks. After all those nights of not sleeping and all those days of too much lovemaking, my body struck back and I got attacked by a nasty infection in my bladder. A typical affliction of the overly sexed, especially likely to strike when you’re not used to being overly sexed anymore. It came up as fast as any tragedy can strike. I was walking through town one morning doing some chores when suddenly I was buckled over with burning pain and fever. I’d had these infections before, during my wayward youth, so I knew what it was. I panicked for a moment—these things can be awful—but then thought, “Thank God my best friend in Bali is a healer,” and I ran into Wayan’s shop.

“I’m sick!” I said.

She took one look at me and said, “You sick from making too much sex, Liz.”

I groaned, buried my face in my hands, embarrassed.

She chuckled, said, “You can’t keep secrets from Wayan . . .”

I was in godawful pain. Anyone who’s ever had this infection knows the dreadful feeling; anyone who hasn’t experienced this specific suffering—well, just make up your own torturous metaphor, preferably using the term “fire poker” someplace in the sentence.

Wayan, like a veteran firefighter or an ER surgeon, never moves fast. She methodically started chopping some herbs, boiling some roots, wandering back and forth between her kitchen and me, bringing me one warm, brown, toxic-tasting concoction after another, saying, “Drink, honey . . .”

Whenever the next batch boiled, she would sit across from me, giving me sly, dirty looks and using the opportunity to get nosy.

“You careful not to get pregnant, Liz?”

“Not possible, Wayan. Felipe has a vasectomy.”

“Felipe has a vasectomy?” she asked, in as much awe as if she were asking, “Felipe has a villa in Tuscany?” (I feel the same way about it, by the way.) “Very difficult in Bali to get a man to do this. Always the woman problem, birth control.”

(Although it is true that the Indonesian birth rates are down lately due to a brilliant recent birth control incentive program: the government promised a new motorcycle to every man who would volunteer to come in for a vasectomy . . . though I hate to think the guys had to ride their new bikes home the same day.)

“Sex is funny,” Wayan mused as she watched me grimacing in pain, drinking more of her homemade medicine.

“Yeah, Wayan, thanks. It’s hilarious.”

“No, sex is funny,” she went on. “Make people do funny things. Everyone gets like this, at the beginning of love. Wanting too much happiness, too much pleasure, until you make yourself sick. Even to Wayan this happens at beginning of love story. Lose balance.”

“I’m embarrassed,” I say.

“Don’t,” she said. Then she added in perfect English (and perfect Balinese logic), “To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balanced life.”

I decided to call Felipe. I had some antibiotics at the house, an emergency stash I always travel with, just in case. Having had these infections before, I know how bad they can get, even traveling up into your kidneys. I didn’t want to go through that, not in Indonesia. So I called him and told him what had happened (he was mortified) and asked him to bring me over the pills. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Wayan’s healing prowess, it’s just that this was really serious pain . . .

She said, “You don’t need Western pills.”

“But maybe it’s better, just to be safe . . .”

“Give two hours,” she said. “If I don’t make you better, you can take your pills.”

Reluctantly, I agreed. My experience with these infections is that they can take days to clear, even with strong antibiotics. But I didn’t want to make her feel bad.

Tutti was playing in the shop and she kept bringing little drawings of houses over to cheer me up, patting my hand with an eight-year-old’s compassion. “Mama Elizabeth sick?” At least she didn’t know what I’d been doing to get sick.

“Did you buy your house yet, Wayan?” I asked.

“Not yet, honey. No hurry.”

“What about that place you liked? I thought you were going to buy that?”

“Found out not for sale. Too expensive.”

“Do you have any other places in mind?”

“Not worry about it now, Liz. For now, let me make you quickly feel better.”

Felipe arrived with my medicine and a face full of remorse, apologizing to both me and Wayan for having inflicted me with this pain, or at least that’s how he was seeing it.

“Not serious,” said Wayan. “Not worry. I fix her soon. Quickly better.”

Then she went into the kitchen and produced a giant glass mixing bowl full of leaves, roots, berries, something I recognized as turmeric, some shaggy mass of something that looked like witches’ hair, plus eye of what I believe might have been newt . . . all floating in its own brown juice. There was about a gallon of it in the bowl, whatever it was. It stank like a corpse.

“Drink, honey,” Wayan said. “Drink all.”

I suffered it down. And in less than two hours . . . well, we all know how the story ends. In less than two hours I was fine, totally healed. An infection that would have taken days to treat with Western antibiotics was gone. I tried to pay her for having fixed me up, but she only laughed. “My sister doesn’t need to pay.” Then she turned on Felipe, fake stern: “You be careful with her now. Only sleep tonight, no touching.”

“You’re not embarrassed to fix people for problems like this, from sex?” I asked Wayan.

“Liz—I’m healer. I fix all problems, with women’s vaginas, with men’s bananas. Sometimes for women, I even make fake penises. For making sex alone.”

“Dildos?” I asked, shocked.

“Not everyone has Brazilian boyfriend, Liz,” she admonished. Then she looked at Felipe and said brightly, “If you ever need help making stiff your banana, I can give you medicine.”

I was busily assuring Wayan that Felipe needed not one bit of help with his banana, but he interrupted me—always the entrepreneur—to ask Wayan if this banana-stiffening therapy of hers could perhaps be bottled and marketed. “We could make a fortune,” he said. But she explained, no, it’s not like that. All her medicines must be made fresh each day in order to work. And they must be accompanied by her prayers. Anyway, internal medicine is not the only way Wayan can firm up a man’s banana, she assured us; she can also do this with massage. Then, to our lurid fascination, she described the different massages she does for men’s impotent bananas, how she grips around the base of the thing and kind of shakes it around for about an hour to encourage the blood to flow, while incanting special prayers.

I asked, “But Wayan—what happens when the man comes back every day and says, ‘Still not cured, Doctor! Need another banana massage!’” She laughed at this bawdy idea, and admitted that, yes, she has to be careful not to spend too much time fixing men’s bananas because it causes a certain amount of . . . strong feeling . . . within her, which she isn’t sure is good for the healing energy. And sometimes, yes, the men get out of control. (As you would, too, if you’d been impotent for years and suddenly this beautiful mahogany-skinned woman with long black silky hair gets the engine to turn over again.) She told us about the one man who leapt up and started chasing her around the room during an impotency cure, saying: “I need Wayan! I need Wayan!”

But that’s not all Wayan can do. Also, she told us, she is sometimes called upon to be a teacher of sex for a couple who are either struggling with impotence or frigidity, or who are having trouble making a baby. She has to draw magic pictures on their bedsheets and explain to them which sexual positions are appropriate for which time of the month. She said that if a man wants to make a baby he should make intercourse with his wife “really, really hard” and should shoot “water out from his banana into her vagina really, really fast.” Sometimes Wayan has to actually be there in the room with the copulating couple, explaining just how hard and fast this must be done.

I ask, “And is the man able to shoot water out of his banana really hard and really fast with Dr. Wayan standing over him watching?”

Felipe imitates Wayan watching the couple: “Faster! Harder! You want this baby or not?”

Wayan says, yes, she knows it’s crazy, but this is the job of the healer. Though she admits it requires a whole lot of purification ceremonies before and after this event in order to keep her sacred spirit intact, and she doesn’t like to do it very often because it makes her feel “funny.” But if a baby needs to be conceived, she will take care of it.

“And do these couples all have babies now?” I asked.

“Have babies!” she confirmed with pride. Of course they do.

But then Wayan confides something extremely interesting. She said that if a couple is not having any luck conceiving a child, she will examine both the man and the woman to determine who is, as they say, to blame. If it’s the woman, no problem—Wayan can fix this with ancient healing techniques. But if it’s the man—well, this presents a delicate situation here in the patriarchy of Bali. Wayan’s medical options here are limited because it is beyond the pale of safety to inform a Balinese man that he is sterile; it cannot possibly be true. Men are men, after all. If no pregnancy is occurring, it has to be the woman’s fault. And if the woman doesn’t provide her husband with a baby soon, she could be in big trouble—beaten, shamed or divorced.

“So what do you do in that situation?” I asked, impressed that a woman who still calls semen “banana water” could diagnose male infertility.

Wayan told us all. What she does in the case of male infertility is to inform the man that his wife is infertile and needs to be seen privately every afternoon for “healing sessions.” When the wife comes to the shop alone, Wayan calls some young stud from the village to come over and have sex with her, hopefully creating a baby.

Felipe was appalled: “Wayan! No!”

But she just calmly nodded. Yes. “It’s the only way. If the wife is healthy, she will have baby. Then everybody happy.”

Felipe immediately wanted to know, since he lives in this town, “Who? Who do you hire to do this job?”

Wayan said, “The drivers.”

Which made us all laugh because Ubud is full of these young guys, these “drivers,” who sit on every corner and harass passing tourists with the neverending sales pitch, “Transport? Transport?” trying to make a buck driving folks out of town to the volcanoes, the beaches or the temples. Generally speaking, this is a fairly good-looking crowd, what with their fine Gauguin skin, toned bodies and groovy long hair. You could make a nice bit of money in America operating a “fertility clinic” for women, staffed with beautiful guys like this. Wayan says the best thing about her infertility treatment is that the drivers generally don’t even ask any payment for their sexual transport services, especially if the wife is really cute. Felipe and I agree that this is quite generous and community-spirited of the fellows. Nine months later a beautiful baby is born. And everyone is happy. Best of all: “No need to cancel the marriage.” And we all know how horrible it is to cancel a marriage, especially in Bali.

Felipe said, “My God—what suckers we men are.”

But Wayan is unapologetic. This treatment is only necessary because it’s not possible to tell a Balinese man that he is infertile without risking that he will go home and do something terrible to his wife. If men in Bali weren’t like this, she could cure their infertility in other ways. But this is the reality of the culture, so there it is. She doesn’t have the tiniest shred of bad conscience about it but thinks it’s just another way of being a creative healer. Anyway, she adds, it’s sometimes nice for the wife to make sex with one of those cool drivers, because most husbands in Bali don’t know how to make love to a woman, anyway.

“Most husbands, it’s like roosters, like goats.”

I suggested, “Maybe you should teach sex education class, Wayan. You could teach men how to touch women in a soft way, then maybe their wives would like sex more. Because if a man really touches you gently, caresses your skin, says loving things, kisses you all over your body, takes his time . . . sex can be nice.”

Suddenly she blushed. Wayan Nuriyasih, this banana-massaging, bladder-infection-treating, dildo-peddling, small-time-pimp, actually blushed.

“You make me feel funny when you talk like that,” she said, fanning herself. “This talking, it makes me feel . . . different. Even in my underpants I feel different! Go home now, you both. No more talk like this about sex. Go home, go to bed, but only sleeping, OK? Only SLEEPING!”

101

On the ride home Felipe asked, “Has she bought a house yet?”

“Not yet. But she says she’s looking.”

“It’s been over a month already since you gave her the money, hasn’t it?”

“Yeah, but the place she wanted, it wasn’t for sale . . .”

“Be careful, darling,” Felipe said. “Don’t let this drag out too long. Don’t let this situation get all Balinese on you.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m not trying to interfere in your business, but I’ve lived in this country for five years and I know how things are. Stories can get complicated around here. Sometimes it’s hard to get to the truth of what’s actually happening.”

“What are you trying to say, Felipe?” I asked, and when he didn’t answer immediately, I quoted to him one of his own signature lines: “If you tell me slowly, I can understand quickly.”

“What I’m trying to say, Liz, is that your friends have raised an awful lot of money for this woman, and right now it’s all sitting in Wayan’s bank account. Make sure she actually buys a house with it.”

102

The end of July came, and my thirty-fifth birthday with it. Wayan threw a birthday party for me in her shop, quite unlike any I have ever experienced before. Wayan had dressed me in a traditional Balinese birthday suit—a bright purple sarong, a strapless bustier and a long length of golden fabric that she wrapped tightly around my torso, forming a sheath so snug I could barely take a breath or eat my own birthday cake. As she was mummifying me into this exquisite costume in her tiny, dark bedroom (crowded with the belongings of the three other little human beings who live there with her), she asked, not quite looking at me, but doing some fancy tucking and pinning of material around my ribs, “You have prospect to marrying Felipe?”

“No,” I said. “We have no prospects for marrying. I don’t want any more husbands, Wayan. And I don’t think Felipe wants any more wives. But I like being with him.”

“Handsome on the outside is easy to find, but handsome on the outside and handsome on the inside—this not easy. Felipe has this.”

I agreed.

She smiled. “And who bring this good man to you, Liz? Who prayed every day for this man?”

I kissed her. “Thank you, Wayan. You did a good job.”

We commenced to the birthday party. Wayan and the kids had decorated the whole place with balloons and palm fronds and handwritten signs with complex, run-on messages like, “Happy birthday to a nice and sweet heart, to you, our dearest sister, to our beloved Lady Elizabeth, Happy Birthday to you, always peace to you and Happy Birthday.” Wayan has a brother whose young children are gifted dancers in temple ceremonies, and so the nieces and nephews came and danced for me right there in the restaurant, staging a haunting, gorgeous performance usually offered only to priests. All the children were decked out in gold and massive headdresses, decorated in fierce drag queen makeup, with powerful stamping feet and graceful, feminine fingers.

Balinese parties as a whole are generally organized around the principle of people getting dressed up in their finest clothes, then sitting around and staring at each other. It’s a lot like magazine parties in New York, actually. (“My God, darling,” moaned Felipe, when I told him that Wayan was throwing me a Balinese birthday party, “it’s going to be so boring . . .”) It wasn’t boring, though—just quiet. And different. There was the whole dressing-up part, and then there was the whole dance performance part, and then there was the whole sitting around and staring at each other part, which wasn’t so bad. Everyone did look lovely. Wayan’s whole family had come, and they kept smiling and waving at me from four feet away, and I kept smiling at them and waving back at them.

I blew out the candles of the birthday cake along with Little Ketut, the smallest orphan, whose birthday, I had decided a few weeks ago, would also be on July 18 from now on, shared with my own, since she’d never had a birthday or a birthday party before. After we blew out the candles, Felipe presented Little Ketut with a Barbie doll, which she unwrapped in stunned wonder and then regarded as though it were a ticket for a rocket ship to Jupiter— something she never, ever in seven billion light-years could’ve imagined receiving.

Everything about this party was kind of funny. It was an oddball international and intergenerational mix of a handful of my friends, Wayan’s family and some of her Western clients and patients whom I’d never met before. My friend Yudhi brought me a six-pack of beer to wish me happy birthday, and also this cool young hipster screenwriter from L.A. named Adam came by. Felipe and I had met Adam in a bar the other night and had invited him. Adam and Yudhi passed their time at the party talking to a little boy named John, whose mother is a patient of Wayan’s, a German clothing designer married to an American who lives in Bali. Little John—who is seven years old and who is kind of American, he says, because of his American dad (even though he himself has never been there), but who speaks German with his mother and speaks Indonesian with Wayan’s children—was smitten with Adam because he’d found out that the guy was from California and could surf.

“What’s your favorite animal, mister?” asked John, and Adam replied, “Pelicans.”

“What’s a pelican?” the little boy asked, and Yudhi jumped in and said, “Dude, you don’t know what a pelican is? Dude, you gotta go home and ask your dad about that. Pelicans rock, dude.”

Then John, the kind-of-American boy, turned to say something in Indonesian to little Tutti (probably to ask her what a pelican was) as Tutti sat in Felipe’s lap trying to read my birthday cards, while Felipe was speaking beautiful French to a retired gentleman from Paris who comes to Wayan for kidney treatments. Meanwhile, Wayan had turned on the radio and Kenny Rogers was singing “Coward of the County,” while three Japanese girls wandered randomly into the shop to see if they could get medicinal massages. As I tried to talk the Japanese girls into eating some of my birthday cake, the two orphans—Big Ketut and Little Ketut—were decorating my hair with the giant spangled barrettes they’d saved up all their money to buy me as a gift. Wayan’s nieces and nephews, the child temple dancers, the children of rice farmers, sat very still, tentatively staring at the floor, dressed in gold like miniature deities; they imbued the room with a strange and otherworldly godliness. Outside, the roosters started crowing, even though it was not yet evening, not yet dusk. My traditional Balinese clothing was squeezing me like an ardent hug, and I was feeling like this was definitely the strangest— but maybe the happiest—birthday party I’d ever experienced in my whole life.

103

Still, Wayan needs to buy a house, and I’m getting worried that it’s not happening. I don’t understand why it’s not happening, but it absolutely needs to happen. Felipe and I have stepped in now. We found a realtor who could take us around and show us properties, but Wayan hasn’t liked anything we’ve shown her. I keep telling her, “Wayan, it’s important that we buy something. I’m leaving here in September, and I need to let my friends know before I leave that their money actually went into a home for you. And you need to get a roof over your head before you get evicted.”

“Not so simple to buy land in Bali,” she keeps telling me. “Not like to walk into a bar and buy a beer. Can take long time.”

“We don’t have a long time, Wayan.”

She just shrugs, and I remember again about the Balinese concept of “rubber time,” meaning that time is a very relative and bouncy idea. “Four weeks” doesn’t really mean to Wayan what it means to me. One day to Wayan isn’t necessarily composed of twenty-four hours, either; sometimes it’s longer, sometimes it’s shorter, depending upon the spiritual and emotional nature of that day. As with my medicine man and his mysterious age, sometimes you count the days, sometimes you weigh them.

Meanwhile, it also turns out that I have completely underestimated how expensive it is to buy property in Bali. Because everything is so cheap here, you would assume that land is also undervalued, but that’s a mistaken assumption. To buy land in Bali—especially in Ubud—can get almost as expensive as buying land in Westchester County, in Tokyo, or on Rodeo Drive. Which is completely illogical because once you own the property you can’t make back your money on it in any traditionally logical way. You may pay approximately $25,000 for an aro of land (an aro is a land measurement roughly translating into English as: “Slightly bigger than the parking spot for an SUV”), and then you can build a little shop there where you will sell one batik sarong a day to one tourist a day for the rest of your life, for a profit of about seventy-five cents a hit. It’s senseless.

But the Balinese value their land with a passion that extends beyond the reaches of economic sense. Since land ownership is traditionally the only wealth that Balinese recognize as legitimate, property is valued in the same way as the Masai value cattle or as my five-year-old niece values lip gloss: namely, that you cannot have enough of it, that once you have claimed it you must never let it go, and that all of it in the world should rightfully belong to you.

Moreover—as I discover throughout the month of August, during my Narnia-like voyage into the intricacies of Indonesian real estate—it’s almost impossible to find out when land is actually for sale around here. Balinese who are selling land typically don’t like other people to know that their land is up for sale. Now, you would think it might be advantageous to advertise this fact, but the Balinese don’t see it that way. If you’re a Balinese farmer and you’re selling your land, it means you are desperate for cash, and this is humiliating. Also, if your neighbors and family find out that you actually sold some land, then they’ll assume you came into some money, and everyone will be asking if they can borrow that money. So land becomes available for sale only by . . . rumor. And all these land deals are executed under strange veils of secrecy and deception. The Western expatriates around here—hearing that I’m trying to buy land for Wayan—start gathering around me, offering cautionary tales based on their own nightmarish experiences. They warn me that you can never really be certain what’s going on when it comes to real estate around here. The land you are “buying” may not actually “belong” to the person who is “selling” it. The guy who showed you the property might not even be the owner, but only the disgruntled nephew of the owner, trying to get one over on his uncle because of some old family dispute. Don’t expect that the boundaries of your property will ever be clear. The land you buy for your dream house may later be declared “too close to a temple” to allow a building permit (and it’s difficult, in this small country with an estimated 20,000 temples, to find any land that is not too close to a temple).

Also you must take into consideration that you’re quite probably living on the slopes of a volcano and you might be straddling a fault line, as well. And not just a geological fault line, either. As idyllic as Bali seems, the wise keep in mind that this is, in fact, Indonesia— the largest Islamic nation on earth, unstable at its core, corrupt from the highest ministers of justice all the way down to the guy who pumps gas into your car (and who only pretends to fill it all the way up). Some kind of revolution will always be possible here at any moment, and all your assets may be reclaimed by the victors. Probably at gunpoint.

Negotiating all this dodgy business is not something I have any qualifications whatsoever to be doing. I mean—I went through a divorce proceeding in New York State and everything, but this is another page of Kafka altogether. Meanwhile, $18,000 of money donated by me, my family and my dearest friends is sitting in Wayan’s bank account, converted into Indonesia rupiah—a currency that has a history of crashing without notice and turning to vapor. And Wayan is supposed to get evicted from her shop in September, which is around the time I leave the country. Which is in about three weeks.

But it’s turning out to be almost impossible for Wayan to find a piece of land she deems appropriate for a home. Setting aside all the practical considerations, she has to examine the taksu—the spirit—of each place. As a healer, Wayan’s sense of taksu, even by Balinese standards, is supremely acute. I found one place that I thought was perfect, but Wayan said it was possessed by angry demons. The next piece of land was rejected because it was too close to a river, which, as everyone knows, is where ghosts live. (The night after she saw that place, Wayan says, she dreamt of a beautiful woman in torn clothes, weeping, and that did it—we could not buy this land.) Then we found a lovely little shop near town, with a backyard and everything, but it was located on a corner, and only somebody who wants to go bankrupt and die young would ever live in a house located on a corner. As everyone knows.

“Don’t even try talking her out of it,” Felipe advised me. “Trust me, darling. Don’t get between the Balinese and their taksu.”

Then last week Felipe found a place that seemed to fit the criteria exactly—a small, pretty piece of land, close to central Ubud, on a quiet road, next to a rice field, plenty of space for a garden and well within our budget. When I asked Wayan, “Should we buy it?” she replied, “Don’t know yet, Liz. Not too fast, for making decisions like this. I need talk to a priest first.”

She explained that she would need to consult a priest in order to find an auspicious day upon which to purchase the land, if she does decide to buy it at all. Because nothing significant can be done in Bali before an auspicious day is chosen. But she can’t even ask the priests for the auspicious date upon which to buy the land until she decides if she really wants to live there. Which is a commitment she refuses to make until she’s had an auspicious dream. Aware of my dwindling days here, I asked Wayan, like a good New Yorker, “How soon can you arrange to have an auspicious dream?”

Wayan replied, like a good Balinese, “Cannot be rushed, this.” Although, she mused, it might help if she could go to one of the major temples in Bali with an offering, and pray to the gods to bring her an auspicious dream . . .

“OK,” I said. “Tomorrow Felipe can drive you to the major temple and you can make an offering and ask the gods to please send you an auspicious dream.”

Wayan would love to, she said. It’s a great idea. Only one problem. She’s not permitted to enter any temples for this entire week.

Because she is . . . menstruating.

104

Maybe I’m not getting across how fun all this is. Truly, it’s so much odd and satisfying fun, trying to figure all this out. Or maybe I’m just enjoying this surreal moment in my life so much because I happen to be falling in love, and that always makes the world seem delightful, no matter how insane your reality.

I always liked Felipe. But there’s something about the way he takes on The Saga of Wayan’s House that brings us together during the month of August like a real couple. It’s none of his concern, of course, what happens to this trippy Balinese medicine woman. He’s a businessman. He’s managed to live in Bali for five years without getting too entwined in the personal lives and complex rituals of the Balinese, but suddenly here he is wading with me through muddy rice paddies and trying to find a priest who will give Wayan an auspicious date . . .

“I was perfectly happy in my boring life before you came along,” he always says.

He was bored in Bali before. He was languid and killing time, a character from a Graham Greene novel. That indolence stopped the moment we were introduced. Now that we’re together, I get to hear Felipe’s version of how we met, a delicious story I never tire of hearing—about how he saw me at the party that night, standing with my back to him, and how I did not even need to turn my head and show him my face before he had realized somewhere deep in his gut, “That is my woman. I will do anything to have that woman.”

“And it was easy to get you,” he says. “All I had to do was beg and plead for weeks.”

“You didn’t beg and plead.”

“You didn’t notice me begging and pleading?”

He talks about how we went dancing that first night we met, and how he watched me get all attracted to that cute Welsh guy, and how his heart sank as he saw the scene unfolding, thinking, “I’m putting all this work into seducing this woman, and now that handsome young guy’s just going to take her from me and bring so much complication into her life—if only she knew how much love I could offer her.”

Which he can. He’s a caregiver by nature, and I can feel him going into a kind of orbit around me, making me the key directional setting for his compass, growing into the role of being my attendant knight. Felipe is the kind of man who desperately needs a woman in his life—but not so that he can be taken care of; only so that he can have someone to care for, someone to consecrate himself to. Having lived without such a relationship ever since his marriage ended, he’s been adrift in life recently, but now he is organizing himself around me. It’s lovely to be treated this way. But it also scares me. I hear him downstairs sometimes making me dinner as I am lounging upstairs reading, and he’s whistling some happy Brazilian samba, calling up, “Darling—would you like another glass of wine?” and I wonder if I am capable of being somebody’s sun, somebody’s everything. Am I centered enough now to be the center of somebody else’s life? But when I finally brought up the topic with him one night, he said, “Have I asked you to be that person, darling? Have I asked you to be the center of my life?”

I was immediately ashamed of myself for my vanity, for having assumed that he wanted me to stay with him forever so that he could indulge my whims till the end of time.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “That was a little arrogant, wasn’t it?”

“A little,” he acknowledged, then kissed my ear. “But not so much, really. Darling, of course it’s something we have to discuss because here’s the truth—I’m wildly in love with you.” I blanched in reflex, and he made a quick joke, trying to be reassuring: “I mean that in a completely hypothetical way, of course.” But then he said in all seriousness, “Look, I’m fifty-two years old. Believe me, I already know how the world works. I recognize that you don’t love me yet the way I love you, but the truth is that I don’t really care. For some reason, I feel the same way about you that I felt about my kids when they were small—that it wasn’t their job to love me, it was my job to love them. You can decide to feel however you want to, but I love you and I will always love you. Even if we never see each other again, you already brought me back to life, and that’s a lot. And of course, I’d like to share my life with you. The only problem is, I’m not sure how much of a life I can offer you in Bali.”

This is a concern I’ve had, too. I’ve been watching the expatriate society in Ubud, and I know for a stone-cold fact this is not the life for me. Everywhere in this town you see the same kind of character— Westerners who have been so ill-treated and badly worn by life that they’ve dropped the whole struggle and decided to camp out here in Bali indefinitely, where they can live in a gorgeous house for $200 a month, perhaps taking a young Balinese man or woman as a companion, where they can drink before noon without getting any static about it, where they can make a bit of money exporting a bit of furniture for somebody. But generally, all they are doing here is seeing to it that nothing serious will ever be asked of them again. These are not bums, mind you. This is a very high grade of people, multinational, talented and clever. But it seems to me that everyone I meet here used to be something once (generally “married” or “employed”); now they are all united by the absence of the one thing they seem to have surrendered completely and forever: ambition. Needless to say, there’s a lot of drinking.

Of course, the precious Balinese town of Ubud is not such a bad place to putter away your life, ignoring the passing of the days. I suppose in that way it’s similar to places like Key West, Florida, or Oaxaca, Mexico. Most expats in Ubud, when you ask them how long they’ve lived here, aren’t really sure. For one thing, they aren’t really sure how much time has passed since they moved to Bali. But for another thing, it’s like they aren’t really sure if they do live here. They belong to nowhere, unanchored. Some of them like to imagine that they’re just hanging out for a while, just running the engine on idle at the traffic light, waiting for the signal to change. But after seventeen years of that you start to wonder . . . does anybody ever leave?

There is much to enjoy in their lazy company, in these long Sunday afternoons spent at brunch, drinking champagne and talking about nothing. Still, when I am around this scene, I feel somewhat like Dorothy in the poppy fields of Oz. Be careful! Don’t fall asleep in this narcotic meadow, or you could doze away the rest of your life here!

So what will become of me and Felipe? Now that there is, it seems, a “me and Felipe”? He told me not long ago, “Sometimes I wish you were a lost little girl and I could scoop you up and say, ‘Come and live with me now, let me take care of you forever.’ But you aren’t a lost little girl. You’re a woman with a career, with ambition. You are a perfect snail: you carry your home on your back. You should hold on to that freedom for as long as possible. But all I’m saying is this—if you want this Brazilian man, you can have him. I’m yours already.”

I’m not sure what I want. I do know that there’s a part of me which has always wanted to hear a man say, “Let me take care of you forever,” and I have never heard it spoken before. Over the last few years, I’d given up looking for that person, learned how to say this heartening sentence to myself, especially in times of fear. But to hear it from someone else now, from someone who is speaking sincerely . . .

I was thinking about all this last night after Felipe fell asleep, and I was curled up beside him, wondering what would become of us. What are the possible futures? What about the geography question between us—where would we live? Then there’s the age difference to consider. Though, when I called my mother the other day to tell her I’d met a really nice man, but—brace yourself, Mom!—“he’s fifty-two years old,” she was completely non-flummoxed. All she said was, “Well, I’ve got news for you, Liz. You’re thirty-five.” (Excellent point, Ma. I’m lucky to get anyone at such a withered age.) Truthfully, though, I don’t really mind the age difference, either. I actually like that Felipe is so much older. I think it’s sexy. Makes me feel kind of . . . French.

What will happen with us?

Why am I worrying about this, by the way?

What have I not yet learned about the futility of worry?

So after a while, I stopped thinking about all this and just held him while he slept. I am falling in love with this man. Then I fell asleep beside him and had two memorable dreams.

Both were about my Guru. In the first dream, my Guru informed me that she was closing down her Ashrams and that she would no longer be speaking, teaching or publishing books. She gave her students one final speech, in which she said, “You’ve had more than enough teachings. You have been given everything you need to know in order to be free. It’s time for you to go out in the world and live a happy life.”

The second dream was even more confirming. I was eating in a terrific restaurant in New York City with Felipe. We were having a wonderful meal of lamb chops and artichokes and fine wine and we were talking and laughing happily. I looked across the room and saw Swamiji, my Guru’s master, deceased since 1982. But he was alive that night, right there in a snazzy New York restaurant. He was eating dinner with a group of his friends and they also seemed to be having a merry time of it. Our eyes met across the room and Swamiji smiled at me and raised his wineglass in a toast.

And then—quite distinctly—this small Indian Guru who had spoken precious little English during his lifetime mouthed this one word to me across the distance:

Enjoy.

105

I haven’t seen Ketut Liyer in so long. Between my involvement with Felipe and my struggle to secure a home for Wayan, my long afternoons of aimless conversation about spirituality on the medicine man’s porch have long since ended. I’ve stopped by his house a few times, just to say hello and to drop off a gift of fruit for his wife, but we haven’t spent any quality time together since back in June. Whenever I try to apologize to Ketut for my absence, though, he laughs like a man who has already been shown the answers to every test in the universe and says, “Everything working perfect, Liss.”

Still, I miss the old man, so I stopped by to hang out with him this morning. He beamed at me, as usual, saying, “I am very happy to meet you!” (I never was able to break him of that habit.)

“I am happy to see you, too, Ketut.”

“You leaving soon, Liss?”

“Yes, Ketut. In less than two weeks. That’s why I wanted to come over today. I wanted to thank you for everything you’ve given me. If it wasn’t for you, I never would’ve come back to Bali.”

“Always you were coming back to Bali,” he said without doubt or drama. “You still meditate with your four brothers like I teach you?”

“Yes.”

“You still meditate like your Guru in India teach you?”

“Yes.”

“You have bad dreams anymore?”

“No.”

“You happy now with God?”

“Very.”

“You love new boyfriend?”

“I think so. Yes.”

“Then you must spoil him. And he must spoil you.”

“OK,” I promised.

“You are good friend to me. Better than friend. You are like my daughter,” he said. (Not like Sharon . . .) “When I die, you will come back to Bali, come to my cremation. Balinese cremation ceremony very fun—you will like it.”

“OK,” I promised again, all choked up now.

“Let your conscience be your guide. If you have Western friends come to visit Bali, bring them to me for palm-reading. I am very empty in my bank since the bomb. You want to come with me to baby ceremony today?”

And this is how I ended up participating in the blessing of a baby who had reached the age of six months, and who was now ready to touch the earth for the first time. The Balinese don’t let their children touch the ground for the first six months of life, because newborn babies are considered to be gods sent straight from heaven, and you wouldn’t let a god crawl around on the floor with all the toenail clippings and cigarette butts. So Balinese babies are carried for those first six months, revered as minor deities. If a baby dies before it is six months old, it is given a special cremation ceremony and the ashes are not placed in a human cemetery because this being was never human: it was only ever a god. But if the baby lives to six months, then a big ceremony is held and the child’s feet are allowed to touch the earth at last and Junior is welcomed to the human race.

This ceremony today was held at the house of one of Ketut’s neighbors. The baby in question was a girl, already nicknamed Putu. Her parents were a beautiful teenage girl and an equally beautiful teenage boy, who is the grandson of a man who is Ketut’s cousin, or something like that. Ketut wore his finest clothes for the event—a white satin sarong (trimmed in gold) and a white, long-sleeved button-down jacket with gold buttons and a Nehru collar, which made him look rather like a railroad porter or a busboy at a fancy hotel. He had a white turban wrapped around his head. His hands, as he proudly showed me, were all pimped out with giant gold rings and magic stones. About seven rings in total. All of them with holy powers. He had his grandfather’s shining brass bell for summoning spirits, and he wanted me to take a lot of photographs of him.

We walked over to his neighbor’s compound together. It was a considerable distance and we had to walk on the busy main road for a while. I’d been in Bali almost four months, and had never seen Ketut leave his compound before. It was disconcerting watching him walk down the highway amid all the speeding cars and madcap motorcycles. He looked so tiny and vulnerable. He looked so wrong set against this modern backdrop of traffic and honking horns. It made me want to cry, for some reason, but I was feeling a little extra emotive today anyway.

About forty guests were there already at the neighbor’s house when we arrived, and the family altar was heaped with offerings— piles of woven palm baskets filled with rice, flowers, incense, roasted pigs, some dead geese and chickens, coconut and bits of currency that fluttered around in the breeze. Everyone was decked out in their most elegant silks and lace. I was underdressed, sweaty from my bike ride, self-conscious in my broken T-shirt amid all this beauty. But I was welcomed exactly the way you would want to be if you were the white girl who’d wandered in inappropriately attired and uninvited. Everyone smiled at me with warmth, and then ignored me and commenced to the part of the party where they all sat around admiring each other’s clothes.

The ceremony took hours, Ketut officiating. Only an anthropologist with a team of interpreters could tell you all that occurred, but some of the rituals I understood, from Ketut’s explanations and from books that I had read. The father held the baby during the first round of blessings and the mother held an effigy of the baby— a coconut swaddled to look like an infant. This coconut was blessed and doused with holy water just like the real baby, then placed on the ground right before the baby’s feet touch earth for the first time; this is to fool the demons, who will attack the dummy baby and leave the real baby alone.

There were hours of chants, though, before that real baby’s feet could touch ground. Ketut rang his bell and sang his mantras endlessly, and the young parents beamed with pleasure and pride. The guests came and went, milling about, gossiping, watching the ceremony for a while, offering their gifts and then taking off for another appointment. It was all strangely casual amid all the ancient ritualistic formality, sort of backyard-picnic-meets-high-church. The mantras Ketut chanted to the baby were so sweet, sounding like a combination of the sacred and the affectionate. While the mother held the infant, Ketut waved before the child samples of food, fruit, flowers, water, bells, a wing from the roast chicken, a bit of pork, a cracked coconut . . . With each new item he would sing something to her. The baby would laugh and clap her hands, and Ketut would laugh and keep singing.

I imagined my own translation of his words:

“Ohhhh . . . little baby, this is roast chicken for you to eat! Someday you will love roast chicken and we hope you have lots of it! Ohhhhhhh . . . little baby, this is a chunk of cooked rice, may you always have all the chunks of cooked rice you could ever desire, may you be showered with rice for always. Ohhhhh . . . little baby, this is a coconut, isn’t it funny how this coconut looks, someday you will eat lots of coconuts! Ohhhhhh . . . little baby, this is your family, do you not see how much your family adores you? Ohhhhh . . . little baby, you are precious to the whole universe! You are an A-plus student! You are our magnificent bunny! You are a yummy hunk of silly putty! Ooohhhhh little baby, you are the Sultan of Swing, you are our everything . . .”

Everyone was blessed again and again with flower petals dipped in holy water. The whole family took turns passing the baby around, cooing to her, while Ketut sang the ancient mantras. They even let me hold the baby for a while, even in my jeans, and I whispered my own blessings to her as everyone sang. “Good luck,” I told her. “Be brave.” It was boiling hot, even in the shade. The young mother, dressed in a sexy bustier under her sheer lace shirt, was sweating. The young father, who didn’t seem to know any facial expression other than a massively proud grin, was also sweating. The various grandmothers fanned themselves, got weary, sat down, stood up, fussed with the roasted sacrificial pigs, chased away dogs. Everyone was alternately interested, not interested, tired, laughing, earnest. But Ketut and the baby seemed to be locked in their own experience together, riveted to each other’s attention. The baby didn’t take her eyes off the old medicine man all day. Who ever heard of a six-month-old baby not crying or fussing or sleeping for four straight hours in the hot sun, but just watching someone with curiosity?

Ketut did his job well, and the baby did her job well, too. She was fully present for her transformation ceremony from god-status to human-status. She was handling the responsibilities marvelously, like a good Balinese girl already—steeped in ritual, confident of her beliefs, obedient to the requirements of her culture.

At the end of all the chanting, the baby was wrapped in a long, clean white sheet that hung far below her little legs, making her look tall and regal—a veritable debutante. Ketut made a drawing on the bottom of a pottery bowl of the four directions of the universe, filled the bowl with holy water and set it on the ground. This hand-drawn compass marked the holy spot on earth where the baby’s feet would first touch.

Then the whole family gathered by the baby, everyone seeming to hold her at the same time, and—oop! there goes!—they lightly dipped the baby’s feet in this pottery bowl full of holy water, right above the magic drawing which encompassed the whole universe, and then they touched her soles to the earth for the first time. When they lifted her back up into the air, tiny damp footprints remained on the ground below her, orienting this child at last onto the great Balinese grid, establishing who she was by establishing where she was. Everyone clapped their hands, delighted. The little girl was one of us now. A human being—with all the risks and thrills which that perplexing incarnation entails.

The baby looked up, looked around, smiled. She wasn’t a god anymore. She didn’t seem to mind. She wasn’t fearful at all. She seemed thoroughly satisfied with every decision she had ever made.

106

The deal fell through with Wayan. That property Felipe had found for her somehow didn’t happen. When I ask Wayan what went wrong, I get some fuzzy reply about a lost deed; I don’t think I was ever told the real story. What matters is only that it’s a dead deal. I’m starting to get kind of panicked about this whole Wayan house situation. I try to explain my urgency to her, saying, “Wayan—I have to leave Bali in less than two weeks and go back to America. I can’t face my friends who gave me all this money and tell them that you still don’t have a home.”

“But Liz, if a place has no good taksu . . .”

Everybody has a different sense of urgency in this life.

But a few days later Wayan calls over at Felipe’s house, giddy. She’s found a different piece of land, and this one she really loves. An emerald expanse of rice field on a quiet road, close to town. It has good taksu written all over it. Wayan tells us that the land belongs to a farmer, a friend of her father’s, who is desperate for cash. He has seven aro total to sell, but (needing fast money) would be willing to give her only the two aro she can afford. She loves this land. I love this land. Felipe loves this land. Tutti—spinning across the grass in circles, arms extended, a little Balinese Julie Andrews—loves it, too.

“Buy it,” I tell Wayan.

But a few days pass, and she keeps stalling. “Do you want to live there or not?” I keep asking.

She stalls some more, then changes her story again. This morning, she says, the farmer called to tell her he isn’t certain anymore whether he can sell only the two-aro parcel to her; instead, he might want to sell the whole seven-aro lot intact . . . it’s his wife that’s the problem . . . The farmer needs to talk to his wife, see if it’s OK with her to break up the land . . .

Wayan says, “Maybe if I had more money . . .”

Dear God, she wants me to come up with the cash to buy the whole chunk of land. Even as I’m trying to figure out how to raise a staggering 22,000 extra American dollars, I’m telling her, “Wayan, I can’t do it, I don’t have the money. Can’t you make a deal with the farmer?”

Then Wayan, whose eyes are not exactly meeting mine anymore, crochets a complicated story. She tells me that she visited a mystic the other day and the mystic went into a trance and said that Wayan absolutely needs to buy this entire seven-aro package in order to make a good healing center . . . that this is destiny . . . and, anyway, the mystic also said that if Wayan could have the entire package of land, then maybe she could someday build a nice fancy hotel there . . .

A nice fancy hotel?

Ah.

That’s when suddenly I go deaf and the birds stop singing and I can see Wayan’s mouth moving but I’m not listening to her anymore because a thought has just come, scrawled blatantly across my mind: SHE’S FUCKING WITH YOU, GROCERIES.

I stand up, say good-bye to Wayan, walk home slowly and ask Felipe point-blank for his opinion: “Is she fucking with me?”

He has not ever commented upon my business with Wayan, not once.

“Darling,” he says kindly. “Of course she’s fucking with you.”

My heart drops into my guts with a splat.

“But not intentionally,” he adds quickly. “You need to understand the thinking in Bali. It’s a way of life here for people to try to get the most money they can out of visitors. It’s how everyone survives. So she’s making up some stories now about the farmer. Darling, since when does a Balinese man need to talk to his wife before he can make a business deal? Listen—the guy is desperate to sell her a small parcel; he already said he would. But she wants the whole thing now. And she wants you to buy it for her.”

I cringe at this for two reasons. First of all, I hate to think this could be true of Wayan. Second, I hate the cultural implications under his speech, the whiff of colonial White Man’s Burden stuff, the patronizing “this-is-what-all-these-people-are-like” argument.

But Felipe isn’t a colonialist; he’s a Brazilian. He explains, “Listen, I grew up poor in South America. You think I don’t understand the culture of this kind of poverty? You’ve given Wayan more money than she’s ever seen in her life and now she’s thinking crazy. As far as she’s concerned, you’re her miracle benefactor and this might be her last chance to ever get a break. So she wants to get all she can before you go. For God’s sake—four months ago the poor woman didn’t have enough money to buy lunch for her child and now she wants a hotel?”

“What should I do?”

“Don’t get angry about it, whatever happens. If you get angry, you’ll lose her, and that would be a pity because she’s a marvelous person and she loves you. This is her survival tactic, just accept that. You must not think that she’s not a good person, or that she and the kids don’t honestly need your help. But you cannot let her take advantage of you. Darling, I’ve seen it repeated so many times. What happens with Westerners who live here for a long time is that they usually end up falling into one of two camps. Half of them keep playing the tourist, saying, ‘Oh, those lovely Balinese, so sweet, so gracious . . . ,” and getting ripped off like crazy. The other half get so frustrated with being ripped off all the time, they start to hate the Balinese. And that’s a shame, because then you’ve lost all these wonderful friends.”

“But what should I do?”

“You need to get back some control of the situation. Play some kind of game with her, like the games she’s playing with you. Threaten her with something that motivates her to act. You’ll be doing her a favor; she needs a home.”

“I don’t want to play games, Felipe.”

He kisses my head. “Then you can’t live in Bali, darling.”

The next morning, I hatch my plan. I can’t believe it—here I am, after a year of studying virtues and struggling to find an honest life for myself, about to spin a big fat lie. I’m about to lie to my favorite person in Bali, to someone who is like a sister to me, someone who has cleaned my kidneys. For heaven’s sake, I’m going to lie to Tutti’s mommy!

I walk into town, into Wayan’s shop. Wayan goes to hug me. I pull away, pretending to be upset.

“Wayan,” I say. “We need to talk. I have a serious problem.”

“With Felipe?”

“No. With you.”

She looks like she’s going to faint.

“Wayan,” I say. “My friends in America are very angry with you.”

“With me? Why, honey?”

“Because four months ago, they gave you a lot of money to buy a home, and you did not buy a home yet. Every day, they send me emails, asking me, ‘Where is Wayan’s house? Where is my money?’ Now they think you are stealing their money, using it for something else.”

“I’m not stealing!”

“Wayan,” I say. “My friends in America think you are . . . a bullshit.”

She gasps as if she’s been punched in the windpipe. She looks so wounded, I waver for a moment and almost grab her in a reassuring hug and say, “No, no, it’s not true! I’m making this up!” But, no, I have to finish this. But, Lord, she is clearly staggered now. Bullshit is a word that has been more emotionally incorporated into Balinese than almost any other in the English language. It’s one of the very worst things you can call someone in Bali—“a bullshit.” In this culture, where people bullshit each other a dozen times before breakfast, where bullshitting is a sport, an art, a habit, and a desperate survival tactic, to actually call someone out on their bullshit is an appalling statement. It’s something that would have, in old Europe, guaranteed you a duel.

“Honey,” she said, eyes tearing. “I am not a bullshit!”

“I know that, Wayan. This is why I’m so upset. I try to tell my friends in America that Wayan is not a bullshit, but they don’t believe me.”

She lays her hand on mine. “I’m sorry to put you in a pickle, honey.”

“Wayan, this is a very big pickle. My friends are angry. They say that you must buy some land before I come back to America. They told me that if you don’t buy some land in the next week, then I must . . . take the money back.”

Now she doesn’t look like she’s going to faint; she looks like she’s going to die. I feel like one-half of the biggest prick in history, spinning this tale to this poor woman, who—among other things—obviously doesn’t realize that I no more have the power to take that money out of her bank account than I have to revoke her Indonesian citizenship. But how could she know that? I made the money magically appear in her bankbook, didn’t I? Couldn’t I just as easily take it away?

“Honey,” she says, “believe me, I find land now, don’t worry, very fast I find land. Please don’t worry . . . maybe in next three days this is finish, I promise.”

“You must, Wayan,” I say, with a gravity that is not entirely acting. The fact is, she must. Her kids need a home. She’s about to get evicted. This is no time to be a bullshit.

I say, “I’m going back to Felipe’s house now. Call me when you’ve bought something.”

Then I walk away from my friend, aware that she is watching me but refusing to turn around and look back at her. All the way home, I’m offering up to God the weirdest prayer: “Please, let it be true that she’s been bullshitting me.” Because if she wasn’t bullshitting, if she’s genuinely incapable of finding herself a place to live despite an $18,000 cash infusion, then we’re in really big trouble here and I don’t know how this woman is ever going to pull herself out of poverty. But if she was bullshitting me, then in a way it’s a ray of hope. It shows she’s got some wiles, and she might be OK in this shifty world, after all.

I go home to Felipe, feeling awful. I say, “If only Wayan knew how deviously I was plotting behind her back . . .”

“. . . plotting for her happiness and success,” he finishes the sentence for me.

Four hours later—four measly hours!—the phone rings in Felipe’s house. It’s Wayan. She’s breathless. She wants me to know the job is finished. She has just purchased the two aro from the farmer (whose “wife” suddenly didn’t seem to mind breaking up the property). There was no need, as it turns out, for any magic dreams or priestly interventions or taksu radiation-level tests. Wayan even has the certificate of ownership already, in her very hands! And it’s notarized! Also, she assures me, she has already ordered construction materials for her house and workers will start building early next week—before I leave. So I can see the project under way. She hopes that I am not angry with her. She wants me to know that she loves me more than she loves her own body, more than she loves her own life, more than she loves this whole world.

I tell her that I love her, too. And that I can’t wait to be a guest someday in her beautiful new home. And that I would like a photocopy of that certificate of ownership.

When I get off the phone, Felipe says, “Good girl.”

I don’t know whether he’s referring to her or me. But he opens a bottle of wine and we raise a toast to our dear friend Wayan the Balinese landowner.

Then Felipe says, “Can we go on vacation now, please?”

107

The place we end up going on vacation is a tiny island called Gili Meno, located off the coast of Lombok, which is the next stop east of Bali in the great, sprawling Indonesian archipelago. I’d been to Gili Meno before, and I wanted to show it to Felipe, who had never been there.

The island of Gili Meno is one of the most important places in the world to me. I came here by myself two years ago when I was in Bali for the first time. I was on that magazine assignment, writing about Yoga vacations, and I’d just finished two weeks of mightily restorative Yoga classes. But I had decided to extend my stay in Indonesia after the assignment was up, since I was already all the way over here in Asia. What I wanted to do, actually, was to find someplace very remote and give myself a ten-day retreat of absolute solitude and absolute silence.

When I look back at the four years that elapsed between my marriage starting to fall apart and the day I was finally divorced and free, I see a detailed chronicle of total pain. And the moment when I came to this tiny island all by myself was the very worst of that entire dark journey. The bottom of the pain and the middle of it. My unhappy mind was a battlefield of conflicted demons. As I made my decision to spend ten days alone and in silence in the middle of exactly nowhere, I told all my warring and confused parts the same thing: “We’re all here together now, guys, all alone. And we’re going to have to work out some kind of deal for how to get along, or else everybody is going to die together, sooner or later.”

Which may sound firm and confident, but I must admit this, as well—that sailing over to that quiet island all alone, I was never more terrified in my life. I hadn’t even brought any books to read, nothing to distract me. Just me and my mind, about to face each other on an empty field. I remember that my legs were visibly shaking with fear. Then I quoted to myself one of my favorite lines ever from my Guru: “Fear—who cares?” and I disembarked alone.

I rented myself a little cabin on the beach for a few dollars a day and I shut my mouth and vowed not to open it again until something inside me had changed. Gili Meno Island was my ultimate truth and reconciliation hearing. I had chosen the right place to do this—that much was clear. The island itself is tiny, pristine, sandy, blue water, palm trees. It’s a perfect circle with a single path that goes around it, and you can walk the whole circumference in about an hour. It’s located almost exactly on the equator, and so there’s a changelessness about its daily cycles. The sun comes up on one side of the island at about 6:30 in the morning and goes down on the other side at around 6:30 PM, every day of the year. The place is inhabited by a small handful of Muslim fishermen and their families. There is no spot on this island from which you cannot hear the ocean. There are no motorized vehicles here. Electricity comes from a generator, and for only a few hours in the evenings. It’s the quietest place I’ve ever been.

Every morning I walked the circumference of the island at sunrise, and walked it again at sunset. The rest of the time, I just sat and watched. Watched my thoughts, watched my emotions, watched the fishermen. The Yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is caused by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those words bring attendant emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash. We get seduced by our own mantras (I’m a failure . . . I’m lonely . . . I’m a failure . . . I’m lonely . . . ) and we become monuments to them. To stop talking for a while, then, is to attempt to strip away the power of words, to stop choking ourselves with words, to liberate ourselves from our suffocating mantras.

It took me a while to drop into true silence. Even after I’d stopped talking, I found that I was still humming with language. My organs and muscles of speech—brain, throat, chest, back of the neck—vibrated with the residual effects of talking long after I’d stopped making sounds. My head shimmied in a reverb of words, the way an indoor swimming pool seems to echo interminably with sounds and shouts, even after the kindergartners have left for the day. It took a surprisingly long time for all this pulsation of speech to fall away, for the whirling noises to settle. Maybe it took about three days.

Then everything started coming up. In that state of silence, there was room now for everything hateful, everything fearful, to run across my empty mind. I felt like a junkie in detox, convulsing with the poison of what emerged. I cried a lot. I prayed a lot. It was difficult and it was terrifying, but this much I knew—I never didn’t want to be there, and I never wished that anyone were there with me. I knew that I needed to do this and that I needed to do it alone.

The only other tourists on the island were a handful of couples having romantic vacations. (Gili Meno is far too pretty and far too remote a place for anyone but a crazy person to come visit solo.) I watched these couples and felt some envy for their romances, but knew, “This is not your time for companionship, Liz. You have a different task here.” I kept away from everyone. People on the island left me alone. I think I threw off a spooky vibe. I had not been well all year. You can’t lose that much sleep and that much weight and cry so hard for so long without starting to look like a psychotic. So nobody talked to me.

Actually, that’s not true. One person talked to me, every day. It was this little kid, one of a gang of kids who run up and down the beaches trying to sell fresh fruit to the tourists. This boy was maybe nine years old, and seemed to be the ringleader. He was tough, scrappy and I would have called him street-smart if his island actually had any streets. He was beach-smart, I suppose. Somehow he’d learned great English, probably from harassing sunbathing Westerners. And he was on to me, this kid. Nobody else asked me who I was, nobody else bothered me, but this relentless child would come and sit next to me on the beach at some point every day and demand, “Why don’t you ever talk? Why are you strange like this? Don’t pretend you can’t hear me—I know you can hear me. Why are you always alone? Why don’t you ever go swimming? Where is your boyfriend? Why don’t you have a husband? What’s wrong with you?”

I was like, Back off, kid! What are you—a transcript of my most evil thoughts?

Every day I would try to smile at him kindly and send him away with a polite gesture, but he wouldn’t quit until he got a rise out me. And inevitably, he always got a rise out of me. I remember bursting out at him once, “I’m not talking because I’m on a friggin’ spiritual journey, you nasty little punk—now go AWAY!”

He ran away laughing. Every day, after he’d gotten me to respond, he would always run away laughing. I’d usually end up laughing, too, once he was out of sight. I dreaded this pesky kid and looked forward to him in equal measure. He was my only comedic break during a really tough ride. Saint Anthony once wrote about having gone into the desert on silent retreat and being assaulted by all manner of visions—devils and angels, both. He said, in his solitude, he sometimes encountered devils who looked like angels, and other times he found angels who looked like devils. When asked how he could tell the difference, the saint said that you can only tell which is which by the way you feel after the creature has left your company. If you are appalled, he said, then it was a devil who had visited you. If you feel lightened, it was an angel.

I think I know what that little punk was, who always got a laugh out of me.

On my ninth day of silence, I went into meditation one evening on the beach as the sun was going down and I didn’t stand up again until after midnight. I remember thinking, “This is it, Liz.” I said to my mind, “This is your chance. Show me everything that is causing you sorrow. Let me see all of it. Don’t hold anything back.” One by one, the thoughts and memories of sadness raised their hands, stood up to identify themselves. I looked at each thought, at each unit of sorrow, and I acknowledged its existence and felt (without trying to protect myself from it) its horrible pain. And then I would tell that sorrow, “It’s OK. I love you. I accept you. Come into my heart now. It’s over.” I would actually feel the sorrow (as if it were a living thing) enter my heart (as if it were an actual room). Then I would say, “Next?” and the next bit of grief would surface. I would regard it, experience it, bless it, and invite it into my heart, too. I did this with every sorrowful thought I’d ever had—reaching back into years of memory—until nothing was left.

Then I said to my mind, “Show me your anger now.” One by one, my life’s every incident of anger rose and made itself known. Every injustice, every betrayal, every loss, every rage. I saw them all, one by one, and I acknowledged their existence. I felt each piece of anger completely, as if it were happening for the first time, and then I would say, “Come into my heart now. You can rest there. It’s safe now. It’s over. I love you.” This went on for hours, and I swung between these mighty poles of opposite feelings—experiencing the anger thoroughly for one bone-rattling moment, and then experiencing a total coolness, as the anger entered my heart as if through a door, laid itself down, curled up against its brothers and gave up fighting.

Then came the most difficult part. “Show me your shame,” I asked my mind. Dear God, the horrors that I saw then. A pitiful parade of all my failings, my lies, my selfishness, jealousy, arrogance. I didn’t blink from any of it, though. “Show me your worst,” I said. When I tried to invite these units of shame into my heart, they each hesitated at the door, saying, “No—you don’t want me in there . . . don’t you know what I did?” and I would say, “I do want you. Even you. I do. Even you are welcome here. It’s OK. You are forgiven. You are part of me. You can rest now. It’s over.”

When all this was finished, I was empty. Nothing was fighting in my mind anymore. I looked into my heart, at my own goodness, and I saw its capacity. I saw that my heart was not even nearly full, not even after having taken in and tended to all those calamitous urchins of sorrow and anger and shame; my heart could easily have received and forgiven even more. Its love was infinite.

I knew then that this is how God loves us all and receives us all, and that there is no such thing in this universe as hell, except maybe in our own terrified minds. Because if even one broken and limited human being could experience even one such episode of absolute forgiveness and acceptance of her own self, then imagine—just imagine!—what God, in all His eternal compassion, can forgive and accept.

I also knew somehow that this respite of peace would be temporary. I knew that I was not yet finished for good, that my anger, my sadness and my shame would all creep back eventually, escaping my heart, and occupying my head once more. I knew that I would have to keep dealing with these thoughts again and again until I slowly and determinedly changed my whole life. And that this would be difficult and exhausting to do. But my heart said to my mind in the dark silence of that beach: “I love you, I will never leave you, I will always take care of you.” That promise floated up out of my heart and I caught it in my mouth and held it there, tasting it as I left the beach and walked back to the little shack where I was staying. I found an empty notebook, opened it up to the first page—and only then did I open my mouth and speak those words into the air, letting them free. I let those words break my silence and then I allowed my pencil to document their colossal statement onto the page:

“I love you, I will never leave you, I will always take care of you.”

Those were the first words I ever wrote in that private notebook of mine, which I would carry with me from that moment forth, turning back to it many times over the next two years, always asking for help—and always finding it, even when I was most deadly sad or afraid. And that notebook, steeped through with that promise of love, was quite simply the only reason I survived the next years of my life.

108

And now I’m coming back to Gili Meno under notably different circumstances. Since I was last here, I’ve circled the world, settled my divorce, survived my final separation from David, erased all mood-altering medications from my system, learned to speak a new language, sat upon God’s palm for a few unforgettable moments in India, studied at the feet of an Indonesian medicine man and purchased a home for a family who sorely needed a place to live. I am happy and healthy and balanced. And, yes, I cannot help but notice that I am sailing to this pretty little tropical island with my Brazilian lover. Which is—I admit it!—an almost ludicrously fairy-tale ending to this story, like the page out of some housewife’s dream. (Perhaps even a page out of my own dream, from years ago.) Yet what keeps me from dissolving right now into a complete fairy-tale shimmer is this solid truth, a truth which has veritably built my bones over the last few years—I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue.

My thoughts turn to something I read once, something the Zen Buddhists believe. They say that an oak tree is brought into creation by two forces at the same time. Obviously, there is the acorn from which it all begins, the seed which holds all the promise and potential, which grows into the tree. Everybody can see that. But only a few can recognize that there is another force operating here as well—the future tree itself, which wants so badly to exist that it pulls the acorn into being, drawing the seedling forth with longing out of the void, guiding the evolution from nothingness to maturity. In this respect, say the Zens, it is the oak tree that creates the very acorn from which it was born.

I think about the woman I have become lately, about the life that I am now living, and about how much I always wanted to be this person and live this life, liberated from the farce of pretending to be anyone other than myself. I think of everything I endured before getting here and wonder if it was me—I mean, this happy and balanced me, who is now dozing on the deck of this small Indonesian fishing boat—who pulled the other, younger, more confused and more struggling me forward during all those hard years. The younger me was the acorn full of potential, but it was the older me, the already-existent oak, who was saying the whole time: “Yes— grow! Change! Evolve! Come and meet me here, where I already exist in wholeness and maturity! I need you to grow into me!” And maybe it was this present and fully actualized me who was hovering four years ago over that young married sobbing girl on the bathroom floor, and maybe it was this me who whispered lovingly into that desperate girl’s ear, “Go back to bed, Liz . . .” Knowing already that everything would be OK, that everything would eventually bring us together here. Right here, right to this moment. Where I was always waiting in peace and contentment, always waiting for her to arrive and join me.

Then Felipe wakes up. We’d both been dozing in and out of consciousness all afternoon, curled in each other’s arms on the deck of this Indonesian fisherman’s sailboat. The ocean has been swaying us, the sun shining. While I lie there with my head pillowed on his chest, Felipe tells me that he had an idea while he was sleeping. He says, “You know—I obviously need to keep living in Bali because my business is here, and because it’s so close to Australia, where my kids live. I also need to be in Brazil often, because that’s where the gemstones are and because I have family there. And you obviously need to be in the United States, because that’s where your work is, and that’s where your family and friends are. So I was thinking . . . maybe we could try to build a life together that’s somehow divided between America, Australia, Brazil and Bali.”

All I can do is laugh, because, hey—why not? It just might be crazy enough to work. A life like this might strike some people as absolutely loony, as sheer foolishness, but it resembles me so closely. Of course this is how we should proceed. It feels so familiar already. And I quite like the poetry of his idea, too, I must say. I mean that literally. After this whole year spent exploring the individual and intrepid I’s, Felipe has just suggested to me a whole new theory of traveling:

Australia, America, Bali, Brazil = AABB.

Like a classic poem, like a pair of rhyming couplets.

The little fishing boat anchors right off the shore of Gili Meno. There are no docks here on this island. You have to roll up your pants, jump off the boat and wade in through the surf on your own power. There’s absolutely no way to do this without getting soaking wet or even banged up on the coral, but it’s worth all the trouble because the beach here is so beautiful, so special. So me and my lover, we take off our shoes, we pile our small bags of belongings on the tops of our heads and we prepare to leap over the edge of that boat together, into the sea.

You know, it’s a funny thing. The only Romance language Felipe doesn’t happen to speak is Italian. But I go ahead and say it to him anyway, just as we’re about to jump.

I say: “Attraversiamo.”

Let’s cross over.

FINAL RECOGNITION AND

REASSURANCE

A few months after I’d left Indonesia, I returned to visit loved ones and to celebrate the Christmas and New Year’s holiday. My flight landed in Bali only two hours after Southeast Asia was struck by a tsunami of staggering destruction. Acquaintances all over the world contacted me immediately, concerned about the safety of my Indonesian friends. People seemed particularly consumed with this worry: “Are Wayan and Tutti OK?” The answer is that the tsunami did not impact Bali in any way whatsoever (aside from emotionally, of course) and I found everybody safe and sound. Felipe was waiting for me at the airport (the first of many times we would be meeting each other at various airports). Ketut Liyer was sitting on his porch, same as ever, making medicine and meditations. Yudhi had recently taken work playing guitar in some fancy local resort and was doing well. And Wayan’s family was living happily in their beautiful new house, far away from the dangerous coastline, sheltered high in the rice terraces of Ubud.

With all the gratitude I can summon (and on Wayan’s behalf), I would now like to thank everyone who contributed money to build that home:

Sakshi Andreozzi, Savitri Axelrod, Linda and Renee Barrera, Lisa Boone, Susan Bowen, Gary Brenner, Monica Burke and Karen Kudej, Sandie Carpenter, David Cashion, Anne Connell (who also, along with Jana Eisenberg, is a master of last-minute rescues), Mike and Mimi de Gruy, Armenia de Oliveira, Rayya Elias and Gigi Madl, Susan Freddie, Devin Friedman, Dwight Garner and Cree LeFavour, John and Carole Gilbert, Mamie Healey, Annie Hubbard and the almost-unbelievable Harvey Schwartz, Bob Hughes, Susan Kittenplan, Michael and Jill Knight, Brian and Linda Knopp, Deborah Lopez, Deborah Luepnitz, Craig Marks and Rene Steinke, Adam McKay and Shira Piven, Jonny and Cat Miles, Sheryl Moller, John Morse and Ross Petersen, James and Catherine Murdock (with Nick and Mimi’s blessings), José Nunes, Anne Pagliarulo, Charley Patton, Laura Platter, Peter Richmond, Toby and Beverly Robinson, Nina Bernstein Simmons, Stefania Somare, Natalie Standiford, Stacey Steers, Darcey Steinke, The Thoreson Girls (Nancy, Laura and Miss Rebecca), Daphne Uviller, Richard Vogt, Peter and Jean Warrington, Kristen Weiner, Scott Westerfeld and Justine Larbalestier, Bill Yee and Karen Zimet.

Lastly, and on a different topic, I wish I could find a way to properly acknowledge my cherished Uncle Terry and my Aunt Deborah for all the help they gave me during this year of travel. To call it mere “technical support” is to diminish the importance of their contribution. Together they wove a net beneath my tightrope without which—quite simply—I would not have been able to write this book. I don’t know how to repay them.

In the end, though, maybe we must all give up trying to pay back the people in this world who sustain our lives. In the end, maybe it’s wiser to surrender before the miraculous scope of human generosity and to just keep saying thank you, forever and sincerely, for as long as we have voices.

COMMITTED

A Sceptic Makes Peace with Marriage

Elizabeth

GILBERT

BLOOMSBURY

LONDON · BERLIN · NEW YORK

Para J.L.N.—o meu coroa

There is no greater risk than matrimony.

But there is nothing happier than a happy marriage.

_____

BENJAMIN DISRAELI, 1870,

IN A LETTER TO QUEEN VICTORIA’S DAUGHTER LOUISE,

CONGRATULATING HER ON HER ENGAGEMENT

Contents

A Note to the Reader

Chapter One Marriage and Surprises

Chapter Two Marriage and Expectation

Chapter Three Marriage and History

Chapter Four Marriage and Infatuation

Chapter Five Marriage and Women

Chapter Six Marriage and Autonomy

Chapter Seven Marriage and Subversion

Chapter Eight Marriage and Ceremony

Acknowledgments

A Note to the Reader

A few years ago, I wrote a book called Eat, Pray, Love, which told the story of a journey I had taken around the world, alone, after a bad divorce. I was in my midthirties when I wrote that book, and everything about it represented a huge departure for me as a writer. Before Eat, Pray, Love, I had been known in literary circles (if I was known at all) as a woman who wrote predominantly for, and about, men. I’d been working for years as a journalist for such male-focused magazines as GQ and Spin, and I had used those pages to explore masculinity from every possible angle. Similarly, the subjects of my first three books (both fiction and nonfiction) were all supermacho characters: cowboys, lobster fishermen, hunters, truckers, Teamsters, woodsmen . . .

Back then, I was often told that I wrote like a man. Now, I’m not entirely sure what writing “like a man” even means, but I do believe it is generally intended as a compliment. I certainly took it as a compliment at the time. For one GQ article, I even went so far as to impersonate a man for a week. I cropped my hair, flattened my breasts, stuffed a birdseed-filled condom down my pants, and affixed a soul patch beneath my lower lip—all in an effort to somehow inhabit and comprehend the alluring mysteries of manhood.

I should add here that my fixation with men also extended into my private life. Often this brought complications.

No—always this brought complications.

Between my romantic entanglements and my professional obsessions, I was so absorbed by the subject of maleness that I never spent any time whatsoever contemplating the subject of femaleness. I certainly never spent any time contemplating my own femaleness. For that reason, as well as a general indifference toward my own well-being, I never became very familiar to myself. So when a massive wave of depression finally struck me down around the age of thirty, I had no way of understanding or articulating what was happening to me. My body fell apart first, then my marriage, and then—for a terrible and frightening interval—my mind. Masculine flint offered no solace in this situation; the only way out of the emotional tangle was to feel my way through it. Divorced, heartbroken, and lonely, I left everything behind and took off for a year of travel and introspection, intent on scrutinizing myself as closely as I’d once studied the elusive American cowboy.

Then, because I am a writer, I wrote a book about it.

Then, because life is really strange sometimes, that book became a megajumbo international best seller, and I suddenly found myself—after a decade spent writing exclusively about men and maleness—being referred to as a chick-lit author. Again, I’m not entirely sure what “chick-lit” even means, but I’m pretty certain it’s never intended as a compliment.

In any case, people ask me all the time now whether I saw any of this coming. They want to know if, as I was writing Eat, Pray, Love, I had somehow anticipated how big it would become. No. There was no way in the world I could possibly have predicted or planned for such an overwhelming response. If anything, I’d been hoping as I wrote the book that I’d be forgiven for writing a memoir at all. I had only a handful of readers, it was true, but they were loyal readers, and they had always liked the stalwart young lady who wrote tough-minded stories about manly men doing manly things. I did not anticipate that those readers would enjoy a rather emotional first-person chronicle about a divorced woman’s quest for psychospiritual healing. I hoped they would be generous enough, though, to understand that I had needed to write that book for my own personal reasons, and maybe everyone would let it slide, and then we could all move on.

That was not how things turned out.

(And just to be clear: The book that you are now holding is not a tough-minded story about manly men doing manly things either. Never let it be said that you were not warned!)

Another question people ask me all the time these days is how Eat, Pray, Love has changed my life. That one is difficult to answer because the scope has been so massive. A useful analogy from my childhood: When I was little, my parents once took me to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. We stood there together in the Hall of Oceans. My dad pointed up toward the ceiling at the life-sized model of the great blue whale that hung suspended over our heads. He tried to impress upon me the size of this gargantuan creature, but I could not see the whale. I was standing right underneath the whale, mind you, and I was staring directly up at the whale, but I could not absorb the whale. My mind had no mechanism for comprehending something so large. All I could see was the blue ceiling and the wonderment on everyone else’s faces (obviously something exciting was happening here!), but I could not grasp the whale itself.

That’s how I feel sometimes about Eat, Pray, Love. There came a point in that book’s trajectory when I could no longer sanely absorb its dimensions, so I gave up trying and turned my attention to other pursuits. Planting a garden helped; there’s nothing like picking slugs off your tomato plants to keep things in perspective.

That said, it has been a bit of a perplexity for me to figure out how, after that phenomenon, I would ever write unself-consciously again. Not to act all falsely nostalgic for literary obscurity, but in the past I had always written my books in the belief that very few people would read them. For the most part, of course, that knowledge had always been depressing. In one critical way, though, it was comforting: If I humiliated myself too atrociously, at least there wouldn’t be many witnesses. Either way, the question was now academic: I suddenly had millions of readers awaiting my next project. How in the world does one go about writing a book that will satisfy millions? I didn’t want to blatantly pander, but I also didn’t want to dismiss out of hand all those bright, passionate, and predominantly female readers—not after everything we’d been through together.

Uncertain of how to proceed, I proceeded anyhow. Over the course of a year, I wrote an entire first draft of this very book—five hundred pages—but I realized immediately upon completion that it was somehow wrong. The voice didn’t sound like me. The voice didn’t sound like anybody. The voice sounded like something coming through a megaphone, mistranslated. I put that manuscript away, never to be looked at again, and headed back out to the garden for some more contemplative digging, poking, and pondering.

I want to make it clear here that this was not exactly a crisis, that period when I could not figure out how to write—or, at least, when I could not figure out how to write naturally. Life was really nice otherwise, and I was grateful enough for personal contentment and professional success that I wasn’t about to manufacture a calamity from this particular puzzle. But it certainly was a puzzle. I even started wondering if maybe I was finished as a writer. Not being a writer anymore didn’t seem like the worst fate in the world, if indeed that was to be my fate, but I honestly couldn’t tell yet. I had to spend a lot more hours in the tomato patch, is all I’m saying, before I could sort this thing out.

In the end, I found a certain comfort in recognizing that I could not—cannot—write a book that would satisfy millions of readers. Not deliberately, anyhow. The fact is, I do not know how to write a beloved best seller on demand. If I knew how to write beloved best sellers on demand, I can assure you that I would have been writing them all along, because it would have made my life a lot easier and more comfortable ages ago. But it doesn’t work that way—or at least not for writers like me. We write only the books that we need to write, or are able to write, and then we must release them, recognizing that whatever happens to them next is somehow none of our business.

For a multitude of personal reasons, then, the book that I needed to write was exactly this book—another memoir (with extra socio-historical bonus sections!) about my efforts to make peace with the complicated institution of marriage. The subject matter was never in doubt; it’s just that I had trouble there for a while finding my voice. Ultimately I discovered that the only way I could write again at all was to vastly limit—at least in my own imagination—the number of people I was writing for. So I started completely over. And I did not write this version of Committed for millions of readers. Instead, I wrote it for exactly twenty-seven readers. To be precise, the names of those twenty-seven readers are: Maude, Carole, Catherine, Ann, Darcey, Deborah, Susan, Sofie, Cree, Cat, Abby, Linda, Bernadette, Jen, Jana, Sheryl, Rayya, Iva, Erica, Nichelle, Sandy, Anne, Patricia, Tara, Laura, Sarah, and Margaret.

Those twenty-seven women constitute my small but critically important circle of female friends, relatives, and neighbors. They range in age from their early twenties to their midnineties. One of them happens to be my grandmother; another is my stepdaughter. One is my oldest friend; another is my newest friend. One is freshly married; another two or so sorely wish to be married; a few have recently remarried; one in particular is unspeakably grateful never to have married at all; another just ended a nearly decade-long relationship with a woman. Seven are mothers; two (as of this writing) are pregnant; the rest—for a variety of reasons and with a wide range of feelings about it—are childless. Some are homemakers; others are professionals; a couple of them, bless their hearts, are homemakers and professionals. Most are white; a few are black; two were born in the Middle East; one is Scandinavian; two are Australian; one is South American; another is Cajun. Three are devoutly religious; five are utterly uninterested in all questions of divinity; most are somewhat spiritually perplexed; the others have somehow, over the years, brokered their own private agreements with God. All these women have an above-average sense of humor. All of them, at some point in their lives, have experienced heartbreaking loss.

Over many years, over many cups of tea and booze, I have sat with one or another of these dear souls and wondered aloud over questions of marriage, intimacy, sexuality, divorce, fidelity, family, responsibility, and autonomy. This book was built on the bones of those conversations. While I pieced together various pages of this story, I would find myself literally speaking aloud to these friends, relatives, and neighbors—responding to questions that sometimes dated back decades, or posing new questions of my own. This book could never have come into existence without the influence of those twenty-seven extraordinary women and I am enormously grateful for their collective presence. As ever, it has been an education and a comfort just to have them in the room.

Elizabeth Gilbert

New Jersey, 2009

COMMITTED

CHAPTER ONE

Marriage and Surprises

Marriage is a friendship recognized by the police.

—Robert Louis Stevenson

Late one afternoon in the summer of 2006, I found myself in a small village in northern Vietnam, sitting around a sooty kitchen fire with a number of local women whose language I did not speak, trying to ask them questions about marriage.

For several months already, I had been traveling across Southeast Asia with a man who was soon to become my husband. I suppose the conventional term for such an individual would be “fiancé,” but neither one of us was very comfortable with that word, so we weren’t using it. In fact, neither one of us was very comfortable with this whole idea of matrimony at all. Marriage was not something we had ever planned with each other, nor was it something either of us wanted. Yet providence had interfered with our plans, which was why we were now wandering haphazardly across Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Indonesia, all the while making urgent—even desperate—efforts to return to America and wed.

The man in question had been my lover, my sweetheart, for over two years by then, and in these pages I shall call him Felipe. Felipe is a kind, affectionate Brazilian gentleman, seventeen years my senior, whom I’d met on another journey (an actual planned journey) that I’d taken around the world a few years earlier in an effort to mend a severely broken heart. Near the end of those travels, I’d encountered Felipe, who had been living quietly and alone in Bali for years, nursing his own broken heart. What had followed was attraction, then a slow courtship, and then, much to our mutual wonderment, love.

Our resistance to marriage, then, had nothing to do with an absence of love. On the contrary, Felipe and I loved each other unreservedly. We were happy to make all sorts of promises to stay together faithfully forever. We had even sworn lifelong fidelity to each other already, although quite privately. The problem was that the two of us were both survivors of bad divorces, and we’d been so badly gutted by our experiences that the very idea of legal marriage—with anyone, even with such nice people as each other—filled us with a heavy sense of dread.

As a rule, of course, most divorces are pretty bad (Rebecca West observed that “getting a divorce is nearly always as cheerful and useful an occupation as breaking very valuable china”), and our divorces had been no exception. On the mighty cosmic one-to-ten Scale of Divorce Badness (where one equals an amicably executed separation, and ten equals . . . well, an actual execution), I would probably rate my own divorce as something like a 7.5. No suicides or homicides had resulted, but aside from that, the rupture had been about as ugly a proceeding as two otherwise well-mannered people could have possibly manifested. And it had dragged on for more than two years.

As for Felipe, his first marriage (to an intelligent, professional Australian woman) had ended almost a decade before we’d met in Bali. His divorce had unfolded graciously enough at the time, but losing his wife (and access to the house and kids and almost two decades of history that came along with her) had inflicted on this good man a lingering legacy of sadness, with special emphases on regret, isolation, and economic anxiety.

Our experiences, then, had left the two of us taxed, troubled, and decidedly suspicious of the joys of holy wedded matrimony. Like anyone who has ever walked through the valley of the shadow of divorce, Felipe and I had each learned firsthand this distressing truth: that every intimacy carries, secreted somewhere below its initial lovely surfaces, the ever-coiled makings of complete catastrophe. We had also learned that marriage is an estate that is very much easier to enter than it is to exit. Unfenced by law, the unmarried lover can quit a bad relationship at any time. But you—the legally married person who wants to escape doomed love—may soon discover that a significant portion of your marriage contract belongs to the State, and that it sometimes takes a very long while for the State to grant you your leave. Thus, you can feasibly find yourself trapped for months or even years in a loveless legal bond that has come to feel rather like a burning building. A burning building in which you, my friend, are handcuffed to a radiator somewhere down in the basement, unable to wrench yourself free, while the smoke billows forth and the rafters are collapsing . . .

I’m sorry—does all this sound unenthusiastic?

I share these unpleasant thoughts only to explain why Felipe and I had made a rather unusual pact with each other, right from the beginning of our love story. We had sworn with all our hearts to never, ever, under any circumstances, marry. We had even promised never to blend together our finances or our worldly assets, in order to avoid the potential nightmare of ever again having to divvy up an explosive personal munitions dump of shared mortgages, deeds, property, bank accounts, kitchen appliances, and favorite books. These promises having been duly pledged, the two of us proceeded forth into our carefully partitioned companionship with a real sense of calmness. For just as a sworn engagement can bring to so many other couples a sensation of encircling protection, our vow never to marry had cloaked the two of us in all the emotional security we required in order to try once more at love. And this commitment of ours—consciously devoid of official commitment—felt miraculous in its liberation. It felt as though we had found the Northwest Passage of Perfect Intimacy—something that, as García Márquez wrote, “resembled love, but without the problems of love.”

So that’s what we’d been doing up until the spring of 2006: minding our own business, building a delicately divided life together in unfettered contentment. And that is very well how we might have gone on living happily ever after, except for one terribly inconvenient interference.

The United States Department of Homeland Security got involved.

T he trouble was that Felipe and I—while we shared many similarities and blessings—did not happen to share a nationality. He was a Brazilian-born man with Australian citizenship who, when we met, had been living mostly in Indonesia. I was an American woman who, my travels aside, had been living mostly on the East Coast of the United States. We didn’t initially foresee any problems with our countryless love story, although in retrospect perhaps we should have anticipated complications. As the old adage goes: A fish and a bird may indeed fall in love, but where shall they live? The solution to this dilemma, we believed, was that we were both nimble travelers (I was a bird who could dive and Felipe was a fish who could fly), so for our first year together, at least, we basically lived in midair—diving and flying across oceans and continents in order to be together.

Our work lives, fortunately enough, facilitated such footloose arrangements. As a writer, I could carry my job with me anyplace. As a jewelry and gemstone importer who sold his goods in the United States, Felipe always needed to be traveling anyhow. All we had to do was coordinate our locomotion. So I would fly to Bali; he would come to America; we would both go to Brazil; we would meet up again in Sydney. I took a temporary job teaching writing at the University of Tennessee, and for a few curious months we lived together in a decaying old hotel room in Knoxville. (I can recommend that living arrangement, by the way, to anyone who wants to test out the actual compatibility levels of a new relationship.)

We lived at a staccato rhythm, on the hoof, mostly together but ever on the move, like witnesses in some odd international protection program. Our relationship—though steadying and calm at the personal level—was a constant logistical challenge, and what with all that international air travel, it was bloody expensive. It was also psychologically jarring. With each reunion, Felipe and I had to learn each other all over again. There was always that nervous moment at the airport when I would stand there waiting for him to arrive, wondering, Will I still know him? Will he still know me? After the first year, then, we both began to long for something more stable, and Felipe was the one who made the big move. Giving up his modest but lovely cottage in Bali, he moved with me to a tiny house I had recently rented on the outskirts of Philadelphia.

While trading Bali for the suburbs of Philly may seem a peculiar choice, Felipe swore that he had long ago grown tired of life in the tropics. Living in Bali was too easy, he complained, with each day a pleasant, boring replica of the day before. He had been longing to leave for some time already, he insisted, even before he’d met me. Now, growing bored with paradise might be impossible to understand for someone who has never actually lived in paradise (I certainly found the notion a bit crazy), yet Bali’s dreamland setting honestly had come to feel oppressively dull to Felipe over the years. I will never forget one of the last enchanting evenings that he and I spent together at his cottage there—sitting outside, barefoot and dewy-skinned from the warm November air, drinking wine and watching a sea of constellations flicker above the rice fields. As the perfumed winds rustled the palm trees and as faint music from a distant temple ceremony floated on the breeze, Felipe looked at me, sighed, and said flatly, “I’m so sick of this shit. I can’t wait to go back to Philly.”

So—to Philadelphia (city of brotherly potholes) we duly decamped! The fact is we both liked the area a lot. Our little rental was near my sister and her family, whose proximity had become vital to my happiness over the years, so that brought familiarity. Moreover, after all our collective years of travel to far-flung places, it felt good and even revitalizing to be living in America, a country which, for all its flaws, was still interesting to both of us: a fast-moving, multicultural, ever-evolving, maddeningly contradictory, creatively challenging, and fundamentally alive sort of place.

There in Philadelphia, then, Felipe and I set up headquarters and practiced, with encouraging success, our first real sessions of shared domesticity. He sold his jewelry; I worked on writing projects that required me to stay in one place and conduct research. He cooked; I took care of the lawn; every once in a while one of us would fire up the vacuum cleaner. We worked well together in a home, dividing our daily chores without strife. We felt ambitious and productive and optimistic. Life was nice.

But such intervals of stability could never last long. Because of Felipe’s visa restrictions, three months was the maximum amount of time that he could legally stay in America before he would have to excuse himself to another country for a spell. So off he would fly, and I would be alone with my books and my neighbors while he was gone. Then, after a few weeks, he’d return to the United States on another ninety-day visa and we’d recommence our domestic life together. It is a testament to how warily we both regarded long-term commitment that these ninety-day chunks of togetherness felt just about perfect for us: the exact amount of future planning that two tremulous divorce survivors could manage without feeling too threatened. And sometimes, when my schedule allowed, I would join him on his visa runs out of the country.

This explains why one day we were returning to the States together from a business trip overseas and we landed—due to the peculiarity of our cheap tickets and our connecting flight—at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport. I passed through Immigration first, moving easily through the line of my fellow repatriating American citizens. Once on the other side, I waited for Felipe, who was in the middle of a long line of foreigners. I watched as he approached the immigration official, who carefully studied Felipe’s bible-thick Australian passport, scrutinizing every page, every mark, every hologram. Normally they were not so vigilant, and I grew nervous at how long this was taking. I watched and waited, listening for the all-important sound of any successful border crossing: that thick, solid, librarian-like thunk of a welcoming visa-entry stamp. But it never came.

Instead, the immigration official picked up his phone and made a quiet call. Moments later, an officer wearing the uniform of the United States Department of Homeland Security came and took my baby away.

T he uniformed men at the Dallas airport held Felipe in interrogation for six hours. For six hours, forbidden to see him or ask questions, I sat there in a Homeland Security waiting room—a bland, fluorescent-lit space filled with apprehensive people from all over the world, all of us equally rigid with fear. I had no idea what they were doing to Felipe back there or what they were asking from him. I knew that he had not broken any laws, but this was not as comforting a thought as you might imagine. These were the late years of George W. Bush’s presidential administration: not a relaxing moment in history to have your foreign-born sweetheart held in government custody. I kept trying to calm myself with the famous prayer of the fourteenth-century mystic Juliana of Norwich (“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well”), but I didn’t believe a word of it. Nothing was well. Not one single manner of thing whatsoever was well.

Every once in a while I would stand up from my plastic chair and try to elicit more information from the immigration officer behind the bulletproof glass. But he ignored my pleas, each time reciting the same response: “When we have something to tell you about your boyfriend, miss, we’ll let you know.”

In a situation like this, may I just say, there is perhaps no more feeble-sounding word in the English language than boyfriend. The dismissive manner in which the officer uttered that word indicated how unimpressed he was with my relationship. Why on earth should a government employee ever release information about a mere boyfriend? I longed to explain myself to the immigration officer, to say, “Listen, the man you are detaining back there is far more important to me than you could ever begin to imagine.” But even in my anxious state, I doubted this would do any good. If anything, I feared that pushing things too far might bring unpleasant repercussions on Felipe’s end, so I backed off, helpless. It occurs to me only now that I probably should have made an effort to call a lawyer. But I didn’t have a telephone with me, and I didn’t want to abandon my post in the waiting room, and I didn’t know any lawyers in Dallas, and it was a Sunday afternoon, anyhow, so who could I have reached?

Finally, after six hours, an officer came and led me through some hallways, through a rabbit warren of bureaucratic mysteries, to a small, dimly lit room where Felipe was sitting with the Homeland Security officer who had been interrogating him. Both men looked equally tired, but only one of those men was mine—my beloved, the most familiar face in the world to me. Seeing him in such a state made my chest hurt with longing. I wanted to touch him, but I sensed this was not allowed, so I remained standing.

Felipe smiled at me wearily and said, “Darling, our lives are about to get a lot more interesting.”

Before I could respond, the interrogating officer quickly took charge of the situation and all its explanations.

“Ma’am,” he said, “we’ve brought you back here to explain that we will not be allowing your boyfriend to enter the United States anymore. We’ll be detaining him in jail until we can get him on a flight out of the country, back to Australia, since he does have an Australian passport. After that, he won’t be able to come back to America again.”

My first reaction was physical. I felt as if all the blood in my body had instantly evaporated, and my eyes refused to focus for a moment. Then, in the next instant, my mind kicked into action. I revved through a fast summation of this sudden, grave crisis. Starting long before we had met, Felipe had made his living in the United States, visiting several times a year for short stays, legally importing gemstones and jewelry from Brazil and Indonesia for sale in American markets. America has always welcomed international businessmen like him; they bring merchandise and money and commerce into the country. In return, Felipe had prospered in America. He’d put his kids (who were now adults) through the finest private schools in Australia with income that he’d made in America over the decades. America was the center of his professional life, even though he’d never lived here until very recently. But his inventory was here and all his contacts were here. If he could never come back to America again, his livelihood was effectively destroyed. Not to mention the fact that I lived here in the United States, and that Felipe wanted to be with me, and that—because of my family and my work—I would always want to remain based in America. And Felipe had become part of my family, too. He’d been fully embraced by my parents, my sister, my friends, my world. So how would we continue our life together if he were forever banned? What would we do? (“Where will you and I sleep?” go the lyrics to a mournful Wintu love song. “At the down-turned jagged rim of the sky? Where will you and I sleep?”)

“On what grounds are you deporting him?” I asked the Homeland Security officer, trying to sound authoritative.

“Strictly speaking, ma’am, it’s not a deportation.” Unlike me, the officer didn’t have to try sounding authoritative; it came naturally. “We’re just refusing him entrance to the United States on the grounds that he’s been visiting America too frequently in the last year. He’s never overstayed his visa limits, but it does appear from all his comings and goings that he’s been living with you in Philadelphia for three-month periods and then leaving the country, only to return to the United States again immediately after.”

This was difficult to argue, since that was precisely what Felipe had been doing.

“Is that a crime?” I asked.

“Not exactly.”

“Not exactly, or no?”

“No, ma’am, it’s not a crime. That’s why we won’t be arresting him. But the three-month visa waiver that the United States government offers to citizens of friendly countries is not intended for indefinite consecutive visits.”

“But we didn’t know that,” I said.

Felipe stepped in now. “In fact, sir, we were once told by an immigration officer in New York that I could visit the United States as often as I liked, as long as I never overstayed my ninety-day visa.”

“I don’t know who told you that, but it isn’t true.”

Hearing the officer say this reminded me of a warning Felipe had given me once about international border crossings: “Never take it lightly, darling. Always remember that on any given day, for any given reason whatsoever, any given border guard in the world can decide that he does not want to let you in.”

“What would you do now, if you were in our situation?” I asked. This is a technique I’ve learned to use over the years whenever I find myself at an impasse with a dispassionate customer service operator or an apathetic bureaucrat. Phrasing the sentence in such a manner invites the person who has all the power to pause for a moment and put himself in the shoes of the person who is powerless. It’s a subtle appeal to empathy. Sometimes it helps. Most of the time, to be honest, it doesn’t help at all. But I was willing to try anything here.

“Well, if your boyfriend ever wants to come back into the United States again, he’s going to need to secure himself a better, more permanent visa. If I were you, I would go about securing him one.”

“Okay, then,” I said. “What’s the fastest way for us to secure him a better, more permanent visa?”

The Homeland Security officer looked at Felipe, then at me, then back at Felipe. “Honestly?” he said. “The two of you need to get married.”

M y heart sank, almost audibly. Across the tiny room, I could sense Felipe’s heart sinking along with mine, in complete hollow tandem.

In retrospect, it does seem unbelievable that this proposition could possibly have taken me by surprise. Had I never heard of a green card marriage before, for heaven’s sake? Maybe it also seems unbelievable that—given the urgent nature of our circumstances—the suggestion of matrimony brought me distress instead of relief. I mean, at least we’d been given an option, right? Yet the proposition did take me by surprise. And it did hurt. So thoroughly had I barred the very notion of marriage from my psyche that hearing the idea spoken aloud now felt shocking. I felt mournful and sucker punched and heavy and banished from some fundamental aspect of my being, but most of all I felt caught. I felt we had both been caught. The flying fish and the diving bird had been netted. And my naïveté, not for the first time in my life, I’m afraid, struck me across the face like a wet slap: Why had I been so foolish as to imagine that we could get away with living our lives as we pleased forever?

Nobody spoke for a while, until the Homeland Security interrogation officer, regarding our silent faces of doom, asked, “Sorry, folks. What seems to be the problem with this idea?”

Felipe took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes—a sign, I knew from long experience, of utter exhaustion. He sighed, and said, “Oh, Tom, Tom, Tom . . .”

I had not yet realized that these two were on a first-name basis, though I suppose that’s bound to happen during a six-hour interrogation session. Especially when the interrogatee is Felipe.

“No, seriously—what’s the problem?” asked Officer Tom. “You two have obviously been cohabiting already. You obviously care about each other, you’re not married to anyone else . . .”

“What you have to understand, Tom,” explained Felipe, leaning forward and speaking with an intimacy which belied our institutional surroundings, “is that Liz and I have both been through really, really bad divorces in the past.”

Officer Tom made a small noise—a sort of soft, sympathetic “Oh . . .” Then he took off his own glasses and rubbed his own eyes. Instinctively, I glanced at the third finger of his left hand. No wedding ring. From that bare left hand and from his reflexive reaction of tired commiseration I made a quick diagnosis: divorced.

It was here that our interview turned surreal.

“Well, you could always sign a prenuptial agreement,” Officer Tom suggested. “I mean, if you’re worried about going through all the financial mess of a divorce again. Or if it’s the relationship issues that scare you, maybe some counseling would be a good idea.”

I listened in wonder. Was a deputy of the United States Department of Homeland Security giving us marital advice? In an interrogation room? In the bowels of the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport?

Finding my voice, I offered this brilliant solution: “Officer Tom, what if I just found a way to somehow hire Felipe, instead of marrying him? Couldn’t I bring him to America as my employee, instead of my husband?”

Felipe sat up straight and exclaimed, “Darling! What a terrific idea!”

Officer Tom gave us each an odd look. He asked Felipe, “You would honestly rather have this woman as your boss than your wife?”

“Dear God, yes!”

I could sense Officer Tom almost physically restraining himself from asking, “What the hell kind of people are you?” But he was far too professional for anything like that. Instead, he cleared his throat and said, “Unfortunately, what you have just proposed here is not legal in this country.”

Felipe and I both slumped again, once more in complete tandem, into a depressed silence.

After a long spell of this, I spoke again. “All right,” I said, defeated. “Let’s get this over with. If I marry Felipe right now, right here in your office, will you let him into the country today? Maybe you have a chaplain here at the airport who could do that?”

There are moments in life when the face of an ordinary man can take on a quality of near-divinity, and this is just what happened now. Tom—a weary, badge-wearing, Texan Homeland Security officer with a paunch—smiled at me with a sadness, a kindness, a luminous compassion that was utterly out of place in this stale, dehumanizing room. Suddenly, he looked like a chaplain himself.

“Oh no-o-o . . . ,” he said gently. “I’m afraid things don’t work that way.”

Looking back on it all now, of course I realize that Officer Tom already knew what was facing Felipe and me, far better than we ourselves could have known. He well knew that securing an official United States fiancé visa, particularly after a “border incident” such as this one, would be no small feat. Officer Tom could foresee all the trouble that was now coming to us: from the lawyers in three countries—on three continents, no less—who would have to secure all the necessary legal documents; to the federal police reports that would be required from every country in which Felipe had ever lived; to the stacks of personal letters, photos, and other intimate ephemera which we would now have to compile to prove that our relationship was real (including, with maddening irony, such evidence as shared bank accounts—details we’d specifically gone through an awful lot of trouble in our lives to keep separated); to the fingerprinting; to the inoculations; to the requisite tuberculosis-screening chest X-rays; to the interviews at the American embassies abroad; to the military records that we would somehow have to recover of Felipe’s Brazilian army service thirty-five years earlier; to the sheer expanse and expense of time that Felipe now would have to spend out of the country while this process played itself out; to—worst of all—the horrible uncertainty of not knowing whether any of this effort would be enough, which is to say, not knowing whether the United States government (behaving, in this regard, rather much like a stern, old-fashioned father) would ever even accept this man as a husband for me, its jealously guarded natural-born daughter.

So Officer Tom already knew all that, and the fact that he expressed sympathy toward us for what we were about to undergo was an unexpected turn of kindness in an otherwise devastating situation. That I never, prior to this moment, imagined myself praising a member of the Department of Homeland Security in print for his personal tenderness only highlights how bizarre this whole situation had become. But I should say here that Officer Tom did us one other kind deed, as well. (That is, before he handcuffed Felipe and led him off to the Dallas county jail, depositing him for the night in a cell filled with actual criminals.) The gesture that Officer Tom made was this: He left me and Felipe alone together in the interrogation room for two whole minutes, so that we could say our good-byes to each other in privacy.

When you have only two minutes to say good-bye to the person you love most in the world, and you don’t know when you’ll see each other again, you can become logjammed with the effort to say and do and settle everything at once. In our two minutes alone in the interrogation room, then, we made a hasty, breathless plan. I would go home to Philadelphia, move out of our rented house, put everything into storage, secure an immigration lawyer and start this legal process moving. Felipe, of course, would go to jail. Then he would be deported back to Australia—even if, strictly speaking, he wasn’t being legally “deported.” (Please forgive me for using the word “deported” throughout the pages of this book, but I’m still not sure what else to call it when a person gets thrown out of a country.) Since Felipe had no life in Australia anymore, no home or financial prospects, he would make arrangements as quickly as possible to go somewhere cheaper to live—Southeast Asia, probably—and I would join him on that side of the world once I got things rolling on my end. There, we would wait out this indefinite period of uncertainty together.

While Felipe jotted down the phone numbers of his lawyer, his grown children, and his business partners so that I could alert everyone to his situation, I emptied out my handbag, frantically looking for things I could give him to keep him more comfortable in jail: chewing gum, all my cash, a bottle of water, a photograph of us together, and a novel I had been reading on the airplane titled, aptly enough, The People’s Act of Love.

Then Felipe’s eyes filled with tears and he said, “Thank you for coming into my life. No matter what happens now, no matter what you decide to do next, just know that you’ve given me the two most joyful years I’ve ever known and I will never forget you.”

I realized in a flash: Dear God, the man thinks I might leave him now. His reaction surprised me and touched me, but more than anything it shamed me. It had not crossed my mind, since Officer Tom had laid out the option, that I would not now marry Felipe and save him from exile—but apparently it had crossed his mind that he might now be ditched. He genuinely feared that I might abandon him, leaving him high and dry, broke and busted. Had I earned such a reputation? Was I really known, even within the boundaries of our small love story, as somebody who jumps ship at the first obstacle? But were Felipe’s fears entirely unjustified, given my history? If our situations had been reversed, I would never have doubted for a moment the solidity of his loyalties, or his willingness to sacrifice virtually anything on my account. Could he be certain of the same steadfastness from me?

I had to admit that if this state of affairs had taken place ten or fifteen years earlier, I almost certainly would have bailed out on my endangered partner. I am sorry to confess that I possessed a scant amount of honor in my youth, if any, and behaving in a flighty and thoughtless manner was a bit of a specialty of mine. But being a person of character matters to me now, and matters only more as I grow older. At that moment, then—and I had only one moment left alone with Felipe—I did the only right thing by this man whom I adored. I vowed to him—drilling the words into his ear so he would grasp my earnestness—that I would not leave him, that I would do whatever it took to fix things, and that even if things could not somehow be fixed in America, we would always stay together anyhow, somewhere, wherever in the world that had to be.

Officer Tom came back into the room.

At the last instant, Felipe whispered to me, “I love you so much, I will even marry you.”

“And I love you so much,” I promised, “that I will even marry you.”

Then the nice Homeland Security people separated us and handcuffed Felipe and led him away—first to jail and then off to exile.

A s I flew home alone that night to our now-obsolete little existence in Philadelphia, I considered more soberly what I had just promised. I was surprised to find that I was not feeling weepy or panicky; somehow the situation seemed too grave for any of that. What I felt, instead, was a ferocious sense of focus—a sense that this situation must be addressed with the utmost seriousness. In the space of only a few hours, my life with Felipe had been neatly flipped upside down, as though by some great cosmic spatula. And now, it seemed, we were engaged to be married. This had certainly been a strange and rushed engagement ceremony. It felt more like something out of Kafka than out of Austen. Yet the engagement was nonetheless official because it needed to be.

Fine, then. So be it. I would certainly not be the first woman in my family’s history who ever had to get married because of a serious situation—although my situation, at least, did not involve accidental pregnancy. Still, the prescription was the same: Tie the knot, and do it quickly. So that’s what we would do. But here was the real problem, which I identified that night all alone on the plane back home to Philadelphia: I had no idea what marriage was.

I had already made this mistake—entering into marriage without understanding anything whatsoever about the institution—once before in my life. In fact, I had jumped into my first marriage, at the totally unfinished age of twenty-five, much the same way that a Labrador jumps into a swimming pool—with exactly that much preparation and foresight. Back when I was twenty-five, I was so irresponsible that I probably should not have been allowed to choose my own toothpaste, much less my own future, and so this carelessness, as you can imagine, came at a dear cost. I reaped the consequences in spades, six years later, in the grim setting of a divorce court.

Looking back on the occasion of my first wedding day, I’m reminded of Richard Aldington’s novel Death of a Hero, in which he ponders his two young lovers on their ill-fated wedding day: “Can one tabulate the ignorances, the relevant ignorances, of George Augustus and Isabel when they pledged themselves together until death do us part?” I, too, was once a giddy young bride very much like Aldington’s Isabel, about whom he wrote: “What she didn’t know included almost the whole range of human knowledge. The puzzle is to find out what she did know.”

Now, though—at the considerably less giddy age of thirty-seven—I was not convinced that I knew very much more than ever about the realities of institutionalized companionship. I had failed at marriage and thus I was terrified of marriage, but I’m not sure this made me an expert on marriage; this only made me an expert on failure and terror, and those particular fields are already crowded with experts. Yet destiny had intervened and was demanding marriage from me, and I’d learned enough from life’s experiences to understand that destiny’s interventions can sometimes be read as invitations for us to address and even surmount our biggest fears. It doesn’t take a great genius to recognize that when you are pushed by circumstance to do the one thing you have always most specifically loathed and feared, this can be, at the very least, an interesting growth opportunity.

So it slowly dawned on me on the airplane out of Dallas—my world now turned back-to-front, my lover exiled, the two of us having effectively been sentenced to marry—that perhaps I should use this time to somehow make peace with the idea of matrimony before I jumped into it once again. Perhaps it would be wise to put a little effort into unraveling the mystery of what in the name of God and human history this befuddling, vexing, contradictory, and yet stubbornly enduring institution of marriage actually is.

S o that is what I did. For the next ten months—while traveling with Felipe in a state of rootless exile and while working like a dog to get him back into America so we could safely wed (getting married in Australia or anywhere else in the world, Officer Tom had warned us, would merely irritate the Homeland Security Department and slow down our immigration process even more)—the only thing I thought about, the only thing I read about, and pretty much the only thing I talked about with anybody was the perplexing subject of matrimony.

I enlisted my sister back home in Philadelphia (who, conveniently, is an actual historian) to send me boxes of books about marriage. Wherever Felipe and I happened to be staying, I would lock myself up in our hotel room to study the books, passing untold hours in the company of such eminent matrimonial scholars as Stephanie Coontz and Nancy Cott—writers whose names I had never heard before but who now became my heroes and teachers. To be honest, all this studying made me a lousy tourist. During those months of travel, Felipe and I fetched up in many beautiful and fascinating places, but I’m afraid I didn’t always pay close attention to our surroundings. This stretch of traveling never had the feeling of a carefree adventure anyhow. It felt more like an expulsion, a hegira. Traveling because you cannot go back home again, because one of you is not legally allowed to go home again, can never be an enjoyable endeavor.

Moreover, our financial situation was worrisome. Eat, Pray, Love was less than a year away from becoming a lucrative best seller, but that welcome development had not yet occurred, nor did we anticipate its ever occurring. Felipe was now completely cut off from his income source, so we were both living off the fumes of my last book contract, and I wasn’t sure how long that would hold out. A while, yes—but not forever. I had recently begun working on a new novel, but my research and writing had now been interrupted by Felipe’s deportation. So this is how we ended up going to Southeast Asia, where two frugal people can feasibly live on about thirty dollars a day. While I won’t say that we exactly suffered during this period of exile (we were hardly starving political refugees, for heaven’s sake), I will say that it was an extremely odd and tense way to live, with the oddness and tension only heightened by the uncertainty of the outcome.

We wandered for close to a year, waiting for the day when Felipe would be called to his interview at the American Consulate in Sydney, Australia. Flopping in the meantime from country to country, we came to resemble nothing more than an insomniac couple trying to find a restful sleeping position in a strange and uncomfortable bed. For many anxious nights, in many strange and uncomfortable beds indeed, I would lie there in the dark, working through my conflicts and prejudices about marriage, filtering through all the information I was reading, mining history for comforting conclusions.

I should clarify right away here that I limited my studies largely to an examination of marriage in Western history, and that this book will therefore reflect that cultural limitation. Any proper matrimonial historian or anthropologist will find huge gaps in my narrative, as I have left unexplored entire continents and centuries of human history, not to mention skipping over some pretty vital nuptial concepts (polygamy, as just one example). It would have been pleasurable for me, and certainly educational, to have delved more deeply into an examination of every possible marital custom on earth, but I didn’t have that kind of time. Trying to get a handle on the complex nature of matrimony in Islamic societies alone, for instance, would have taken me years of study, and my urgency had a deadline that precluded such extended contemplation. A very real clock was ticking in my life: Within one year—like it or not, ready or not—I had to get married. That being the case, it seemed imperative that I focus my attention on unraveling the history of monogamous Western marriage in order to better understand my inherited assumptions, the shape of my family’s narrative, and my culturally specific catalogue of anxieties.

I hoped that all this studying might somehow mitigate my deep aversion to marriage. I wasn’t sure how that would happen, but it had always been my experience in the past, anyhow, that the more I learned about something, the less it frightened me. (Some fears can be vanquished, Rumpelstiltskin-like, only by uncovering their hidden, secret names.) What I really wanted, more than anything, was to find a way to somehow embrace marriage to Felipe when the big day came rather than merely swallowing my fate like a hard and awful pill. Call me old-fashioned, but I thought it might be a nice touch to be happy on my wedding day. Happy and conscious, that is.

This book is the story of how I got there.

And it all begins—because every story must begin somewhere—in the mountains of northern Vietnam.

CHAPTER TWO

M arriage and E xpectation

A man can be happy with any woman

as long as he does not love her.

—Oscar Wilde

A little girl found me that day.

Felipe and I had arrived in this particular village after an overnight journey from Hanoi on a loud, dirty, Soviet-era train. I can’t rightly remember now why we went to this specific town, but I think some young Danish backpackers had recommended it to us. In any case, after the loud, dirty train journey, there had been a long, loud, dirty bus ride. The bus had finally dropped us off in a staggeringly beautiful place that teetered on the border with China—remote and verdant and wild. We found a hotel and when I stepped out alone to explore the town, to try to shake the stiffness of travel out of my legs, the little girl approached me.

She was twelve years old, I would learn later, but tinier than any American twelve-year-old I’d ever met. She was exceptionally beautiful. Her skin was dark and healthy, her hair glossy and braided, her compact body all sturdy and confident in a short woolen tunic. Though it was summertime and the days were sultry, her calves were wrapped in brightly colored wool leggings. Her feet tapped restlessly in plastic Chinese sandals. She had been hanging around our hotel for some time—I had spotted her when we were checking in—and now, when I stepped out of the place alone, she approached me full-on.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“I’m Liz. What’s your name?”

“I’m Mai,” she said, “and I can write it down for you so you can learn how to spell it properly.”

“You certainly speak good English,” I complimented her.

She shrugged. “Of course. I practice often with tourists. Also, I speak Vietnamese, Chinese, and some Japanese.”

“What?” I joked. “No French?”

“Un peu,” she replied with a sly glance. Then she demanded, “Where are you from, Liz?”

“I’m from America,” I said. Then, trying to be funny, since obviously she was from right there, I asked, “And where are you from, Mai?”

She immediately saw my funny and raised it. “I am from my mother’s belly,” she replied, instantly causing me to fall in love with her.

Indeed, Mai was from Vietnam, but I realized later she would never have called herself Vietnamese. She was Hmong—a member of a small, proud, isolated ethnic minority (what anthropologists call “an original people”) who inhabit the highest mountain peaks of Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, and China. Kurdish-like, the Hmong have never really belonged to any of the countries in which they live. They remain some of the world’s most spectacularly independent people—nomads, storytellers, warriors, natural-born anticonformists, and a terrible bane to any nation that has ever tried to control them.

To understand the unlikelihood of the Hmong’s continued existence on this planet you have to imagine what it would be like if, for instance, the Mohawk were still living in upstate New York exactly as they had for centuries, dressing in traditional clothing, speaking their own language, and absolutely refusing to assimilate. Stumbling on a Hmong village like this one, then, in the early years of the twenty-first century is an anachronistic wonder. Their culture provides a vanishingly rare window into an older version of the human experience. All of which is to say, if you want to know what your family was like four thousand years ago, they were probably something like the Hmong.

“Hey, Mai,” I said. “Would you like to be my translator today?”

“Why?” she asked.

The Hmong are a famously direct people, so I laid it out directly: “I need to talk to some of the women in your village about their marriages.”

“Why?” she demanded again.

“Because I’m getting married soon, and I would like some advice.”

“You’re too old to be getting married,” Mai observed, kindly.

“Well, my boyfriend is old, too,” I replied. “He’s fifty-five years old.”

She looked at me closely, let out a low whistle, and said, “Well. Lucky him.”

I’m not sure why Mai decided to help me that day. Curiosity? Boredom? The hope that I would pass her some cash? (Which, of course, I did.) But regardless of her motive, she did agree. Soon enough, after a steep march over a nearby hillside, we arrived at Mai’s stone house, which was tiny, soot-darkened, lit only by a few small windows, and nestled in one of the prettiest river valleys you could ever imagine. Mai led me inside and introduced me around to a group of women, all of them weaving, cooking, or cleaning. Of all the women, it was Mai’s grandmother whom I found most immediately intriguing. She was the laughingest, happiest, four-foot-tall toothless granny I’d ever seen in my life. What’s more, she thought me hilarious. Every single thing about me seemed to crack her up beyond measure. She put a tall Hmong hat on my head, pointed at me, and laughed. She stuck a tiny Hmong baby into my arms, pointed at me, and laughed. She draped me in a gorgeous Hmong textile, pointed at me, and laughed.

I had no problem with any of this, by the way. I had long ago learned that when you are the giant, alien visitor to a remote and foreign culture it is sort of your job to become an object of ridicule. It’s the least you can do, really, as a polite guest. Soon more women—neighbors and relations—poured into the house. They also showed me their weavings, stuck their hats on my head, crammed my arms full of their babies, pointed at me, and laughed.

As Mai explained, her whole family—almost a dozen of them in total—lived in this one-room home. Everyone slept on the floor together. The kitchen was on one side and the wood stove for winter was on the other side. Rice and corn were stored in a loft above the kitchen, while pigs, chickens, and water buffalo were kept close by at all times. There was only one private space in the whole house and it wasn’t much bigger than a broom closet. This, as I learned later in my reading, was where the newest bride and groom in any family were allowed to sleep alone together for the first few months of their marriage in order to get their sexual explorations out of the way in private. After that initial experience of privacy, though, the young couple joins the rest of the family again, sleeping with everyone else on the floor for the rest of their lives.

“Did I tell you that my father is dead?” Mai asked as she was showing me around.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “When did it happen?”

“Four years ago.”

“How did he die, Mai?”

“He died,” she said coolly, and that settled it. Her father had died of death. The way people used to die, I suppose, before we knew very much about why or how. “When he died, we ate the water buffalo at his funeral.” At this memory, her face flashed a complicated array of emotions: sadness at the loss of her father, pleasure at the remembrance of how good the water buffalo had tasted.

“Is your mother lonely?”

Mai shrugged.

It was hard to imagine loneliness here. Just as it was impossible to imagine where in this crowded domestic arrangement you might find the happier twin sister of loneliness: privacy. Mai and her mother lived in constant closeness with so many people. I was struck—not for the first time in my years of travel—by how isolating contemporary American society can seem by comparison. Where I come from, we have shriveled down the notion of what constitutes “a family unit” to such a tiny scale that it would probably be unrecognizable as a family to anybody in one of these big, loose, enveloping Hmong clans. You almost need an electron microscope to study the modern Western family these days. What you’ve got are two, possibly three, or maybe sometimes four people rattling around together in a giant space, each person with her own private physical and psychological domain, each person spending large amounts of the day completely separated from the others.

I don’t want to suggest here that everything about the shrunken modern family unit is necessarily bad. Certainly women’s lives and women’s health improve whenever they reduce the number of babies they have, which is a resounding strike against the lure of bustling clan culture. Also, sociologists have long known that incidences of incest and child molestation increase whenever so many relatives of different ages live together in such close proximity. In a crowd so big, it can become difficult to keep track of or defend individuals—not to mention individuality.

But surely something has been lost, as well, in our modern and intensely private, closed-off homes. Watching the Hmong women interact with each other, I got to wondering whether the evolution of the ever smaller and ever more nuclear Western family has put a particular strain on modern marriages. In Hmong society, for instance, men and women don’t spend all that much time together. Yes, you have a spouse. Yes, you have sex with that spouse. Yes, your fortunes are tied together. Yes, there might very well be love. But aside from that, men’s and women’s lives are quite firmly separated into the divided realms of their gender-specific tasks. Men work and socialize with other men; women work and socialize with other women. Case in point: there was not a single man to be found anywhere that day around Mai’s house. Whatever the men were off doing (farming, drinking, talking, gambling) they were doing it somewhere else, alone together, separated from the universe of the women.

If you are a Hmong woman, then, you don’t necessarily expect your husband to be your best friend, your most intimate confidant, your emotional advisor, your intellectual equal, your comfort in times of sorrow. Hmong women, instead, get a lot of that emotional nourishment and support from other women—from sisters, aunties, mothers, grandmothers. A Hmong woman has many voices in her life, many opinions and emotional buttresses surrounding her at all times. Kinship is to be found within arm’s reach in any direction, and many female hands make light work, or at least lighter work, of the serious burdens of living.

At last, all the greetings having been exchanged and all the babies having been dandled and all the laughter having died down into politeness, we all sat. With Mai as our translator, I began by asking the grandmother if she would please tell me about Hmong wedding ceremonies.

It’s all quite simple, the grandmother explained patiently. Before a traditional Hmong wedding, it is required that the groom’s family come and visit the bride’s house, so the families work out a deal, a date, a plan. A chicken is always killed at this time in order to make the families’ ghosts happy. Once the wedding date arrives, a good many pigs are killed. A feast is prepared and relatives come from every village to celebrate. Both the families chip in to cover expenses. There is a procession to the wedding table, and a relative of the groom will always carry an umbrella.

At this point, I interrupted to ask what the umbrella signified, but the question brought some confusion. Confusion, perhaps, over what the word “signifies” signifies. The umbrella is the umbrella, I was told, and it is carried because umbrellas are always carried at weddings. That is why, and that is that, and so it has always been.

Umbrella-related questions thereby resolved, the grandmother went on to explain the traditional Hmong marital custom of kidnapping. This is an ancient custom, she said, though it is much less in practice these days than it was in the past. Still, it does exist. Brides—who are sometimes consulted beforehand about their kidnapping and sometimes not—are abducted by their potential grooms, who carry them by pony to their own families’ homes. This is all strictly organized and is permitted only on certain nights of the year, at celebrations after certain market days. (You can’t just kidnap a bride any old time you want. There are rules.) The kidnapped girl is given three days to live in the home of her captor, with his family, in order to decide whether or not she would like to marry this fellow. Most of the time, the grandmother reported, the marriage proceeds with the girl’s consent. On the rare occasion that the kidnapped potential bride doesn’t embrace her captor, she is allowed to return home to her own family at the end of the three days, and the whole business is forgotten. Which sounded reasonable enough to me, as far as kidnappings go.

Where our conversation did turn peculiar for me—and for all of us in the room—was when I tried to get the grandmother to tell me the story of her own marriage, hoping to elicit from her any personal or emotional anecdotes about her own experience with matrimony. The confusion started immediately, when I asked the old woman, “What did you think of your husband, the first time you ever met him?”

Her entire wrinkled face arranged itself into a look of puzzlement. Assuming that she—or perhaps Mai—had misunderstood the question, I tried again:

“When did you realize that your husband might be somebody you wanted to marry?”

Again, my question was met with what appeared to be polite bafflement.

“Did you know that he was special right away?” I tried once more. “Or did you learn to like him over time?”

Now some of the women in the room had started giggling nervously, the way you might giggle around a slightly crazy person—which was, apparently, what I had just become in their eyes.

I backed up and tried a different tack: “I mean, when did you first meet your husband?”

The grandmother sorted through her memory a bit on that one, but couldn’t come up with a definitive answer aside from “long ago.” It really didn’t seem to be an important question for her.

“Okay, where did you first meet your husband?” I asked, trying to simplify the matter as much as possible.

Again, the very shape of my curiosity seemed a mystery to the grandmother. Politely, though, she gave it a try. She had never particularly met her husband before she married him, she tried to explain. She’d seen him around, of course. There are always a lot of people around, you know. She couldn’t really remember. Anyway, she said, it is not an important question as to whether or not she knew him when she was a young girl. After all, as she concluded to the delight of the other women in the room, she certainly knows him now.

“But when did you fall in love with him?” I finally asked, pointblank.

The instant Mai translated this question, all the women in the room, except the grandmother, who was too polite, laughed aloud—a spontaneous outburst of mirth, which they then all tried to stifle politely behind their hands.

You might think this would have daunted me. Perhaps it should have daunted me. But I persisted, following up their peals of laughter with a question that struck them as even more ridiculous:

“And what do you believe is the secret to a happy marriage?” I asked earnestly.

Now they all really did lose it. Even the grandmother was openly howling with laughter. Which was fine, right? As has already been established, I am always perfectly willing to be mocked in a foreign country for somebody else’s entertainment. But in this case, I must confess, all the hilarity was a bit unsettling on account of the fact that I really did not get the joke. All I could understand was that these Hmong ladies and I were clearly speaking an entirely different language here (I mean, above and beyond the fact that we were literally speaking an entirely different language here). But what was so specifically absurd to them about my questions?

In the weeks to come, as I replayed this conversation over in my mind, I was forced to hatch my own theory about what had made me and my hosts so foreign and incomprehensible to each other on the subject of marriage. And here’s my theory: Neither the grandmother nor any other woman in that room was placing her marriage at the center of her emotional biography in any way that was remotely familiar to me. In the modern industrialized Western world, where I come from, the person whom you choose to marry is perhaps the single most vivid representation of your own personality. Your spouse becomes the most gleaming possible mirror through which your emotional individualism is reflected back to the world. There is no choice more intensely personal, after all, than whom you choose to marry; that choice tells us, to a large extent, who you are. So if you ask any typical modern Western woman how she met her husband, when she met her husband, and why she fell in love with her husband, you can be plenty sure that you will be told a complete, complex, and deeply personal narrative which that woman has not only spun carefully around the entire experience, but which she has memorized, internalized, and scrutinized for clues as to her own selfhood. Moreover, she will more than likely share this story with you quite openly—even if you are a perfect stranger. In fact, I have found over the years that the question “How did you meet your husband?” is one of the best conversational icebreakers ever invented. In my experience, it doesn’t even matter whether that woman’s marriage has been happy or a disaster: It will still be relayed to you as a vitally important story about her emotional being—perhaps even the most vitally important story about her emotional being.

Whoever that modern Western woman is, I can promise you that her story will concern two people—herself and her spouse—who, like characters in a novel or movie, are presumed to have been on some kind of personal life’s journeys before meeting each other, and whose journeys then intersected at a fateful moment. (For instance: “I was living in San Francisco that summer, and I had no intention of staying much longer—until I met Jim at that party.”) The story will probably have drama and suspense (“He thought I was dating the guy I was there with, but that was just my gay friend Larry!”). The story will have doubts (“He wasn’t really my type; I normally go for guys who are more intellectual”). Critically, the story will end either with salvation (“Now I can’t imagine my life without him!”), or—if things have turned sour—with recriminating second-guesses (“Why didn’t I admit to myself right away that he was an alcoholic and a liar?”). Whatever the details, you can be certain that the modern Western woman’s love story will have been examined by her from every possible angle, and that, over the years, her narrative will have been either hammered into a golden epic myth or embalmed into a bitter cautionary tale.

I’m going to go way out on a limb here and state: Hmong women don’t seem to do that. Or at least not these Hmong women.

Please understand, I am not an anthropologist and I acknowledge that I am operating far above my pay grade when I make any conjectures whatsoever about Hmong culture. My personal experience with these women was limited to a single afternoon’s conversation, with a twelve-year-old child acting as a translator, so I think it’s safe to assume that I probably missed a smidge of nuance about this ancient and intricate society. I also concede that these women may have found my questions intrusive, if not outright offensive. Why should they have told their most intimate stories to me, a nosy interloper? And even if they were somehow trying to impart information to me about their relationships, it’s likely that certain subtle messages fell by the wayside through mistranslation or a simple lack of cross-cultural understanding.

All that said, though, I am somebody who has spent a large chunk of her professional life interviewing people, and I trust my ability to watch and listen closely. Moreover, like all of us, whenever I enter the family homes of strangers, I am quick to notice the ways in which they may look at or do things differently than my family looks at or does things. Let us say, then, that my role that day in that Hmong household was that of a more-than-averagely observant visitor who was paying a more-than-average amount of attention to her more-than-averagely expressive hosts. In that role, and only in that role, I feel fairly confident reporting what I did not see happening that day in Mai’s grandmother’s house. I did not see a group of women sitting around weaving overexamined myths and cautionary tales about their marriages. The reason I found this so notable was that I have watched women all over the world weave overexamined myths and cautionary tales about their marriages, in all sorts of mixed company, and at the slightest provocation. But the Hmong ladies did not seem remotely interested in doing that. Nor did I see these Hmong women crafting the character of “the husband” into either the hero or the villain in some vast, complex, and epic Story of the Emotional Self.

I’m not saying that these women don’t love their husbands, or that they never had loved them, or that they never could. That would be a ridiculous thing to infer, because people everywhere love each other and always have. Romantic love is a universal human experience. Evidence of passion exists in all corners of this world. All human cultures have love songs and love charms and love prayers. People’s hearts get broken across every possible social, religious, gender, age, and cultural boundary. (In India, just so you know, May 3 is National Broken Hearts Day. And in Papua New Guinea, there exists a tribe whose men write mournful love songs called namai, which tell the tragic stories of marriages which never came to pass but should have.) My friend Kate once went to a concert of Mongolian throat singers who were traveling through New York City on a rare world tour. Although she couldn’t understand the words to their songs, she found the music almost unbearably sad. After the concert, Kate approached the lead Mongolian singer and asked, “What are your songs about?” He replied, “Our songs are about the same things that everyone else’s songs are about: lost love, and somebody stole your fastest horse.”

So of course the Hmong fall in love. Of course they feel preference for one person over another person, or miss a beloved one who has died, or find that they inexplicably adore somebody’s particular smell, or laugh. But perhaps they don’t believe that any of that romantic love business has very much to do with the actual reasons for marriage. Perhaps they do not assume that those two distinct entities (love and marriage) must necessarily intersect—either at the beginning of the relationship or maybe ever at all. Perhaps they believe that marriage is about something else altogether.

If this sounds like a foreign or crazy notion, remember that it wasn’t so long ago that people in Western culture held these same sorts of unromantic views about matrimony. Arranged marriage has never been a prominent feature of American life, of course—much less bridal kidnapping—but certainly pragmatic marriages were routine at certain levels of our society until fairly recently. By “pragmatic marriage,” I mean any union where the interests of the larger community are considered above the interests of the two individuals involved; such marriages were a feature of American agricultural society, for instance, for many, many generations.

I personally know of one such pragmatic marriage, as it turns out. When I was growing up in my small town in Connecticut, my favorite neighbors were a white-haired husband and wife named Arthur and Lillian Webster. The Websters were local dairy farmers who lived by an inviolable set of classic Yankee values. They were modest, frugal, generous, hardworking, unobtrusively religious, and socially discreet members of the community who raised their three children to be good citizens. They were also enormously kind. Mr. Webster called me “Curly” and let me ride my bike for hours on their nicely paved parking lot. Mrs. Webster—if I was very good—would sometimes let me play with her collection of antique medicine bottles.

Just a few years ago, Mrs. Webster passed away. A few months after her death, I went out to dinner with Mr. Webster, and we got to talking about his wife. I wanted to know how they had met, how they had fallen in love—all the romantic beginnings of their life together. I asked him all the same questions, in other words, that I would eventually ask the Hmong ladies in Vietnam, and I got the same sorts of replies—or lack of replies. I couldn’t dredge up a single romantic memory from Mr. Webster about the origins of his marriage. He couldn’t even remember the precise moment when he had first met Lillian, he confessed. She had always been around town, as he recalled. It was certainly not love at first sight. There was no moment of electricity, no spark of instant attraction. He had never become infatuated with her in any way.

“So why did you marry her?” I asked.

As Mr. Webster explained in his typically open and matter-of-fact Yankee manner, he had gotten married because his brother had instructed him to get married. Arthur was soon going to be taking over the family farm and therefore he needed a wife. You cannot run a proper farm without a wife, any more than you can run a proper farm without a tractor. It was an unsentimental message, but dairy farming in New England was an unsentimental business, and Arthur knew his brother’s edict was on target. So, the diligent and obedient young Mr. Webster went out there into the world and dutifully secured him- self a wife. You got the feeling, listening to his narrative, that any number of young ladies might have gotten the job of being “Mrs. Webster,” instead of Lillian herself, and it wouldn’t have made a huge difference to anyone at the time. Arthur just happened to settle on the blonde one, the one who worked over at the Extension Service in town. She was the right age for it. She was nice. She was healthy. She was good. She would do.

The Websters’ marriage, therefore, clearly did not launch from a place of passionate, personal, and fevered love—no more than the Hmong grandmother’s marriage had. We might therefore assume, then, that such a union is “a loveless marriage.” But we have to be careful about drawing such assumptions. I know better, at least when it comes to the case of the Websters.

In her waning years, Mrs. Webster was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. For almost a decade, this once-powerful woman wasted away in a manner that was agonizing to watch for everyone in the community. Her husband—that pragmatic old Yankee farmer—took care of his wife at home the entire time she was dying. He bathed her, fed her, gave up freedoms in order to keep watch over her, and learned to endure the dreadful consequences of her decay. He tended to this woman long after she knew who he was anymore—even long after she knew who she herself was anymore. Every Sunday, Mr. Webster dressed his wife in nice clothing, put her in a wheelchair, and brought her to services at the same church where they had been married almost sixty years earlier. He did this because Lillian had always loved that church, and he knew she would’ve appreciated the gesture if only she had been conscious of it. Arthur would sit there in the pew beside his wife, Sunday after Sunday, holding her hand while she slowly ebbed away from him into oblivion.

And if that isn’t love, then somebody is going to have to sit me down and explain to me very carefully what love actually is.

That said, we have to be careful, too, not to assume that all arranged marriages across history, or all pragmatic marriages, or all marriages that begin with an act of kidnapping, necessarily resulted in years of contentment. The Websters were lucky, to an extent. (Though they also put a good deal of work into their marriage, one suspects.) But what Mr. Webster and the Hmong people perhaps have in common is a notion that the emotional place where a marriage begins is not nearly as important as the emotional place where a marriage finds itself toward the end, after many years of partnership. Moreover, they would likely agree that there is not one special person waiting for you somewhere in this world who will make your life magically complete, but that there are any number of people (right in your own community, probably) with whom you could seal a respectful bond. Then you could live and work alongside that person for years, with the hope that tenderness and affection would be the gradual outcome of your union.

At the end of my afternoon’s visit at Mai’s family’s house, I was granted the clearest possible insight into this notion when I asked the tiny old Hmong grandmother one final question, which again, she thought bizarre and foreign.

“Is your man a good husband?” I asked.

The old woman had to ask her granddaughter to repeat the question several times, just to make sure she’d heard it correctly: Is he a good husband? Then she gave me a bemused look, as though I’d asked, “These stones which compose the mountains in which you live—are they good stones?”

The best answer she could come up with was this: Her husband was neither a good husband nor a bad husband. He was just a husband. He was the way that husbands are. As she spoke about him, it was as though the word “husband” connoted a job description, or even a species, far more than it represented any particularly cherished or frustrating individual. The role of “husband” was simple enough, involving as it did a set of tasks that her man had obviously fulfilled to a satisfactory degree throughout their life together—as did most other women’s husbands, she suggested, unless you were unlucky and got yourself a real dud. The grandmother even went so far as to say that it is not so important, in the end, which man a woman marries. With rare exceptions, one man is pretty much the same as another.

“What do you mean by that?” I asked.

“All men and all women are mostly the same, most of the time,” she clarified. “Everybody knows that this is true.”

The other Hmong ladies all nodded in agreement.

M ay I pause here for a moment to make a blunt and perhaps perfectly obvious point?

It is too late for me to be Hmong.

For heaven’s sake, it’s probably even too late for me to be a Webster.

I was born into a late-twentieth-century American middle-class family. Like untold millions of other people in the contemporary world born into similar circumstances, I was raised to believe that I was special. My parents (who were neither hippies nor radicals; who in fact voted for Ronald Reagan twice) simply believed that their children had particular gifts and dreams that set them apart from other people’s children. My “me-ness” was always prized, and was moreover recognized as being different from my sister’s “her-ness,” my friends’ “them-ness,” and everyone else’s “everyone-else-ness.” Though I was certainly not spoiled, my parents believed that my personal happiness was of some importance, and that I should learn to shape my life’s journey in such a way that would support and reflect my individual search for contentment.

I must add here that all my friends and relatives were raised with varying degrees of this same belief. With the possible exception of the very most conservative families among us, or the very most recently immigrated families among us, everyone I knew—at some basic level—shared this assumed cultural respect for the individual. Whatever our religion, whatever our economic class, we all at least somewhat embraced the same dogma, which I would describe as being very historically recent and very definitely Western and which can effectively be summed up as: “You matter.”

I don’t mean to imply that the Hmong don’t believe their children matter; on the contrary, they are famous in anthropological circles for building some of the world’s most exceptionally loving families. But this was clearly not a society that worshiped at the Altar of Individual Choice. As in most traditional societies, Hmong family dogma might effectively be summed up not as “You matter” but as “Your role matters.” For, as everyone in this village seemed to know, there are tasks at hand in life—some tasks that men must do and some tasks that women must do—and everyone must contribute to the best of his or her abilities. If you perform your tasks reasonably well, you can go to sleep at night knowing that you are a good man or a good woman, and you need not expect much more out of life or out of relationships than that.

Meeting the Hmong women that day in Vietnam reminded me of an old adage: “Plant an expectation; reap a disappointment.” My friend the Hmong grandmother had never been taught to expect that her husband’s job was to make her abundantly happy. She had never been taught to expect that her task on earth was to become abundantly happy in the first place. Never having tasted such expectations to begin with, she had reaped no particular disenchantment from her marriage. Her marriage fulfilled its role, performed its necessary social task, became merely what it was, and that was fine.

By contrast, I had always been taught that the pursuit of happiness was my natural (even national) birthright. It is the emotional trademark of my culture to seek happiness. Not just any kind of happiness, either, but profound happiness, even soaring happiness. And what could possibly bring a person more soaring happiness than romantic love? I, for one, had always been taught by my culture that marriage ought to be a fertile greenhouse in which romantic love can abundantly flourish. Inside the somewhat rickety greenhouse of my first marriage, then, I had planted row after row of grand expectations. I was a veritable Johnny Appleseed of grand expectations, and all I reaped for my trouble was a harvest of bitter fruit.

One gets the feeling that if I’d tried to explain all that to the Hmong grandmother, she would have had no idea what the hell I was talking about. She probably would have responded exactly the way an old woman I once met in southern Italy responded, when I confessed to her that I’d left my husband because the marriage made me unhappy.

“Who’s happy?” the Italian widow asked casually, and shrugged away the conversation forever.

L ook, I don’t want to risk romanticizing the oh-so-simple life of the picturesque rural peasant here. Let me make it clear that I had no desire to trade lives with any of the women that I met in that Hmong village in Vietnam. For the dental implications alone, I do not want their lives. It would be farcical and insulting, besides, for me to try adopting their worldview. In fact, the inexorable march of industrial progress suggests that the Hmong will be more likely to start adopting my worldview in the years to come.

As a matter of fact, it’s already happening. Now that young girls like my twelve-year-old friend Mai are being exposed to modern Western women like me through crowds of tourists, they’re experiencing those first critical moments of cultural hesitation. I call this the “Wait-a-Minute Moment”—that pivotal instant when girls from traditional cultures start pondering what’s in it for them, exactly, to be getting married at the age of thirteen and starting to have babies not long after. They start wondering if they might prefer to make different choices for themselves, or any choices, for that matter. Once girls from closed societies start thinking such thoughts, all hell breaks loose. Mai—trilingual, bright, and observant—had already glimpsed another set of options for life. It wouldn’t be long before she was making demands of her own. In other words: It might be too late for even the Hmong to be Hmong anymore.

So, no, I’m not willing—or probably even able—to relinquish my life of individualistic yearnings, all of which are the birthright of my modernity. Like most human beings, once I’ve been shown the options, I will always opt for more choices for my life: expressive choices, individualistic choices, inscrutable and indefensible and sometimes risky choices, perhaps . . . but they will all be mine. In fact, the sheer number of choices that I’d already been offered in my life—an almost embarrassing cavalcade of options—would have made the eyes pop out of the head of my friend the Hmong grandmother. As a result of such personal freedoms, my life belongs to me and resembles me to an extent that would be unthinkable in the hills of northern Vietnam, even today. It’s almost as if I’m from an entirely new strain of woman (Homo limitlessness, you might call us). And while we of this brave new species do have possibilities that are vast and magnificent and almost infinite in scope, it’s important to remember that our choice-rich lives have the potential to breed their own brand of trouble. We are susceptible to emotional uncertainties and neuroses that are probably not very common among the Hmong, but that run rampant these days among my contemporaries in, say, Baltimore.

The problem, simply put, is that we cannot choose everything simultaneously. So we live in danger of becoming paralyzed by indecision, terrified that every choice might be the wrong choice. (I have a friend who second-guesses herself so compulsively that her husband jokes her autobiography will someday be titled I Should’ve Had the Scampi.) Equally disquieting are the times when we do make a choice, only to later feel as though we have murdered some other aspect of our being by settling on one single concrete decision. By choosing Door Number Three, we fear we have killed off a different—but equally critical—piece of our soul that could only have been made manifest by walking through Door Number One or Door Number Two.

The philosopher Odo Marquard has noted a correlation in the German language between the word zwei, which means “two,” and the word zweifel, which means “doubt”—suggesting that two of anything brings the automatic possibility of uncertainty to our lives. Now imagine a life in which every day a person is presented with not two or even three but dozens of choices, and you can begin to grasp why the modern world has become, even with all its advantages, a neurosis-generating machine of the highest order. In a world of such abundant possibility, many of us simply go limp from indecision. Or we derail our life’s journey again and again, backing up to try the doors we neglected on the first round, desperate to get it right this time. Or we become compulsive comparers—always measuring our lives against some other person’s life, secretly wondering if we should have taken her path instead.

Compulsive comparing, of course, only leads to debilitating cases of what Nietzsche called Lebensneid, or “life envy”: the certainty that somebody else is much luckier than you, and that if only you had her body, her husband, her children, her job, everything would be easy and wonderful and happy. (A therapist friend of mine defines this problem simply as “the condition by which all of my single patients secretly long to be married, and all of my married patients secretly long to be single.”) With certainty so difficult to achieve, everyone’s decisions become an indictment of everyone else’s decisions, and because there is no universal model anymore for what makes “a good man” or “a good woman,” one must almost earn a personal merit badge in emotional orientation and navigation in order to find one’s way through life anymore.

All these choices and all this longing can create a weird kind of haunting in our lives—as though the ghosts of all our other, unchosen, possibilities linger forever in a shadow world around us, continuously asking, “Are you certain this is what you really wanted?” And nowhere does that question risk haunting us more than in our marriages, precisely because the emotional stakes of that most intensely personal choice have become so huge.

Believe me, modern Western marriage has much to recommend it over traditional Hmong marriage (starting with its kidnapping-free spirit), and I will say it again: I would not trade lives with those women. They will never know my range of freedom; they will never have my education; they will never have my health and prosperity; they will never be allowed to explore so many aspects of their own natures. But there is one critical gift that a traditional Hmong bride almost always receives on her wedding day which all too often eludes the modern Western bride, and that is the gift of certainty. When you have only one path set before you, you can generally feel confident that it was the correct path to have taken. And a bride whose expectations for happiness are kept necessarily low to begin with is more protected, perhaps, from the risk of devastating disappointments down the road.

To this day, I admit, I’m not entirely sure how to use this information. I cannot quite bring myself to make an official motto out of “Ask for less!” Nor can I imagine advising a young woman on the eve of her marriage to lower her expectations in life in order to be happy. Such thinking runs contrary to every modern teaching I’ve ever absorbed. Also, I’ve seen this tactic backfire. I had a friend from college who deliberately narrowed down her life’s options, as though to vaccinate herself against overly ambitious expectations. She skipped a career and ignored the lure of travel to instead move back home and marry her high school sweetheart. With unwavering confidence, she announced that she would become “only” a wife and mother. The simplicity of this arrangement felt utterly safe to her—certainly compared to the convulsions of indecision that so many of her more ambitious peers (myself included) were suffering. But when her husband left her twelve years later for a younger woman, my friend’s rage and sense of betrayal were as ferocious as anything I’ve ever seen. She virtually imploded with resentment—not so much against her husband, but against the universe, which she perceived to have broken a sacred contract with her. “I asked for so little!” she kept saying, as though her diminished demands alone should have protected her against any disappointments. But I think she was mistaken; she had actually asked for a lot. She had dared to ask for happiness, and she had dared to expect that happiness out of her marriage. You can’t possibly ask for more than that.

But maybe it would be useful for me to at least acknowledge to myself now, on the eve of my second marriage, that I, too, ask for an awful lot. Of course I do. It’s the emblem of our times. I have been allowed to expect great things in life. I have been permitted to expect far more out of the experience of love and living than most other women in history were ever permitted to ask. When it comes to questions of intimacy, I want many things from my man, and I want them all simultaneously. It reminds me of a story my sister once told me, about an Englishwoman who visited the United States in the winter of 1919 and who, scandalized, reported back home in a letter that there were people in this curious country of America who actually lived with the expectation that every part of their bodies should be warm at the same time! My afternoon spent discussing marriage with the Hmong made me wonder if I, in matters of the heart, had also become such a person—a woman who believed that my lover should magically be able to keep every part of my emotional being warm at the same time.

We Americans often say that marriage is “hard work.” I’m not sure the Hmong would understand this notion. Life is hard work, of course, and work is very hard work—I’m quite certain they would agree with those statements—but how does marriage become hard work? Here’s how: Marriage becomes hard work once you have poured the entirety of your life’s expectations for happiness into the hands of one mere person. Keeping that going is hard work. A recent survey of young American women found that what women are seeking these days in a husband—more than anything else—is a man who will “inspire” them, which is, by any measure, a tall order. As a point of comparison, young women of the same age, surveyed back in the 1920s, were more likely to choose a partner based on qualities such as “decency,” or “honesty,” or his ability to provide for a family. But that’s not enough anymore. Now we want to be inspired by our spouses! Daily! Step to it, honey!

But this is exactly what I myself have expected in the past from love (inspiration, soaring bliss) and this is what I was now preparing to expect all over again with Felipe—that we should somehow be answerable for every aspect of each other’s joy and happiness. That our very job description as spouses was to be each other’s everything.

So I had always assumed, anyhow.

And so I might have gone on blithely assuming, except that my encounter with the Hmong had knocked me off course in one critical regard: For the first time in my life, it occurred to me that perhaps I was asking too much of love. Or, at least, perhaps I was asking too much of marriage. Perhaps I was loading a far heavier cargo of expectation onto the creaky old boat of matrimony than that strange vessel had ever been built to accommodate in the first place.

CHAPTER THREE

M arriage and H istory

The first bond of society is marriage.

—Cicero

What i s marriage supposed to be, then, if not a delivery device of ultimate bliss?

This question was infinitely difficult for me to answer, because marriage—as a historical entity anyhow—has a tendency to resist our efforts to define it in any simple terms. Marriage, it seems, does not like to sit still long enough for anyone to capture its portrait very clearly. Marriage shifts. It changes over the centuries the way that Irish weather changes: constantly, surprisingly, swiftly. It’s not even a safe bet to de-fine marriage in the most reductively simple terms as a sacred union between one man and one woman. First of all, marriage has not always been considered “sacred,” not even within the Christian tradition. And for most of human history, to be honest, marriage has usually been seen as a union between one man and several women.

Sometimes, though, marriage has been seen as a union between one woman and several men (as in southern India, where one bride might be shared by several brothers). Marriage has also, at times, been recognized as a union between two men (as in ancient Rome, where marriages between aristocratic males were once recognized by law); or as a union between two siblings (as in medieval Europe, when valuable property was at stake); or as a union between two children (again in Europe, as orchestrated by inheritance-protecting parents or by power-wielding popes); or as a union between the unborn (ditto); or as a union between two people limited to the same social class (once more in Europe, where medieval peasants were often forbidden by law to marry their betters, in order to keep social divisions clean and orderly).

Marriage has also been seen at times as a deliberately temporary union. In modern revolutionary Iran, for instance, young couples can ask a mullah for a special marriage permit called a sigheh—a twenty-four-hour pass that permits the couple to be “married,” but just for one day. This pass allows a male and female to be safely seen in public together or even, legally, to have sex with each other—essentially creating a Koran-sanctioned, marriage-protected form of provisional romantic expression.

In China, the definition of marriage once included a sacred union between a living woman and a dead man. Such a merger was called a ghost marriage. A young girl of rank would be married off to a dead man from a good family in order to seal the bonds of unity between two clans. Thankfully, no actual skeleton-to-living-flesh contact was involved (it was more of a conceptual wedding, you could say), but the idea still sounds ghoulish to modern ears. That said, some Chinese women came to see this custom as an ideal social arrangement. During the nineteenth century, a surprising number of women in the Shanghai region worked as merchants in the silk trade, and some of them became terrifically successful businesswomen. Trying to gain ever more economic independence, such women would petition for ghost marriages rather than take on living husbands. There was no better path to autonomy for an ambitious young businesswoman than to be married off to a respectable corpse. This brought her all the social status of marriage with none of the constraints or inconveniences of actual wifehood.

Even when marriage has been defined as a union between a man and just one woman, its purposes were not always what we might assume today. In the early years of Western civilization, men and women married each other mostly for the purpose of physical safety. In the time before organized states, in the wild B.C. days of the Fertile Crescent, the fundamental working unit of society was the family. From the family came all your basic social welfare needs—not just companionship and procreation, but also food, housing, education, religious guidance, medical care, and, perhaps most importantly, defense. It was a hazardous world out there in the cradle of civilization. To be alone was to be targeted for death. The more kin you had, the safer you were. People married in order to expand their numbers of relatives. It was not your spouse who was your primary helpmeet, then; it was your entire giant extended family, operating (Hmong-like, you could say) as a single helpmeet entity in the constant combat of survival.

Those extended families grew into tribes, and those tribes became kingdoms, and those kingdoms emerged as dynasties, and those dynasties fought each other in savage wars of conquest and genocide. The early Hebrews emerged from exactly this system, which is why the Old Testament is such a family-centric, stranger-abhorring, genealogical extravaganza—rife with tales of patriarchs, matriarchs, brothers, sisters, heirs, and other miscellaneous kin. Of course, those Old Testament families were not always healthy or functional (we see brothers murdering brothers, siblings selling each other into slavery, daughters seducing their own fathers, spouses sexually betraying each other), but the driving narrative always concerns the progress and tribulations of the bloodline, and marriage was central to the perpetuation of that story.

But the New Testament—which is to say, the arrival of Jesus Christ—invalidated all those old family loyalties to a degree that was truly socially revolutionary. Instead of perpetuating the tribal notion of “the chosen people against the world,” Jesus (who was an unmarried man, in marked contrast to the great patriarchal heroes of the Old Testament) taught that we are all chosen people, that we are all brothers and sisters united within one human family. Now, this was an utterly radical idea that could never possibly fly in a traditional tribal system. You cannot embrace a stranger as your brother, after all, unless you are willing to renounce your real biological brother, thus capsizing an ancient code that binds you in sacred obligation to your blood relatives while setting you in auto-opposition to the unclean outsider. But that sort of fierce clan loyalty was exactly what Christianity sought to overturn. As Jesus taught: “If any man come to me and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26).

But this created a problem, of course. If you’re going to deconstruct the entire social structure of the human family, what do you replace that structure with? The early Christian plan was staggeringly idealistic, even downright utopian: Create an exact replica of heaven right here on earth. “Renounce marriage and imitate the angels,” instructed John of Damascus around A.D. 730, explaining the new Christian ideal in no uncertain terms. And how do you go about imitating angels? By repressing your human urges, of course. By cutting away all your natural human ties. By holding in check all your desires and loyalties, except the yearning to be one with God. Among the heavenly hosts of angels, after all, there existed no husbands or wives, no mothers or fathers, no ancestor worship, no blood ties, no blood vengeance, no passion, no envy, no bodies—and, most especially, no sex.

So that was to be the new human paradigm, as modeled by Christ’s own example: celibacy, fellowship, and absolute purity.

This rejection of sexuality and marriage represented a massive departure from any Old Testament way of thinking. Hebrew society, by contrast, had always held marriage to be the most moral and dignified of all social arrangements (in fact, Jewish priests were required to be married men), and within that bond of matrimony there had always come a frank assumption of sex. Of course, adultery and random fornication were criminalized activities in ancient Jewish society, but nobody forbade a husband and wife from making love to each other, or from enjoying it. Sex within marriage was not a sin; sex within marriage was . . . marriage. Sex, after all, was how Jewish babies were made—and how can you build up the tribe without making more Jewish babies?

But the early Christian visionaries weren’t interested in making Christians in the biological sense (as infants who came from the womb); instead, they were interested in converting Christians in the intellectual sense (as adults who came to salvation through individual choice). Christianity wasn’t something you had to be born into; Christianity was something that you selected as an adult, through the grace and sacrament of baptism. Since there would always be more potential Christians to convert, there was no need for anybody to sully himself by generating new babies through vile sexual congress. And if there was no need anymore for babies, then it naturally stood to reason that there was no need anymore for marriage.

Remember, too, that Christianity was an apocalyptic religion—even more so at the beginning of its history than now. Early Christians were expecting the End of Days to arrive at any moment, perhaps as early as tomorrow afternoon, so they were not especially interested in launching future dynasties. Effectively, the future did not exist for these people. With Armageddon both inevitable and imminent, the newly baptized Christian convert had only one task in life: to prepare himself for the upcoming apocalypse by making himself as pure as humanly possible.

Marriage = wife = sex = sin = impurity.

Therefore: Don’t marry.

When we speak today, then, about “holy wedded matrimony,” or the “sanctity of marriage,” we would do well to remember that, for approximately ten centuries, Christianity itself did not see marriage as being either holy or sanctified. Marriage was certainly not modeled as the ideal state of moral being. On the contrary, the early Christian fathers regarded the habit of marriage as a somewhat repugnant worldly affair that had everything to do with sex and females and taxes and property, and nothing whatsoever to do with higher concerns of divinity.

So when modern-day religious conservatives wax nostalgic about how marriage is a sacred tradition that reaches back into history for thousands of uninterrupted years, they are absolutely correct, but in only one respect—only if they happen to be talking about Judaism. Christianity simply does not share that deep and consistent historical reverence toward matrimony. Lately it has, yes—but not originally. For the first thousand or so years of Christian history, the church regarded monogamous marriage as marginally less wicked than flat-out whoring—but only very marginally. Saint Jerome even went so far as to rank human holiness on a 1-to-100 scale, with virgins scoring a perfect 100, newly celibate widows and widowers ranking somewhere around 60, and married couples earning the surprisingly unclean score of 30. It was a helpful scale, but even Jerome himself admitted that these sorts of comparisons had their limits. Strictly speaking, he wrote, one should not even rightly compare virginity to marriage—because you cannot “make a comparison between two things if one is good and the other evil.”

Whenever I read a line like this (and you can find such pronouncements all over early Christian history), I think of my friends and relatives who identify themselves as Christian, and who—despite having strived with all their might to lead blameless lives—often end up getting divorced anyhow. I have watched over the years as these good and ethical people then proceed to absolutely eviscerate themselves with guilt, certain that they have violated the holiest and most ancient of all Christian precepts by not upholding their wedding vows. I myself fell into this trap when I got divorced, and I wasn’t even raised in a fundamentalist household. (My parents were moderate Christians at best, and none of my relatives laid any guilt on me when I was divorcing.) Even so, as my marriage collapsed, I lost more nights of sleep than I care to remember, struggling over the question of whether God would ever forgive me for having left my husband. And for a good long while after my divorce, I remained haunted by the nagging sense that I had not merely failed but had also somehow sinned.

Such currents of shame run deep and cannot be undone overnight, but I submit that it might have been useful for me, during those months of fevered moral torment, to have known a thing or two about the hostility with which Christianity actually regarded marriage for many centuries. “Give over thy stinking family duties!” instructed one English rector, as late as the sixteenth century, in a spittle-flecked denunciation of what we might today call family values. “For under all there lies snapping, snarling, biting, horrid hypocrisy, envy, malice, evil surmising!”

Or consider Saint Paul himself, who wrote in his famous letter to the Corinthians, “It is not good for a man to touch a woman.” Never, ever, under any circumstances, Saint Paul believed, was it good for a man to touch a woman—not even his own wife. If Paul had his way, as he himself readily admitted, all Christians would be celibates like him. (“I would that all men were even as I myself.”) But he was rational enough to realize that this was a tall order. What he asked for instead, then, was that Christians engage in as little marriage as humanly possible. He instructed those who were unmarried never to marry, and asked those who were widowed or divorced to abstain from settling down in the future with another partner. (“Art thou loosed from a wife? Seek not a wife.”) In every possible instance, Paul begged Christians to restrain themselves, to contain their carnal yearnings, to live solitary and sexless lives, on earth as it is in heaven.

“But if they cannot contain,” Paul finally conceded, then “let them marry; for it is better to marry than to burn.”

Which is perhaps the most begrudging endorsement of matrimony in human history. Although it does remind me of the agreement that Felipe and I had recently reached—namely, that it is better to marry than to be deported.

N one of this meant that people stopped getting married, of course. With the exception of the very most devout among them, early Christians rejected the call to celibacy in resounding numbers, continuing to have sex with each other and to get married (often in that order) without any supervision whatsoever from priests. All across the Western world, in the centuries following Christ’s death, couples sealed their unions in various improvisational styles (blending together Jewish, Greek, Roman, and Franco-Germanic matrimonial influences) and then registered themselves in village or city documents as being “married.” Sometimes these couples failed at their marriages, too, and filed for divorce in the surprisingly permissive early European courts. (Women in Wales in the tenth century, for instance, had more rights to divorce and family assets than women in Puritan America would have seven centuries later.) Often these couples remarried new spouses, and argued later over who had rights to furniture, farmland, or children.

Matrimony became a purely civil convention in early European history because, by this point in the game, marriage had evolved into an entirely new shape. Now that people lived in cities and villages rather than fighting for survival in the open desert, marriage was no longer needed as a fundamental personal safety strategy or as a tool of tribal clan building. Instead, marriage was now regarded as a highly efficient form of wealth management and social order, requiring some sort of organizing structure from the larger community.

At a time when banks and laws and governments were still enormously unstable, marriage became the single most important business arrangement most people would ever make in their lives. (Still is, some might argue. Even today, very few people have the power to influence your financial standing—for better or worse—quite so deeply as your spouse.) But marriage in the Middle Ages was certainly the safest and smoothest means of passing wealth, livestock, heirs, or property from one generation to the next. Great wealthy families stabilized their fortunes through marriages much the same way that great multinational corporations today stabilize their fortunes through careful mergers and acquisitions. (Great wealthy families back then essentially were great multinational corporations.) Wealthy European children with titles or inheritance became chattel, to be traded and manipulated like investment stocks. Not just the girls, mind you, but the boys, too. A child of rank could find himself engaged and then unengaged to seven or eight potential wives before he reached the age of puberty and all the families and their lawyers reached a final decision.

Even among the common classes, economic considerations weighed heavily on both sexes. Landing a good spouse back then was sort of like getting into a good college, or earning tenure, or securing a job at the post office; it insured a certain future stability. Of course people did have their personal affections for each other, and of course tenderhearted parents did try to arrange emotionally satisfying unions for their children, but marriages during the Middle Ages were more often than not openly opportunistic. As just one example: A great wave of matrimonial fever swept across medieval Europe right after the Black Death had killed off seventy-five million people. For the survivors, there were suddenly unprecedented avenues for social advancement through marriage. After all, there were thousands of brand-new widows and widowers floating around Europe with a considerable amount of valuable property waiting to be redistributed, and perhaps no more living heirs. What followed, then, was a kind of matrimonial gold rush, a land grab of the highest order. Court records from this era are suspiciously filled with cases of twenty-year-old men marrying elderly women. They weren’t idiots, these guys. They saw their window—or widow—of opportunity, and they leapt.

Reflecting this general lack of sentimentality toward matrimony, it’s not surprising that European Christians married privately, in their own homes, in their everyday clothing. The big romantic white weddings that we now think of as “traditional” didn’t come into being until the nineteenth century—not until a teenaged Queen Victoria walked down the aisle in a fluffy white gown, thereby setting a fashion trend that has never gone out of style since. Before that, though, your average European wedding day wasn’t all that much different from any other day of the week. Couples exchanged vows in impromptu ceremonies that generally lasted only a few moments. Witnesses became important on wedding days only so that later there would be no argument in the courts as to whether or not this couple had really consented to marriage—a vital question when money, land, or children were at stake. The reason the courts were involved at all was only in the interest of upholding a certain degree of social order. As the historian Nancy Cott has put it, “marriage prescribed duties and dispensed privileges,” distributing clear roles and responsibilities among the citizenry.

For the most part, this is still true in modern Western society. Even today, pretty much the only things the law cares about when it comes to your marriage are your money, your property, and your offspring. Granted, your priest, your rabbi, your neighbors, or your parents may have other ideas about marriage, but in the eyes of modern secular law, the only reason marriage matters is that two people have come together and produced something in their union (children, assets, businesses, debts), and these things all need to be managed so that civil society can proceed in a methodical fashion and governments will not be stuck with the messy business of raising abandoned babies or supporting bankrupted ex-spouses.

When I began divorce proceedings in 2002, for instance, the judge had no interest whatsoever in myself or my then-husband as emotional or moral beings. She didn’t care about our sentimental grievances or our shattered hearts or any holy vows that may or may not have been broken. She certainly didn’t care about our mortal souls. What she cared about was the deed to our house and who was going to hold it. She cared about our taxes. She cared about the six months remaining on our car’s lease, and who would be obligated to make the monthly payments. She cared about who had the rights to my future book royalties. If we’d had any children together (which we did not have, mercifully), the judge would’ve cared very much about who was obligated to provide for their schooling and medical care and housing and babysitting. Thus—through the power invested in her by the State of New York—she kept our little corner of civil society tidy and organized. In so doing, that judge in the year 2002 was hearkening back to a medieval understanding of marriage: namely, that this is a civil/secular affair, not a religious/moral one. Her rulings would not have been out of place in a tenth-century European courtroom.

To me, though, the most striking feature of these early European marriages (and divorces, I should add) was their looseness. People got married for economic and personal reasons, but they also separated for economic and personal reasons—and fairly easily, compared to what would soon come. Civil society back then seemed to understand that, while human hearts make many promises, human minds can change. And business deals can change, too. In medieval Germany, the courts even went so far as to create two different kinds of legal marriage: Muntehe, a heavily binding permanent life contract, and Friedelehe, which basically translates as “marriage-lite”—a more casual living arrangement between two consenting adults which took no account whatsoever of dowry requirements or inheritance law, and which could be dissolved by either party at any time.

By the thirteenth century, though, all that looseness was about to change because the church got involved in the business of matrimony again—or rather, for the first time. The utopian dreams of early Christianity were long over. Church fathers were no longer monkish scholars intent on re-creating heaven on earth, but were now mighty political figures very much invested in controlling their growing empire. One of the biggest administrative challenges the church now faced was managing the European royalty, whose marriages and divorces often made and broke political alliances in ways that were not always agreeable to various popes.

In the year 1215, then, the church took control of matrimony forever, laying down rigid new edicts about what would henceforth constitute legitimate marriage. Before 1215, a spoken vow between two consenting adults had always been considered contract enough in the eyes of the law, but the church now insisted that this was unacceptable. The new dogma declared: “We absolutely prohibit clandestine marriages.” (Translation: We absolutely prohibit any marriage that takes place behind our backs.) Any prince or aristocrat who now dared to marry against the wishes of the church could suddenly find himself excommunicated, and those restrictions trickled down to the common classes as well. Just to further tighten controls, Pope Innocent III now forbade divorce under any circumstances—except in cases of church-sanctioned annulments, which were often used as tools of empire building or empire busting.

Marriage, once a secular institution monitored by families and civil courts, now became a stringently religious affair, monitored by celibate priests. Moreover, the church’s strict new prohibitions against divorce turned marriage into a life sentence—something it had never really been before, not even in ancient Hebrew society. And divorce remained illegal in Europe until the sixteenth century, when Henry VIII brought back the custom in grand style. But for about two centuries there—and for much longer in countries that remained Catholic after the Protestant Reformation—unhappy couples no longer had any legal escape from their marriages should things go wrong.

In the end, it must be said that these limitations made life far more difficult for women than for men. At least men were allowed to look for love or sex outside their marriages, but ladies had no such socially condoned outlet. Women of rank were especially locked into their nuptial vows, expected to make do with whatever and whoever had been foisted upon them. (Peasants could both select and abandon their spouses with a little more freedom, but in the upper classes—with so much wealth at stake—there was simply no room for any give.) Girls from important families could find themselves shipped off in mid-adolescence to countries where they might not even speak the language, left there forever to wither in the domain of some random husband. One such English teenager, describing the plans for her upcoming arranged marriage, wrote mournfully about making “daily preparations for my journey to Hell.”

To further enforce controls over wealth management and stabilization, courts all across Europe were now seriously upholding the legal notion of coverture—that is, the belief that a woman’s individual civil existence is erased the moment she marries. Under this system, a wife effectively becomes “covered” by her husband and no longer has any legal rights of her own, nor can she hold any personal property. Coverture was initially a French legal notion, but it spread handily across Europe and soon became entrenched deep in English Common Law. Even as late as the nineteenth century, the British judge Lord William Blackstone was still defending the essence of coverture in his courtroom, insisting that a married woman did not really exist as a legal entity. “The very being of the woman,” Blackstone wrote, “is suspended during marriage.” For that reason, Blackstone ruled, a husband cannot share assets with his wife even if he wanted to—not even if those assets were once technically the woman’s property. A man cannot grant anything to his wife, for doing so would presuppose “her separate existence” from him—and such a thing was clearly impossible.

Coverture, then, was not so much a blending of two individuals as a spooky and almost voodoo-like “twicing” of the man, wherein his powers doubled and his wife’s evaporated completely. Combined with the strict new antidivorce policies of the church, marriage became, by the thirteenth century, an institution that entombed and then erased its female victims—particularly among the gentry. One can only imagine how lonely the lives of those women must have become once they were so thoroughly eradicated as humans. How on earth did they fill their days? Over the course of their paralyzing marriages, as Balzac wrote of such unfortunate ladies, “Boredom overtakes them, and they give themselves up to religion, or cats, or little dogs, or other manias which are offensive only to God.”

I f there is one word, by the way, that triggers all the inherent terrors I have ever felt about the institution of marriage, it is coverture. This is exactly what the dancer Isadora Duncan was talking about when she wrote that “any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract and then goes into it deserves all the consequences.”

My aversion is not entirely irrational either. The legacy of coverture lingered in Western civilization for many more centuries than it ought to have, clinging to life in the margins of dusty old law books, and always linked to conservative assumptions about the proper role of a wife. It wasn’t until the year 1975, for instance, that the married women of Connecticut—including my own mother—were legally allowed to take out loans or open checking accounts without the written permission of their husbands. It wasn’t until 1984 that the state of New York overturned an ugly legal notion called “the marital rape exemption,” which had previously permitted a man to do anything he liked sexually to his wife, no matter how violent or coercive, since her body belonged to him—since, in effect, she was him.

There’s one particular example of coverture’s legacy which—given my circumstances—touches me most of all. The fact is, I was lucky that the United States government was even considering allowing me to marry Felipe without forcing me to renounce my own nationality in the process. In 1907, a law was passed by the United States Congress stating that any natural-born American woman who married a foreign-born man would have to surrender her American citizenship upon her marriage and automatically become a citizen of her husband’s nation—whether she wanted to or not. Though the courts conceded that this was unpleasant, they maintained for many years that it was necessary. As the Supreme Court ruled on the matter, if you were to permit an American woman to keep her own nationality at the moment of marriage to a foreigner, you would essentially be allowing the wife’s citizenship to trump the husband’s citizenship. In so doing, you would be suggesting that the woman was in possession of something that rendered her superior to her husband—in even one small regard—and this was obviously unconscionable, as one American judge explained, since it undermined “the ancient principle” of the marital contract, which existed in order “to merge their identity (man and wife) and give dominance to the husband.” (Strictly speaking, of course, that’s not a merger; that’s a takeover. But you get the point.)

Needless to say, the law did not hold the reverse to be true. If a natural-born American man married a foreign-born woman, the husband was certainly allowed to keep his citizenship, and his bride (covered by him, after all) would certainly be allowed to become an American citizen herself—that is, so long as she met the official naturalization requirements for foreign-born wives (which is to say, so long as she was not a Negro, a mulatto, a member of “the Malay race,” or any other kind of creature that the United States of America expressly deemed undesirable).

This brings us to another subject I find disturbing about matrimony’s legacy: the racism that one encounters all over marriage law—even in very recent American history. One of the more sinister characters in the American matrimonial saga was a fellow named Paul Popenoe, an avocado farmer from California who opened a eugenics clinic in Los Angeles in the 1930s called “The Human Betterment Foundation.” Inspired by his attempts to cultivate better avocados, he devoted his clinic to the work of cultivating better (read: whiter) Americans. Popenoe was concerned that white women—who had lately started attending college and delaying marriage—weren’t breeding quickly or copiously enough, while all the wrong-colored people were breeding in dangerous numbers. He also nursed deep concerns about marriage and breeding among the “unfit,” and so his clinic’s first priority was to sterilize all those whom Popenoe judged unworthy to reproduce. If any of this sounds distressingly familiar, it’s only because the Nazis were impressed by Popenoe’s work, which they quoted often in their own writings. Indeed, the Nazis really ran with his ideas. While Germany eventually sterilized over 400,000 people, American states—following Popenoe’s programs—managed to get only about 60,000 citizens sterilized.

It’s also chilling to learn that Popenoe used his clinic as the base from which to launch the very first marriage-counseling center in America. The intention of this counseling center was to encourage marriage and breeding among “fit” couples (white, Protestant couples of northern European descent). More chilling still is the fact that Popenoe, the father of American eugenics, also went on to launch the famous Ladies’ Home Journal column “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” His intention with the advice column was identical to that of the counseling center: to keep all those white American couples together so they could produce more white American babies.

But racial discrimination has always shaped marriage in America. Slaves in the antebellum South, not surprisingly, were never allowed to marry. The argument against slaves’ marrying, simply put, was this: It’s impossible. Marriage in Western society is supposed to be a contract based on mutual consent, and a slave—by very definition—does not possess his own consent. His every move is controlled by his master and therefore he cannot willfully enter into any contract with another human being. To allow a slave to enter into a consensual marriage, then, would be to assume that a slave can make even one small promise of his own, and this is obviously impossible. Therefore, slaves could not marry. A tidy line of reasoning, this argument (and the brutal policies that enforced it) effectively destroyed the institution of marriage within the African American community for generations to come—a disgraceful legacy that haunts society to this day.

Then there is the question of interracial marriage, which was illegal in the United States until fairly recently. For most of American history, falling in love with a person of the wrong color could land you in jail, or worse. All this changed in 1967, with the case of a rural Virginia couple named—poetically enough—the Lovings. Richard Loving was white; his wife, Mildred—whom he had adored since he was seventeen years old—was black. When they decided to marry in 1958, interracial unions were still illegal in the Commonwealth of Virginia as well as in fifteen other American states. So the young couple sealed their vows in Washington, D.C., instead. But when they returned home after their honeymoon, they were swiftly apprehended by local police, who broke into the Lovings’ bedroom in the middle of the night and arrested them. (The police had hoped to find the couple having sex, so they could also charge them with the crime of interracial intercourse, but no luck; the Lovings were only sleeping.) Still, the fact that they had married each other at all rendered the couple guilty enough to haul off to jail. Richard and Mildred petitioned the courts for the right to uphold their District of Columbia marriage, but a Virginia state judge struck down their wedding vows, helpfully explaining in his ruling that “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and He placed them on separate continents. The fact that He separated the races shows that He did not intend for the races to mix.”

Good to know.

The Lovings moved to Washington, D.C., with the understanding that if they ever again returned to Virginia, they would face a jail sentence. Their story might have ended there, but for a letter that Mildred wrote to the NAACP in 1963, asking if the organization might help find a way for the couple to return home to Virginia, even if only for a short visit. “We know we can’t live there,” Mrs. Loving wrote with a devastating humility, “but we would like to go back once and awhile to visit our families & friends.”

A pair of civil rights lawyers from the ACLU took on the case, which finally made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967, where the justices—upon reviewing the story—unanimously begged to differ with the idea that modern civil law should be based on biblical exegesis. (To its everlasting credit, the Roman Catholic Church itself had issued a public statement only a few months earlier, expressing its unqualified support for interracial marriage.) The Supreme Court sealed the legality of Richard and Mildred’s union in a 9–0 ruling, and with this ringing statement: “The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.”

At the time, I must also mention, a poll showed that 70 percent of Americans vehemently opposed this ruling. Let me repeat that: In recent American history, seven out of ten Americans still believed that it should be a criminal offense for people of different races to marry each other. But the courts were morally ahead of the general population on this matter. The last racial barriers were removed from the canon of American matrimonial law, and life went on, and everyone got used to the new reality, and the institution of marriage did not collapse for having had its boundaries adjusted just that tiny bit wider. And although there still may be people out there who believe that the intermingling of races is abhorrent, you would have to be an extreme fringe racist lunatic these days to seriously suggest aloud that consenting adults of different ethnic backgrounds should be excluded from legal matrimony. Moreover, there is not a single politician in this country who could ever win election to high office again by running on such a contemptible platform.

We have moved on, in other words.

Y ou see where I’m heading with this, right?

Or rather, you see where history is heading with this?

What I mean to say is: You won’t be surprised, will you, if I now take a few moments to discuss the subject of same-sex marriage? Please understand that I realize people have strong feelings on this topic. Then-congressman James M. Talent of Missouri undoubtedly spoke for many when he said in 1996, “It is an act of hubris to believe that marriage can be infinitely malleable, that it can be pushed and pulled around like Silly Putty without destroying its essential stability and what it means to our society.”

The problem with that argument, though, is that the only thing marriage has ever done, historically and definitionally speaking, is to change. Marriage in the Western world changes with every century, adjusting itself constantly around new social standards and new notions of fairness. The Silly Putty–like malleability of the institution, in fact, is the only reason we still have the thing at all. Very few people—Mr. Talent included, I’ll wager—would accept marriage on its thirteenth-century terms. Marriage survives, in other words, precisely because it evolves. (Though I suppose this would not be a very persuasive argument to those who probably also don’t believe in evolution.)

In the spirit of full disclosure, I should make clear here that I’m a supporter of same-sex marriage. Of course I would be; I’m precisely that sort of person. The reason I bring up this topic at all is that it irritates me immensely to know that I have access, through the act of marriage, to certain critical social privileges that a large number of my friends and fellow taxpayers do not have. It irritates me even more to know that if Felipe and I had happened to be a same-sex couple, we would have been in really big trouble after that incident at the Dallas/ Fort Worth Airport. The Homeland Security Department would have taken one look at our relationship and thrown my partner out of the country forever, with no hope of future parole through marriage. Strictly on account of my heterosexual credentials, then, I am allowed to secure Felipe an American passport. Put in such terms, my upcoming marriage starts to look something like a membership at an exclusive country club—a means of offering me valuable amenities that are denied to my equally worthy neighbors. That sort of discrimination will never sit well with me, only adding to the natural suspicion I already feel toward this institution.

Even so, I’m hesitant to discuss in much detail the specifics of this particular social debate, if only because gay marriage is such a hot issue that it’s almost too early to be publishing books about it yet. Two weeks before I sat down to write this paragraph, same-sex marriage was legalized in the state of Connecticut. A week after that, it was declared illegal in the state of California. While I was editing this paragraph a few months later, all hell broke loose in Iowa and Vermont. Not long after that, New Hampshire became the sixth state to make same-sex marriage legal, and I’m beginning to believe that whatever I declare today about the gay marriage debate in America will most likely be obsolete by next Tuesday afternoon.

What I can say about this subject, though, is that legalized same-sex marriage is coming to America. In large part this is because non-legalized same-sex marriage is already here. Same-sex couples already live together openly these days, whether their relationships have been officially sanctioned by their states or not. Same-sex couples are raising children together, paying taxes together, building homes together, running businesses together, creating wealth together, and even getting divorced from each other. All these already existing relationships and social responsibilities must be managed and organized through rule of law in order to keep civil society running smoothly. (This is why the 2010 U.S. Census will be documenting same-sex couples as “married” for the first time in order to chart clearly the actual demographics of the nation.) The federal courts will eventually get fed up, just as they did with interracial marriage, and decide that it’s far easier to let all consenting adults have access to matrimony than it is to sort out the issue state by state, amendment by amendment, sheriff by sheriff, personal prejudice by personal prejudice.

Of course, social conservatives may still believe that homosexual marriage is wrong because the purpose of matrimony is to create children, but infertile and childless and postmenopausal heterosexual couples get married all the time and nobody protests. (The archconservative political commentator Pat Buchanan and his wife are childless, just as one example, and nobody suggests that their marital privileges should be revoked for failure to propagate biological offspring.) And as for the notion that same-sex marriage will somehow corrupt the community at large, nobody has ever been able to prove this in a court of law. On the contrary, hundreds of scientific and social organizations—from the American Academy of Family Physicians, to the American Psychological Association, to the Child Welfare League of America—have publicly endorsed both gay marriage and gay adoption.

But gay marriage is coming to America first and foremost because marriage here is a secular concern, not a religious one. The objection to gay marriage is almost invariably biblical, but nobody’s legal vows in this country are defined by interpretation of biblical verse—or at least, not since the Supreme Court stood up for Richard and Mildred Loving. A church wedding ceremony is a nice thing, but it is neither required for legal marriage in America nor does it constitute legal marriage in America. What constitutes legal marriage in this country is that critical piece of paper that you and your betrothed must sign and then register with the state. The morality of your marriage may indeed rest between you and God, but it’s that civic and secular paperwork which makes your vows official here on earth. Ultimately, then, it is the business of America’s courts, not America’s churches, to decide the rules of matrimonial law, and it is in those courts that the same-sex marriage debate will finally be settled.

Anyhow, to be perfectly honest, I find it a bit crazy that social conservatives are fighting so hard against this at all, considering that it’s quite a positive thing for society in general when as many intact families as possible live under the estate of matrimony. And I say this as someone who is—I think we can all agree by now—admittedly suspicious of marriage. Yet it’s true. Legal marriage, because it restrains sexual promiscuity and yokes people to their social obligations, is an essential building block of any orderly community. I’m not convinced that marriage is always so terrific for every individual within the relationship, but that’s another question altogether. There is no doubt—not even within my rebellious mind—that in general, matrimony stabilizes the larger social order and is often exceedingly good for children.*

If I were a social conservative, then—that is to say, if I were somebody who cared deeply about social stability, economic prosperity, and sexual monogamy—I would want as many gay couples as possible to get married. I would want as many of every kind of couple as possible to get married. I recognize that conservatives are worried that homosexuals will destroy and corrupt the institution of marriage, but perhaps they should consider the distinct possibility that gay couples are actually poised at this moment in history to save marriage. Think of it! Marriage is on the decline everywhere, all across the Western world. People are getting married later in life, if they’re getting married at all, or they are producing children willy-nilly out of wedlock, or (like me) they are approaching the whole institution with ambivalence or even hostility. We don’t trust marriage anymore, many of us straight folk. We don’t get it. We’re not at all convinced that we need it. We feel as though we can take it or leave it behind forever. All of which leaves poor old matrimony twisting in the winds of cold modernity.

But just when it seems like maybe all is lost for marriage, just when matrimony is about to become as evolutionarily expendable as pinkie toes and appendixes, just when it appears that the institution will wither slowly into obscurity due to a general lack of social interest, in come the gay couples, asking to be included! Indeed, pleading to be included! Indeed, fighting with all their might to be included in a custom which may be terrifically beneficial for society as a whole but which many—like me—find only suffocating and old-fashioned and irrelevant.

It might seem ironic that homosexuals—who have, over the centuries, made an art form out of leading bohemian lives on the outer fringes of society—want so desperately now to be part of such a mainstream tradition. Certainly not everyone understands this urge to guarantee, assimilate, not even within the gay community. The filmmaker John Waters, for one, says that he always thought the only advantages of being gay were that he didn’t have to join the military and he didn’t have to get married. Still, it is true that many same-sex couples want nothing more than to join society as fully integrated, socially responsible, family-centered, taxpaying, Little League–coaching, nation-serving, respectably married citizens. So why not welcome them in? Why not recruit them by the vanload to sweep in on heroic wings and save the flagging and battered old institution of matrimony from a bunch of apathetic, ne’er-do-well, heterosexual deadbeats like me?

In any case, whatever happens with gay marriage, and whenever it happens, I can also assure you that future generations will someday find it ridiculous to the point of comedy that we ever debated this topic at all, much the same way that it seems absurd today that it was once strictly illegal for an English peasant to marry outside of his class, or for a white American citizen to marry someone of “the Malay race.” Which brings us to the final reason that gay marriage is coming: because marriage in the Western world over the last several centuries has been moving—slowly but inexorably—in the direction of ever more personal privacy, ever more fairness, ever more respect for the two individuals involved, and ever more freedom of choice.

You can chart the beginning of the “marital freedom movement,” as we might call it, from sometime around the mideighteenth century. The world was changing, liberal democracies were on the rise, and all over western Europe and the Americas came a massive social push for more freedom, more privacy, more opportunities for individuals to pursue their own personal happiness regardless of other people’s wishes. Men and women alike began to express ever more vocally their desire for choice. They wanted to choose their own leaders, choose their own religions, choose their own destinies, and—yes—even choose their own spouses.

Moreover, with the advancements of the Industrial Revolution and the increase in personal earnings, couples could now afford to purchase their own homes rather than live forever with extended family—and we cannot overestimate how much that social transformation affected marriage. Because along with all those new private homes came . . . well, privacy. Private thoughts and private time, which led to private desires and private ideas. Once the doors of your house were closed, your life belonged to you. You could be the master of your own destiny, the captain of your emotional ship. You could seek your own paradise and find your own happiness—not in heaven but right there in downtown Pittsburgh, for instance, with your own lovely wife (whom you had personally selected, by the way, not because it was an economically advantageous choice, or because your family had arranged the match, but because you liked her laugh).

One of my personal hero-couples of the marital freedom movement were a pair named Lillian Harman and Edwin Walker, of the great state of Kansas circa 1887. Lillian was a suffragette and the daughter of a noted anarchist; Edwin was a progressive journalist and feminist sympathizer. They were made for each other. When they fell in love and decided to seal their relationship, they visited neither minister nor judge, but entered instead into what they called an “autonomistic marriage.” They created their own wedding vows, speaking during the ceremony about the absolute privacy of their union, and swearing that Edwin would not dominate his wife in any way, nor would she take his name. Moreover, Lillian refused to swear eternal loyalty to Edwin, but stated firmly that she would “make no promises that it may become impossible or immoral for me to fulfill, but retain the right to act always as my conscience and best judgment shall dictate.”

It goes without saying that Lillian and Edwin were arrested for this flouting of convention—and on their wedding night, no less. (What is it about arresting people in their beds that always signals a new era in marriage history?) The pair were charged with failure to respect license and ceremony, with one judge stating that “the union between E.C. Walker and Lillian Harman is no marriage, and they deserve all the punishment which has been inflicted upon them.”

But the toothpaste was already out of the tube. Because what Lillian and Edwin wanted was not all that different from what their contemporaries wanted: the freedom to enter into or dissolve their own unions, on their own terms, for private reasons, entirely free from meddling interference by church, law, or family. They wanted parity with each other and fairness within their marriage. But mostly what they wanted was the liberty to define their own relationship based on their own personal interpretation of love.

Of course, there was resistance to these radical notions. Even as early as the mid-1800s, you start to see prim, fussy, social conservatives suggesting that this trend toward expressive individualism in marriage would spell out the very breakdown of society. What these conservatives specifically predicted was that allowing couples to make life matches based purely on love and the whims of personal affection would promptly lead to astronomical divorce rates and a host of bitterly broken homes.

Which all seems ridiculous now, doesn’t it?

Except that they were kind of right.

D ivorce, which had once been vanishingly rare in Western society, did begin to increase by the midnineteenth century—almost as soon as people began choosing their own partners for reasons of mere love. And divorce rates have only been growing higher since as marriage becomes ever less “institutional” (based on the needs of the larger society) and ever more “expressively individualistic” (based on the needs of . . . you).

Which is somewhat hazardous, as it turns out. Because here comes the single most interesting fact I’ve learned about the entire history of marriage: Everywhere, in every single society, all across the world, all across time, whenever a conservative culture of arranged marriage is replaced by an expressive culture of people choosing their own partners based on love, divorce rates will immediately begin to skyrocket. You can set your clock to it. (It’s happening in India right now, for instance, even as we speak.)

About five minutes after people start clamoring for the right to choose their own spouses based on love, they will begin clamoring for the right to divorce those spouses once that love has died. Moreover, the courts will start permitting people to divorce, on the grounds that forcing a couple who once loved each other to stay together now that they detest each other is a form of wanton cruelty. (“Send the husband and wife to penal servitude if you disapprove of their conduct and want to punish them,” protested George Bernard Shaw, “but don’t send them back to perpetual wedlock.”) As love becomes the currency of the institution, judges become more sympathetic to miserable spouses—possibly because they, too, know from personal experience just how painful ruined love can become. In 1849, a Connecticut court ruled that spouses should be allowed to legally leave their marriages not only for reasons of abuse, neglect, or adultery, but also because of simple unhappiness. “Any such conduct as permanently destroys the happiness of the petitioner,” the judge declared, “defeats the purpose of the marriage relation.”

This was a truly radical statement. To infer that the purpose of marriage is to create a state of happiness had never before been an assumption in human history. This notion led, inevitably you could say, to the rise of something the matrimonial researcher Barbara Whitehead has called “expressive divorces”—cases of people leaving their marriages merely because their love has died. In such cases, nothing else is wrong with the relationship. Nobody has beaten or betrayed anyone, but the feeling of the love story has changed and divorce becomes the expression of that most intimate disappointment.

I know exactly what Whitehead is talking about when it comes to expressive divorce; my exit from my first marriage was precisely that. Of course, when a situation is making you truly miserable, it’s difficult to say that you are “merely” unhappy. There seems to be nothing “mere,” for instance, about crying for months on end, or feeling that you are being buried alive within your own home. But yes, in all fairness, I must admit that I left my ex-husband merely because my life with him had become miserable, and this gesture marked me as a very expressively modern wife indeed.

So this transformation of marriage from a business deal to a badge of emotional affection has weakened the institution considerably over time—because marriages based on love are, as it turns out, just as fragile as love itself. Just consider my relationship with Felipe and the gossamer thread that holds us together. To put it simply, I do not need this man in almost any of the ways that women have needed men over the centuries. I do not need him to protect me physically, because I live in one of the safest societies on earth. I do not need him to provide for me financially, because I have always been the winner of my own bread. I do not need him to extend my circle of kinship, because I have a rich community of friends and neighbors and family all on my own. I do not need him to give me the critical social status of “married woman,” because my culture offers respect to unmarried women. I do not need him to father my children, because I have chosen not to become a mother—and even if I did want children, technology and the permissiveness of a liberal society would permit me to secure babies through other means, and to raise them alone.

So where does that leave us? Why do I need this man at all? I need him only because I happen to adore him, because his company brings me gladness and comfort, and because, as a friend’s grandfather once put it, “Sometimes life is too hard to be alone, and sometimes life is too good to be alone.” The same goes for Felipe: He needs me only for my companionship as well. Seems like a lot, but it isn’t much at all; it is only love. And a love-based marriage does not guarantee the lifelong binding contract of a clan-based marriage or an asset-based marriage; it cannot. By unnerving definition, anything that the heart has chosen for its own mysterious reasons it can always unchoose later—again, for its own mysterious reasons. And a shared private heaven can quickly descend into a failed private hell.

Moreover, the emotional havoc that accompanies divorce is often colossal, which makes the psychological risk of marrying for love extreme. The most common survey that doctors are using these days to determine stress levels in their patients is a test put together in the 1970s by a pair of researchers named Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe. The Holmes-Rahe scale puts “death of a spouse” at the very top of their list, as the single most stressful event most people will ever undergo in their lives. But guess what’s second on the list? Divorce. According to this survey, “divorce” is even more anxiety-inducing than “death of a close family member” (even the death of one’s own child, we must assume, for there is no separate category for that awful event), and it is far more emotionally stressful than “serious illness,” or “losing a job,” or even “imprisonment.” But what I found most amazing about the Holmes-Rahe scale is that “marital reconciliation” also ranks quite high on the list of stress-inducing events. Even almost getting a divorce and then saving the marriage at the last moment can be absolutely emotionally devastating.

So when we talk about how love-based marriages can lead to higher divorce rates, this is not something to be taken lightly. The emotional, financial, and even physical costs of failed love can destroy individuals and families. People stalk, injure, and kill their ex-spouses, and even when it doesn’t reach the extreme of physical violence, divorce is a psychological and emotional and economic wrecking ball—as anyone who has ever been in, or even near, a failing marriage can attest.

Part of what makes the experience of divorce so dreadful is the emotional ambivalence. It can be difficult, if not impossible, for many divorced people ever to rest in a state of pure grief, pure anger, or pure relief when it comes to feelings about one’s ex-spouse. Instead, the emotions often remain mixed up together in an uncomfortably raw stew of contradictions for many years. This is how we end up missing our ex-husband at the same time as resenting him. This is how we end up worrying about our ex-wife even as we feel absolute murderous rage toward her. It’s confusing beyond measure. Most of the time, it’s hard even to assign clear blame. In almost all the divorces I’ve ever witnessed, both parties (unless one of them was a clear-cut sociopath) were at least somewhat responsible for the collapse of the relationship. So which character are you, once your marriage has failed? Victim or villain? It’s not always easy to tell. These lines mesh and blend, as though there’s been an explosion at a factory and fragments of glass and steel (bits of his heart and her heart) have melded together in the searing heat. Trying to pick through all that wreckage can bring a person straight to the brink of madness.

This is not even to mention the special horror of watching as somebody whom you once loved and defended becomes an aggressive antagonist. I once asked my divorce lawyer, when we were really going through the thick of it, how she could bear to do this work—how she could endure watching every day as couples who had once loved each other tore each other apart in the courtroom. She said, “I find this work rewarding for one reason: because I know something that you don’t know. I know that this is the worst experience of your life, but I also know that someday you’ll move past it and you’ll be fine. And helping somebody like you through the worst experience of her life is incredibly gratifying.”

She was correct in one respect (we will all be fine eventually), but she was dead wrong in another respect (we will never entirely move past it, either). In this sense, we divorced folks are something like twentieth-century Japan: We had a culture which was prewar and we have a culture which is postwar, and right between those two histories lies a giant smoking hole.

I will do virtually anything to avoid going through that apocalypse again. But I recognize that there’s always the possibility of another divorce, exactly because I love Felipe, and because love-based unions make for strangely fragile tethers. I’m not giving up on love, mind you. I still believe in it. But maybe that’s the problem. Maybe divorce is the tax we collectively pay as a culture for daring to believe in love—or at least, for daring to link love to such a vital social contract as matrimony. Maybe it is not love and marriage that go together like a horse and carriage after all. Maybe it is love and divorce that go together . . . like a carriage and a horse.

So perhaps this is the social issue that needs to be addressed here, far more than who is allowed to get married and who isn’t allowed to get married. From an anthropological perspective, the real dilemma of modern relationships is this: If you honestly want to have a society in which people choose their own partners on the basis of personal affection, then you must prepare yourself for the inevitable. There will be broken hearts; there will be broken lives. Exactly because the human heart is such a mystery (“such a tissue of paradox,” as the Victorian scientist Sir Henry Finck beautifully described it), love renders all our plans and all our intentions a great big gamble. Maybe the only difference between first marriage and second marriage is that the second time at least you know you are gambling.

I remember a conversation I had several years ago with a young woman I met at a publishing party in New York City during a bad moment in my life. The young woman, whom I’d met on one or two previous social occasions, asked me out of politeness where my husband was. I revealed that my husband would not be joining me that evening because we were going through a divorce. My companion uttered a few not-very-heartfelt words of sympathy, and then said, before digging into the cheese plate, “I myself have been happily married for eight years already. And I’ll never get divorced.”

What do you say to a comment like that? Congratulations on an accomplishment that you have not yet accomplished? I can see now that this young woman still had a certain innocence about marriage. Unlike your average sixteenth-century Venetian teenager, she was lucky enough not to have had a husband inflicted upon her. But for that very reason—exactly because she had chosen her spouse out of love—her marriage was more fragile than she realized.

The vows that we make on our wedding day are a noble effort to belie this fragility, to convince ourselves that—truly—what God Almighty has brought together, no man can tear asunder. But unfortunately God Almighty is not the one who swears those wedding vows; man (unmighty) is, and man can always tear a sworn vow asunder. Even if my acquaintance at the publishing party was certain that she herself would never abandon her husband, the question was not entirely up to her. She was not the only person in that bed. All lovers, even the most faithful lovers, are vulnerable to abandonment against their will. I know this simple fact to be true, for I myself have abandoned people who did not want me to go, and I myself have been abandoned by those whom I begged to stay. Knowing all this, I will enter into my second marriage with far more humility than I entered into my first. As will Felipe. Not that humility alone will protect us, but at least this time we’ll have some.

It’s been famously said that second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience, but I’m not entirely sure that’s true. It seems to me that first marriages are the more hope-drenched affairs, awash in vast expectations and easy optimism. Second marriages are cloaked, I think, in something else: a respect for forces that are bigger than us, maybe. A respect that perhaps even approaches awe.

An old Polish adage warns: “Before going to war, say one prayer. Before going to sea, say two prayers. Before getting married, say three.”

I myself intend to pray all year.

* Pardon me for a moment. This is such an important and complicated point that it warrants the only footnote of this whole book. When sociologists say that “marriage is extremely good for children,” what they really mean is that stability is extremely good for children. It has been categorically proven that children thrive in environments where they are not subjected to constant unsettling emotional changes—such as, for instance, an endless rotation of Mom’s or Dad’s new romantic partners cycling in and out of the home. Marriage tends to stabilize families and prevent such upheavals, but not necessarily. These days, for instance, a child born to an unmarried couple in Sweden (where legal marriage is increasingly passé, but where family bonds are quite solid) has a greater chance of living forever with the same parents than a child born to a married couple in America (where marriage is still revered but divorce runs rampant). Children need constancy and familiarity. Marriage encourages, but cannot guarantee, familial solidity. Unmarried couples and single parents and even grandparents can create calm and stable environments in which children can thrive, outside the bonds of legal matrimony. I just wanted to be very clear about that. Sorry for the interruption, and thanks.

CHAPTER FOUR

M arriage and I nfatuation

Be of love (a little)/ More careful/

Than of everything

—e.e. cummings

It was now September 2006.

Felipe and I were still wandering across Southeast Asia. We had nothing but time to kill. Our immigration case had stalled completely. To be fair, it was not only our immigration case that had stalled, but the cases of every single couple applying for fiancé visas to America. The whole system was in lockdown, frozen shut. To our collective misfortune, a new immigration law had just been passed by Congress and now everybody was going to be held up—thousands of couples—for at least another four months or so of bureaucratic limbo. The new law stated that any American citizen who wanted to marry a foreigner now had to be investigated by the FBI, who would search the applicant for evidence of past felonies.

That’s right: any American who now wished to marry a foreigner was subject to FBI investigation.

Curiously enough, this law had been passed to protect women—poor foreign women from developing nations, to be precise—from being imported into the United States as brides for convicted rapists, murderers, or known spousal abusers. This had become a grisly problem in recent years. American men were essentially buying brides from the former Soviet Union, Asia, and South America, who—once shipped off to the United States—often faced horrible new lives as prostitutes or sex slaves, or even ended up murdered by American husbands who may have already had a police record of rape and homicide. Thus, this new law came into being to prescreen all prospective American spouses, in order to protect their foreign-born brides from marrying a potential monster.

It was a good law. It was a fair law. It was impossible not to approve of such a law. The only problem for Felipe and me was that it was an awfully inconveniently timed law, given that our case would now take at least four extra months to process, as the FBI back home did their due diligence investigations to confirm that I was neither a convicted rapist nor a serial murderer of unfortunate women, despite the fact that I totally matched the profile.

Every few days I would send another e-mail to our immigration lawyer back in Philadelphia, checking in for progress reports, for timelines, for hope.

“No news,” the lawyer would always report. Sometimes he would remind me, just in case I had forgotten: “Make no plans. Nothing is promised.”

So while all that played out (or rather, while all that didn’t play out) Felipe and I entered the country of Laos. We took a flight out of northern Thailand to the ancient city of Luang Prabang, passing over a continuous emerald expanse of mountains that poked out of the verdant jungle, steep and striking, one after another, like choppy frozen green waves. The local airport looked something like a small-town American post office. We hired a bicycle taxi to carry us into Luang Prabang itself, which turned out to be a treasure of a city, situated beautifully on a delta between the Mekong and Nam Khan rivers. Luang Prabang is an exquisite place that has somehow managed over the centuries to wedge forty Buddhist temples onto one small slice of real estate. For this reason, one encounters Buddhist monks everywhere there. The monks range in age from about ten years old (the novices) to about ninety years old (the masters), and literally thousands of them live in Luang Prabang at any given time. The monk-to-normal-mortal ratio, therefore, feels something like five to one.

The novices were some of the most beautiful boys I’d ever seen. They dressed in bright orange robes, and had shaved heads and golden skin. Every morning before dawn, they streamed out of the temples in long lines, alms bowls in hand, collecting their daily food from the townspeople, who would kneel in the streets to offer up rice for the monks to eat. Felipe, already weary of traveling, described this ceremony as “an awful lot of fuss for five o’clock in the morning,” but I loved it, and I awoke every day before dawn to sneak onto the veranda of our crumbling hotel and watch.

I was captivated by the monks. They were a fascinating distraction for me. I completely fixated on them. In fact, I was so captivated by the monks that, after a few languid days spent doing nothing much in this small Laotian town, I commenced to spying on them.

O kay, spying on monks is probably a very wicked activity (may the Buddha forgive me), but it was difficult to resist. I was dying to know who these boys were, what they felt, what they wanted out of life, but there was a limit to how much information I could find out openly. Notwithstanding the language barrier, women are not even supposed to look at the monks, or even stand near them, much less speak to them. Also, it was difficult to collect any personal information about any particular monk when they all looked exactly the same. It’s not an insult or a racist dismissal to say that they all looked exactly the same; sameness is the very intention of the shaved heads and the simple, identical orange robes. The reason their Buddhist masters created this uniform look is to deliberately help the boys diminish their sense of themselves as individuals, to blend them into a collective. Even they are not supposed to distinguish themselves one from the other.

But we stayed there in Luang Prabang for several weeks, and after a great deal of backstreet surveillance I slowly came to recognize individual monks within the crowds of interchangeable orange robes and shaved heads. There were young monks of all sorts, it gradually became clear. There were the flirtatious and daring monks who stood on each other’s shoulders to peek over the temple wall at you and call out “Hello, Mrs. Lady!” as you walked by. There were novices who snuck cigarettes at night outside the temple walls, the embers of their smokes glowing as orange as their robes. I saw a buff teenage monk doing pushups, and I spotted another one with an unexpectedly gangsterish tattoo of a knife emblazoned on one golden shoulder. One night I’d eavesdropped while a handful of monks sang Bob Marley songs to each other underneath a tree in a temple garden, long after they should have been asleep. I’d even seen a knot of barely adolescent novices kickboxing each other—a display of good-natured competition that, like boys’ games all over the world, carried the threat of turning truly violent at a moment’s notice.

But I was most surprised by an incident I witnessed one afternoon in the small, dark Internet café in Luang Prabang, where Felipe and I would spend several hours a day checking e-mails and communicating with our families and our immigration lawyer. I often came to this Internet café alone, too. When Felipe wasn’t with me, I would use the computers to scan real estate notices back home, looking at houses around the Philadelphia area. I was feeling—more than I had ever felt in my life, or maybe even for the first time in my life—homesick. As in: sick for a home. I longed like mad for a house, an address, a small private location of our own. I yearned to liberate my books from storage and alphabetize them on shelves. I dreamed of adopting a pet, of eating home-cooked food, of visiting my old shoes, of living close to my sister and her family.

I had recently called my niece to wish her a happy eighth birthday, and she had fallen apart on the phone.

“Why aren’t you here?” Mimi demanded. “Why aren’t you coming over to my birthday party?”

“I can’t come, sweetheart. I’m stuck on the other side of the world.”

“Then why don’t you come over tomorrow?”

I didn’t want to burden Felipe with any of this. My homesickness just made him feel helpless and trapped and somehow responsible for having uprooted us to northern Laos. But home was a constant distraction for me. Scrolling through real estate listings behind Felipe’s back made me feel guilty, as though I were surfing porn, but I did it anyhow. “Make no plans,” our immigration lawyer kept repeating, but still, I could not help myself. I dreamed of plans. Floor plans.

So as I was sitting there alone in the Internet café one hot afternoon in Luang Prabang, staring at my flickering computer screen, admiring an image of a stone cottage on the Delaware River (with a small barn that could easily be transformed into a writing studio!), a thin teenage novice monk suddenly sat down at the computer next to me, balancing his skinny bottom lightly on the edge of a hard wooden chair. I’d been seeing monks using computers in this Internet café for weeks now, but I had still not gotten over the cultural disconnect of watching shaven-headed, serious boys in saffron robes surfing the Web. Overcome with curiosity about what exactly they were doing on those computers, I would sometimes get up from my seat and casually wander around the room, glancing at everyone’s screens as I passed by. Usually the boys were playing video games, though sometimes I found them typing laboriously away at English-language texts, utterly absorbed in their work.

On this day, though, the young monk sat down right beside me. He was so close that I could see the faint hairs on his thin, pale-brown arms. Our workstations were so near to each other that I could also see his computer screen quite clearly. After a spell, I glanced over to get a sense of what he was working on, and realized that the boy was reading a love letter. Actually, he was reading a love e-mail, which I quickly gleaned was from somebody named Carla, who was clearly not Laotian and who wrote in comfortable, colloquial English. So Carla was American, then. Or maybe British. Or Australian. One sentence on the boy’s computer screen popped out at me: “I still long for you as my lover.”

Which snapped me from my reverie. Dear Lord, what was I doing reading somebody’s private correspondence? And over his shoulder, no less? I pulled my eyes away, ashamed of myself. This was none of my business. I returned my attention to Delaware Valley real estate listings. Though naturally I found it a tad difficult to focus on my own tasks anymore, because, come on: Who the hell was Carla?

How had a young Western woman and a teenage Laotian monk met in the first place? How old was she? And when she wrote, “I still long for you as my lover,” had she meant, “I want you as my lover?”—or had this relationship been consummated, and she was now cherishing a memory of shared physical passion? If Carla and the monk had consummated their love affair—well, how? When? Perhaps Carla had been on vacation in Luang Prabang, and maybe she’d struck up a conversation somehow with this boy, despite the fact that females should not even gaze at the novices? Had he sung out “Hello, Mrs. Lady!” to her, and maybe things had tumbled toward a sexual encounter from there? What would become of them now? Was this boy going to give up his vows and move to Australia now? (Or Britain, or Canada, or Memphis?) Would Carla relocate to Laos? Would they ever see each other again? Would he be defrocked if they were caught? (Do you even call it “defrocked” in Buddhism?) Was this love affair going to ruin his life? Or hers? Or both?

The boy stared at his computer in rapt silence, studying his love letter with such concentration that he had no awareness whatsoever of me sitting right there beside him, worrying silently about his future. And I was worried about him—worried that he was in way over his head here, and that this chain of action could only lead to heartache.

Then again, you cannot stop the flood of desire as it moves through the world, inappropriate though it may sometimes be. It is the prerogative of all humans to make ludicrous choices, to fall in love with the most unlikely of partners, and to set themselves up for the most predictable of calamities. So Carla had the hots for a teenage monk—what of it? How could I judge her for this? Over the course of my own life, hadn’t I also fallen in love with many inappropriate men? And weren’t the beautiful young “spiritual” ones the most alluring of all?

The monk did not type out a response to Carla—or at least not that afternoon. He read the letter a few more times, as carefully as though he were studying a religious text. Then he sat for a long while in silence, hands resting lightly on his lap, eyes closed as though in meditation. Finally the boy took action: He printed out the e-mail. He read Carla’s words once more, this time on paper. He folded the note with tenderness, as though he were folding an origami crane, and tucked it away somewhere inside his orange robes. Then this beautiful almost-child of a young man disconnected from the Internet and walked out of the café into the searing heat of the ancient river town.

I stood up after a moment and followed him outside, unnoticed. I watched as he walked up the street, moving slowly in the direction of the central temple on the hill, looking neither to the left nor the right. Soon enough a group of young monks came walking by, gradually overtaking him, and Carla’s monk quietly joined their ranks, disappearing into the crowd of slim young novices like an orange fish vanishing into a school of its duplicate brothers. I immediately lost track of him there in this throng of boys who all looked exactly the same. But clearly these boys were not all exactly the same. Only one of those young Laotian monks, for instance, had a love letter from a woman named Carla folded and hidden somewhere within his robes. And as crazy as it seemed, and as dangerous a game as he was playing here, I could not help but feel a little excited for the kid.

Whatever the outcome, something was happening to him.

T he Buddha taught that all human suffering is rooted in desire. Don’t we all know this to be true? Any of us who have ever desired something and then didn’t get it (or, worse, got it and subsequently lost it) know full well the suffering of which the Buddha spoke. Desiring another person is perhaps the most risky endeavor of all. As soon as you want somebody—really want him—it is as though you have taken a surgical needle and sutured your happiness to the skin of that person, so that any separation will now cause you a lacerating injury. All you know is that you must obtain the object of your desire by any means necessary, and then never be parted. All you can think about is your beloved. Lost in such primal urgency, you no longer completely own yourself. You have become an indentured servant to your own yearnings.

So you can see why the Buddha, who taught serene detachment as a path to wisdom, might not have approved of this young monk furtively carrying around love letters from somebody named Carla. You can see how Lord Buddha might have regarded this tryst as a bit of distraction. Certainly no relationship rooted in secrecy and lust would have impressed him. But then the Buddha was not a big fan of sexual or romantic intimacy anyhow. Remember, before he became the Perfected One, he had abandoned a wife and child of his own in order to set forth unencumbered on a spiritual journey. Much like the early Christian fathers, the Buddha taught that only the celibate and the solitary can find enlightenment. Therefore, traditional Buddhism has always been somewhat suspicious of marriage. The Buddhist path is a journey of nonattachment, and marriage is an estate that brings an intrinsic sense of attachment to spouse, children, and home. The journey to enlightenment begins by walking away from all that.

There does exist a role for married people in traditional Buddhist culture, but it’s more of a supporting role than anything else. The Buddha referred to married people as “householders.” He even gave clear instructions as to how one should be a good householder: Be nice to your spouse, be honest, be faithful, give alms to the poor, buy some insurance against fire and flood . . .

I’m dead serious: The Buddha literally advised married couples to buy property insurance.

Not quite as exciting a path as parting the veil of illusion and standing on the shimmering threshold of untarnished perfection, now is it? But as far as the Buddha was concerned, enlightenment was simply not available to householders. In this way, again, he resembled the early Christian fathers, who believed that spousal attachment was nothing but an obstacle to heaven—which does lead one to start pondering exactly what these enlightened beings had against couplehood anyhow. Why all the hostility toward romantic and sexual union, or even toward steadfast marriage? Why all the resistance to love? Or perhaps it wasn’t love that was the problem; Jesus and the Buddha were the greatest teachers of love and compassion the world has ever seen. Perhaps it was the attendant danger of desire that caused these masters to worry for people’s souls and sanity and equilibrium.

The problem is that we’re all full of desire; it is the very hallmark of our emotional existence, and it can lead to our downfall—and to the downfall of others. In the most famous treatise on desire ever written, The Symposium, Plato describes a famous dinner party during which the playwright Aristophanes lays out the mythical story of why we humans have such deep longings for union with each other, and why our acts of union can sometimes be so unsatisfying and even destructive.

Once upon a time, Aristophanes relates, there were gods in the heavens and humans down on earth. But we humans did not look the way we look today. Instead, we each had two heads and four legs and four arms—a perfect melding, in other words, of two people joined together, seamlessly united into one being. We came in three different possible gender or sexual variations: male/female meldings, male/male meldings, and female/female meldings, depending on what suited each creature the best. Since we each had the perfect partner sewn into the very fabric of our being, we were all happy. Thus, all of us double-headed, eight-limbed, perfectly contented creatures moved across the earth much the same way that the planets travel through the heavens—dreamily, orderly, smoothly. We lacked for nothing; we had no unmet needs; we wanted nobody. There was no strife and no chaos. We were whole.

But in our wholeness, we became overly proud. In our pride, we neglected to worship the gods. The mighty Zeus punished us for our neglect by cutting all the double-headed, eight-limbed, perfectly contented humans in half, thereby creating a world of cruelly severed one-headed, two-armed, two-legged miserable creatures. In this moment of mass amputation, Zeus inflicted on mankind that most painful of human conditions: the dull and constant sense that we are not quite whole. For the rest of time, humans would be born sensing that there was some missing part—a lost half, which we love almost more than we love ourselves—and that this missing part was out there someplace, spinning through the universe in the form of another person. We would also be born believing that if only we searched relentlessly enough, we might someday find that vanished half, that other soul. Through union with the other, we would recomplete our original form, never to experience loneliness again.

This is the singular fantasy of human intimacy: that one plus one will somehow, someday, equal one.

But Aristophanes warned that this dream of completion-through love is impossible. We are too broken as a species to ever entirely mend through simple union. The original cleaved halves of the severed eight-limbed humans were far too scattered for any of us to ever find our missing halves again. Sexual union can make a person feel completed and sated for a while (Aristophanes surmised that Zeus had given humans the gift of orgasm out of pity, specifically so that we could feel temporarily melded again, and would not die of depression and despair), but eventually, one way or another, we will all be left alone with ourselves in the end. So the loneliness continues, which causes us to mate with the wrong people over and over again, seeking perfected union. We may even believe at times that we have found our other half, but it’s more likely that all we’ve found is somebody else who is searching for his other half—somebody who is equally desperate to believe that he has found that completion in us.

This is how infatuation begins. And infatuation is the most perilous aspect of human desire. Infatuation leads to what psychologists call “intrusive thinking”—that famously distracted state in which you cannot concentrate on anything other than the object of your obsession. Once infatuation strikes, all else—jobs, relationships, responsibilities, food, sleep, work—falls by the wayside as you nurse fantasies about your dearest one that quickly become repetitive, invasive, and all-consuming. Infatuation alters your brain chemistry, as though you were dousing yourself with opiates and stimulants. The brain scans and mood swings of an infatuated lover, scientists have recently discovered, look remarkably similar to the brain scans and mood swings of a cocaine addict—and not surprisingly, as it turns out, because infatuation is an addiction, with measurable chemical effects on the brain. As the anthropologist and infatuation expert Dr. Helen Fisher has explained, infatuated lovers, just like any junkie, “will go to unhealthy, humiliating, and even physically dangerous lengths to procure their narcotic.”

Nowhere is that drug stronger than at the very beginning of a passionate relationship. Fisher has noted that an awful lot of babies are conceived during the first six months of a love story, a fact that I find really noteworthy. Hypnotic obsession can lead to a sense of euphoric abandon, and euphoric abandon is the very best way to find yourself accidentally pregnant. Some anthropologists argue, in fact, that the human species needs infatuation as a reproductive tool in order to keep us reckless enough to risk the hazards of pregnancy so that we can constantly replenish our ranks.

Fisher’s research has also shown that people are far more susceptible to infatuation when they are going through delicate or vulnerable times in their lives. The more unsettled and unbalanced we feel, the more quickly and recklessly we are likely fall in love. This makes infatuation start to sound like a dormant virus, lying in wait, ever ready to attack our weakened emotional immune systems. College students, for instance—away from home for the first time, uncertain, lacking familiar support networks—are notoriously susceptible to infatuation. And we all know that travelers in foreign lands often fall wildly in love, overnight it seems, with total strangers. In the flux and thrill of travel, our protective mechanisms break down quickly. This is marvelous in one way (for the rest of my life I will always feel a shiver of pleasure whenever I remember kissing that guy outside the bus terminal in Madrid), but it is wise in such circumstances to heed the advice of the venerable North American philosopher Pamela Anderson: “Never get married on vacation.”

Anybody going through a difficult time emotionally—due to the death of a family member, perhaps, or the loss of a job—is also susceptible to unstable love. The sick and the wounded and the frightened are famously vulnerable to sudden love, too—which helps explain why so many battle-torn soldiers marry their nurses. Spouses with relationships in crisis are also prime candidates for infatuation with a new lover, as I can personally attest from the mad commotion that surrounded the end of my own first marriage—when I had the good, solid judgment to go out in the world and fall quite insanely in love with another man at the very same moment as I was leaving my husband. My great unhappiness and my shredded sense of self made me ripe for the plucking of infatuation, and boy, did I get plucked. In my situation (and from what I know now, it is a tediously common textbook example), my new love interest seemed to have a giant EXIT sign hanging over his head—and I dived right through that exit, using the love affair as an excuse to escape my collapsing marriage, then claiming with an almost hysterical certainty that this person was everything I truly needed in life.

Shocking how that didn’t work out.

The problem with infatuation, of course, is that it’s a mirage, a trick of the eye—indeed, a trick of the endocrine system. Infatuation is not quite the same thing as love; it’s more like love’s shady second cousin who’s always borrowing money and can’t hold down a job. When you become infatuated with somebody, you’re not really looking at that person; you’re just captivated by your own reflection, intoxicated by a dream of completion that you have projected on a virtual stranger. We tend, in such a state, to decide all sorts of spectacular things about our lovers that may or may not be true. We perceive something almost divine in our beloved, even if our friends and family might not get it. One man’s Venus is another man’s bimbo, after all, and somebody else might easily consider your personal Adonis to be a flat-out boring little loser.

Of course all lovers do—and should—see their partners through generous eyes. It’s natural, even appropriate, to exaggerate somewhat our partners’ virtues. Carl Jung suggested that the first six months of most love stories is a period of pure projection for just about anyone. But infatuation is projection run off the rails. An infatuation-based affair is a sanity-free zone, where misconception has no limits and where perspective finds no foothold. Freud defined infatuation pithily as “the overvaluation of the object,” and Goethe put it even better: “When two people are really happy about one another, one can generally assume they are mistaken.” (By the way, poor Goethe! Not even he was immune to infatuation, not for all his wisdom or experience. That staunch old German, at the age of seventy-one, fell passionately in love with the utterly inappropriate Ulrike, a nineteen-year-old beauty who turned down his heated marriage proposals, leaving the aging genius so bereft that he wrote a requiem to his own life, concluding with the lines “I have lost the whole world, I have lost myself.”)

Any actual relating is impossible during such a state of pitched fever. Real, sane, mature love—the kind that pays the mortgage year after year and picks up the kids after school—is not based on infatuation but on affection and respect. And the word “respect,” from the Latin respicere (“to gaze at”), suggests that you can actually see the person who is standing next to you, something you absolutely cannot do from within the swirling mists of romantic delusion. Reality exits the stage the moment that infatuation enters, and we might soon find ourselves doing all sorts of crazy things that we would never have considered doing in a sane state. For instance, we might find ourselves sitting down one day to write a passionate e-mail to a sixteen-year-old monk in Laos—or whatever. When the dust has settled years later, we might ask ourselves, “What was I thinking?” and the answer is usually: You weren’t.

Psychologists call that state of deluded madness “narcissistic love.”

I call it “my twenties.”

Listen, I want to make it clear here that I am not intrinsically against passion. Mercy, no! The single most exhilarating sensations I have ever experienced in my life happened when I was consumed by romantic obsession. That kind of love makes you feel superheroic, mythical, beyond human, immortal. You radiate life; you need no sleep; your beloved fills your lungs like oxygen. As painfully as those experiences may have turned out in the end (and they always did end in pain for me), I would hate to see someone go through an entire lifetime never knowing what it feels like to morph euphorically into another person’s being. So when I say that I’m sort of excited for the monk and Carla, that’s what I’m talking about. I’m glad they have the opportunity to taste that narcotic bliss. But I’m also really, really glad that it’s not me this time.

Because here is something I know for certain about myself, as I near the age of forty. I can no longer do infatuation. It kills me. In the end, it always puts me through the wood chipper. While I know there must be some couples out there whose love stories began with a bonfire of obsession and then mellowed safely over the years into the embers of a long, healthy relationship, I myself never learned that trick. For me, infatuation has only ever done one thing: It destroys, and generally pretty fast.

But I loved the high of infatuation in my youth, and so I made a habit of it. By “habit,” I mean exactly the same thing that any heroin addict means when he speaks of his habit: a mild word for an unmanageable compulsion. I sought passion everywhere. I freebased it. I became the kind of girl about whom Grace Paley was surely thinking when she described a character who always needed a man in her life, even when it might have appeared that she already had one. Falling in love at first sight became a particular specialty of mine in my late teens and early twenties; I could do it upwards of four times a year. There were occasions when I made myself so sick over romance that I lost whole chunks of my life to it. I would vanish into abandon at the beginning of the encounter but soon enough find myself sobbing and barfing at the end of it. Along the way I would lose so much sleep and so much sanity that parts of the whole process start to look, in retrospect, like an alcoholic blackout. Except without the alcohol.

Should such a young lady have gotten married at the age of twenty-five? Wisdom and Prudence might have suggested not. But I did not invite Wisdom or Prudence to my wedding. (In my defense, nor were they guests of the groom.) I was a careless girl back then, in every possible way. I once read a newspaper article about a man who caused thousands of acres of forest to burn down because he drove all day through a national park with his muffler dragging, causing explosive sparks to leap into the dry underbrush and set a new small fire every few hundred feet. Other motorists along the way kept honking and waving and trying to alert the driver’s attention to the damage he was causing, but the guy was happily listening to his radio and didn’t notice the catastrophe he had set in motion behind him.

That was me in my youth.

Only when I reached my early thirties, only once my ex-husband and I had wrecked our marriage for good, only once my life had been utterly disrupted (as well as the lives of a few very nice men, a few not-so-nice men, and a handful of innocent bystanders) did I finally stop the car. I got out and looked around at the charred landscape, blinked a bit, and asked, “You don’t mean to suggest that all this mess might have something to do with me?”

Then came the depression.

The Quaker teacher Parker Palmer once said of his own life that depression was a friend sent to save him from the exaggerated elevations of false euphoria that he’d been manufacturing forever. Depression pushed him back down to earth, Palmer said, back down to a level where it might finally be safe for him to walk and stand in reality. I, too, needed to be hauled down to the real after years spent artificially hoisting myself aloft with one thoughtless passion after another. I’ve come to see my season of depression, too, as having been essential—if also grim and sorrowful.

I used that time alone to study myself, to truthfully answer painful questions, and—with the help of a patient therapist—to work out the origins of my most destructive behaviors. I traveled (and veered away from handsome Spanish men in bus terminals). I diligently pursued healthier forms of joy. I spent a lot of time alone. I’d never been alone before, but I mapped my way through it. I learned how to pray, atoning as best I could for the burned wasteland behind me. Most of all, though, I practiced the novel art of self-comfort, resisting all fleeting romantic and sexual temptations with this newly adult question: “Will this choice be beneficial to anybody in the long term?” In short: I grew up.

Immanuel Kant believed that we humans, because we are so emotionally complex, go through two puberties in life. The first puberty is when our bodies become mature enough for sex; the second puberty is when our minds become mature enough for sex. The two events can be separated by many, many years, though I do wonder if perhaps our emotional maturity comes to us only through the experiences and lessons of our youthful romantic failures. To ask a twenty-year-old girl to somehow automatically know things about life that most forty-year-old women needed decades to understand is expecting an awful lot of wisdom from a very young person. Maybe we must all go through the anguish and errors of a first puberty, in other words, before any of us can ascend into the second one?

Anyhow, long into my experiment with solitude and self-accountability, I met Felipe. He was kind and loyal and attentive, and we took it slow. This was not teen love. Nor was it puppy love or last-day-of-summer-camp love. On the surface, I will admit, our love story did seem awfully romantic as it was unfolding. For pity’s sake, we met on the tropical island of Bali, under the swaying palm trees, etc., etc. One could hardly summon a more idyllic setting than this. At the time, I remember describing this whole dreamy scene in an e-mail that I sent to my older sister back in the suburbs of Philadelphia. In retrospect, this was probably unfair of me. Catherine—at home with two little kids and facing down a massive house renovation—replied only, “Yeah, I was planning to go to a tropical island this weekend with my Brazilian lover, too . . . but then there was all that traffic.”

So, yes, my love affair with Felipe had a wonderful element of romance to it, which I will always cherish. But it was not an infatuation, and here’s how I can tell: because I did not demand that he become my Great Emancipator or my Source of All Life, nor did I immediately vanish into that man’s chest cavity like a twisted, unrecognizable, parasitical homunculus. During our long period of courtship, I remained intact within my own personality, and I allowed myself to meet Felipe for who he was. In each other’s eyes, we may very well have seemed beautiful and perfect and heroic beyond measure, but I never lost sight of our actual realities: I was a loving but haggard divorced lady who needed to carefully manage her tendency toward melodramatic romance and unreasonable expectation; Felipe was an affectionate and balding divorced guy who needed to carefully manage his drinking and his deep-seated fear of betrayal. We were two nice enough people, bearing the wounds of some very average massive personal disappointments, and we were looking for something that might simply be possible in each other—a certain kindness, a certain attentiveness, a certain shared yearning to trust and be trusted.

To this day, I refuse to burden Felipe with the tremendous responsibility of somehow completing me. By this point in my life I have figured out that he cannot complete me, even if he wanted to. I’ve faced enough of my own incompletions to recognize that they belong solely to me. Having learned this essential truth, I can actually tell now where I end and where somebody else begins. That may sound like an embarrassingly simple trick, but I do need to make clear that it took me over three and a half decades to get to this point—to learn the limitations of sane human intimacy, as nicely defined by C. S. Lewis, when he wrote of his wife, “We both knew this: I had my miseries, not hers; she had hers, not mine.”

One plus one, in other words, is sometimes supposed to equal two.

B ut how do I know for certain that I will never again become infatuated with anybody else? How trustworthy is my heart? How solid is Felipe’s loyalty to me? How do I know without doubt that outside desires won’t tempt us apart?

These were the questions that I started asking myself as soon as I realized that Felipe and I were—as my sister calls us—“lifers.” To be honest, I was less worried about his loyalties than I was about my own.

Felipe has a far simpler history in love than I do. He is a hopeless monogamist who chooses somebody and then relaxes easily into fidelity, and that’s pretty much it. He’s faithful in every regard. Once he has a favorite restaurant, he’s happy to eat there every night, never craving variety. If he enjoys a movie, he’ll contentedly watch it hundreds of times. If he likes an item of clothing, you will see him wearing it for years. The first time I ever bought him a pair of shoes, he said quite sweetly, “Oh, that’s lovely of you, darling—but I already have a pair of shoes.”

Felipe’s first marriage didn’t end with infidelity (he already had a pair of shoes, if you catch my point). Instead, the relationship was buried under an avalanche of circumstantial misfortunes that put too much pressure on the family and finally snapped the bonds. This was a pity, because Felipe, I honestly believe, is meant to mate for life. He’s loyal on a cellular level. I mean that, perhaps, quite literally. There’s a theory within evolutionary scholarship these days suggesting that there are two sorts of men in this world: those who are meant to father children, and those who are meant to raise children. The former are promiscuous; the latter are constant.

This is the famous “Dads or Cads” theory. In evolutionary circles this is not considered a moral judgment call, but rather something that can actually be broken down to the level of DNA. Apparently, there is this critical little chemical variation in the male of the species called the “vasopressin receptor gene.” Men who have the vasopressin receptor gene tend to be trustworthy and reliable sexual partners, sticking with one spouse for decades, raising children and running stable households. (Let’s call such guys “Harry Trumans.”) Men who lack the vasopressin receptor gene, on the other hand, are prone to dalliance and disloyalty, always needing to seek sexual variety elsewhere. (Let’s call such men “John F. Kennedys.”)

The joke among female evolutionary biologists is that there’s only one part of a man’s anatomy that any potential mate should worry about measuring, and that is the length of his vasopressin receptor gene. The scantily-vasopression-receptor-gened John F. Kennedys of this world wander far and wide, spreading their seed across the earth, keeping the human DNA code mixed up and jumbled—which is good for the species, if not necessarily good for the women who are loved and then often abandoned. The long-gened Harry Trumans, in the end, often find themselves raising the kids of the John F. Kennedys.

Felipe is a Harry Truman, and by the time I met him, I was so finished with JFKs, so exhausted by their charms and heart-splintering whims, that all I wanted was this reassuring bundle of steadfastness. But I don’t take Felipe’s decency for granted either, nor do I blithely relax with regard to my own fidelity. History teaches us that just about anybody is capable of just about anything when it comes to the realm of love and desire. Circumstances arise in all of our lives that challenge even our most stubborn loyalties. Maybe this is what we fear most when we enter into marriage—that “circumstances,” in the form of some uncontrollable outside passion, will someday break the bond.

How do you guard against such things?

The only comfort I’ve ever found on this subject came to me through reading the work of Shirley P. Glass, a psychologist who spent much of her career studying marital infidelity. Her question was always, “How did it happen?” How did it happen that good people, decent people, even Harry Truman–like people, find themselves suddenly swept away by currents of desire, destroying lives and families without ever really intending to? We’re not talking about serial cheaters here but trustworthy people who—against their better judgment or their own moral code—stray. How many times have we heard someone say, “I wasn’t looking for love outside my marriage, but it just happened”? Put in such terms, adultery starts to sound like a car accident, like a patch of black ice hidden on a treacherous curve, waiting for an unsuspecting motorist.

But Glass, in her research, discovered that if you dig a little deeper into people’s infidelities, you can almost always see how the affair started long before the first stolen kiss. Most affairs begin, Glass wrote, when a husband or wife makes a new friend, and an apparently harmless intimacy is born. You don’t sense the danger as it’s happening, because what’s wrong with friendship? Why can’t we have friends of the opposite sex—or of the same sex, for that matter—even if we are married?

The answer, as Dr. Glass explained, is that nothing is wrong with a married person launching a friendship outside of matrimony—so long as the “walls and windows” of the relationship remain in the correct places. It was Glass’s theory that every healthy marriage is composed of walls and windows. The windows are the aspects of your relationship that are open to the world—that is, the necessary gaps through which you interact with family and friends; the walls are the barriers of trust behind which you guard the most intimate secrets of your marriage.

What often happens, though, during so-called harmless friendships, is that you begin sharing intimacies with your new friend that belong hidden within your marriage. You reveal secrets about yourself—your deepest yearnings and frustrations—and it feels good to be so exposed. You throw open a window where there really ought to be a solid, weight-bearing wall, and soon you find yourself spilling your secret heart with this new person. Not wanting your spouse to feel jealous, you keep the details of your new friendship hidden. In so doing, you have now created a problem: You have just built a wall between you and your spouse where there really ought to be free circulation of air and light. The entire architecture of your matrimonial intimacy has therefore been rearranged. Every old wall is now a giant picture window; every old window is now boarded up like a crack house. You have just established the perfect blueprint for infidelity without even noticing.

So by the time your new friend comes into your office one day in tears over some piece of bad news, and you wrap your arms around each other (only meaning to be comforting!), and then your lips brush and you realize in a dizzying rush that you love this person—that you have always loved this person!—it’s too late. Because now the fuse has been lit. And now you really do run the risk of someday (probably very soon) standing amid the wreckage of your life, facing a betrayed and shattered spouse (whom you still care about immensely, by the way), trying to explain through your ragged sobs how you never meant to hurt anybody, and how you never saw it coming.

And it’s true. You didn’t see it coming. But you did build it, and you could have stopped it if you’d acted faster. The moment you found yourself sharing secrets with a new friend that really ought to have belonged to your spouse, there was, according to Dr. Glass, a much smarter and more honest path to be taken. Her suggestion would be that you come home and tell your husband or wife about it. The script goes along these lines: “I have something worrying to share with you. I went out to lunch twice this week with Mark, and I was struck by the fact that our conversation quickly became intimate. I found myself sharing things with him that I used to share only with you. This is the way you and I used to talk at the beginning of our relationship—and I loved that so much—but I fear we’ve lost that. I miss that level of intimacy with you. Do you think there’s anything you and I might do to rekindle our connection?”

The answer, truthfully, might be: “No.”

There might be nothing you can do to rekindle that connection. I have a friend who brought her husband pretty much this exact conversation, to which he replied, “I don’t really give a shit who you spend your time with.” And there’s a marriage that, not surprisingly, ended soon after. (And needed to, I would argue.) But if your spouse is at all responsive, he or she might hear the longing behind your admission, and will hopefully react to it, maybe even countering with an expression of his or her own longing.

It’s always possible that the two of you will be unable to figure things out, but at least you’ll know later on that you made a heartfelt effort to keep the walls and the windows of your marriage secured, and that knowledge can be comforting. Also, you may avoid cheating on your spouse, even if you may not ultimately avoid divorcing your spouse—and that alone can be a good thing, for many reasons. As an old lawyer friend of mine once observed, “No divorce in human history has ever been rendered more simple, more compassionate, more quick or less expensive by somebody’s episode of adultery.”

In any case, reading Dr. Glass’s research on infidelity filled me with a sense of hope that felt almost euphoric. Her ideas about marital fidelity are not especially complex, but it’s just that I’d never learned this stuff before. I’m not sure I ever understood the almost embarrassingly remedial notion that you are somewhat in control of what happens within and around your relationships. I shame myself by admitting this, but it’s true. I once believed that desire was as unmanageable as a tornado; all you could do was hope it didn’t suck up your house and explode the thing in midair. As for those couples whose relationships lasted decades? They must have been very lucky, I figured, that the tornado never hit them. (It never occurred to me that they might have actually constructed storm cellars together underneath their homes, where they could retreat whenever the winds picked up.)

Though the human heart may indeed be shot through with bottomless desire, and while the world may well be full of alluring creatures and other delicious options, it seems one truly can make clear-eyed choices that limit and manage the risk of infatuation. And if you’re worried about future “trouble” in your marriage, it’s good to understand that trouble is not necessarily something that always “just happens”; trouble is often cultured unthinkingly in careless little petri dishes we have left scattered all over town.

Does all this sound excruciatingly obvious to everybody else? Because it was not excruciatingly obvious to me. This is information I really could’ve used over a decade ago when I was getting married for the first time. I didn’t know any of this stuff. And I am appalled sometimes to realize that I stepped into matrimony without this piece of useful data, or without very many pieces of useful data at all. Looking back on my first wedding now, I’m reminded of what so many of my friends say about the day they brought their first babies home from the hospital. There is this moment, my friends report, when the nurse hands over the infant, and the new mother realizes with horror, “Oh my God—they’re going to send this thing home with me? I have no idea what I’m doing!” But of course hospitals give mothers their babies and send them on home, because there is an assumption that motherhood is somehow instinctive, that you will naturally know how to care for your own child—that love will teach you how—even if you have zero experience or training for this towering undertaking.

I’ve come to believe that we all too often make the same assumption about marriage. We believe that if two people really love each other, then intimacy will somehow be intuitive to them, and their marriage will run forever on the mere power of affection. Because all you need is love! Or so I believed in my youth. You certainly don’t need strategies or assistance or tools or perspective. And so it came to pass that my first husband and I just went ahead and got married from a place of great ignorance and great immaturity and great unpreparedness simply because we felt like getting married. We sealed our vows without a single clue whatsoever about how to keep our union alive and safe.

Is it any wonder that we went straight home and dropped that baby on its fuzzy little head?

So now, a dozen years later, preparing to enter marriage again, it seemed like some more mindful preparations might be in order. The silver lining to the unforeseen long engagement period offered to us by the Department of Homeland Security was that Felipe and I had a luxurious amount of time (every waking hour of the day, actually, for many months on end) to discuss our questions and issues about marriage. And so we did discuss them. All of them. Isolated from our families, alone together in remote places, stuck on one ten-hour-long bus ride after another—all we had was time. So Felipe and I talked and talked and talked, clarifying daily what the shape of our marriage contract would be.

Fidelity, of course, was of primary importance. This was the one nonnegotiable condition of our marriage. We both recognized that once trust has been shattered, piecing it back together again is arduous and agonizing, if not impossible. (As my father once said about water pollution, from his standpoint as an environmental engineer, “It’s so much easier and cheaper to keep the river uncontaminated in the first place than it is to clean it up again once it’s been polluted.”)

The potentially radioactive topics of housework and domestic chores were also fairly simple to address; we’d lived together already and had discovered that we shared these tasks easily and fairly. Similarly, Felipe and I shared a united position on the subject of ever having children (to wit: thanks, but no thanks), and our concordance on this massive subject seemed to erase a textbook-sized volume of potential future marital conflict. Happily, we were also compatible in bed, so we didn’t foresee future problems in the human sexuality department, and I didn’t think it was smart to start digging for trouble where none existed.

That left just one major issue that can really undo a marriage: money. And as it turned out, there was much to discuss here. Because while Felipe and I easily agree on what is important in life (good food) and what is not important in life (expensive china on which to serve that good food), we hold seriously different values and beliefs about money. I’ve always been conservative with my earnings, careful, a compulsive saver, fundamentally incapable of debt. I chalk this up to the lessons taught to me by my frugal parents, who treated every single day as though it were October 30, 1929, and who opened up my first savings account for me when I was in the second grade.

Felipe, on the other hand, was raised by a father who once traded a pretty nice car for a fishing pole.

Whereas thrift is my family’s state-sponsored religion, Felipe has no such reverence for frugality. If anything, he is imbued with a natural-born entrepreneur’s willingness to take risks, and is far more willing than I am to lose everything and start all over again. (Let me rephrase that: I am utterly unwilling to lose everything and start over again.) Moreover, Felipe doesn’t have any of the innate trust in financial institutions that I have. He blames this, not unreasonably, on having grown up in a country with a wildly fluctuating currency; as a child, he had learned to count by watching his mother readjust her reserves of Brazilian cruzeiros every single day for inflation. Cash, therefore, means very little to him. Savings accounts mean even less. Bank statements are nothing but “zeroes on a page” that can disappear overnight, for reasons completely out of one’s control. Therefore, Felipe explained, he would prefer to keep his wealth in gemstones, for instance, or in real estate, rather than in banks. He made it clear that he was never going to change his mind about this.

Okay, fair enough. It is what it is. That being the case, though, I did ask Felipe if he would be willing to let me handle our living expenses and manage our household accounts. I was pretty certain that the electric company would not accept monthly payment in amethysts, so we would have to work out a joint bank account, if only to handle the bills. He agreed to this idea, which was comforting.

What was even more comforting, though, was that Felipe was willing to use our months of travel together to very carefully and very respectfully—over the course of those many long bus rides—work with me on setting the terms of a prenuptial agreement. In fact, he insisted on it, just as much as I did. While this might be difficult for some readers to understand or embrace, I must ask you to please consider our situations. As a self-made and self-employed woman in a creative field, who has always earned my own living, and who has a history of financially supporting the men in my life (and who still, painfully, writes checks to my ex), this subject mattered dearly to my heart. As for Felipe, a man whose divorce had left him not only broken-hearted but also quite literally broke . . . well, it mattered to him, too.

I recognize that whenever prenuptial agreements are discussed in the media, it is generally because a rich older man is about to marry yet another beautiful younger woman. The topic always seems sordid, a distrustful sex-for-cash scheme. But Felipe and I were neither tycoons nor opportunists; we were just experienced enough to recognize that relationships do sometimes end, and it seemed willfully childish to pretend that such a thing could never happen to us. Anyhow, questions of money are always different when you’re getting married in middle age rather than youth. We would each be bringing to this marriage our existing individual worlds—worlds that contained careers, businesses, assets, his children, my royalties, the gemstones he had been carefully collecting for years, the retirement accounts that I had been building ever since I was a twenty-year-old diner waitress . . . and all these things of value needed to be considered, weighed, discussed.

While drafting a prenup might not sound like a particularly romantic way to spend the months leading up to one’s marriage, I must ask you to believe me when I say that we shared some truly tender moments during these conversations—especially those moments when we would find ourselves arguing on behalf of the other person’s best interests. That said, there were also times when this process turned uncomfortable and tense. There was a real limit to how long we could discuss the subject at all, before we would need to take a break from it, change the subject, or even spend a few hours apart. Interestingly, a couple of years later, as Felipe and I were drafting our wills together, we encountered this exact same problem—an exhaustion of the heart that kept driving us away from the table. It’s dreary work, planning for the worst. And in both cases, with both the wills and the prenup, I lost track of how many times we each uttered the phrase “God forbid.”

We stayed with the task, though, and got our prenuptial agreement written under terms that made each of us happy. Or maybe “happy” isn’t exactly the right word to use when you’re conceptualizing an emergency exit strategy for a love story that is still only at its beginning. Imagining the failure of love is a grim job, but we did it anyhow. We did it because marriage is not just a private love story but also a social and economic contract of the strictest order; if it weren’t, there wouldn’t be thousands of municipal, state, and federal laws pertaining to our matrimonial union. We did it because we knew that it’s better to set your own terms than to risk the possibility that someday down the road unsentimental strangers in a harsh courtroom might set the terms for you. Mostly, though, we pushed through the unpleasantness of these very awkward financial conversations because Felipe and I have both, over time, learned this hard fact to be incontrovertibly true: If you think it’s difficult to talk about money when you’re blissfully in love, try talking about it later, when you are disconsolate and angry and your love has died.

God forbid.

B ut was I delusional to hope that our love would not die?

Could I dare to even dream of that? I spent an almost embarrassing amount of time during our travels ticking off lists of everything that Felipe and I had going in our favor, collecting our merits like lucky pebbles, piling them up in my pockets, running my fingers over them nervously in a constant search for assurance. Didn’t my family and friends already love Felipe? Wasn’t that a meaningful endorsement, or even a lucky charm? Hadn’t my most wise and prescient old friend—the one woman who had warned me years earlier against marrying my first husband—completely embraced Felipe as a good match for me? Hadn’t my hammer-blunt ninety-one-year-old grandfather even liked him? (Grandpa Stanley had watched Felipe carefully all weekend the first time they met, and then finally cast his verdict: “I like you, Felipe,” he pronounced. “You seem to be a survivor. And you’d better be one, too—because this girl has burned through quite a few of ’em already.”)

I clung to those endorsements not because I was trying to collect reassurances about Felipe, but because I was trying to collect reassurances about myself. For exactly the reason so frankly stated by Grandpa Stanley, I was the one whose romantic discrimination was not entirely trustworthy. I had a long and colorful history of making some extremely bad decisions on the subject of men. So I leaned on the opinions of others in order to prop up my own confidence about the decision I was making now.

I leaned on some other encouraging evidence, too. I knew from our two years already spent together that Felipe and I were, as a couple, what psychologists call “conflict averse.” This is shorthand for “Nobody Is Ever Going to Throw Dishes at Anyone from Across the Kitchen Table.” In fact, Felipe and I argue so infrequently that it used to worry me. Conventional wisdom has always taught that couples must argue in order to air out their grievances. But we scarcely ever argued. Did this mean we were repressing our true anger and resentment, and that one day it would all explode in our faces in a hot wave of fury and violence? It didn’t feel that way. (But of course it wouldn’t; that’s the insidious trick of repression, isn’t it?)

When I researched the topic more, though, I relaxed a bit. New research shows that some couples manage to dodge serious conflict for decades without any serious blowback. Such couples make an art form out of something called “mutually accommodating behavior”—delicately and studiously folding themselves inside out and backwards in order to avoid discord. This system, by the way, works only when both people have accommodating personalities. Needless to say, it is not a healthy marriage when one spouse is meekly compliant and the other is a domineering monster or an unrepentant harridan. But mutual meekness can make for a successful partnering strategy, if it’s what both people want. Conflict-averse couples prefer to let their grievances dissolve rather than fight over every point. From a spiritual standpoint, this idea appeals to me immensely. The Buddha taught that most problems—if only you give them enough time and space—will eventually wear themselves out. Then again, I’d been in relationships in the past where our troubles were never going to wear themselves out, not in five consecutive lifetimes, so what did I know about it? All I do know is that Felipe and I seem to get along really nicely. What I can’t tell you is why.

But human compatibility is such a mysterious piece of business anyhow. And not just human compatibility! The naturalist William Jordan wrote a small, lovely book called Divorce Among the Gulls, in which he explained that even among seagulls—a species of bird that allegedly mates for life—there exists a 25 percent “divorce rate.” Which is to say that one-quarter of all seagull couples fail in their first relationships—failing to the point that they must separate due to irreconcilable differences. Nobody can figure out why those particular birds don’t get along with each other, but clearly: They just don’t get along. They bicker and compete for food. They argue over who will build the nest. They argue over who will guard the eggs. They probably argue over navigation, too. Ultimately they fail to produce healthy chicks. (Why such contentious birds were ever attracted to each other in the first place, or why they didn’t listen to their friends’ warnings, is a mystery—but I suppose I’m hardly one to judge.) Anyhow, after a season or two of strife, those miserable seagull couples give up and go find themselves other spouses. And here’s the kicker: often their “second marriage” is perfectly happy, and then many of them do mate for life.

Imagine that, I beg you! Even among birds with brains the size of camera batteries, there does exist such a thing as fundamental compatibility and incompatibility, which seems to be based—as Jordan explains—on “a bedrock of basic psycho-biological differences” which no scientist has yet been able to define. The birds are either capable of tolerating each other for many years, or they aren’t. It’s that simple, and it’s that complex.

The situation is the same for humans. Some of us drive each other nuts; some of us do not. Maybe there’s a limit to what can be done about this. Emerson wrote that “we are not very much to blame for our bad marriages,” so maybe it stands to reason that we should also not be overly credited for our good ones. After all, doesn’t every romance begin in the same place—at that same intersection of affection and desire, where two strangers always meet to fall in love? So how can anyone at the beginning of a love story ever possibly anticipate what the years might bring? Some of it really has to be chalked up to chance. Yes, there is a certain amount of work involved in keeping any relationship together, but I know some very nice couples who put heaps of serious labor into saving their marriages only to end up divorced anyhow, while other couples—no intrinsically nicer or better than their neighbors—seem to hum along happily and trouble-free together for years, like self-cleaning ovens.

I once read an interview with a New York City divorce court judge, who said that in the sorrowful days after September 11, a surprisingly large number of divorcing couples withdrew their cases from her purview. All these couples claimed to have been so moved by the scope of the tragedy that they decided to revive their marriages. Which makes sense. Calamity on that scale would put your petty arguments about emptying the dishwasher into perspective, filling you with a natural and compassionate longing to bury old grievances and perhaps even generate new life. It was a noble urge, truly. But as the divorce judge noted, six months later, every single one of those couples was back in court, filing for divorce all over again. Noble urges notwithstanding, if you really cannot tolerate living with somebody, not even a terrorist attack can save your marriage.

On the subject of compatibility, I often wonder sometimes, too, if maybe those seventeen years that separate me from Felipe work to our advantage. He always insists that he’s a far better partner to me now than he ever could have been to anybody twenty years ago, and I certainly appreciate (and need) his maturity. Or maybe we’re just extra careful with each other because the age difference stands as a reminder of our relationship’s innate mortality. Felipe is already in his midfifties; I’m not going to have him forever, and I don’t want to waste the years that I do have him locked in strife.

I remember watching my grandfather bury my grandmother’s ashes on our family’s farm twenty-five years ago. It was November, upstate New York, a cold winter’s evening. We, his children and grandchildren, all walked behind my grandfather through the purple evening shadows across the familiar meadows, out to the sandy point by the river’s bend where he had decided to bury his wife’s remains. He carried a lantern in one hand and a shovel over his shoulder. The ground was covered with snow and the digging was hard work—even for such a small container as this urn, even for such a robust man as Grandpa Stanley. But he hung the lantern on a naked tree limb and steadily dug that hole—and then it was over. And that’s how it goes. You have somebody for a little while, and then that person is gone.

So it will come to pass for all of us—for all couples who stay with each other in love—that someday (if we are lucky enough to have earned a lifetime together) one of us will carry the shovel and the lantern on behalf of the other. We all share our houses with Time, who ticks alongside us as we work at our daily lives, reminding us of our ultimate destination. It’s just that for some of us Time ticks particularly insistently . . .

Why am I talking about all this right now?

Because I love him. Have I actually gotten this far in my book without having yet said that clearly? I love this man. I love him for countless ridiculous reasons. I love his square, sturdy, Hobbit-like feet. I love the way he always sings “La Vie en Rose” when he’s cooking dinner. (Needless to say, I love that he cooks dinner.) I love how he speaks almost perfect English but still, even after all these years with the language, sometimes manages to invent marvelous words. (“Smoothfully” is a personal favorite of mine, though I’m also fond of “lulu-bell,” which is Felipe’s own lovely translation for the word “lullaby.”) I love that he has never quite mastered the exact wording or pacing of certain English-language idioms either. (“Don’t count your eggs while they’re still up inside the chicken’s ass,” is a terrific example, though I’m also a big fan of “Nobody sings till the fat lady sings.”) I love that Felipe can never—not for the life of him—keep straight the names of American celebrities. (“George Cruise” and “Tom Pitt” are two prime examples.)

I love him and therefore I want to protect him—even from me, if that makes sense. I didn’t want to skip any steps of preparation for marriage, or leave anything unresolved that might reemerge later to harm us—to harm him. Worried that, even with all this talking and researching and legal wrangling, I might be missing some important relevant matrimonial issue, I somehow got my hands on a recent Rutgers University report called “Alone Together: How Marriage Is Changing in America,” and went a little crazy with it. This massive tome carefully sorts through the results of a twenty-year survey on matrimony in America—the most extensive such study ever produced—and I pored over the thing like it was the veritable I Ching. I sought solace in its statistics, fretting over charts about “marital resilience,” searching for the faces of Felipe and me hidden within columns of comparable variance scales.

From what I could understand of the Rutgers report (and I’m sure I didn’t understand everything), it seemed that the researchers had discovered trends in “divorce proneness,” based on a certain number of hard demographic factors. Some couples are simply more likely to fail than others, to a degree that can be somewhat predicted. Some of these factors sounded familiar to me. We all know that people whose parents were divorced are more likely to someday divorce themselves—as though divorce breeds divorce—and examples of this are spread across generations.

But other ideas were less familiar, and even reassuring. I’d always heard, for instance, that people who had divorced once were statistically more likely to also fail in their second marriage, but no—not necessarily. Encouragingly, the Rutgers survey demonstrates that many second marriages do last a lifetime. (As with seagull love affairs, some people make bad choices the first time, but do far better with a subsequent partner.) The problem comes when people carry unresolved destructive behaviors with them from one marriage to the next—such as alcoholism, compulsive gambling, mental illness, violence, or philandering. With baggage like that, it really doesn’t matter whom you marry, because you’re going to wreck that relationship eventually and inevitably, based on your own pathologies.

Then there is the business of that infamous 50 percent divorce rate in America. We all know that classic statistic, don’t we? It gets tossed around constantly, and man, does it ever sound grim. As the anthropologist Lionel Tiger wrote trenchantly on this topic: “It is astonishing that, under the circumstances, marriage is still legally allowed. If nearly half of anything else ended so disastrously, the government would surely ban it immediately. If half the tacos served in restaurants caused dysentery, if half the people learning karate broke their palms, if only 6 percent of people who went on roller coaster rides damaged their middle ears, the public would be clamoring for action. Yet the most intimate of disasters . . . happens over and over again.”

But that 50 percent figure is far more complicated than it looks, once you break it down across certain demographics. The age of the couple at the time of their marriage seems to be the most significant consideration. The younger you are when you get married, the more likely you are to divorce later. In fact, you are astonishingly more likely to get divorced if you marry young. You are, for example, two to three times more likely to get divorced if you marry in your teens or early twenties than if you wait until your thirties or forties.

The reasons for this are so glaringly obvious that I hesitate to enumerate them for fear of insulting my reader, but here goes: When we are very young, we tend to be more irresponsible, less self-aware, more careless, and less economically stable than when we are older. Therefore, we should not get married when we are very young. This is why eighteen-year-old newlyweds do not have a 50 percent divorce rate; they have something closer to a 75 percent divorce rate, which totally blows the curve for everyone else. Age twenty-five seems to be the magic cutoff point. Couples who marry before that age are exceptionally more divorce-prone than couples who wait until they are twenty-six or older. And the statistics get only more reassuring as the couple in question ages. Hold off on getting married until you’re in your fifties, and the odds of your ever ending up in a divorce court become statistically almost invisible. I found this incredibly heartening, given that—if you add together Felipe’s age and my age, and then divide that number by two—we average out around forty-six years old. When it comes to the statistical predictor of age, we absolutely rock.

But age, of course, isn’t the only consideration. According to the Rutgers study, other factors of marital resilience include:

1. Education. The better-educated you are, statistically speaking, the better off your marriage will be. The better-educated a woman is, in particular, the happier her marriage will be. Women with college educations and careers who marry relatively late in life are the most likely female candidates to stay married. This reads like good news, definitely tipping a few points in favor of Felipe and me.

2. Children. The statistics show that couples with young children at home report “more disenchantment” within their marriage than couples with grown children, or couples who have no children at all. The demands that newborns in particular put on a relationship are considerable, for reasons I am certain I do not have to explain to anyone who has recently had a baby. I don’t know what this means for the future of the world at large, but for Felipe and me it was more good news. Older, educated, and babyless, Felipe and I are running some pretty good odds here as a couple—or at least according to the bookies at Rutgers.

3. Cohabitation. Ah, but here is where the tide begins to turn against us. It appears that people who live together before marriage have a slightly higher divorce rate than those who wait until marriage to cohabit. The sociologists can’t quite figure this one out, except to wager a guess that perhaps premarital cohabitation indicates a more casual view in general toward sincere commitment. Whatever the reason: Strike One against Felipe and Liz.

4. Heterogamy. This factor depresses me, but here goes: The less similar you and your partner are in terms of race, age, religion, ethnicity, cultural background, and career, the more likely you are to someday divorce. Opposites do attract, but they don’t always endure. Sociologists suspect that this trend will diminish as society’s prejudices break down over time, but for now? Strike Two against Liz and her much older, Catholic-born, South American businessman sweetheart.

5. Social Integration. The more tightly woven a couple is within a community of friends and family, the stronger their marriage will be. The fact that Americans today are less likely to know their neighbors, belong to social clubs, or live near kin has had a seriously destabilizing effect on marriage, across the board. Strike Three against Felipe and Liz, who were—at the time of Liz’s reading this report—living all alone in a shabby hotel room in the north of Laos.

6. Religiousness. The more religious a couple is, the more likely they are to stay married, though faith offers only a slight edge. Born-again Christians in America have a divorce rate that is only 2 percent lower than their more godless neighbors—perhaps because Bible Belt couples are getting married too young? Anyhow, I’m not sure where this question of religion leaves me and my intended. If you blend together Felipe’s and my personal views on divinity, they comprise a philosophy that one might call “vaguely spiritual.” (As Felipe explains: “One of us is spiritual; the other is merely vague.”) The Rutgers report offered no particular data about marital-resilience statistics within the ranks of the vaguely spiritual. We’ll have to call this one a wash.

7. Gender Fairness. Here’s a juicy one. Marriages based on a traditional, restrictive sense about a woman’s place in the home tend to be less strong and less happy than marriages where the man and the woman regard each other as equals, and where the husband participates in more traditionally female and thankless household chores. All I can say on this matter is that I once overheard Felipe telling a houseguest that he has always believed a woman’s place is in the kitchen . . . sitting in a comfortable chair, with her feet up, drinking a glass of wine and watching her husband cook dinner. Can I get a few bonus points on this one?

I could go on, but I did start—after a while—to get a little cross-eyed and crazy with all these bits of data. My cousin Mary, who is a statistician at Stanford University, warns me against putting too much weight on these sorts of studies anyhow. They are not meant to be read like tea leaves, apparently. Mary especially cautions me to look carefully at any matrimonial research that measures such concepts as “happiness,” since happiness is not exactly scientifically quantifiable. Moreover, just because a statistical study shows a link between two ideas (higher education and marital resilience, for instance) doesn’t mean that one necessarily follows from the other. As cousin Mary is quick to remind me, statistical studies have also proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that drowning rates in America are highest in geographical areas with strong ice cream sales. This does not mean, obviously, that buying ice cream causes people to drown. It more likely means that ice cream sales tend to be strong at the beach, and people tend to drown at beaches, because that’s where water tends to be found. Linking the two utterly unrelated notions of ice cream and drowning is a perfect example of a logical fallacy, and statistical studies are often rife with such red herrings. Which is probably why, when I sat down one night in Laos with the Rutgers report and tried to concoct a template for the least possible divorce-prone couple in America, I came up with quite a Fran-kensteinian duo.

First, you must find yourself two people of the same race, age, religion, cultural background, and intellectual level whose parents had never divorced. Make these two people wait until they are about forty-five years old before you allow them to marry—without letting them live together first, of course. Ensure that they both fervently believe in God and that they utterly embrace family values, but forbid them to have any children of their own. (Also, the husband must warmly em- brace the precepts of feminism.) Make them live in the same town as their families, and see to it that they spend many happy hours bowling and playing cards with their neighbors—that is, while they’re not out there in the world succeeding at the wonderful careers that they each launched on account of their fabulous higher educations.

Who are these people?

And what was I doing, anyhow, steaming away in a hot Laotian hotel room, poring over statistical studies and trying to concoct a perfect American marriage? My obsession was beginning to remind me of a scene I witnessed one fine summer day on Cape Cod when I was out for a walk with my friend Becky. We watched as a young mother took her son out on a bicycle ride. The poor kid was decked out in protective gear from head to toe—helmet, kneepads, wrist braces, training wheels, orange warning flags, and a reflective vest. Moreover, the mother literally had the child’s bicycle on a tether as she ran frantically after him, making sure he would never be out of her reach, not even for a moment.

My friend Becky took in this scene and sighed. “I’ve got news for that lady,” she said. “Someday that child’s gonna get bit by a tick.”

The emergency that always gets you in the end is the one you didn’t prepare for.

Nobody sings, in other words, until the fat lady sings.

But still, can’t we at least try to minimize our dangers? Is there a way to do this sanely, without becoming neurotic about it? Unsure how to walk that line, I just kept stumbling through my premarital preparations, trying to cover every base, trying to foresee every imaginable possibility. And the last and most important thing that I wanted to do, out of a fierce impulse toward honesty, was to make sure that Felipe knew what he was getting—and getting into—with me. I desperately did not want to sell this man a bill of goods, or offer up some idealized seductive performance of myself. Seduction works full-time as Desire’s handmaiden: All she does is delude—that is her very job description—and I did not want her stage-dressing this relationship during the out of-town tryouts. In fact, I was so adamant about this that I sat Felipe down one day in Laos, right there on the banks of the Mekong River, and presented to him a list of my very worst character flaws, just so I would be certain he had been fairly warned. (Call it a prenuptial informed consent release.) And here is what I came up with as my most deplorable faults—or at least once I had painstakingly narrowed them down to the top five:

1. I think very highly of my own opinion. I generally believe that I know best how everyone in the world should be living their lives—and you, most of all, will be the victim of this.

2. I require an amount of devotional attention that would have made Marie Antoinette blush.

3. I have far more enthusiasm in life than I have actual energy. In my excitement, I routinely take on more than I can physically or emotionally handle, which causes me to break down in quite predictable displays of dramatic exhaustion. You will be the one burdened with the job of mopping me up every time I’ve overextended myself and then fallen apart. This will be unbelievably tedious. I apologize in advance.

4. I am openly prideful, secretly judgmental, and cowardly in conflict. All these things collude at times and turn me into a big fat liar.

5. And my most dishonorable fault of all: Though it takes me a long while to get to this point, the moment I have decided that somebody is unforgivable, that person will very likely remain unforgiven for life—all too often cut off forever, without fair warning, explanation, or another chance.

It was not an attractive list. It stung me to read it, and I’d certainly never codified my failings for anyone so honestly before. But when I presented Felipe with this inventory of lamentable character defects, he took in the news without apparent disquiet. In fact, he just smiled and said, “Is there anything you would now like to tell me about yourself that I didn’t already know?”

“Do you still love me?” I asked.

“Still,” he confirmed.

“How?”

Because this is the essential question, isn’t it? I mean, once the initial madness of desire has passed and we are faced with each other as dimwitted mortal fools, how is it that any of us find the ability to love and forgive each other at all, much less enduringly?

Felipe didn’t answer for a long time. Then he said, “When I used to go down to Brazil to buy gemstones, I would often buy something they call ‘a parcel.’ A parcel is this random collection of gems that the miner or the wholesaler or whoever is bullshitting you puts together. A typical parcel would contain, I don’t know, maybe twenty or thirty aquamarines at once. Supposedly, you get a better deal that way—buying them all in a bunch—but you have to be careful, because of course the guy is trying to rip you off. He’s trying to unload his bad gemstones on you by packaging them together with a few really good ones.

“So when I first started in the jewelry business,” Felipe went on, “I used to get in trouble because I’d get too excited about the one or two perfect aquamarines in the parcel, and I wouldn’t pay as much attention to the junk they threw in there. After I got burned enough times, I finally got wise and learned this: You have to ignore the perfect gemstones. Don’t even look at them twice because they’re blinding. Just put them away and have a careful look at the really bad stones. Look at them for a long time, and then ask yourself honestly, ‘Can I work with these? Can I make something out of this?’ Otherwise, you’ve just spent a whole lot of money on one or two gorgeous aquamarines buried inside a big heap of worthless crap.

“It’s the same with relationships, I think. People always fall in love with the most perfect aspects of each other’s personalities. Who wouldn’t? Anybody can love the most wonderful parts of another person. But that’s not the clever trick. The really clever trick is this: Can you accept the flaws? Can you look at your partner’s faults honestly and say, ‘I can work around that. I can make something out of that.’? Because the good stuff is always going to be there, and it’s always going to be pretty and sparkly, but the crap underneath can ruin you.”

“Are you saying you’re clever enough to work around my worthless, junky, crappy bits?” I asked.

“What I’m trying to say, darling, is that I’ve been watching you carefully for a long time already, and I believe I can accept the whole parcel.”

“Thank you,” I said, and I meant it. I meant it with every flaw in my being.

“Would you like to know my worst faults now?” Felipe asked.

I must admit that I thought to myself, I already know your worst faults, mister. But before I could speak, he relayed the facts quickly and bluntly, as only a man who is all too familiar with himself can do.

“I’ve always been good at making money,” he said, “but I never learned how to save the shit. I drink too much wine. I was overprotective of my children and I’ll probably always be overprotective of you. I’m paranoid—my natural Brazilianness makes me that way—so whenever I misunderstand what’s going on around me, I always assume the worst. I’ve lost friends because of this, and I always regret it, but that’s just the way I am. I can be antisocial and temperamental and defensive. I am a man of routine, which means I’m boring. I have very little patience with idiots.” He smiled and tried to leaven up the moment. “Also, I can’t look at you without wanting to have sex with you.” “I can work with that,” I said.

There is a hardly a more gracious gift that we can offer somebody than to accept them fully, to love them almost despite themselves. I say this because listing our flaws so openly to each other was not some cutesy gimmick, but a real effort to reveal the points of darkness contained in our characters. They are no laughing matter, these faults. They can harm. They can undo. My narcissistic neediness, left unchecked, has every bit as much potential to sabotage a relationship as Felipe’s financial daredevilry, or his hastiness to assume the worst in moments of uncertainty. If we are at all self-aware, we work hard to keep these more dicey aspects of our natures under control, but they don’t go away. Also good to note: If Felipe has character flaws that he cannot change in himself, it would be unwise of me to believe that I could change them on his behalf. Likewise in reverse, of course. And some of the things that we cannot change about ourselves are mirthless to behold. To be fully seen by somebody, then, and to be loved anyhow—this is a human offering that can border on the miraculous.

With all respect to the Buddha and to the early Christian celibates, I sometimes wonder if all this teaching about nonattachment and the spiritual importance of monastic solitude might be denying us something quite vital. Maybe all that renunciation of intimacy denies us the opportunity to ever experience that very earthbound, domesticated, dirt-under-the-fingernails gift of difficult, long-term, daily forgiveness. “All human beings have failings,” Eleanor Roosevelt wrote. (And she—one-half of a very complex, sometimes unhappy, but ultimately epic marriage—knew what she was talking about.) “All human beings have needs and temptations and stresses. Men and women who have lived together over long years get to know one another’s failings; but they also come to know what is worthy of respect and admiration in those they live with and in themselves.”

Maybe creating a big enough space within your consciousness to hold and accept someone’s contradictions—someone’s idiocies, even—is a kind of divine act. Perhaps transcendence can be found not only on solitary mountaintops or in monastic settings, but also at your own kitchen table, in the daily acceptance of your partner’s most tiresome, irritating faults.

I’m not suggesting that anyone should learn to “tolerate” abuse, neglect, disrespect, alcoholism, philandering, or contempt, and I certainly don’t think that couples whose marriages have become fetid tombs of sorrow should simply buck up and deal with it. “I just didn’t know how many more coats of paint I could put on my heart,” a friend of mine said in tears after she had left her husband—and who, with any sort of conscience, would reproach her for ditching that misery? There are marriages that simply rot over time, and some of them must end. Leaving a blighted marriage is not necessarily a moral failure, then, but can sometimes represent the opposite of quitting: the beginning of hope.

So, no, when I mention “tolerance,” I’m not talking about learning how to stomach pure awfulness. What I am talking about is learning how to accommodate your life as generously as possible around a basically decent human being who can sometimes be an unmitigated pain in the ass. In this regard, the marital kitchen can become something like a small linoleum temple where we are called up daily to practice forgiveness, as we ourselves would like to be forgiven. Mundane this may be, yes. Devoid of any rock-star moments of divine ecstasy, certainly. But maybe such tiny acts of household tolerance are a miracle in some other way—in some quietly measureless way—all the same?

And even beyond the flaws, there are just some simple differences between Felipe and me that we will both have to accept. He will never—I promise you—attend a yoga class with me, no matter how many times I may try to convince him that he would absolutely love it. (He would absolutely not love it.) We will never meditate together on a weekend spiritual retreat. I will never get him to cut back on all the red meat, or to do some sort of faddish fasting cleanse with me, just for the fun of it. I will never get him to smooth out his temperament, which burns at sometimes exhausting extremes. He will never take up hobbies with me, I am certain of this. We will not stroll through the farmer’s market hand in hand, or go on a hike together specifically to identify wildflowers. And although he is happy to sit and listen to me talk all day long about why I love Henry James, he will never read the collected works of Henry James by my side—so this most exquisite pleasure of mine must remain a private one.

Similarly, there are pleasures in his life that I will never share. We grew up in different decades in different hemispheres; I sometimes miss his cultural references and jokes by a mile. (Or, I should say, by a kilometer.) We never raised children together, so Felipe can’t reminisce to his partner for hours on end about what Zo and Erica were like when they were little kids—as he might have done had he stayed married to their mother for thirty years. Felipe relishes fine wines almost to the point of holy rapture, but any good wine is wasted on me. He loves to speak French; I don’t understand French. He would prefer to linger lazily in bed with me all morning, but if I’m not awake and doing something productive by dawn, I begin to twitch with a kind of ferocious Yankee mania. Moreover, Felipe will never have as quiet a life with me as he might want. He’s solitary; I am not. Like a dog, I have pack needs; like a cat, he prefers a quieter house. As long as he is married to me, his house will never be quiet.

And may I add: This is only a partial list.

Some of these differences are significant, others not so much, but all of them are inalterable. In the end, it seems to me that forgiveness may be the only realistic antidote we are offered in love, to combat the inescapable disappointments of intimacy. We humans come into this world—as Aristophanes so beautifully explained—feeling as though we have been sawed in half, desperate to find somebody who will recognize us and repair us. (Or repair us.) Desire is the severed umbilicus that is always with us, always bleeding and wanting and longing for flawless union. Forgiveness is the nurse who knows that such immaculate mergers are impossible, but that maybe we can live on together anyhow if we are polite and kind and careful not to spill too much blood.

There are moments when I can almost see the space that separates Felipe from me—and that always will separate us—despite my lifelong yearning to be rendered whole by somebody else’s love, despite all my efforts over the years to find someone who would be perfect for me and who, in turn, would allow me to become some sort of perfected being. Instead, our dissimilarities and our faults hover between us always, like a shadowy wave. But sometimes, out of the corner of my eye, I catch a glimpse of Intimacy herself, balancing right there on that very wave of difference—actually standing there right between us—actually (heaven help us) standing a chance.

CHAPTER FIVE

M arriage and W omen

Today the problem that has no name is how

to juggle work, love, home and children.

—Betty Friedan, The Second Stage

During our last week in Luang Prabang, we met a young man named Keo.

Keo was a friend of Khamsy, who ran the tiny hotel on the Mekong River where Felipe and I had been staying for some time already. Once I’d fully explored Luang Prabang both on foot and bicycle, once I’d exhausted myself spying on the monks, once I knew every street and every temple of this small city, I finally asked Khamsy if he might have an English-speaking friend with a car, who could perhaps take us around the mountains outside the city.

Khamsy, thereafter, had generously produced Keo, who had in turn generously produced his uncle’s automobile—and away we went.

Keo was a young man of twenty-one years who had many interests in life. I know this to be a fact, for it was among the first things that he told me: “I am a young man of twenty-one years who has many interests in life.” Keo also explained to me that he had been born very poor—the youngest of seven children in a poor family in the poorest country in Southeast Asia—but that he had always been foremost in school on account of his tremendous mental diligence. Only one student a year is named “Best Student in English” and this Best Student in English was always Keo, which was why all the teachers enjoyed calling on Keo in class because Keo always knew the correct answers. Keo also assured me that he knew everything about food. Not only Laotian food, but also French food, because he was once a waiter in a French restaurant, and therefore he would happily share his knowledge with me on these subjects. Also, Keo had worked for a while with the elephants at an elephant camp for tourists, so there was a great deal that he knew about elephants.

To demonstrate how much he knew about elephants, Keo asked me, immediately on meeting me, “Can you guess how many toenails an elephant has on its front feet?”

At random, I guessed three.

“You are false,” said Keo. “I will permit you to guess again.”

I guessed five.

“Unfortunately you are still false,” Keo said. “So I will tell you the answer. There are four toenails on an elephant’s front feet. Now, how about the back feet?”

I guessed four.

“Unfortunately you are false. I will allow you to guess again.”

I guessed three.

“You are still false. There are five toenails on an elephant’s back feet. Now, can you guess how many liters of water an elephant’s trunk can hold?”

I could not. I could not even imagine how many liters of water an elephant’s trunk could hold. But Keo knew: eight liters! As he also knew, I’m afraid, hundreds of other facts about elephants. Therefore, spending a whole day driving through the Laotian mountains with Keo was certainly an education in pachyderm biology! But Keo knew about other subjects, too. As he explained carefully, “It is not only facts and explanations about elephants about which I shall inform you. I also know a great deal about fighting fish.”

For that is exactly the sort of young man of twenty-one years that Keo was. And that is the reason Felipe elected not to join me on my day trips outside of Luang Prabang—because one of Felipe’s other flaws (although he did not mention it on his list) is that he has a very low level of tolerance for being quizzed relentlessly about elephant toenails by serious young men of twenty-one years.

I liked Keo, though. I have an inherent affection for the Keos of the world. Keo was naturally curious and enthusiastic, and he was patient with my curiosity and my enthusiasms. Whatever questions I asked him, no matter how arbitrary, he was always willing to attempt an answer. Sometimes his answers were informed by his rich sense of Laotian history; at other times his replies were more reductive. One afternoon, for instance, we were driving through an immensely poor mountain village, where the people’s houses had dirt floors, no doors, and windows cut roughly out of corrugated steel. And yet, as with so many of the places I’d seen in rural Laos, many of these huts had expensive television satellite dishes tacked onto their roofs. I pondered in silence the question of why somebody would choose to invest in a satellite dish before investing in, say, a door. Finally I asked Keo, “Why is it so important to these people that they have satellite dishes?” He just shrugged and said, “Because TV reception is really bad out here.”

But most of my questions to Keo were about marriage, of course, that being the theme of my year. Keo was more than happy to explain to me how marriage was done in Laos. Keo said that a wedding is the most important event in a Laotian person’s life. Only birth and death come close for momentousness, and sometimes it’s hard to plan parties around them. Therefore a wedding is always a huge occasion. Keo himself, he informed me, had invited seven hundred people to his own wedding, just last year. This is standard, he said. Like most Laotians, Keo has, as he admitted, “too many cousins, too many friends. And we must invite them all.”

“Did all seven hundred guests come to your wedding?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” he assured me. “Over one thousand people came!”

Because what happens at a typical Laotian wedding is that every cousin and every friend invites all their cousins and all their friends (and guests of guests sometimes bring guests), and since the host must never turn anybody away, things can get out of hand quite quickly.

“Would you like me to instruct you now with facts and information about the traditional wedding gift of a traditional Laotian marriage?” Keo asked.

I would like that very much, I said, and so Keo explained. When a Laotian couple is about to get married, they send invitation cards to each guest. The guests take these original invitation cards (with their names and addresses on them), fold the cards into the shape of a small envelope, and stick some money inside. On the wedding day, all these envelopes go into a giant wooden box. This immense donation is the money with which the couple will begin their new life together. This is why Keo and his bride invited so many guests to the wedding: to guarantee the highest possible cash infusion.

Later, when the wedding party is over, the bride and groom sit up all night and count the money. While the groom counts, the bride sits with a notebook, writing down exactly how much money was given by each guest. This is not so that detailed thank-you notes can be written later (as my WASP-y mind immediately assumed), but so that a careful accounting can be kept forever. That notebook—which is really a banking ledger—will be stored in a safe place, to be consulted many times over the coming years. Such that, five years later, when your cousin down in Vientiane gets married, you will go check that old notebook and confirm how much money he gave to you on your wedding day, and then you will give him back the exact same amount of money on the occasion of his marriage. In fact, you will give him back a tiny bit more money than he gave you, as interest.

“Adjusted for inflation!” as Keo explained proudly.

The wedding money, then, is not really a gift: It’s an exhaustively catalogued and ever-shifting loan, circulating from one family to the next as each new couple starts a life together. You use your wedding money to get yourself going in the world, to buy a piece of property or start a small business, and then, as you settle into prosperity, you pay that money back slowly over the years, one wedding at a time.

This system makes brilliant sense in a country of such extreme poverty and economic chaos. Laos suffered for decades behind the most restrictive communistic “Bamboo Curtain” in all of Asia, where one incompetent government after another presided over a financial scorched earth policy, and where national banks withered and died in corrupt and incompetent hands. In response, the people gathered together their pennies and turned their wedding ceremonies into a banking system that really worked: the nation’s only truly trustworthy National Trust. This entire social contract was built on the collective understanding that, as a young bride and groom, your wedding money doesn’t belong to you; it belongs to the community, and the community must be paid back. With interest. To a certain extent, this means that your marriage doesn’t entirely belong to you, either; it also belongs to the community, which will be expecting a dividend out of your union. Your marriage, in effect, becomes a business in which everyone around you owns a literal share.

The stakes of that share became clearer to me one afternoon when Keo drove me far out of the mountains of Luang Prabang to a tiny village called Ban Phanom—a distant lowland community populated by an ethnic minority called the Leu, a people who had fled to Laos from China a few centuries earlier, seeking relief from prejudice and persecution, bringing with them only their silkworms and their agricultural skills. Keo had a friend from university who lived in the village and was now working as a weaver, just like every other Leu woman around. This girl and her mother had agreed to meet with me and talk to me about marriage, and Keo had agreed to translate.

The family lived in a clean square bamboo house with a concrete floor. There were no windows, in order to keep out the ferocious sun. The effect, once you were inside the house, was something like sitting in a giant wicker sewing basket—which was fitting in this culture of gifted weavers. The women brought me a tiny stool to sit on and a glass of water. The house was almost empty of furniture, but in the living room were displayed the family’s most valuable objects, lined up in a row in order of importance: a brand-new loom, a brand-new motorcycle, and a brand-new television.

Keo’s friend was named Joy, and her mother was Ting—an attractive, roundish woman in her forties. While the daughter sat in silence, hemming a silk textile, her mother bubbled over with enthusiasm, so I directed all my questions at Mom. I asked Ting about the traditions of marriage in her particular village and she said that it was all fairly simple. If a boy likes a girl, and the girl likes the boy in return, then the parents will meet and talk over a plan. If all goes well, both families will soon find themselves visiting a special monk, who will consult the Buddhist calendar to find an auspicious date for the couple to marry. Then the young people will marry, with everyone in the community lending money. And those marriages last forever, Ting was eager to explain, because there is no such thing as divorce in the village of Ban Phanom.

Now I had heard remarks like this before in my travels. And I always take it with a grain of salt, because nowhere in the world is there “no such thing as divorce.” If you dig a bit, you will always find a story buried somewhere about a marriage that failed. Everywhere. Trust me. It all reminds me of that moment in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth when a gossipy old society lady observes: “There is a divorce and a case of appendicitis in every family one knows.” (And the “case of appendicitis,” by the way, was polite old Edwardian code for “abortion”—and that happens everywhere, too, and sometimes in the most surprising circles.)

But yes, there are societies where divorce is extremely rare.

And so it was in Ting’s clan. When pressed, she owned up that one of her childhood friends did have to move to the capital because her husband had abandoned her, but that was the only divorce she could think of in the last five years. Anyway, she said, there are systems in place to help keep families bonded together. As you can imagine, in a tiny impoverished village like this, where lives are so critically (and financially) interdependent, urgent steps must be taken to keep families whole. When problems arise in a marriage, as Ting explained, the community has a four-tiered approach to finding solutions. First of all, the wife in the troubled marriage is encouraged to keep peace by bending to her husband’s will as much as possible. “A marriage is best when there is only one captain,” she said. “It is easiest if the husband is the captain.”

I nodded politely at this, deciding it was better to just let the conversation slide as quickly as possible on to Stage Number Two.

But sometimes, Ting explained, not even absolute submission can solve all domestic conflicts, and then you must outsource the problem. The second level of intervention, then, is to bring in the parents of both the husband and the wife to see if they can fix the domestic problems. The parents will have a conference with the couple, and with each other, and everyone will try as a family to work things out.

If parental supervision is unsuccessful, the couple moves on to the third stage of intervention. Now they must go before the village organization of elders—the same people who married them in the first place. The elders will take up the problem in a public council meeting. Domestic failures, then, become civic agenda items, like dealing with graffiti or school taxes, and everyone must pull together to solve the issue. Neighbors will toss out ideas and solutions, or even offer relief—such as taking in young children for a week or two while the couple works out their troubles without distractions.

Only at Stage Four—if all else fails—is there an admission of hopelessness. If the family can’t fix the dispute and if the community can’t fix the dispute (which is rare), then and only then will the couple go off to the big city, outside the realm of the village, to secure a legal divorce.

Listening to Ting explain all this, I found myself thinking all over again about my own failed first marriage. I wondered whether my ex-husband and I might have saved our relationship if only we’d interrupted our free fall sooner, before things turned so completely toxic. What if we had called in an emergency council of friends, families, and neighbors to give us a hand? Maybe a timely intervention could have righted us, dusted us off, and guided us back together. We did attend six months of counseling together at the very end of our marriage, but—as I’ve heard so many therapists lament about their patients—we sought outside help too late, and put in too little effort. Visiting someone’s office for one hour a week was not enough of a fix for the massive impasse we had already reached in our nuptial journey. By the time we took our ailing marriage to the good doctor, she could do little beyond offering up a postmortem pathology report. But maybe if we’d acted sooner, or with more trust . . . ? Or maybe if we’d sought help from our family and community . . . ?

On the other hand, maybe not.

There was a lot wrong with that marriage. I’m not sure we could have endured together even if we’d had the entire village of Manhattan working on our collective behalf. Besides, we had no cultural template for anything like family or community intervention. We were modern, independent Americans who lived hundreds of miles away from our families. It would have been the most foreign and artificial idea in the world for us to have summoned our relatives and neighbors together for a tribal council meeting on matters that we had deliberately kept private for years. We might as well have sacrificed a chicken in the name of matrimonial harmony and hoped that that would fix things.

Anyhow, there’s a limit to how far you can go with such musings. We must not allow ourselves to get trapped in eternal games of second-guessing and regret about our failed marriages, although such anguished mental contortions are admittedly difficult to control. For this reason, I’m convinced that the supreme patron of all divorced people must be the ancient Greek Titan Epimetheus, who was blessed—or, rather, cursed—with the gift of perfect hindsight. He was a nice enough fellow, that Epimetheus, but he could see things clearly only in reverse, which isn’t a very useful real-world skill. (Interestingly, by the way, Epimetheus was a married man himself, although with his perfect hindsight he probably wished he’d chosen another girl: His wife was a little spitfire named Pandora. Fun couple.) In any case, at some point in our lives we must stop beating ourselves up over bygone blunders—even blunders that seem so painfully obvious to us in retrospect—and we must move on with our lives. Or as Felipe once said, in his inimitable manner, “Let us not dwell on the mistakes of the past, darling. Let us concentrate instead on the mistakes of the future.”

In that vein, it did cross my mind that day in Laos that maybe Ting and her community were on to something here about marriage. Not the business about the husband being the captain, of course, but the thought that perhaps there are times when a community, in order to maintain its cohesion, must share not only money and not only resources, but also a sense of collective accountability. Maybe all our marriages must be linked to each other somehow, woven on a larger social loom, in order to endure. Which is why I made a little note to myself that day in Laos: Don’t privatize your marriage to Felipe so much that it becomes deoxygenated, isolated, solitary, vulnerable . . .

I was tempted to ask my new friend Ting if she had ever intervened in a neighbor’s marriage, as a sort of village elder. But before I could get to my next question, she interrupted me to ask whether perhaps I could find a good husband in America for her daughter, Joy? The one with the university education? Then Ting showed off one of her daughter’s beautiful silk weavings—a tapestry of golden elephants dancing across a wash of crimson. Maybe some man in America would like to marry a girl who could make something like this with her own two hands, she wondered?

The whole time Ting and I were talking, by the way, Joy was sitting there sewing in silence, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, her hair clipped in a loose ponytail. Joy alternated between politely listening to her mom and at other times—in classic daughterly manner—rolling her eyes in embarrassment at her mother’s statements.

“Aren’t there any educated American men who might want to marry a nice Leu girl like my daughter?” Ting asked again.

Ting wasn’t kidding, and the tension in her voice signaled a crisis. I asked Keo if he could gently probe at the problem, and Ting quickly opened up. There had been some big trouble in the village lately, she said. The trouble was that the young women had recently started making more money than the young men, and had also started getting themselves educated. The women of this ethnic minority are exceptionally gifted weavers, and now that Western tourists are coming to Laos, outsiders are interested in buying their textiles. So the local girls can make a fair bit of cash, and they often save that money from a young age. Some of them—like Ting’s daughter, Joy—use their money to pay for college, in addition to buying goods for their families, like motorcycles, TVs, and new looms, whereas the local boys are all still farmers who hardly make any money at all.

This hadn’t been a social problem when nobody made money, but to have one gender—the young women—now thriving, everything was getting thrown out of balance. Ting said that the young women in her village were growing accustomed to the idea of being able to support themselves, and some of them were delaying marriage. But that wasn’t even the biggest problem! The biggest problem was that when young people did get married these days, the men quickly got used to spending their wives’ money, which meant that they didn’t work as hard anymore. The young men, developing no sense of their own worth, drifted away into lives of drinking and gambling. The young women, observing this situation unfold, didn’t like it one bit. Therefore, many girls had decided lately that they didn’t want to get married at all, and this was upending the whole social system of the tiny village, creating all kinds of tensions and complications. This was why Ting was afraid that her daughter might never marry (unless perhaps I could arrange a match with an equally well-educated American?), and then what would happen to the family line? And what would become of the boys in the village, whose girls had outgrown them? What would become of the village’s entire intricate social network?

Ting told me that she referred to this situation as a “Western-style problem,” which meant she’d been reading the newspapers, because this is entirely a Western-style problem—one that we’ve been watching play out in the Western world for several generations now, ever since avenues to wealth became more available to women. One of the first things that changes in any society when women start to earn their own income is the nature of marriage. You see this trend across all nations and all people. The more financially autonomous a woman becomes, the later in life she will get married, if ever.

Some people decry this as the Breakdown of Society, and suggest that female economic independence is destroying happy marriages. But traditionalists who look back nostalgically on the halcyon days when women stayed at home and tended to their families, and when divorce rates were much lower than they are today, should keep in mind that many women over the centuries remained in wretched marriages because they could not afford to leave. Even today, the income of your average divorced American woman still drops 30 percent after her marriage has ended—and it was much worse in the past. An old adage used to warn, accurately enough: “Every woman is one divorce away from bankruptcy.” Where would a woman leave to, exactly, if she had small children and no education and no way to support herself? We tend to idealize cultures in which people stay married forever, but we must not automatically assume that matrimonial endurance is always a sign of matrimonial contentment.

During the Great Depression, for instance, American divorce rates plummeted. Social commentators of the day liked to attribute this decline to the romantic notion that hard times bring married couples closer together. They painted a cheerful picture of resolute families hunkering down to eat their sparse meals together out of one dusty bowl. These same commentators used to say that many a family had lost its car only to find its soul. In reality, though, as any marriage counselor could tell you, deep financial trouble puts monstrous strains on marriages. Short of infidelity and flat-out abuse, nothing corrodes a relationship faster than poverty, bankruptcy, and debt. And when modern historians looked closer at the lowered divorce rates of the Great Depression, they discovered that many American couples had stayed together because they could not afford to separate. It was hard enough to support one household, much less two. Many families elected to ride their way through the Great Depression with a sheet hung in the middle of their living rooms, dividing husband from wife—which is a greatly depressing image, indeed. Other couples did separate but never had the money to file for legal divorce through the courts. Abandonment was epidemic during the 1930s. Legions of bankrupted American men just got up and walked away from their wives and kids, never to be seen again (where do you think all those hobos came from?), and very few women made the effort to officially report their missing husbands with the census takers. They had bigger things to worry about, like finding food.

Extreme poverty breeds extreme tension; this should surprise nobody. Divorce rates all over America are highest among uneducated and financially insecure adults. Money brings its own problems, of course—but money also brings options. Money can buy child care, a separate bathroom, a vacation, the freedom from arguments over bills—all sorts of things that help stabilize a marriage. And when women get their hands on their own money, and when you remove economic survival as a motivation for marriage in the first place, everything changes. By the year 2004, unmarried women were the fastest growing demographic in the United States. A thirty-year-old American woman was three times more likely to be single in 2004 than her counterpart in the 1970s. She was far less likely to become a mother, too—either early, or at all. The number of households in America without children reached an all-time high in 2008.

This change isn’t always welcomed by society at large, of course. In Japan these days, where we find the highest-paid women in the industrial world (as well as, not coincidentally, the lowest birth rates on earth), conservative social critics call young females who refuse to get married and have children “parasite singles”—implying that an unmarried, childless woman helps herself to all the benefits of citizenship (e.g., prosperity) without offering up anything (e.g., babies) in return. Even in societies as repressive as contemporary Iran, young women are choosing to delay marriage and child rearing in increasing numbers in order to concentrate instead on furthering their education and careers. Just as day follows night, the conservative commentators are denouncing the trend already, with one Iranian government official describing such willfully unmarried women as “more dangerous than the enemy’s bombs and missiles.”

As a mother, then, in rural developing Laos, my new friend Ting carried a complicated set of feelings about her daughter. On one hand, she was proud of Joy’s education and weaving skills, which had paid for the brand-new loom, the brand-new television, and the brand-new motorcycle. On the other hand, there was little that Ting could comprehend about her daughter’s brave new world of learning and money and independence. And when she looked into Joy’s future she saw only a puzzling mess of new questions. Such an educated, literate, financially independent, and frighteningly contemporary young woman had no precedent in traditional Leu society. What do you do with her? How will she ever find parity with her uneducated farmer-boy neighbors? Sure, you can park a motorcycle in your living room, and you can stick a satellite dish on the roof of your hut, but where on earth do you park such a girl as this?

Let me tell you how much interest Joy herself had in this debate: She got up and walked out of the house in the middle of my conversation with her mother and I never saw her again. I didn’t manage to get a single word out of the girl herself on the subject of marriage. While I’m sure she had strong feelings on the topic, she certainly didn’t feel like chatting about it with me and her mom. Instead, Joy wandered off to do something else with her time. You kind of got the feeling she was going around the corner to the deli, to pick up some cigarettes and then maybe go see a movie with some friends. Except that this village had no deli, no cigarettes, no movies—only chickens clucking along a dusty road.

So where was that girl going?

Ah, but therein lies the whole question, doesn’t it?

B y the way, have I mentioned the fact that Keo’s wife was pregnant? In fact, the baby was due the very week that I met Keo and hired him to be my translator and guide. I found out about his wife’s pregnancy when Keo mentioned that he had been especially happy for the extra income, on account of the baby’s imminent arrival. Keo was enormously proud to be having a child, and on our last night in Luang Prabang, he invited Felipe and me to his house for dinner—to show us his life and to introduce us to pregnant young Noi.

“We met at school,” Keo had said of his wife. “I always liked her. She is somewhat younger than me—only nineteen years old now. She is very pretty. Although it’s odd for me now that she is having the baby. She used to be so tiny that she barely weighed any kilos at all! Now it appears that she weighs all the kilos at once!”

So we went to Keo’s house—driven there by his friend Khamsy the innkeeper—and we went bearing gifts. Felipe brought several bottles of Beerlao, the local ale, and I brought some cute gender-neutral baby clothes that I’d found in the market and now wanted to present to Keo’s wife.

Keo’s house stood at the end of a rutted dirt road just outside Luang Prabang. It was the last house on a road of similar houses, before the jungle took over, and it occupied a twenty-by-thirty-foot rectangle of land. Half of this property was covered by concrete tanks, which Keo had filled with the frogs and fighting fish he raises to supplement his income as an elementary school teacher and occasional tour guide. He sells the frogs for food. As he proudly explained, they go for about 25,000 kip—$2.50—a kilo, and on average there are three to four frogs in a kilo because these frogs are quite hefty. So it’s a good little side living. In the meantime, he also has the fighting fish, which sell for 5,000 kip each—fifty cents—and which are breeding happily. He sells the fighting fish to local men who bet on the aquatic battles. Keo explained that he had begun raising fighting fish as a young boy, already looking for a way to make some extra money so he would not be a burden to his parents. Though Keo does not like to boast, he could not help but reveal that he was perhaps the best breeder of fighting fish in all of Luang Prabang.

Keo’s house took up the rest of his property—that which was not overrun by tanks of frogs and fish—which meant the house proper was about fifteen feet square. The structure was made of bamboo and plywood, with a corrugated metal roof. The one original room of the house had recently been divided into two rooms, to make a living area and a sleeping area. The dividing wall was just a plywood separation that Keo had wallpapered neatly with pages from English-language newspapers such as the Bangkok Post and the Herald Tribune. (Felipe told me later that he suspects Keo lies there at night, reading every word of his wallpaper, always working to better his English.) There was only one light-bulb, which hung over the living room. There was also a tiny concrete bathroom with a squat toilet and a basin for bathing. On the night of our visit, however, the basin was filled with frogs, because the frog tanks out front were at capacity. (Here is a side benefit of raising hundreds of frogs, as Keo explained: “Among all our neighbors, we alone do not have a problem with the mosquitoes.”) The kitchen was outside the house, beneath a small overhang, with a dirt floor, tidily swept.

“Someday we will invest in a real kitchen floor,” Keo said with the ease of a suburban man predicting that he will someday build a winterized deck off the family room. “But I will need to make some more money first.”

There was no table anywhere in this house, nor chairs. There was a small bench outside in the kitchen, and underneath that bench was the family’s tiny pet dog, who’d just had puppies a few days earlier. Those puppies were about the size of gerbils. The only embarrassment Keo ever expressed to me about his modest lifestyle was that his dog was so very small. He seemed to feel that there was something almost ungenerous about introducing his honored guests to such an undersized dog—as though the petite stature of his dog did not match Keo’s station in life, or at the very least did not match Keo’s aspirations.

“We are always laughing at her because she is so small. I’m sorry she is not bigger,” he apologized. “But she really is a nice dog.”

There was also a chicken. The chicken lived in the kitchen/porch area, with a bit of twine tying her to the wall so that she could wander but not escape. She had a small cardboard box and in this box she laid her one egg a day. When Keo presented us with his hen and her cardboard box, he did so in the manner of a gentleman farmer, with a proudly outstretched arm: “And this is our chicken!”

At that moment, I caught a glimpse of Felipe out of the corner of my eye, and watched as a series of emotions rippled across his face: tenderness, pity, nostalgia, admiration, and a little dose of sadness. Felipe grew up poor in southern Brazil, and—like Keo—he’d always been a proud soul. In fact, Felipe is still a proud soul, to the point that he likes to tell people he was born “broke,” not “poor”—thereby conveying the message that he’d always regarded his poverty as a temporary condition (as though somehow, as a helpless babe in arms, he had been caught just a little short on cash). And, as did Keo, Felipe leaned toward a scrappy entrepreneurship that had expressed itself at an early age. Felipe’s first big business idea came to him at the age of nine when he noticed that cars were always stalling out in a deep puddle at the bottom of a hill in his town of Porto Alegre. He enlisted a friend to help him, and the two of them would wait at the bottom of that hill all day long to push stalled cars out of the puddle. The drivers would give the boys spare change for their efforts, and with this spare change many American comic books were purchased. By the age of ten, Felipe had entered the junk metal business, scouring his town for scraps of iron, brass, and copper to sell for cash. By thirteen, he was selling animal bones (scavenged outside the local butcher shops and slaughterhouses) to a glue manufacturer, and it was partly with this money that he bought his first boat ticket out of Brazil. If he had known about frog meat and fighting fish, trust me: He would have done that, too.

Until this evening, Felipe had had no time for Keo. My guide’s officious nature, in fact, bugged him immensely. But something shifted in Felipe as soon as he took in Keo’s house, and the newspaper wallpaper, and the swept dirt floor, and the frogs in the bathroom, and the chicken in the box, and the humble little dog. And when Felipe met Noi, Keo’s wife, who was tiny even in her advanced all-the-kilos-at-once pregnancy, and who was working so hard to cook our dinner over a single gas flame, I saw his eyes moisten with emotion, though he was too polite to express anything toward Noi but friendly interest in her cooking. She shyly accepted Felipe’s praise. (“She speaks English,” Keo said. “But she is too timid about practicing.”)

When Felipe met Noi’s mother—a minuscule yet somehow queenly lady in a worn blue sarong, introduced only as “Grandmother”—my husband-to-be followed some deep personal instinct and bowed from the waist to this diminutive woman. At this grand gesture, Grandmother smiled just the slightest bit (just around the corners of her eyes) and responded with an almost imperceptible nod, telegraphing subtly: “Your bow has pleased me, sir.”

I loved Felipe so much at that moment, perhaps the most that I have ever loved him anywhere or at any time.

I must clarify here that even though Keo and Noi had no furniture, they did have three luxuries in their home. There was a television with a built-in stereo and DVD player, there was a tiny refrigerator, and there was an electric fan. When we entered the house, Keo had all three of these appliances working full tilt, to welcome us. The fan was blowing; the refrigerator buzzed as it made ice for our beer; the television blasted cartoons.

Keo asked, “Would you prefer to listen to music or to watch television cartoons during dinner?”

I told him that we would prefer to listen to music, thank you.

“Would you prefer to listen to hard-rock Western music?” he asked, “or soft Laotian music?”

I thanked him for his consideration, and answered that soft Laotian music would be fine.

Keo said, “That is no trouble for me. I have some perfect soft Laotian music that you will enjoy.” He put on some Laotian love songs, but he played them at an extremely loud volume—the better to demonstrate the quality of his stereo system. This was the same reason Keo directed the electric fan right into our faces. He had these lavish comforts, and he wanted us to benefit from their greatest possible application.

So it was a pretty loud evening, but this was not the worst thing in the world, for the loudness signaled a festive air, and we duly followed that signal. Soon we were all drinking Beerlao and telling stories and laughing. Or at least Felipe, Keo, Khamsy, and I were all drinking and laughing; Noi, in her extreme pregnancy, seemed to be suffering from the heat and did not drink the beer but just sat quietly on the hard dirt floor, shifting every once in a while in search of comfort.

As for Grandmother, she did drink beer, but she did not laugh so much with us. She only regarded us all with a pleased and quiet air. Grandmother was a rice farmer, we learned, who came from up north, up near the Chinese border. She came from a long line of rice farmers, and she herself had borne ten children (Noi the youngest), each one delivered in her own home. She told us all this only because I asked her directly the story of her life. Through Keo’s translation, she told us that her marriage—at the age of sixteen—was somewhat “accidental.” She married a man who was just passing through the village. He had stayed at her family’s house for the evening and fallen in love with her. A few days after the stranger’s arrival, they were married. I tried to ask Grandmother some follow-up questions about her thoughts on her marriage, but she revealed nothing more than these facts: rice farmer, accidental marriage, ten children. I was dying to know what “accidental” marriage might be code for (many women in my family, too, had to get married because of “accidents”), but no more information was forthcoming.

“She is not accustomed to people finding interest in her life,” Keo explained, and so I let the subject drop.

All night long, though, I kept stealing glances at Grandmother, and all night long it appeared to me that she was watching us from a great distance. She exuded a shimmering otherworldliness, marked by a demeanor so silent and reserved that she really at times did almost disappear. Even though she was sitting right across the floor from me, even though I could’ve touched her easily at any moment with an outstretched hand, it felt as though she was residing somewhere else, viewing us all from a benevolent throne set someplace high up on the moon.

Keo’s house—though tiny—was so clean that you could eat off the floor, and that is precisely what we did. We all sat down on a bamboo mat and shared the meal, rolling balls of rice in our hands. In keeping with Laotian custom, we all drank from the same glass, passing it around the room from the oldest person to the youngest. And here is what we ate: wonderfully spicy catfish soup, green papaya salad in a smoky fish sauce, sticky rice, and—of course—frogs. The frogs were the proudly offered main course, since these were Keo’s own homegrown livestock, so we had to eat quite a few of them. I had eaten frogs in the past (well, frogs’ legs) but this was different. These were giant frogs—huge, hefty, meaty bullfrogs—chopped into big parts like a stew chicken and then boiled, skin and bones and all. The skin was the hardest bit of the meal to deal with, since it remained, even after cooking, so obviously a frog’s skin: spotted, rubbery, amphibian.

Noi watched us carefully. She said little during the meal except at one point to remind us, “Don’t just eat the rice—also eat the meat,” because meat is precious and we were valued visitors. So we ate all those slabs of rubbery frog flesh, along with the skin and the occasional bit of bone, chewing through it all without complaint. Felipe asked not once but twice if he could have another serving, which made Noi blush and smile at her pregnant belly in uncontainable pleasure. Though I personally knew that Felipe would rather eat his own sautéed shoe than swallow another hunk of boiled bullfrog, I loved him overwhelmingly again at that moment for his great goodness.

You can take this man anywhere, I thought with pride, and he will always know how to comport himself.

After dinner, Keo put on some videos of traditional Laotian wedding dancing, to entertain and educate us. The videos showed a group of stiff, formal Laotian women dancing on a disco stage, wearing fancy makeup and glittering sarongs. Their dance involved pretty much standing still and twirling their hands, smiles cemented on their faces. We all watched this for half an hour in attentive silence.

“These are all excellent, professional dancers,” Keo finally informed us, breaking the strange reverie. “The singer whose voice you can hear in the background music is very famous in Laos—exactly like your Michael Jackson in America. And I myself have met him.”

There was an innocence to Keo which was almost heartbreaking to behold. In fact, his entire family seemed pure beyond anything I’d ever encountered. Television, fridge, and electric fan notwithstanding, they remained untouched by modernity, or at least untouched by modernity’s cool slickness. Here were just some of the elements missing in conversation with Keo and his family: irony, cynicism, sarcasm, and presumptuousness. I know five-year-olds in America who are cannier than this family. In fact, all the five-year-olds I know in America are cannier than this family. I wanted to wrap their entire house in a sort of protective gauze to defend them from the world—an endeavor that, given the size of their house, would not have required very much gauze at all.

After the dancing exhibition finished, Keo turned off the television and guided our conversation once more to the dreams and plans that he and Noi shared for their life together. After the baby was born, they would clearly need more money, which is why Keo had a plan to increase his frog-meat business. He explained that he would like to someday invent a frog-breeding house with a controlled environment that would mimic the ideal frog-breeding conditions of summertime, but year-round. This contraption, which I gathered would be some kind of greenhouse, would include such technologies as “bogus rain and bogus sun.” The bogus weather conditions would trick the frogs into not noticing that winter had arrived. This would be beneficial, as winter is a difficult time of year for frog breeders. Every winter Keo’s frogs fall into hibernation (or, as he called it, “meditation”), during which time they do not eat, thereby losing much weight and rendering the frog-meat-by-the-kilo business a not very good business at all. But if Keo were to be able to raise frogs year-round, and if he were the only person in Luang Prabang who could do so, his would become a booming business and the whole family would prosper.

“It sounds like a brilliant idea, Keo,” Felipe said.

“It was Noi’s idea,” Keo said, and we all turned our attention again to Keo’s wife, to pretty Noi, only nineteen years old and so damp-faced from the heat, kneeling awkwardly on the dirt floor, her belly all full of baby.

“You’re a genius, Noi!” exclaimed Felipe.

“She is a genius!” Keo agreed.

Noi blushed so deeply at this praise that she almost seemed to swoon. She was unable to meet our eyes, but you could tell that she felt the honor even if she could not face it. You could tell that she fully felt how well-regarded she was by her husband. Handsome, young, inventive Keo thought so highly of his wife that he could not help himself from boasting about her to his honored dinner guests! At such a public declaration of her own importance, shy Noi seemed to swell to twice her natural size (and she already was twice her natural size, what with that baby due any moment). Honestly, for one sublime instant, the young mother-to-be seemed so elated, so inflated, that I feared she might float away and join her mother up there on the face of the moon.

All of this, as we drove back to our hotel that night, got me thinking about my grandmother and her marriage.

My Grandma Maude—who recently turned ninety-six years old—comes from a long line of people whose comfort levels in life far more closely resembled Keo and Noi’s than my own. Grandma Maude’s family were immigrants from the north of England who found their way to central Minnesota in covered wagons, and who lived through those first unthinkable winters in rough sod houses. Merely by working themselves almost to death, they acquired land, built small wooden houses, then bigger houses, and gradually increased their livestock and prospered.

My grandmother was born in January 1913, in the middle of a cold prairie winter, at home. She arrived in this world with a potentially life-threatening impairment—a serious cleft-palate deformity that left her with a hole in the roof of her mouth and an uncompleted upper lip. It would be almost April before the railroad tracks thawed enough to allow Maude’s father to take the baby to Rochester for her first rudimentary surgery. Until that time, my grandmother’s mother and father somehow kept this infant alive despite the fact that she could not nurse. To this day, my grandmother still doesn’t know how her parents fed her, but she thinks it may have had something to do with a length of rubber tubing that her father borrowed from the milking barn. My grandmother wishes now, she told me recently, that she had asked her mother for more information about those first few difficult months of her own life, but this was not a family where people either dwelled on sad memories or encouraged painful conversations, and so the subject was never raised.

Though my grandmother is not one to complain, her life was a challenging one by any measure. Of course, the lives of everyone around her were challenging, too, but Maude carried the extra burden of her medical condition, which had left her with lingering speech problems and a visible scar in the middle of her face. Not surprisingly, she was terribly shy. For all these reasons, it was widely assumed that my grandmother would never marry. This assumption never had to be spoken aloud; everyone just knew it.

But even the most unfortunate destinies can sometimes bring peculiar benefits. In my grandmother’s case, the benefit was this: She was the only member of her family who received a really decent education. Maude was allowed to dedicate herself to her studies because she really needed to be educated, to provide for herself someday as an unmarried woman. So while the boys were all pulled out of school around eighth grade to work in the fields, and while even the girls rarely finished high school (they were often married with a baby before their schooling was completed), Maude was sent to town to board with a local family and to become a diligent student. She excelled in school. She had a special fondness for history and English and hoped to someday become a teacher; she worked cleaning houses to save money for teachers’ college. Then the Great Depression hit, and the expense of college grew far out of reach. But Maude kept working, and her earnings transformed her into one of the rarest imaginable creatures of that era in central Minnesota: an autonomous young woman who lived by her own means.

Those years of my grandmother’s life, just out of high school, have always fascinated me because her path was so different from everyone else’s around her. She had experiences out there in the real world rather than settling right into the business of raising a family. Maude’s own mother rarely left the family farm except to go into town once a month (and never in the winter) to stock up on staples like flour and sugar and gingham. But after graduating from high school, Maude went to Montana all by herself and worked in a restaurant, serving pie and coffee to cowboys. This was in 1931. She did exotic and unusual things that no woman in her family could even imagine doing. She got herself a haircut and a fancy permanent wave (for two entire dollars) from an actual hairdresser, at an actual train station. She bought herself a flirty, kicky, slim yellow dress from an actual store. She went to movies. She read books. She caught a ride back from Montana to Minnesota on the back of a truck driven by some Russian immigrants with a handsome son about her age.

Once home from her Montana adventure, she got a job working as a housekeeper and secretary to a wealthy older woman named Mrs. Parker, who drank and smoked and laughed and enjoyed life immensely. Mrs. Parker, my grandmother informs me, “was not even afraid to curse,” and she threw parties in her home that were so extravagant (the best steaks, the best butter, and plenty of booze and cigarettes) that you might never have known a Depression was raging out there in the world. Moreover, Mrs. Parker was generous and liberal, and she often passed her fine clothes along to my grandmother, who was half the older woman’s size, so unfortunately she couldn’t always take advantage of this literal largesse.

My grandmother worked hard and saved her money. I need to emphasize this here: She had her own savings. I believe you could comb through several centuries of Maude’s ancestors without ever finding a woman who had managed to save money on her own. She was even squirreling away some extra money to pay for an operation that would have rendered her cleft palate scar less noticeable. But to my mind, her youthful independence is best epitomized by one symbol: a gorgeous wine-colored coat with a real fur collar that she bought for herself for twenty dollars in the early 1930s. This was an unprecedented extravagance for a woman from that family. My grandmother’s mother was rendered speechless by the notion of squandering such an astronomical amount of money on . . . a coat. Again, I believe you could pick your way through my family’s genealogy with tweezers and never find a woman before Maude who’d ever bought something so fine and expensive for herself.

If you ask my grandmother today about that purchase, her eyes will still flutter in absolute pleasure. That wine-colored coat with the real fur collar was the most beautiful thing Maude had ever owned in her life—indeed, it was the most beautiful thing she would ever own in her life—and she can still remember the sensuous feeling of the fur brushing against her neck and chin.

Later that year, probably while wearing that same fetching coat, Maude met a young farmer named Carl Olson, whose brother was courting her sister, and Carl—my grandfather—fell in love with her. Carl was not a romantic man, not a poetic man, and certainly not a rich man. (Her small savings account dwarfed his assets.) But he was a staggeringly handsome man and a hard worker. All the Olson brothers were known to be handsome and hardworking. My grandmother fell for him. Soon enough, much to everyone’s surprise, Maude Edna Morcomb was married.

Now, the conclusion I always drew from this story whenever I contemplated it in the past was that her marriage marked the end of any autonomy for Maude Edna Morcomb. Her life after that was pretty much unremitting hardship and hard work until maybe 1975. Not that she was any stranger to work, but things got very tough very fast. She moved out of Mrs. Parker’s fine home (no more steaks, no more parties, no more plumbing) and onto my grandfather’s family’s farm. Carl’s people were severe Swedish immigrants, and the young couple had to live in a small farmhouse with my grandfather’s younger brother and their father. Maude was the only woman on the farm, so she cooked and cleaned for all three men—and often fed the farmhands as well. When electricity finally came to town through Roosevelt’s Rural Electrification Administration program, her father-in-law would spring for only the lowest wattage lightbulbs, and these were seldom turned on.

Maude raised her first five—of seven—babies in that house. My mother was born in that house. The first three of those babies were raised in one single room, under one single lightbulb, just as Keo and Noi’s children will be raised. (Her father-in-law and brother-in-law each got a room to himself.) When Maude and Carl’s oldest son Lee was born, they paid the doctor with a veal calf. There was no money. There was never money. Maude’s savings—the money she’d been collecting for her reconstructive surgery—had long since been absorbed into the farm. When her oldest daughter, my Aunt Marie, was born, my grandmother cut up her cherished wine-colored coat with the real fur collar and used that material to sew a Christmas outfit for the new baby girl.

And that has always been, in my mind, the operative metaphor for what marriage does to my people. By “my people” I mean the women in my family, specifically the women on my mother’s side—my heritage and my inheritance. Because what my grandmother did with her fine coat (the loveliest thing she would ever own) is what all the women of that generation (and before) did for their families and their husbands and their children. They cut up the finest and proudest parts of themselves and gave it all away. They repatterned what was theirs and shaped it for others. They went without. They were the last ones to eat at supper, and they were the first ones to get up every morning, warming the cold kitchen for another day spent caring for everyone else. This was the only thing they knew how to do. This was their guiding verb and their defining principle in life: They gave.

The story of the wine-colored coat with the real fur collar has always made me cry. And if I were to tell you that this story has not shaped forever my feelings about marriage, or that it has not forged within me a small, quiet sorrow about what the matrimonial institution can take away from good women, I would be lying to you.

But I would also be lying to you—or at least withholding critical information—if I did not reveal this unexpected coda to the story: A few months before Felipe and I were sentenced to marry by the Homeland Security Department, I went out to Minnesota to visit my grandmother. I sat down with her while she worked on a quilting square, and she told me stories. Then I asked her a question I’d never asked before: “What was the happiest time of your life?”

In my heart, I believed I already knew the answer. It was back in the early 1930s, when she was living with Mrs. Parker, walking around in a slim yellow dress and a barbershop hairdo and a tailor-fitted wine-colored coat. That had to be the answer, right? But here’s the trouble with grandmothers. With all that they give away to others, they still insist on maintaining their own opinions about their own lives. Because what Grandma Maude actually said was “The happiest time in my life were those first few years of marriage to your grandfather, when we were living together on the Olson family farm.”

Let me remind you: They had nothing. Maude was a virtual house slave to three grown men (gruff Swedish farmers, no less, who were usually irritated with each other) and she was forced to cram her babies and their sodden cloth diapers into one cold and badly lit room. She became progressively sicker and weaker with each pregnancy. The Depression raged outside their door. Her father-in-law refused to run plumbing into the house. And so on, and so on . . .

“Grandma,” I said, taking her arthritic hands in mine, “how could that have been the happiest time of your life?”

“It was,” she said. “I was happy because I had a family of my own. I had a husband. I had children. I had never dared to dream that I would be allowed to have any of those things in my life.”

As much as her words surprised me, I believed her. But just because I believed her did not mean that I understood her. I did not, in fact, begin to understand my grandmother’s reply about her life’s greatest happiness until the night, months later, that I ate dinner in Laos with Keo and Noi. Sitting there on the dirt floor, watching Noi shift uncomfortably around her pregnant belly, I had naturally begun to formulate all sorts of assumptions about her life as well. I pitied Noi for the difficulties she faced by marrying so young, and I worried about how she would raise her baby in a home already overtaken by a herd of bullfrogs. But when Keo boasted to us about how clever his young wife was (what with all those big ideas about greenhouses!) and when I saw the joy pass over the face of this young woman (a woman so shy that she had barely met our eyes the entire night), I suddenly encountered my grandmother. I suddenly knew my grandmother, as reflected in Noi, in a way I had never known her before. I knew how my grandmother must have looked as a young wife and mother: proud, vital, appreciated. Why was Maude so happy in 1936? She was happy for the same reason that Noi was happy in 2006—because she knew that she was indispensable to somebody else’s life. She was happy because she had a partner, and because they were building something together, and because she believed deeply in what they were building, and because it amazed her to be included in such an undertaking.

I shall not insult either my grandmother or Noi by insinuating that they really ought to have aimed for something higher in their lives (something more closely approximating, perhaps, my aspirations and my ideals). I also refuse to say that a desire to be at the center of their husbands’ lives reflected or reflects pathology in these women. I will grant that both Noi and my grandmother know their own happiness, and I bow respectfully before their experiences. What they got, it seems, is precisely what they had always wanted.

So that’s settled.

Or is it?

Because—just to confuse the issue even more—I must relay what my grandmother said to me at the end of our conversation that day back in Minnesota. She knew that I had recently fallen in love with this man named Felipe, and she’d heard that things were getting serious between us. Maude is not an intrusive woman (unlike her granddaughter), but we had been speaking intimately, so perhaps that’s why she felt free to ask me directly, “What are your plans with this man?”

I told her that I wasn’t sure, other than that I wanted to stay with him because he was kind and supportive and loving and because he made me happy.

“But will you . . . ?” She trailed off.

I didn’t finish the sentence for her. I knew what she was digging for, but at that point in my life I still had no intention of ever getting married again, so I said nothing, hoping the moment would pass.

After a bit of silence, she tried again. “Are the two of you planning to have . . . ?”

Again, I didn’t supply the answer. I wasn’t trying to be rude or coy. It’s just that I knew I was not going to be having any babies, and I really didn’t want to disappoint her.

But then this nearly century-old woman shocked me. My grandmother threw up her hands and said, “Oh, I might as well ask you outright! Now that you’ve met this nice man, you aren’t going to get married and have children and stop writing books, are you?”

So how do I square this?

What am I to conclude when my grandmother says that the happiest decision of her life was giving up everything for her husband and children but then says—in the very next breath—that she doesn’t want me making the same choice? I’m not really sure how to reconcile this, except to believe that somehow both these statements are true and authentic, even as they seem to utterly contradict one another. I believe that a woman who has lived as long as my grandmother should be allowed some contradictions and mysteries. Like most of us, this woman contains multitudes. Besides, when it comes to the subject of women and marriage, easy conclusions are difficult to come by, and enigmas litter the road in every direction.

To get anywhere close to unraveling this subject—women and marriage—we have to start with the cold, ugly fact that marriage does not benefit women as much as it benefits men. I did not invent this fact, and I don’t like saying it, but it’s a sad truth, backed up by study after study. By contrast, marriage as an institution has always been terrifically beneficial for men. If you are a man, say the actuarial charts, the smartest decision you can possibly make for yourself—assuming that you would like to lead a long, happy, healthy, prosperous existence—is to get married. Married men perform dazzlingly better in life than single men. Married men live longer than single men; married men accumulate more wealth than single men; married men excel at their careers above single men; married men are far less likely to die a violent death than single men; married men report themselves to be much happier than single men; and married men suffer less from alcoholism, drug addiction, and depression than do single men.

“A system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness than marriage,” wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1813, but he was dead wrong, or at least with regard to male human happiness. There doesn’t seem to be anything, statistically speaking, that a man does not gain by getting married.

Dishearteningly, the reverse is not true. Modern married women do not fare better in life than their single counterparts. Married women in America do not live longer than single women; married women do not accumulate as much wealth as single women (you take a 7 percent pay cut, on average, just for getting hitched); married women do not thrive in their careers to the extent single women do; married women are significantly less healthy than single women; married women are more likely to suffer from depression than single women; and married women are more likely to die a violent death than single women—usually at the hands of a husband, which raises the grim reality that, statistically speaking, the most dangerous person in the average woman’s life is her own man.

All this adds up to what puzzled sociologists call the “Marriage Benefit Imbalance”—a tidy name for an almost freakishly doleful conclusion: that women generally lose in the exchange of marriage vows, while men win big.

Now before we all lie down under our desks and weep—which is what this conclusion makes me want to do—I must assure everyone that the situation is getting better. As the years go by and more women become autonomous, the Marriage Benefit Imbalance diminishes, and there are some factors that can narrow this inequity considerably. The more education a married woman has, the more money she earns, the later in life she marries, the fewer children she bears, and the more help her husband offers with household chores, the better her quality of life in marriage will be. If there was ever a good moment in Western history, then, for a woman to become a wife, this would probably be it. If you are advising your daughter on her future, and you want her to be a happy adult someday, then you might want to encourage her to finish her schooling, delay marriage for as long as possible, earn her own living, limit the number of children she has, and find a man who doesn’t mind cleaning the bathtub. Then your daughter may have a chance at leading a life that is nearly as healthy and wealthy and happy as her future husband’s life will be.

Nearly.

Because even though the gap has narrowed, the Marriage Benefit Imbalance persists. Given that this is the case, we must pause here for a moment to consider the mystifying question of why—when marriage has been shown again and again to be disproportionately disadvantageous to them—so many women still long for it so deeply. You could argue that maybe women just haven’t read the statistics, but I don’t think the question is that simple. There’s something else going on here about women and marriage—something deeper, something more emotional, something that a mere public service campaign (DO NOT GET MARRIED UNTIL YOU ARE AT LEAST THIRTY YEARS OLD AND ECONOMICALLY SOLVENT!!!) is unlikely to change or to shape.

Puzzled by this paradox, I brought up the question by e-mail with some friends of mine back in the States—female friends whom I knew were longing to find husbands. Their deep craving for matrimony was something I had never personally experienced and therefore could never really understand, but now I wanted to see it through their eyes.

“What’s this all about?” I asked.

I got some thoughtful answers, and some funny answers. One woman composed a long meditation on her desire to find a man who might become, as she elegantly put it, “the co-witness I have always longed for in life.” Another friend said that she wanted to raise a family with somebody “if only to have babies. I want to finally use these giant breasts of mine for their intended purpose.” But women can build partnerships and have babies these days outside of matrimony, so why the specific yearning for legal marriage?

When I posed the question again, another single friend replied, “Wanting to get married, for me, is all about a desire to feel chosen.” She went on to write that while the concept of building a life together with another adult was appealing, what really pulled at her heart was the desire for a wedding, a public event “that will unequivocally prove to everyone, especially to myself, that I am precious enough to have been selected by somebody forever.”

Now, you could say that my friend had been brainwashed by the American mass media, which has been relentlessly selling her this fantasy of womanly perfection forever (the beautiful bride in the white gown, wearing a halo of flowers and lace, surrounded by solicitous ladies-in-waiting), but I don’t entirely buy that explanation. My friend is an intelligent, well-read, thoughtful, and sane adult; I do not happen to believe that animated Disney features or afternoon soap operas have taught her to desire what she desires. I believe she arrived at these desires entirely on her own.

I also believe that this woman should not be condemned or judged for wanting what she wants. My friend is a person of great heart. Her enormous capacity for love has all too often been left unmatched and unreturned by the world. As such, she struggles with some very serious unfulfilled emotional yearnings and questions about her own value. That being the case, what better confirmation of her preciousness could she summon than a ceremony in a beautiful church, where she could be regarded by all in attendance as a princess, a virgin, an angel, a treasure beyond rubies? Who could fault her for wanting to know—just once—what that feels like?

I hope she gets to experience that—with the right person, of course. Thankfully, my friend is mentally stable enough that she has not run out and hastily married some deeply inappropriate man in order to bring to life her wedding fantasies. But surely there are other women out there who have made that exchange—trading in their future well-being (and 7 percent of their incomes, and, let us not forget, a few years off their life expectancy) for one afternoon’s irrefutably public proof of worth. And I must say it again: I will not ridicule such an urge. As someone who has herself always longed to be regarded as precious, and who has often done foolish things in order to test that regard, I get it. But I also get that we women in particular must work very hard to keep our fantasies as clearly and cleanly delineated from our realities as possible, and that sometimes it can take years of effort to reach such a point of sober discernment.

I think of my friend Christine, who realized—on the eve of her fortieth birthday—that she had been postponing her real life forever, waiting for the validation of a wedding day before she could regard herself as an adult. Never having walked down an aisle in a white dress and a veil, she, too, had never felt chosen. For a couple of decades, then, she had just been going through the motions—working, exercising, eating, sleeping—but all the while secretly waiting. But as her fortieth birthday approached, and no man stepped forward to crown her as his princess, she came to realize that all this waiting was ridiculous. No, it was beyond ridiculous: It was an imprisonment. She was being held hostage by an idea she came to call the “Tyranny of the Bride,” and she decided that she had to break that enchantment.

So this is what she did: On the morning of her fortieth birthday, my friend Christine went down to the northern Pacific Ocean at dawn. It was a cold and overcast day. Nothing romantic about it. She brought with her a small wooden boat that she had built with her own hands. She filled the little boat with rose petals and rice—artifacts of a symbolic wedding. She walked out into the cold water, right up to her chest, and set that boat on fire. Then she let it go—releasing along with it her most tenacious fantasies of marriage as an act of personal salvation. Christine told me later that, as the sea took away the Tyranny of the Bride forever (still burning), she felt transcendent and mighty, as though she were physically carrying herself across some critical threshold. She had finally married her own life, and not a moment too soon.

So that’s one way to do it.

To be perfectly honest, though, this kind of brave and willful act of self-selection was never modeled for me within my own family’s history. I never saw anything like Christine’s boat as I was growing up. I never saw any woman actively marrying her own life. The women who have been most influential to me (mother, grandmothers, aunties) have all been married women in the most traditional sense, and all of them, I would have to submit, gave up a good deal of themselves in that exchange. I don’t need to be told by any sociologist about something called the Marriage Benefit Imbalance; I have witnessed it firsthand since childhood.

Moreover, I don’t have to look very far to explain why that imbalance exists. In my family, at least, the great lack of parity between husbands and wives has always been spawned by the disproportionate degree of self-sacrifice that women are willing to make on behalf of those they love. As the psychologist Carol Gilligan has written, “Women’s sense of integrity seems to be entwined with an ethic of care, so that to see themselves as women is to see themselves in a relationship of connection.” This fierce instinct for entwinement has often caused the women in my family to make choices that are bad for them—to repeatedly give up their own health or their own time or their own best interests on behalf of what they perceive as the greater good—perhaps in order to consistently reinforce an imperative sense of specialness, of chosenness, of connection.

I suspect this may be the case in many other families, too. Please be assured that I know there are exceptions and anomalies. I myself have personally witnessed households where the husbands give up more than the wives, or do more child rearing and housekeeping than the wives, or take over more of the traditional feminine nurturing roles than the wives—but I can count those households on exactly one hand. (A hand that I now raise, by the way, to salute those men with enormous admiration and respect.) But the statistics of the last United States Census tell the real story: In 2000, there were about 5.3 million stay-at-home mothers in America, and only about 140,000 stay-at-home dads. That translates into a stay-at-home-dad rate of only about 2.6 percent of all stay-at-home parents. As of this writing, that survey is already a decade old, so let’s hope the ratio is changing. But it can’t change fast enough for my tastes. And such a rare creature—the father who mothers—has never been a character anywhere in the history of my family.

I do not entirely understand why the women to whom I am related give over so much of themselves to the care of others, or why I’ve inherited such a big dose of that impulse myself—the impulse to always mend and tend, to weave elaborate nets of care for others, even sometimes to my own detriment. Is such behavior learned? Inherited? Expected? Biologically predetermined? Conventional wisdom gives us only two explanations for this female tendency toward self-sacrifice, and neither satisfies me. We are either told that women are genetically hardwired to be caretakers, or we are told that women have been duped by an unjustly patriarchal world into believing that they’re genetically hardwired to be caretakers. These two opposing views mean that we are always either glorifying or pathologizing women’s selflessness. Women who give up everything for others are seen as either paragons or suckers, saints or fools. I’m not crazy about either explanation, because I don’t see the faces of my female relatives in any of those descriptions. I refuse to accept that the story of women isn’t more nuanced than that.

Consider, for instance, my mother. And believe me—I have been considering my mother, every single day since I found out I would be marrying again, since I do believe that one should at least try to understand one’s mother’s marriage before embarking on a marriage of one’s own. Psychologists suggest that we must reach back at least three generations to look for clues whenever we begin untangling the emotional legacy of any one family’s history. It’s almost as though we have to look at the story in 3-D, with each dimension representing one unfolding generation.

While my grandmother had been a typical Depression-era farm-wife, my mother belonged to that generation of women I call “feminist cuspers.” Mom was just a tiny bit too old to have been part of the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s. She had been raised to believe that a lady should be married and have children for exactly the same reason that a lady’s handbag and shoes should always match: because this was what was done. Mom came of age in the 1950s, after all, during an era when a popular family advice doctor named Paul Landes preached that every single adult in America should be married, “except for the sick, the badly crippled, the deformed, the emotionally warped and the mentally defective.”

Trying to put myself back into that time, trying to understand more clearly the expectations of marriage that my mother had been raised with, I ordered online an old matrimonial propaganda film from the year 1950 called Marriage for Moderns. The film was produced by McGraw-Hill, and it was based on the scholarship and research of one Professor Henry A. Bowman, Ph.D., chairman of the Division of Home and Family, Department of Marriage Education, Stephens College, Missouri. When I stumbled on this old relic, I thought, “Lordy, here we go,” and I set myself up to be fully entertained by a bunch of tacky, campy, postwar drivel about the sanctity of the home and hearth—starring coiffed actors in pearls and neckties, basking in the glow of their perfect, model children.

But the movie surprised me. The story begins with an ordinary-looking young couple, modestly dressed, sitting on a city park bench, talking to each other in quiet seriousness. Over the image, an authoritative male narrator speaks about how difficult and terrifying it can be “in the America of today” for a young couple even to consider marriage, given how rough life has become. Our cities are haunted by “a social blight called slums,” the narrator explains, and we all live in “an age of impermanence, an age of unrest and confusion, under the constant threat of war.” The economy is troubled, and “rising living costs vie against flagging earning power.” (Here, we see a young man walking dejectedly past a sign on an office building reading NO JOBS AVAILABLE, DO NOT APPLY.) Meanwhile, “for every four marriages, one ends in divorce.” It’s no wonder, then, that it’s so difficult for couples to commit to matrimony. “It is not cowardice that gives people pause,” the narrator explains, “but stark reality.”

I could not quite believe what I was hearing. “Stark reality” was not what I had expected to find here. Hadn’t that decade been our Golden Age—our sweet national matrimonial Eden, back when family, work, and marriage were all sanctified, straightforward ideals? But as this film suggested, for some couples, at least, questions about marriage were no simpler in 1950 than they have ever been.

The film specifically highlights the story of Phyllis and Chad, a recently married young couple trying to make ends meet. When we first meet Phyllis, she’s standing in her kitchen, washing dishes. But the voice-over tells us that only a few years earlier, this same young woman “was staining slides in the pathology lab at the university, making her own living, living her own life.” Phyllis had been a career girl, we are told, with an advanced degree, and she had loved her work. (“Being a bachelor girl wasn’t the social disgrace it was when our parents called them spinsters.”) As the camera catches Phyllis shopping for groceries, the narrator explains, “Phyllis didn’t marry because she had to. She could take it or leave it. Moderns like Phyllis think of marriage as a voluntary state. Freedom of choice—it’s a modern privilege and a modern responsibility.” Phyllis, we are told, volunteered for marriage only because she decided that she wanted a family and children more than she wanted a career. That was her decision to make, and she stands by it even though her sacrifice has been a significant one.

Soon enough, though, we see signs of strain.

Phyllis and Chad had apparently met in math class at the university, where “she had gotten better grades. But now he’s an engineer and she’s a housewife.” Phyllis is shown dutifully ironing her husband’s shirts at home one afternoon. But then our heroine finds herself distracted when she stumbles on the plans her husband has been drawing up for a big building competition. She takes out her slide rule and starts checking up on his figures, just as she knows he would want her to. (“They both know she’s better at math than he is.”) She loses track of time, becoming so engaged in her calculations that she leaves the ironing unfinished; then she suddenly remembers that she’s late for her appointment at the health clinic, where she’s going to discuss her (first) pregnancy. She had entirely forgotten about the baby inside her because she was so captivated by her mathematical calculations.

Sweet heavens, I thought, what kind of 1950s housewife is this?

“A typical one,” the narrator tells me, as though he had heard my question. “A modern one.”

Our story continues. Later that night, pregnant Phyllis the math wiz and her cute husband Chad sit in their tiny apartment, smoking cigarettes together. (Ah, the fresh nicotine taste of 1950s pregnancies!) Together, they are working on Chad’s engineering plans for the new building. The phone rings. It’s a friend of Chad’s; he wants to go to the movies. Chad looks to Phyllis for approval. But Phyllis argues against it. The competition deadline is coming up next week and the plans need to be completed. The two have been working so hard on this! But Chad really wants to see the movie. Phyllis holds her ground; their whole future rests on this work! Chad looks disappointed, almost childishly so. But he relents in the end, sulking a bit, and allows Phyllis to literally push him back to the drawing table.

Our omniscient narrator, analyzing this scene, approves. Phyllis is not a nag, he explains. She has every right to demand that Chad stay home and complete a business project that could advance them both mightily in the world.

“She gave up her career for him,” says our sonorous male narrator, “and she wants to see something come of it.”

I felt a strange combination of embarrassment and emotion as I watched this film. I was embarrassed that I’d never before imagined American couples of the 1950s having conversations like this. Why had I unquestioningly swallowed the conventional cultural nostalgia, that this era had somehow been a “simpler time”? What time has ever been a simple time for those who are living it? Also, I was touched that the filmmakers were defending Phyllis in their own small way, trying to get across this vital message to the young grooms of America: “Your beautiful, intelligent bride just gave up everything for you, buster—so you’d damn well better honor her sacrifice by working hard and giving her a life of prosperity and security.”

Moreover, I found myself moved that this unexpectedly sympathetic response to a woman’s sacrifice had come from somebody as clearly male and authoritative as Dr. Henry A. Bowman, Ph.D., Chairman of the Division of Home and Family, Department of Marriage Education, Stephens College, Missouri.

That said, I couldn’t help wondering what would happen to Phyllis and Chad about twenty years down the road—when the children were older and the prosperity had been achieved, and Phyllis had no life whatsoever outside of the home, and Chad was starting to wonder why he’d given up so much personal pleasure over the years to be a good and faithful provider, only to be rewarded now with a frustrated wife, rebellious teenage children, a sagging body, and a tedious career. For wouldn’t those be the very questions that would explode across American families in the late 1970s, running so many marriages off the rails? Could Dr. Bowman—or anybody else back in 1950, for that matter—ever have anticipated the cultural storm that was coming?

Oh, good luck, Chad and Phyllis!

Good luck, everyone!

Good luck, my mother and father!

Because, while my mom may have defined herself as a 1950s bride (despite having married in 1966, her assumptions about marriage hearkened back to Mamie Eisenhower), history dictated that she grow into a 1970s wife. She had been married only five years, and her daughters were barely out of diapers, when the big wave of feminist turbulence really hit America and shook every assumption about marriage and sacrifice she’d ever been taught.

Mind you, feminism did not arrive overnight, as it sometimes seems. It’s not as though women across the Western world just woke up one morning during the Nixon administration, decided they’d had enough, and took to the streets. Feminist ideas had been circulating through Europe and North America for decades before my mother was even born, but it took—ironically—the unprecedented economic prosperity of the 1950s to unleash the upheaval that defined the 1970s. Once their families’ basic survival needs had been met on such a wide scale, women could finally turn their attention to such finer-point topics as social injustice and even their own emotional desires. What’s more, suddenly there existed in America a massive middle class (my mother was one of its newest members, having been raised poor but trained as a nurse and married to a chemical engineer); within that middle class, labor-saving innovations such as washing machines, refrigerators, processed food, mass-manufactured clothing, and hot running water (comforts that my Grandma Maude could have only dreamed about back in the 1930s) freed up women’s time for the first moment in history—or at least freed up women’s time somewhat.

Moreover, because of mass media, a woman didn’t have to live in a big city anymore to hear revolutionary new notions; newspapers, television, and radio could bring newfangled social concepts right into your Iowa kitchen. So a vast population of ordinary women had the time now (as well as the health, the interconnectedness, and the literacy) to start asking questions like “Wait a minute—what do I really want out of my life? What do I want for my daughters? Why am I still putting a meal in front of this man every night? What if I want to work outside the home, too? Is it permissible for me to get myself an education, even if my husband is uneducated? Why can’t I open up my own checking account, by the way? And is it really necessary for me to keep having all these babies?”

That last question was the most important and transformative of all. While limited forms of birth control had been available in America since the 1920s (to non-Catholic married women with money, anyhow), it wasn’t until the second half of the twentieth century—and the invention and wide availability of the Pill, that the entire social conversation about child rearing and marriage could finally change. As the historian Stephanie Coontz has written, “Until women had access to safe and effective contraception that let them control when to bear children and how many to have, there was only so far they could go in reorganizing their lives and their marriages.”

Whereas my grandmother had borne seven children, my mother bore only two. That’s a massive difference within just one generation. Mom also had a vacuum cleaner and indoor plumbing, so things were a little easier for her all around. This left a sliver of time in my mother’s life to start thinking about other things, and by the 1970s, there were a lot of other things to think about. My mother never identified herself as a feminist—I do want to make that clear. Still, she was not deaf to the voices of this new feminist revolution. As an observant middle child from a large family, my mother had always been a keen listener—and believe me, she listened very carefully to everything that was being said about women’s rights, and a good deal of it made sense to her. For the first time, ideas were being openly discussed that she had been silently pondering for a good long while.

Foremost among these were issues relating to women’s bodies and women’s sexual health, and the hypocrisies intertwined therein. Back in her small Minnesota farming community, my mother had grown up witnessing a particularly unpleasant drama unfold year after year, in household after household, when inevitably a young girl would find herself pregnant and would “have to get married.” In fact, this was how most marriages came to pass. But every time it happened—every single time—it would be treated as a full-on scandal for the girl’s family and a crisis of public humiliation for the girl herself. Every single time, the community behaved as though such a shocking event had never before occurred, much less five times a year, in families from every possible background.

Yet somehow the young man in question—the impregnator—was spared disgrace. He was generally allowed to be seen as an innocent, or sometimes even as the victim of seduction or entrapment. If he married the girl, she was deemed lucky. It was an act of charity, almost. If he didn’t marry her, the girl would be sent away for the duration of the pregnancy, while the boy remained in school, or on the farm, carrying on as if nothing had happened. It was as though, in the community’s mind, the boy had not even been present in the room when the original sexual act had occurred. His role in the conception was strangely, almost biblically, immaculate.

My mother had observed this drama throughout her formative years and at a young age arrived at a rather sophisticated conclusion: If you have a society in which female sexual morality means everything, and male sexual morality means nothing, then you have a very warped and unethical society. She’d never attached such specific words to these feelings before, but when women began to speak up in the early 1970s, she heard these ideas vocalized at last. Amid all the other issues on the feminist agenda—equal employment opportunity, equal access to education, equal rights under the law, more parity between husbands and wives—what really spoke to my mother’s heart was this one question of societal sexual fairness.

Empowered by her convictions, she got a job working at Planned Parenthood in Torrington, Connecticut. She took this job back when my sister and I were still quite young. Her nursing skills got her the job, but it was her innate managerial ability that made her such a vital part of the team. Soon my mother was coordinating the whole Planned Parenthood office, which had started out in a residential living room but quickly grew into a proper health clinic. Those were heady days. This was back when it was still considered renegade to openly discuss contraception or—heaven forbid—abortion. Condoms were still illegal in Connecticut back when I’d been conceived, and a local bishop had recently testified before the state legislature that if restrictions on contraceptives were removed, the state would “be a mass of smoldering ruin” within twenty-five years.

My mother loved her job. She was on the front lines of an actual health-care revolution, breaking all the rules by talking openly about human sexuality, trying to get a Planned Parenthood clinic launched in every county across the state, empowering young women to make their own choices about their bodies, debunking myths and rumors about pregnancy and venereal disease, fighting prudish laws, and—most of all—offering options to tired mothers (and to tired fathers, for that matter) that had never before been available. It was as though through her work she found a way to pay back all those cousins and aunts and female friends and neighbors who had suffered in the past for their absence of choices. My mom had been a hard worker her whole life, but this job—this career—became an expression of her very being, and she loved every minute of it.

But then, in 1976, she quit.

Her decision was sealed the week that she had an important conference to attend in Hartford, and my sister and I both fell sick with the chicken pox. We were ten and seven years old at the time, and of course we had to stay home from school. My mom asked my father if he would take off two days from work to stay home with us so she could attend the conference. He wouldn’t do it.

Listen, I don’t want to chastise my father here. I love that man with all my heart, and I must say in his defense: Regrets have since been expressed. But just as my mother had been a 1950s bride, my father was a 1950s groom. He had never asked for, nor had he ever expected, a wife who would work outside the home. He didn’t ask for the feminist movement to arrive on his watch, and he wasn’t particularly passionate about women’s sexual health issues. He wasn’t all that excited about my mother’s job, when it all came down to it. What she saw as a career, he saw as a hobby. He didn’t object to her having this hobby—just as long as it didn’t interfere with his life in any measure. She could have her job, then, as long as she still took care of everything else at home. And there was a lot to be taken care of at our home, too, because my parents were not just raising a family but also running a small farm. Somehow though, until the chicken pox incident, my mother had managed to do everything. She had been working full-time, keeping the garden going, tending to the housework, making the meals, raising the children, milking the goats, and still being fully available to my father when he got home every night at five-thirty. But when the chicken pox hit and my dad would not give up two days of his life to help out with his kids, suddenly it was too much.

My mother made her choice that week. She quit her job and decided to stay home with my sister and me. It wasn’t like she would never work outside the home again (she would always have some part-time job or another while we were growing up), but as for her career? That was finished. As she explained to me later, she came to feel she had a choice: She could either have a family or she could have a calling, but she couldn’t figure how to do both without support and encouragement from her husband. So she quit.

Needless to say, it was a low point in her marriage. In the hands of a different woman, this incident could have spelled out the end of the marriage altogether. Certainly a lot of other women in my mother’s circle seemed to be getting divorced around 1976, and for similar sorts of reasons. But my mother is not one for rash decisions. She carefully and quietly studied the working mothers who were getting divorces, and tried to gauge whether their lives were any better off. She didn’t always see tremendous improvement, to be honest. These women had been tired and conflicted when they were married, and now, divorced, they still seemed tired and conflicted. It appeared to my mother that they had maybe only replaced their old troubles with a whole new set of troubles—including new boyfriends and new husbands who perhaps weren’t such a big trade-up anyhow. Beyond all this, though, my mother was (and is) at her core a conservative person. She believed in the sanctity of marriage. What’s more, she still happened to love my dad, even though she was angry at him and even though he had disappointed her deeply.

So she made her decision, stuck with her vows, and this is how she framed it: “I chose my family.”

Am I making far too obvious a point here if I say that many, many women have also faced this kind of choice? For some reason, Johnny Cash’s wife comes to mind: “I could’ve made more records,” June said, later in her life, “but I wanted to have a marriage.” There are endless stories like this. I call it the “New England Cemetery Syndrome.” Visit any New England graveyard filled with two or three centuries of history and you will find clusters of family gravestones—often lined up in a neat row—of one infant after another, one winter after another, sometimes for years on end. Babies died. They died in droves. And the mothers did what they had to do: They buried what they had lost, grieved, and somehow moved on to survive another winter.

Modern women, of course, don’t have to deal with such bitter losses—at least not routinely, at least not literally, or at least not yearly, as so many of our ancestors had to. This is a blessing. But don’t necessarily be fooled into thinking that modern life is therefore easy, or that modern life carries no grieving and loss for women anymore. I believe that many modern women, my mother included, carry within them a whole secret New England cemetery, wherein they have quietly buried—in neat little rows—the personal dreams they have given up for their families. June Carter Cash’s never-recorded songs rest in that silent graveyard, for instance, alongside my mother’s modest but eminently worthy career.

And so these women adapt to their new reality. They grieve in their own ways—often invisibly—and move on. The women in my family, anyhow, are very good at swallowing disappointment and moving on. They have, it has always seemed to me, a sort of talent for changing form, enabling them to dissolve and then flow around the needs of their partners, or the needs of their children, or the needs of mere quotidian reality. They adjust, adapt, glide, accept. They are mighty in their malleability, almost to the point of a superhuman power. I grew up watching a mother who became with every new day whatever that day required of her. She produced gills when she needed gills, grew wings when the gills became obsolete, manifested ferocious speed when speed was required, and demonstrated epic patience in other more subtle circumstances.

My father had none of that elasticity. He was a man, an engineer, fixed and steady. He was always the same. He was Dad. He was the rock in the stream. We all moved around him, but my mother most of all. She was mercury, the tide. Due to this supreme adaptability, she created the best possible world for us within her home. She made the decision to quit her job and stay home because she believed this choice would most benefit her family, and, I must say, it did benefit us. When Mom quit her job, all of our lives (except hers, I mean) became much nicer. My dad had a full-time wife again, and Catherine and I had a full-time mom. My sister and I, to be honest, hadn’t loved the days when Mom worked at Planned Parenthood. There were no quality daycare options in our hometown back then, so we’d often find ourselves having to go to the houses of various neighbors after school. Aside from happy access to our neighborhood televisions (we didn’t have the stupendous luxury of TV in our own house), Catherine and I always hated these patched-together babysitting arrangements. Frankly, we were delighted when our mother gave up her dreams and came home to take care of us.

Most of all, though, I believe that my sister and I benefited incalculably from Mom’s decision to stay married to our father. Divorce sucks for kids, and it can leave lingering psychological scars. We were spared all that. We had an attentive mom at home who met us at the door every day after school, who supervised our daily lives, and who had dinner on the table when our dad got home from work. Unlike so many of my friends from broken homes, I never had to meet my father’s icky new girlfriend; Christmases were always in the same place; a sense of constancy in the household allowed me to focus on my homework rather than on my family’s heartache . . . and therefore I prospered.

But I just want to say here—to lock it forever in print, if only to honor my mother—that an awful lot of my advantages as a child were built on the ashes of her personal sacrifice. The fact remains that while our family as a whole profited immensely from my mother’s quitting her career, her life as an individual did not necessarily benefit so immensely. In the end, she did just what her female predecessors had always done: She sewed winter coats for her children from the leftover material of her heart’s more quiet desires.

And this is my beef, by the way, with social conservatives who are always harping about how the most nourishing home for a child is a two-parent household with a mother in the kitchen. If I—as a beneficiary of that exact formula—will concede that my own life was indeed enriched by that precise familial structure, will the social conservatives please (for once!) concede that this arrangement has always put a disproportionately cumbersome burden on women? Such a system demands that mothers become selfless to the point of near invisibility in order to construct these exemplary environments for their families. And might those same social conservatives—instead of just praising mothers as “sacred” and “noble”—be willing to someday join a larger conversation about how we might work together as a society to construct a world where healthy children can be raised and healthy families can prosper without women having to scrape bare the walls of their own souls to do it?

Excuse me for the rant.

This is just a really, really big issue of mine.

M aybe it is precisely because I have seen the cost of motherhood in the lives of women I love and admire that I stand here, nearly forty years old, feeling no desire whatsoever for a baby of my own.

Of course this is a rather important question to discuss on the brink of marriage, and so I must address it here—if only because child rearing and marriage are so inherently linked in our culture and in our minds. We all know the refrain, right? First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage? Even the very word “matrimony” comes to us from the Latin word for mother. We don’t call marriage “patrimony.” Matrimony carries an intrinsic assumption of motherhood, as though it is the babies themselves who make the marriage. Actually, often it is the babies themselves who make the marriage: Not only have many couples throughout history been forced into marriage thanks to an unplanned pregnancy, but sometimes couples waited until a successful pregnancy occurred before sealing the deal with matrimony in order to ensure that fertility would not later be a problem. How else could you find out whether your prospective bride or groom was a productive breeder except by giving the engine a test run? This was often the case in early American colonial society, in which—as the historian Nancy Cott has discovered—many small communities considered pregnancy to be a stigma-free, socially accepted signal that it was now time for a young couple to tie the knot.

But with modernity and the easy availability of birth control, the whole issue of procreation has become more nuanced and tricky. Now the equation is no longer “babies beget matrimony,” or even necessarily “matrimony begets babies”; instead, these days it all comes down to three critical questions: when, how, and whether. Should you and your spouse happen to disagree on any of these questions, married life can become extremely complicated, because often our feelings about these three questions can be nonnegotiable.

I know this from painful personal experience because my first marriage fell apart—to a large extent—over the question of children. My then-husband had always assumed that we would have babies together one day. He had every right to make that assumption, since I had always assumed it myself, though I wasn’t entirely sure when I would want babies. The prospect of eventual pregnancy and parenthood had seemed comfortably distant on my wedding day; it was an event that would happen sometime “in the future,” “at the right moment,” and “when we were both ready.” But the future sometimes approaches us more quickly than we expect, and the right moment doesn’t always announce itself with clarity. The problems that existed within my marriage soon made me doubt whether this man and I would ever be ready, truly, to endure such a challenge as raising children.

Moreover, while the vague idea of motherhood had always seemed natural to me, the reality—as it approached—only filled me with dread and sorrow. As I got older, I discovered that nothing within me cried out for a baby. My womb did not seem to have come equipped with that famously ticking clock. Unlike so many of my friends, I did not ache with longing whenever I saw an infant. (Though I did ache with longing, it is true, whenever I saw a good used-book shop.) Every morning, I would perform something like a CAT scan on myself, searching for a desire to be pregnant, but I never found it. There was no imperative there, and I believe that child rearing must come with an imperative, must be driven by a sense of longing and even destiny, because it is such a massively important undertaking. I’ve witnessed this longing in other people; I know what it looks like. But I never felt it in myself.

Moreover, as I aged, I discovered that I loved my work as a writer more and more, and I didn’t want to give up even an hour of that communion. Like Jinny in Virginia Woolf ’s The Waves, I felt at times “a thousand capacities” spring up in me, and I wanted to chase them all down and make every last one of them manifest. Decades ago, the novelist Katherine Mansfield wrote in one of her youthful diaries, “I want to work!”—and her emphasis, the hard-underlined passion of that yearning, still reaches across the decades and puts a crease in my heart.

I, too, wanted to work. Uninterruptedly. Joyfully.

How would I manage that, though, with a baby? Increasingly panicked by this question, and well aware of my then-husband’s growing impatience, I spent two frantic years interviewing every woman I could—married, single, childless, artistic, archetypally maternal—and I asked them about their choices, and the consequences of their choices. I was hoping their answers might resolve all my questions, but their answers covered such a wide range of experience that I found myself only more confused in the end.

For instance, I met one woman (an artist who worked at home) who said, “I had my doubts, too, but the minute my baby was born, everything else in my life fell away. Nothing is more important to me now than my son.”

But another woman (whom I would define as one of the best mothers I’ve ever met, and whose grown kids are wonderful and successful) admitted to me privately and even shockingly, “Looking back on it all now, I’m not at all convinced that my life was really bettered in any way by the choice to have children. I gave up altogether too much, and I regret it. It’s not that I don’t adore my kids, but honestly, I sometimes wish I could have all those lost years back.”

A fashionable, charismatic West Coast businesswoman, on the other hand, said to me, “The one thing nobody ever warned me about when I started having babies was this: Brace yourself for the happiest years of your life. I never saw that coming. The joy of it has been like an avalanche.”

But I also talked to an exhausted single mom (a gifted novelist) who said, “Raising a child is the very definition of ambivalence. I am overwhelmed at times by how something can simultaneously be so awful and so rewarding.”

Another creative friend of mine said, “Yes, you lose a lot of your freedoms. But as a mother, you gain a new kind of freedom as well—the freedom to love another human being unconditionally, with all your heart. That’s a freedom worth experiencing, too.”

Still another friend, who had left her career as an editor to stay home with her three children, warned me, “Think very carefully about this decision, Liz. It’s difficult enough to be a mom when it’s what you really want to do. Don’t even go near child rearing until you’re absolutely sure.”

Another woman, though, who has managed to keep her vibrant career thriving even with three kids, and who sometimes takes her children with her on overseas business trips, said, “Just go for it. It’s not that hard. You just have to push against all the forces that tell you what you can’t do anymore now that you’re a mom.”

But I was also deeply touched when I met a renowned photographer, now in her sixties, who made this simple comment to me on the topic of children: “I never had ’em, honey. And I never missed ’em.”

Do you see a pattern here?

I didn’t.

Because there wasn’t a pattern. There was just a whole bunch of smart women trying to work things out on their own terms, trying to navigate somehow by their own instincts. Whether I myself should ever be a mother was clearly not a question that any of these women were going to be able to answer for me. I would need to make that choice myself. And the stakes of my choice were personally titanic. Declaring that I did not want to have children effectively meant the end of my marriage. There were other reasons I left that marriage (there were aspects of our relationship that were frankly preposterous), but the question of children was the final blow. There is no compromise position on this question after all.

So, he fumed; I cried; we divorced.

But that’s another book.

Given all that history, it should not be surprising to anyone that, after a few years alone, I met and fell in love with Felipe—an older man with a pair of beautiful, adult children, who had not one smidgen of interest whatsoever in repeating the experience of fatherhood. It is also no accident that Felipe fell in love with me—a childless woman in the waning years of her fertility who adored his kids but who had not one smidgen of interest whatsoever in becoming a mother herself.

That relief—the great thrumming relief that we both felt when we discovered that neither one of us was going to coerce the other into parenthood—still sends a pleasant vibrating hum across our life together. I still can’t entirely get over it. For some reason, I had never once considered the possibility that I might be allowed to have a lifelong male companion without also being expected to have children. This is how deeply the incantation of “first-comes-love-then-comes-marriage-then-comes-baby-in-the-baby-carriage” had penetrated my consciousness; I had honestly neglected to notice that you could opt out of the baby carriage business and nobody—not in our country anyhow—would arrest you for it. And the fact that, upon meeting Felipe, I also inherited two wonderful adult stepchildren was a bonus gift. Felipe’s kids need my love and they need my support, but they do not need my mothering; they had already been beautifully mothered long before I ever arrived on the scene. Best of all, though, by introducing Felipe’s children into my own extended family, I pulled off the ultimate generational magic trick: I provided my parents with an extra set of grandchildren, without ever having to raise babies of my own. Even now, the freedom and abundance of it all feels something close to miraculous.

Being exempted from motherhood has also allowed me to become exactly the person I believe I was meant to be: not merely a writer, not merely a traveler, but also—in a quite marvelous fashion—an aunt. A childless aunt, to be exact—which puts me in extremely good company, because here’s an astonishing fact that I discovered in the margins of my research on marriage: If you look across human populations of all varieties, in every culture and on every continent (even among the most enthusiastic breeders in history, like the nineteenth-century Irish, or the contemporary Amish), you will find that there is a consistent 10 percent of women within any population who never have children at all. The percentage never gets any lower than that, in any population whatsoever. In fact, the percentage of women who never reproduce in most societies is usually much higher than 10 percent—and that’s not just today in the developed Western world, where childless rates among women tend to hover around 50 percent. In the 1920s in America, for instance, a whopping 23 percent of adult women never had any children. (Doesn’t that seem shockingly high, for such a conservative era, before the advent of legalized birth control? Yet it was so.) So the number can get pretty high. But it never goes below 10 percent.

All too often, those of us who choose to remain childless are accused of being somehow unwomanly or unnatural or selfish, but history teaches us that there have always been women who went through life without having babies. Many of those women deliberately elected to skip motherhood, either through avoiding sex with men altogether or through careful application of what the Victorian ladies once called “the precautionary arts.” (The sisterhood has always had its secrets and talents.) Other women, of course, had their childlessness thrust on them unwillingly—because of infertility, or disease, or spinsterhood, or a general shortage of eligible males due to wartime casualties. Whatever the reasons, though, widespread childlessness is not quite so modern a development as we tend to believe.

In any case, the number of women throughout history who never become mothers is so high (so consistently high) that I now suspect that a certain degree of female childlessness is an evolutionary adaptation of the human race. Maybe it’s not only perfectly legitimate for certain women to never reproduce, but also necessary. It’s as though, as a species, we need an abundance of responsible, compassionate, childless women on hand to support the wider community in various ways. Childbearing and child rearing consume so much energy that the women who do become mothers can quickly become swallowed up by that daunting task—if not outright killed by it. Thus, maybe we need extra females, women on the sidelines with undepleted energies, who are ready to leap into the mix and keep the tribe supported. Childless women have always been particularly essential in human society because they often take upon themselves the task of nurturing those who are not their official biological responsibility—and no other group does this to such a large degree. Childless women have always run orphanages and schools and hospitals. They are midwives and nuns and providers of charity. They heal the sick and teach the arts and often they become indispensable on the battlefield of life. Literally, in some cases. (Florence Nightingale comes to mind.)

Such childless women—let’s call them the “Auntie Brigade”—have never been very well honored by history, I’m afraid. They are called selfish, frigid, pathetic. Here’s one particularly nasty bit of conventional wisdom circulating out there about childless women that I need to dispel here, and that is this: that women who have no children may lead liberated and happy and wealthy lives when they are young, but they will ultimately regret that choice when they reach old age, for they shall all die alone and depressed and full of bitterness. Perhaps you’ve heard this old chestnut? Just to set the record straight: There is zero sociological evidence to back this up. In fact, recent studies of American nursing homes comparing happiness levels of elderly childless women against happiness levels of women who did have children show no pattern of special misery or joy in one group or the other. But here’s what the researchers did discover that makes elderly women miserable across the board: poverty and poor health. Whether you have children or not, then, the prescription seems clear: Save your money, floss your teeth, wear your seatbelt, and keep fit—and you’ll be a perfectly happy old bird someday, I guarantee you.

Just a little free advice there, from your Auntie Liz.

In leaving no descendents, however, childless aunts do tend to vanish from memory after a mere generation, quickly forgotten, their lives as transitory as butterflies. But they are vital as they live, and they can even be heroic. Even in my own family’s recent history, there are stories on both sides of truly magnificent aunties who stepped in and saved the day during emergencies. Often able to accrue education and resources precisely because they were childless, these women had enough spare income and compassion to pay for lifesaving operations, or to rescue the family farm, or to take in a child whose mother had fallen gravely ill. I have a friend who calls these sorts of child-rescuing aunties “sparents”—“spare parents”—and the world is filled with them.

Even within my own community, I can see where I have been vital sometimes as a member of the Auntie Brigade. My job is not merely to spoil and indulge my niece and nephew (though I do take that assignment to heart) but also to be a roving auntie to the world—an ambassador auntie—who is on hand wherever help is needed, in anybody’s family whatsoever. There are people I’ve been able to help, sometimes fully supporting them for years, because I am not obliged, as a mother would be obliged, to put all my energies and resources into the full-time rearing of a child. There are a whole bunch of Little League uniforms and orthodontist’s bills and college educations that I will never have to pay for, thereby freeing up resources to spread more widely across the community. In this way, I, too, foster life. There are many, many ways to foster life. And believe me, every single one of them is essential.

Jane Austen once wrote to a relative whose first nephew had just been born: “I have always maintained the importance of Aunts as much as possible. Now that you have become an Aunt, you are a person of some consequence.” Jane knew of which she spoke. She herself was a childless auntie, cherished by her nieces and nephews as a marvelous confidante, and remembered always for her “peals of laughter.”

Speaking of writers: From an admittedly biased perspective, I feel the need to mention here that Leo Tolstoy and Truman Capote and all the Brontë sisters were raised by their childless aunts after their real mothers had either died or abandoned them. Tolstoy claimed that his Aunt Toinette was the greatest influence of his life, as she taught him “the moral joy of love.” The historian Edward Gibbon, having been orphaned young, was raised by his beloved and childless Aunt Kitty. John Lennon was raised by his Aunt Mimi, who convinced the boy that he would be an important artist someday. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s loyal Aunt Annabel offered to pay for his college education. Frank Lloyd Wright’s first building was commissioned by his Aunts Jane and Nell—two lovely old maids who ran a boarding school in Spring Green, Wisconsin. Coco Chanel, orphaned as a child, was raised by her Aunt Gabrielle, who taught her how to sew—a useful skill for the girl, I think we would all agree. Virginia Woolf was deeply influenced by her Aunt Caroline, a Quaker spinster who devoted her life to charitable works, who heard voices and spoke to spirits, and who seemed, as Woolf recalled years later, “a kind of modern prophetess.”

Remember that critical moment in literary history when Marcel Proust bites into his famous madeleine cookie, thereby becoming so overwhelmed by nostalgia that he has no choice but to sit down and write the multivolume epic Remembrance of Things Past? That entire tsunami of eloquent nostalgia was set off by the specific memory of Marcel’s beloved Aunt Leonie, who, every Sunday after church, used to share her madeleines with the boy when he was a child.

And have you ever wondered what Peter Pan really looked like? His creator, J. M. Barrie, answered that question for us back in 1911. For Barrie, Peter Pan’s image and his essence and his marvelous spirit of felicity can be found all over the world, hazily reflected “in the faces of many women who have no children.”

That is the Auntie Brigade.

B ut this decision of mine—the decision to join the Auntie Brigade rather than enlist in the Mommy Corps—does set me off as being quite different from my own mother, and I still felt there was something that needed to be reconciled within that distinction. This is probably why, in the middle of my travels with Felipe, I called my mom one night from Laos, trying to settle some last lingering questions about her own life and her choices and how they related to my life and my choices.

We talked for over an hour. My mom was calm and thoughtful, as ever. She did not seem surprised by my line of questioning—in fact, she responded as though she’d been waiting for me to ask. Waiting, perhaps, for years.

First of all, right off the bat, she was quick to remind me: “I don’t regret anything I ever did for you kids.”

“You don’t regret giving up the work you loved?” I asked.

“I refuse to live in regret,” she said (which did not exactly answer the question, but felt like an honest start). “There was so much to love about those years I spent at home with you girls. I know you kids in a way that your father will never know you. I was there, witnessing your growth. It was a privilege to see you become adults. I wouldn’t have wanted to miss that.”

Also, my mother reminded me that she chose to stay married all those years to the same man because she happens to love my father dearly—which is a good point, and one well taken. It is true that my parents connect not only as friends, but also very much on a bodily level. They are physical in every way together—hiking, biking, and farming side by side. I remember phoning home from college late one winter’s night and catching the two of them out of breath. “What have you guys been up to?” I asked, and my mom, giddy with laughter, announced, “We’ve been sledding!” They had absconded with their ten-year-old neighbor’s toboggan and had been making midnight runs down the icy hill behind our house—my mom lying on my father’s back and shrieking with adrenalized pleasure while he steered the speeding sled through the moonlight. Who still does this in middle age?

My parents have always had a certain sexual chemistry, ever since the day they met. “He looked like Paul Newman,” my mom recalls of their first encounter, and when my sister once asked my father about his favorite memory of my mom, he did not hesitate to reply, “I have always loved the pleasing nature of your mother’s form.” He still loves it. My dad is always grabbing at my mom’s body as she walks by in the kitchen, always checking her out, admiring her legs, lusting after her. She swats him away with fake shock: “John! Stop it!” But you can tell she relishes the attention. I grew up watching that play out, and I think that’s a rare gift—knowing that your parents are physically satisfying to each other. So one big part of my parent’s marriage, as my mother was reminding me, has always been lodged somewhere beyond the rational, hidden someplace deep in the sexual body. And that degree of intimacy is something beyond any explanation, beyond any argument.

Then there is the companionship. My parents have been married for over forty years now. By and large they’ve worked out their deal. They live in a pretty smooth routine, their habits polished by time’s current. They orbit each other in the same basic pattern every day: coffee, dog, breakfast, newspaper, garden, bills, chores, radio, lunch, groceries, dog, dinner, reading, dog, bed . . . and repeat.

The poet Jack Gilbert (no relation, sadly for me) wrote that marriage is what happens “between the memorable.” He said that we often look back on our marriages years later, perhaps after one spouse has died, and all we can recall are “the vacations, and emergencies”—the high points and low points. The rest of it blends into a blurry sort of daily sameness. But it is that very blurred sameness, the poet argues, that comprises marriage. Marriage is those two thousand indistinguishable conversations, chatted over two thousand indistinguishable breakfasts, where intimacy turns like a slow wheel. How do you measure the worth of becoming that familiar to somebody—so utterly well known and so thoroughly ever-present that you become an almost invisible necessity, like air?

Also, my mom had the grace to remind me that night, when I called her from Laos, that she is far from a saint, and that my dad has had to give up parts of himself, too, in order to stay married to her. As my mother generously admitted, she is not always the easiest person to be married to. My father has had to learn how to tolerate and endure the effects of being managed at every turn by a hyperorganized wife. In this regard, the two of them are horribly ill-matched. My father takes life as it comes; my mother makes life happen. An example: My father was out working in the garage one day when he accidentally stirred a small bird from its nest in the rafters. Confused and afraid, the bird settled on the brim of my dad’s hat. Not wanting to disturb it any further, my father sat for about an hour on the floor of the garage until the bird decided to fly away. This is a very Dad story. Such a thing would never happen to my mother. She is far too busy to allow dazed little birds to rest on her head while there are chores to be done. Mom waits for no bird.

Also, while it’s true that my mother has given up more of her personal ambitions in marriage than my father ever did, she demands far more out of marriage than he ever will. He is far more accepting of her than she is of him. (“She’s the best Carole she can be,” he often says, while one gets the feeling that my mother believes her husband could be—maybe even should be—a much better man.) She commands him at every turn. She’s subtle and graceful enough in her methods of control that you don’t always realize that she’s doing it, but trust me: Mom is always steering the boat.

She comes by this trait honestly. All the women in her family do this. They take over every single aspect of their husbands’ lives and then, as my father loves to point out, they absolutely refuse to ever die. No man can outlive an Olson bride. This is simple biological fact. I’m not exaggerating: It has never happened, not in anyone’s memory. And no man can escape being completely controlled by an Olson wife. (“I’m warning you,” my dad told Felipe at the beginning of our relationship, “if you’re going to have any kind of life with Liz, you’ve got to define your space right now, and then defend it forever.”) My father once joked—not really joking—that my mother manages about 95 percent of his life. The wonder of it, he mused, is that she’s much more upset about the 5 percent of his life that he won’t relinquish than he is about the 95 percent that she utterly dominates.

Robert Frost wrote that “a man must partly give up being a man” in order to enter into marriage—and I cannot fairly deny this point when it comes to my family. I have written many pages already describing marriage as a repressive tool used against women, but it’s important to remember that marriage is often used as a repressive tool against men, too. Marriage is a harness of civilization, linking a man to a set of obligations and thereby containing his restless energies. Traditional societies have long recognized that nothing is more useless to a community than a whole bunch of single, childless young men (aside from their admittedly useful role as cannon fodder, of course). For the most part, single young men have a global reputation for squandering their money on whores and drinking and games and laziness: They contribute nothing. You need to contain such beasts, to bind them into accountability—or so the argument has always gone. You need to convince these young men to put aside their childish things and take up the mantle of adulthood, to build homes and businesses and to cultivate an interest in their surroundings. It’s an ancient truism across countless different cultures that there is no better accountability-forging tool for an irresponsible young man than a good, solid wife.

This certainly was the case with my parents. “She whipped me into shape,” is my dad’s summation of the love story. Mostly he’s okay with this, though sometimes—say, in the middle of a family gathering, surrounded by his powerful wife and his equally powerful daughters—my father resembles nothing more than a puzzled old circus bear who cannot seem to figure out how he came to be quite so domesticated, or how he came to be perched quite so high up on this strange unicycle. He reminds me in such moments of Zorba the Greek, who replied when asked if he had ever married, “Am I not a man? Of course I’ve been married. Wife, house, kids, the full catastrophe!” (Zorba’s melodramatic angst, by the way, reminds me of the curious fact that, within the Greek Orthodox Church, marriage is regarded not so much as a sacrament, but as a holy martyrdom—the understanding being that successful long-term human partnership requires a certain Death of the Self to those who participate.)

My parents have each certainly felt that restriction, that small sense of self-death, in their own marriage. I know this to be true. But I’m not sure they’ve always minded having each other in the way either. When I once asked my father what kind of creature he would like to be in his next life, should there be a next life, he replied without hesitation, “A horse.”

“What kind of horse?” I asked, imagining him as a stallion galloping wildly across the open plains.

“A nice horse,” he said.

I duly adjusted the picture in my mind. Now I imagined a friendly stallion galloping wildly across the plains.

“What kind of nice horse?” I probed.

“A gelding,” he pronounced.

A castrated horse! That was unexpected. The picture in my mind changed completely. Now I envisioned my father as a gentle dray horse, docilely pulling a cart driven by my mother.

“Why a gelding?” I asked.

“I’ve found that life is just easier that way,” he replied. “Trust me.”

And so life has been easier for him. In exchange for the almost castrating constraints that marriage has clamped on my father’s personal freedoms, he has received stability, prosperity, encouragement in his labors, clean and mended shirts that appear as if by magic in his dresser drawers, a reliable meal at the end of a good day’s work. In return, he has worked for my mother, he has been faithful to her, and he submits to her will a solid 95 percent of the time—elbowing her away only when she comes a little bit too close to achieving total world domination. The terms of this contract must be acceptable to both of them because—as my mother reminded me when I phoned her from Laos—their marriage now endures into its fifth decade.

The terms of my parents’ marriage are probably not for me, of course. Whereas my grandmother was a traditional farmwife and my mother was a feminist cusper, I grew up with completely new ideas about the institutions of marriage and family. The relationship I’m likely to build with Felipe is something my sister and I have termed “Wifeless Marriage”—which is to say that nobody in our household will play (or play exclusively) the traditional role of the wife. The more thankless chores that have always fallen on women’s shoulders will be balanced out more evenly. And since there will be no babies, you could also call it “Motherless Marriage” I suppose—a model of marriage that my grandmother and mother obviously never experienced. Similarly, the responsibility of breadwinning will not fall entirely on Felipe’s shoulders, as it fell to my father and grandfather; indeed, the bulk of the household earnings will probably always be mine. Perhaps in that regard, then, we will have something like a “Husbandless Marriage” as well. Wifeless, childless, husbandless marriages . . . there haven’t been a whole lot of those unions in history, so we don’t really have a template to work with here. Felipe and I will have to make up the rules and boundaries of our story as we go along.

I don’t know, though. Maybe everyone has to make up the rules and boundaries of their story as they go along.

Anyway, when I asked my mother that night on the phone from Laos whether she has been happy in her marriage over the years, she assured me that she’d had a really nice time of it with my father, far more often than not. When I asked her what the happiest period of her life had been, she replied: “Right now. Living with your dad, healthy, financially stable, free. Your father and I pass our days doing our own thing and then we meet at the dinner table together every night. Even after all these years, we still sit there for hours talking and laughing. It’s really lovely.”

“That’s wonderful,” I said.

There was a pause.

“Can I say something that I hope doesn’t offend you?” she ventured.

“Go for it.”

“To be perfectly honest, the best part of my life began as soon as you kids grew up and left the house.”

I started laughing (Gee—thanks, Mom!) but she spoke over my laughter with urgency. “I’m serious, Liz. There’s something you have to understand about me: I’ve been raising children my entire life. I grew up in a big family, and I always had to take care of Rod and Terry and Luana when they were little. How many times did I get up in the middle of the night when I was ten years old to clean up somebody who had wet the bed? That was my whole childhood. I never had time for myself. Then, when I was a teenager, I took care of my older brother’s kids, always trying to figure out how to do my homework while I was babysitting. Then I had my own family to raise, and I had to give so much of myself over to that. When you and your sister finally left for college, that was the first moment in my life I hadn’t been responsible for any children. I loved it. I can’t tell you how much I love it. Having your father to myself, having my own time to myself—it’s been revolutionary for me. I’ve never been happier.”

Okay, then, I thought, with a surge of relief. So she has made her peace with it all. Good.

There was another moment of silence.

Then my mother suddenly added, in a tone I’d never heard from her before, “But I do have to tell you something else. There are times when I refuse to even let myself think about the early years of my marriage and all that I had to give up. If I dwell on that too much, honest to God, I become so enraged, I can’t even see straight.”

Oh.

Therefore, the tidy ultimate conclusion is . . . ???

It was slowly becoming clear to me that perhaps there was never going to be any tidy ultimate conclusion here. My mother herself had probably given up long ago trying to draw tidy ultimate conclusions about her own existence, having abandoned (as so many of us must do, after a certain age) the luxuriously innocent fantasy that one is entitled to have unmixed feelings about one’s own life. And if I needed to have unmixed feelings about my mother’s life in order to calm down my own anxieties about matrimony, then I’m afraid I was barking up the wrong tree. All I could tell for certain was that my mom had somehow found a way to build a quiet enough resting place for herself within intimacy’s rocky field of contradictions. There, in a satisfactory-enough amount of peace, she dwells.

Leaving me alone, of course, to figure out how I might someday construct such a careful habitat of my own.

CHAPTER SIX

M arriage and A utonomy

Marriage is a beautiful thing. But it’s also

a constant battle for moral supremacy.

—Marge Simpson

By October 2006, Felipe and I had already been traveling for six months and morale was flagging. We had left the Laotian holy city of Luang Prabang weeks earlier, having exhausted all its treasures, and had taken to the road again in the same random motion as before, killing time, passing hours and days.

We had hoped to be home by now, but there was still no movement whatsoever on our immigration case. Felipe’s future was stalled in a bottomless sort of limbo that we had somewhat irrationally come to believe might never end. Separated from his business inventory in America, unable to make any plans or earn any money, utterly dependent on the United States Department of Homeland Security (and me) to decide his fate, he was feeling more powerless by the day. This was not an ideal situation. For if there is one thing I have learned over the years about men, it is that feelings of powerlessness do not usually bring forth their finest qualities. Felipe was no exception. He was becoming increasingly jittery, quick-tempered, irritable, and ominously tense.

Even under the best of circumstances, Felipe has the bad habit of sometimes snapping impatiently at people he feels are either behaving poorly or interfering somehow with the quality of his life. This happens rarely, but I wish it would happen never. All over the world and in many languages I have watched this man bark his disapproval at bungling flight attendants, inept taxi drivers, unscrupulous merchants, apathetic waiters, and the parents of ill-behaved children. Arm waving and raised voices are sometimes involved in such scenes.

I deplore this.

Having been raised by a self-composed midwestern mother and a taciturn Yankee father, I am genetically and culturally incapable of handling Felipe’s more classically Brazilian version of conflict resolution. People in my family wouldn’t even speak this way to a mugger. Moreover, whenever I see Felipe fly off the handle in public, it messes around with my cherished personal narrative about what a gentle and tenderhearted guy I have chosen to love, and that, frankly, pisses me off more than anything else. If there is one indignity I shall never endure gracefully, it is watching people mess around with my most cherished personal narratives about them.

What’s worse, my yearning to have everyone in the world be best friends, combined with my near-pathological empathy for underdogs, often leaves me defending Felipe’s victims, which only adds to the tension. While he expresses zero tolerance toward idiots and incompetents, I think that behind every incompetent idiot there lies a really sweet person having a bad day. All this can lead to contention between Felipe and me, and on the rare occasions that we argue, it is generally over such questions. He has never let me forget how I once forced him to walk back into a shoe store in Indonesia and apologize to a young salesclerk whom I felt he had treated rudely. And he did it! He marched back into that little rip-off of a shoe store and offered the bewildered girl a courtly expression of regret for having lost his temper. But he did so only because he found my defense of the salesclerk charming. I did not, however, find anything about the situation charming. I never find it charming.

Blessedly, Felipe’s outbursts are fairly uncommon in our normal life. But what we were living through right then was not normal life. Six months of rough travel and small hotel rooms and frustrating bureaucratic holdups were taking their toll on his emotional state, to the point that I felt Felipe’s impatience rising to almost epidemic levels (though readers should probably take the word “epidemic” with a large grain of salt, given that my hypersensitivity to even the faintest human conflict makes me a thin-skinned judge of emotional friction). Still, the evidence seemed incontrovertible: He was not merely raising his voice at complete strangers these days, he was also snapping out at me. This really was unprecedented, because somehow Felipe had always seemed immune to me in the past—as though I, alone among everyone else on earth, was somehow preternaturally incapable of irritating him. Now, though, that sweet period of immunity seemed to have ended. He was annoyed at me for taking too long on the rented computers, annoyed at me for dragging us to see “the fucking elephants” at an expensive tourist trap, annoyed at me for planting us on yet another miserable overnight train, annoyed when I either spent money or saved money, annoyed that I always wanted to walk everywhere, annoyed that I kept trying to find healthy food when it was clearly impossible . . .

Felipe seemed increasingly stuck in that awful breed of mood where any glitch or hassle whatsoever becomes almost physically intolerable. This was unfortunate, because traveling—particularly the cheap and dirty traveling we were undertaking—is pretty much nothing but one glitch and hassle after another, interrupted by the occasional stunning sunset, which my companion had evidently lost the ability to enjoy. As I hauled the ever more reluctant Felipe from one Southeast Asian activity to the next (exotic markets! temples! waterfalls!), he became only less relaxed, less accommodating, less comforted. I, in turn, reacted to his befouled humor the way I’d been taught by my mother to react to a man’s befouled humor: by becoming only more cheerful, more upbeat, more obnoxiously chipper. I buried my own frustrations and homesickness under a guise of indefatigable optimism, barreling forth with an aggressively sunny demeanor, as though I could somehow force Felipe into a state of lighthearted gladness by the sheer power of my magnetic, tireless merrymaking.

Astonishingly, this did not work.

Over time, I became irritated with him—exasperated by his impatience, grumpiness, lethargy. Moreover, I became irritated with myself, annoyed by the false notes in my voice as I tried to engage Felipe in whatever curiosity I’d dragged him to this time. (Oh, darling—look! They’re selling rats for food! Oh, darling—look! The mommy elephant is washing her baby! Oh, darling—look! This hotel room has such an interesting view of the slaughterhouse!) Meanwhile, Felipe would head off to the bathroom and come back fuming about the filth and stink of the place—whatever place we happened to be in—while simultaneously complaining that the air pollution was making his throat sting and the traffic was giving him a headache.

His tension made me tense, which caused me to become physically careless, which caused me to stub my toe in Hanoi, to cut my finger on his razor in Chiang Mai as I dug through the toiletries bag for toothpaste, and—one really awful night—to put insect repellent in my eyes instead of eyedrops because I hadn’t looked carefully at the travel-sized bottle. What I remember most about that last incident is howling in pain and self-recrimination while Felipe held my head over the sink and rinsed out my eyes with one lukewarm bottle of water after another, fixing me up as best he could while raging in a steady, furious tirade about the stupidity of the fact that we were even in this godforsaken country to begin with. It is a testament to how bad those weeks had become that I do not now specifically remember which godforsaken country we were in.

All this tension reached a peak (or, rather, hit a nadir) the day I hauled Felipe on a twelve-hour bus ride through the center of Laos to visit what I insisted would be a fascinating archaeological site in the middle of the country. We shared the bus with no small amount of livestock, and our seats were harder than Quaker meetinghouse pews. There was no air-conditioning, of course, and the windows were sealed shut. I can’t rightly say that the heat was unbearable, because obviously we bore it, but I will say that it was very, very hot. I couldn’t rouse Felipe’s interest in the upcoming archaeological site, but I also couldn’t get a rise out of him about the conditions of our bus ride—and that really was notable, given that this was probably the most perilous public transportation experience I’d ever endured. The driver operated his ancient vehicle with a manic aggression, several times almost dumping us over some fairly impressive cliffs. But Felipe did not react to any of this, nor did he react to any of our near collisions with oncoming traffic. He just went numb. He shut his eyes in weariness and stopped speaking altogether. He seemed resigned to death. Or perhaps he was merely longing for it.

After several more such life-threatening hours, our bus suddenly rounded a curve and came upon the site of a big road accident: Two buses not at all unlike ours had just crashed head-on. There seemed to be no injuries, but the vehicles were a twisted-up pile of smoking metal. As we slowed to pass, I grabbed Felipe’s arm and said, “Look, darling! There’s been a collision between two buses!”

Without even opening his eyes, he replied sarcastically, “How on earth could that possibly have happened?”

Suddenly I was shot through with anger.

“What is it that you want?” I demanded.

He didn’t answer, which only made me angrier, so I pushed on: “I’m just trying to make the best out of this situation, okay? If you have any better ideas or any better plans—please, by all means, offer some. And I really hope you can think of something that will make you happy, because I honestly can’t take your misery anymore, I really can’t.”

Now his eyes flew open. “I just want a coffeepot,” he said with unexpected passion.

“What do you mean, a coffeepot?”

“I just want to be home, living with you in one place safely together. I want routine. I want a coffeepot of our own. I want to be able to wake up at the same time every morning and make breakfast for us, in our own house, with our own coffeepot.”

In another setting, maybe this confession would have drawn sympathy from me, and perhaps it should have drawn sympathy from me then, but it just made me angrier: Why was he dwelling on the impossible?

“We can’t have any of that stuff right now,” I said.

“My God, Liz—you think I don’t know that?”

“You think I don’t want those things, too?” I shot back.

His voice rose: “You think I’m not aware that you want those things? You think I haven’t seen you reading real estate ads online? You think I can’t tell you’re homesick? Do you have any idea how it makes me feel that I cannot provide you with a home right now, that you’re stuck in all these beat-up hotel rooms on the other side of the world because of me? Do you have any idea how humiliating that is for me, that I can’t afford to offer you a better life right now? Do you have any idea how fucking helpless that makes me feel? As a man?”

I forget sometimes.

I have to say this, because I think it’s such an important point when it comes to marriage: I do forget sometimes how much it means for certain men—for certain people—to be able to provide their loved ones with material comforts and protection at all times. I forget how dangerously reduced some men can feel when that basic ability has been stripped from them. I forget how much that matters to men, what it represents.

I can still remember the anguished look on an old friend’s face when he told me, several years ago, that his wife was leaving him. Her complaint, apparently, was that she was overwhelmingly lonely, that he “wasn’t there for her”—but he could not begin to understand what this meant. He felt he had been breaking his back to take care of his wife for years. “Okay,” he admitted, “so maybe I wasn’t there for her emotionally, but by God, I provided for that woman! I worked two jobs for her! Doesn’t that show that I loved her? She should have known that I would have done anything to keep providing for her and protecting her! If a nuclear holocaust ever struck, I would’ve picked her up and thrown her over my shoulder and carried her across the burning landscape to safety—and she knew that about me! How could she say I wasn’t there for her?”

I could not bring myself to break the bad news to my devastated friend that most days, unfortunately, there is no nuclear holocaust. Most days, unfortunately, the only thing his wife had really needed was a little more attention.

Similarly, the only thing I needed from Felipe at that moment was for him to calm down, to be nicer, to show me and everyone else around us a little more patience, a little more emotional generosity. I didn’t need provision or protection from him. I didn’t need his manly pride; it wasn’t serving for anything here. I just needed him to relax into the situation as it was. Yes, of course, it would have been much nicer to be back home, near my family, living in a real house—but our rootlessness right now didn’t bother me nearly as much as his moodiness.

Trying to defuse the tension, I touched Felipe’s leg and said, “I can see that this situation is really frustrating for you.”

I had learned that trick from a book called Ten Lessons to Transform Your Marriage: America’s Love Lab Experts Share Their Strategies for Strengthening Your Relationship, by John M. Gottman and Julie Schwartz-Gottman—two (happily married) researchers from the Relationship Research Institute in Seattle who have received a lot of attention lately for their claim that they can predict with 90 percent accuracy whether a couple will still be married in five years merely by studying a fifteen-minute transcript of typical conversation between the husband and the wife. (For this reason, I imagine that John M. Gottman and Julie Schwartz-Gottman make terrifying dinner guests.) Whatever the breadth of their powers may be, the Gottmans do offer some practical strategies for resolving marital disputes, trying to save couples from what they call the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Stonewalling, Defensiveness, Criticism, and Contempt. The trick I had just used—repeating back to Felipe his own frustration in order to indicate that I was listening to him and that I cared—is something the Gottmans call “Turning Toward Your Partner.” It’s supposed to defuse arguments.

It doesn’t always work.

“You don’t know how I feel, Liz!” Felipe snapped. “They arrested me. They handcuffed me and marched me through that entire airport with everyone staring—did you know that? They fingerprinted me. They took away my wallet, they even took the ring you gave me. They took everything. They put me in jail and threw me out of your country. Thirty years of traveling, and I’ve never had a border closed to me before, and now I can’t get into the United States of America—of all bloody places to get kicked out of! In the past I would’ve just said, ‘The hell with it,’ and moved on, but I can’t—because America is where you want to live, and I want to be with you. So I have no choice. I have to put up with all this shit, and I have to turn my entire private life over to these bureaucrats and to your police, and it’s humiliating. And we can’t even get any information about when this is all going to be finished, because we don’t even matter. We’re just numbers on a civil servant’s desk. Meanwhile, my business is dying and I’m going broke. So of course I’m miserable. And now you’re dragging me all over goddamn Southeast Asia on these goddamn buses—”

“All I’m trying to do is keep you happy,” I snapped back at him, pulling away my hand, stung and hurt. If there had been a cord on that bus to pull to signal the driver that a passenger wanted to get off, I swear to God I would have pulled it. I would have jumped off right there, left Felipe on that bus, taken my chances in the jungle by myself.

He inhaled sharply, as though he was going to say something hard but stopped himself. I could almost feel the tendons in his neck tightening, and my frustration escalated, too. Our setting didn’t exactly help, by the way. The bus lurched along, loud and hot and chancy, whacking low-hanging branches, scattering pigs and chickens and children in the road before us, throwing up a stinking cloud of black exhaust, slamming every vertebra in my neck with each jolt. And there were still seven hours left to go.

We said nothing for a long time. I wanted to cry but held myself together, recognizing that crying might be unhelpful. Still, I was angry at him. Sorry for him, yes, of course—but mostly angry at him. And for what? For bad sportsmanship, maybe? For weakness? For caving in before I did? Yes, our situation was lousy, but it could have been infinitely lousier. At least we were together. At least I could afford to stay with him during this period of exile. There were thousands of couples in our exact situation who would have killed for the right to spend even one evening together during such a long period of enforced separation. At least we had that comfort. And at least we had the education to read the monstrously confusing immigration documents, and at least we had enough money to enlist a good lawyer to help us through the rest of the process. Anyhow, even if worse came to worst and the United States rejected Felipe from its shores forever, at least we had other options. My God, we could always move to Australia, for heaven’s sake. Australia! A wonderful country! A nation of Canada-like sanity and prosperity! It wasn’t as if we were going to be sent to exile in northern Afghanistan! Who else in our situation had so many advantages?

And why was I always the one who had to think in such upbeat terms anyhow, while Felipe, frankly, had done little over the last few weeks but sulk over circumstances that were largely out of our control? Why could he never bend to adverse situations with a little more grace? And would it have killed him, by the way, to show a little enthusiasm about the upcoming archeological site?

I very nearly said this—every word of it, the whole crapping rant of it—but I refrained. An overflow of emotions like this signifies what John M. Gottman and Julie Schwartz-Gottman call “flooding”—the point at which you get so tired or frustrated that your mind becomes deluged (and deluded) by anger. A surefire indication that flooding is imminent is when you start using the words “always” or “never” in your argument. The Gottmans call this “Going Universal” (as in: “You always let me down like this!” or “I can never count on you!”). Such language absolutely murders any chance of fair or intelligent discourse. Once you have Flooded, once you have Gone Universal on somebody’s ass, all hell breaks loose. It’s really best not to let that happen. As an old friend of mine once told me, you can measure the happiness of a marriage by the number of scars that each partner carries on their tongues, earned from years of biting back angry words.

So I didn’t speak, and Felipe didn’t speak, and this heated silence went on for a long time until he finally reached for my hand and said, in an exhausted voice, “Let’s be careful right now, okay?”

I slackened, knowing exactly what he meant. This was an old code of ours. It had come up for the first time on a road trip we’d taken once from Tennessee to Arizona early on in our relationship. I’d been teaching writing at the University of Tennessee, and we were living in that strange hotel room in Knoxville, and Felipe had found a gemstone show that he’d wanted to attend in Tucson. So we’d spontaneously driven out there together, trying to make the distance in one long push. It had been a fun trip for the most part. We had sung, and talked, and laughed. But you can only sing and talk and laugh so much, and there came a moment—about thirty hours into the drive—when both of us reached a point of utter exhaustion. We were running out of gas, literally and figuratively. There were no hotels around and we were hungry and weary. I seem to remember a stark difference of opinion between us about when and where we should stop next. We were still speaking in perfectly civil tones, but tension had begun to encircle the car like a light mist.

“Let’s be careful,” Felipe had said then, out of the blue.

“Of what?” I’d asked.

“Let’s just be careful of what we say to each other for the next few hours,” he’d gone on. “These are the times, when people get tired like this, that fights can happen. Let’s just choose our words very carefully until we find a place to rest.”

Nothing had happened yet, but Felipe was floating the idea that there are, perhaps, moments when a couple must practice preemptive conflict resolution, arresting an argument before it can even begin. So this had become a code phrase of ours, a signpost to mind the gap and beware of falling rocks. It was a tool that we pulled out every now and again in particularly tense moments. It had always worked well for us in the past. Then again, in the past we had never gone through anything quite so tense as this indeterminate period of exile in Southeast Asia. On the other hand, maybe the tension of travel only meant that we needed the yellow flag now more than ever.

I always remember a story my friends Julie and Dennis told me about a horrible fight they’d had on a trip to Africa together, early in their marriage. Whatever the original dispute may have been, they can’t even remember to this day, but here’s how it ended up: One afternoon in Nairobi, the two of them became so enraged at each other that they had to walk on opposite sides of the street toward their mutual destination because they could no longer physically tolerate each other’s proximity. After a long while of this ridiculous parallel marching along, with four defensive lanes of Nairobian traffic between them, Dennis finally stopped. He opened his arms and motioned for Julie to cross the street and join him. It seemed to be a gesture of conciliation, so she conceded. She walked over to her husband, softening along the way, fully expecting to receive something like an apology. Instead, once she got within speaking distance, Dennis leaned forward and gently said, “Hey, Jules? Go fuck yourself.”

In response, she stomped off to the airport and immediately tried to sell her husband’s plane ticket back home to a perfect stranger.

They worked it out in the end, happily. Decades later, this makes for an amusing dinner-party anecdote, but it’s a cautionary tale, too: You kind of don’t want to let things get to that point. So I gave Felipe’s hand a small squeeze and said, “Quando casar passa,” which is a sweet Brazilian expression meaning “When you get married, this will pass.” This is a phrase Felipe’s mother used to say to him as a child whenever he fell down and scraped his knee. It’s a small, silly, maternal murmur of comfort. Felipe and I had been saying this phrase to each other a lot lately. In our case, it was largely true: When we finally got married, a lot of these troubles would pass.

He put his arm around me and pulled me close. I relaxed into his chest. Or as much as I possibly could relax, given the slamming momentum of the bus.

He was a good man, in the end.

He was basically a good man anyhow.

No, he was good. He is good.

“What should we do in the meanwhile?” he asked.

Prior to this conversation, my instinct had been to keep us moving at a fast clip from one new place to another with the hope that fresh vistas would distract us from our legal troubles. This sort of strategy had always worked for me in the past anyhow. Like a fussy baby who can fall asleep only in a moving car, I have always been comforted by the tempo of travel. I’d always assumed that Felipe operated on the same principle, since he is the most widely traveled person I’ve ever met. But he didn’t seem to be enjoying any of this drifting.

For one thing—though I often forget it—the man is seventeen years older than I am. So we must excuse him if he was feeling moderately less excited than I was about the notion of living out of a small backpack for an indeterminate period of time, carrying only one change of clothing and sleeping in eighteen-dollar hotel rooms. It was clearly taking a toll on him. Also, he’d already seen the world. He’d already seen great huge swaths of the damn thing and had been traveling through Asia on third-class trains back when I was in the second grade. Why was I making him do it again?

What’s more, the last few months had brought to my attention an important incompatibility between us—one that I’d never noticed before. For a pair of lifelong travelers, Felipe and I actually travel very differently. The reality about Felipe, as I was gradually realizing, is that he’s both the best traveler I’ve ever met and by far the worst. He hates strange bathrooms and dirty restaurants and uncomfortable trains and foreign beds—all of which pretty much define the act of traveling. Given a choice, he will always select a lifestyle of routine, familiarity, and reassuringly boring everyday practices. All of which might make you assume the man is not fit to be a traveler at all. But you would be wrong to assume that, for here is Felipe’s traveling gift, his superpower, the secret weapon that renders him peerless: He can create a familiar habitat of reassuringly boring everyday practices for himself anyplace, if you just let him stay in one spot. He can assimilate absolutely anywhere on the planet in the space of about three days, and then he’s capable of staying put in that place for the next decade or so without complaint.

This is why Felipe has been able to live all over the world. Not merely travel, but live. Over the years, he has folded himself into societies from South America to Europe, from the Middle East to the South Pacific. He arrives somewhere utterly new, decides he likes the place, moves right in, learns the language, and instantly becomes a local. It had taken Felipe less than a week of living with me in Knoxville, for instance, to locate his favorite breakfast café, his favorite bartender, and his favorite place for lunch. (“Darling!” he’d said one day, terribly excited after a solo foray into downtown Knoxville. “Did you know that they have the most wonderful and inexpensive fish restaurant here called John Long Slivers?”) He would’ve happily stayed in Knoxville indefinitely if I’d wanted us to. He had no trouble with the idea of living in that hotel room for many years to come—as long as we could just stay in one place.

All of which reminds me of a story that Felipe told me once about his childhood. When he was a small boy in Brazil, he used to get scared sometimes in the middle of the night by some nightmare or imagined monster, and each time he would scamper across the room and climb into the bed of his wonderful sister Lily—who was ten years older, and therefore embodied all human wisdom and security. He would tap on Lily’s shoulder and whisper, “Me da um cantinho”—“Give me a little corner.” Sleepily, never protesting, she would move over and open up a warm spot on the bed for him. It wasn’t much to ask for; just one little warm corner. For all the years that I have known this man, I have never heard him ask for much more than that.

I’m not like that, though.

Whereas Felipe can find a corner anywhere in the world and settle down for good, I can’t. I’m much more restless than he is. My restlessness makes me a far better day-to-day traveler than he will ever be. I am infinitely curious and almost infinitely patient with mishaps, discomforts, and minor disasters. So I can go anywhere on the planet—that’s not a problem. The problem is that I just can’t live anywhere on the planet. I’d realized this only a few weeks earlier, back in northern Laos, when Felipe had woken up one lovely morning in Luang Prabang and said, “Darling, let’s stay here.”

“Sure,” I’d said. “We can stay here for a few more days if you want.”

“No, I mean let’s move here. Let’s forget about me immigrating to America. It’s too much trouble! This is a wonderful town. I like the feeling of it. It reminds me of Brazil thirty years ago. It wouldn’t take much money or effort for us to run a little hotel or a shop here, rent an apartment, settle in . . .”

In reaction, I had only blanched.

He was serious. He would just do that. He would just up and move to northern Laos indefinitely and build a new life there. But I can’t. What Felipe was proposing was travel at a level I could not reach—travel that wasn’t even really travel anymore, but rather a willingness to be ingested indefinitely by an unfamiliar place. I wasn’t up for it. My traveling, as I understood then for the first time, was far more dilettantish than I had ever realized. As much as I love snacking on the world, when it comes time to settle down—to really settle down—I wanted to live at home, in my own country, in my own language, near my own family, and in the company of people who think and believe the same things that I think and believe. This basically limits me to a small region of Planet Earth consisting of southern New York State, the more rural sections of central New Jersey, northwestern Connecticut, and bits of eastern Pennsylvania. Quite the scanty habitat for a bird who claims to be migratory. Felipe, on the other hand—my flying fish—has no such domestic limitations. A small bucket of water anywhere in the world will do him just fine.

Realizing all this also helped me put Felipe’s recent irritability in better perspective. He was going through all this trouble—all the uncertainty and humiliation of the American immigration process—purely on my behalf, enduring a completely invasive legal proceeding when he’d just as soon be setting up a newer and much easier life in a freshly rented little apartment in Luang Prabang. Moreover, in the meantime, he was tolerating all this jittery traveling from place to place—a process he does not remotely enjoy—because he sensed that I wanted it. Why was I putting him through this? Why would I not let the man rest, anywhere?

So I changed the plan.

“Why don’t we just go somewhere for a few months and stay there until you get called back to Australia for your immigration interview,” I suggested. “Let’s just go to Bangkok.”

“No,” he said. “Not Bangkok. We’ll lose our minds living in Bangkok.”

“No,” I said. “We won’t settle in Bangkok; we’ll just head in that direction because it’s a hub. Let’s go to Bangkok for a week or so, stay in a nice hotel, rest up, and see if we can find a cheap plane ticket from there to Bali. Once we get back to Bali, let’s see if we can rent a little house. Then we’ll just stay there in Bali and wait until this whole thing blows over.”

I could see by the look on Felipe’s face that the idea was working for him.

“You would do that?” he asked.

Suddenly I had another inspiration. “Wait—let’s see if we can get your old Bali house back! Maybe we can rent it from the new owner. And then we’ll just stay there, in Bali, till we get your visa back to America. How does that sound?”

It took Felipe a moment to respond, but—honest to God—when he finally did, I thought the man might weep with relief.

S o that’s what we did. We headed back to Bangkok. We found a hotel with a pool and a well-stocked bar. We called the new owner of Felipe’s old house to see if it was available to rent. Marvelously, it was, at a comfortable four hundred dollars a month—a surreal but perfectly fine price to pay for a house that had once been yours. We reserved a flight back to Bali, leaving in a week’s time. Instantly, Felipe was happy again. Happy and patient and kindhearted, as I had always known him to be.

But as for me . . .

Something nagged.

Something pulled at me. I could see that Felipe was relaxing, sitting by the nice swimming pool with a detective novel in one hand and a beer in the other, but now I was the agitated one. I am never going to be the person who wants to sit by a hotel pool with a cold beer and a detective novel. My thoughts kept turning to Cambodia, which was so tantalizingly close, which was just over the border from Thailand . . . I had always wanted to see the temple ruins at Angkor Wat but had never quite made it there in my past travels. We had a week to kill, and this would be a perfect time to go. But I couldn’t imagine dragging Felipe over to Cambodia with me right now. In fact, I couldn’t imagine anything Felipe would want to do less than get on a plane to Cambodia to visit crumbling temple ruins in the searing heat.

What if I went to Cambodia alone, then, just for a few days? What if I left Felipe here in Bangkok sitting happily by the pool? For the last five months, we’d spent nearly every single minute of the day in each other’s company, and often in challenging surroundings. It was a miracle that our recent spat on the bus had been the only serious conflict so far. Couldn’t we each benefit from a short spell of separation?

That said, the tenuousness of our situation made me concerned about leaving him for even a few days. This was no time to be messing around. What if something happened to me while I was in Cambodia? What if something happened to him? What if there was an earthquake, a tsunami, a riot, a plane crash, a bad case of food poisoning, a kidnapping? What if Felipe wandered out one day in Bangkok while I was gone and got hit by a car and suffered a serious head injury and ended up in a mysterious hospital somewhere with nobody knowing who he was, and what if I could never find him again? Our existence in the world was in critical flux right now and everything was so delicate. We’d been floating across the planet for five months in a single lifeboat, bobbing together uncertainly. Our union was our only strength for the time being. Why risk separation at such a precarious moment?

On the other hand, maybe it was time to ease up a bit on the fanatical hovering. There was no sane reason to assume that things would not ultimately work out just fine for Felipe and me. Surely our strange period of exile would eventually pass; surely Felipe would be granted his American visa; surely we would get married; surely we would find a stable home in the United States; surely we would have many years to spend together in the future. That being the case, I should probably take a quick trip alone right now, if only to set a solid precedent for the future. Because here was something I already knew to be true about myself: Just as there are some wives who will occasionally need a break from their husbands in order to visit a spa for the weekend with their girlfriends, I will always be the sort of wife who occasionally needs a break from her husband in order to visit Cambodia.

Just for a few days!

And maybe he could use a break from me, too. Watching as Felipe and I had become more irritable with each other over the last few weeks, and now feeling so strongly that I wanted some space away from him, I started thinking about my parents’ garden—which is as good a metaphor as any for how two married people must learn to adapt to each other and to sometimes simply clear out of each other’s path in order to avoid conflict.

My mother was originally the family gardener, but my father has become more interested in home agriculture over the years, maneuvering his way deep into this realm of hers. But just as Felipe and I travel differently, my mother and father garden differently, and often this has led to strife. Over the years, then, they have divided their garden in order to keep some civility out there amid the vegetables. In fact, they have divided the garden in such a complicated manner that, by this point in its history, you would practically need a United Nations peacekeeping force to understand my parents’ carefully partitioned spheres of horticultural influence. The lettuce, broccoli, herbs, beets, and raspberries are all still under my mother’s domain, for instance, because my father has not yet figured out a way to wrest control of that produce from her. But the carrots, leeks, and asparagus are completely my father’s province. And as for the blueberries? Dad chases Mom out of his blueberry patch as though she were a foraging bird. My mother is not allowed anywhere near the blueberries: not to trim them, not to harvest them, not even to water them. My father has laid claim to the blueberry patch, and he defends it.

Where the garden gets really complicated, though, is with the question of tomatoes and corn. Like the West Bank, like Taiwan, like Kashmir, the tomatoes and the corn are still contested territories. My mother plants the tomatoes, but my father is in charge of staking the tomatoes, but then my mother harvests the tomatoes. Don’t ask me why! Those are just the rules of engagement. (Or at least they were the rules of engagement last summer. The tomato situation is still evolving.) On the other hand, there is corn. My father plants the corn and my mother harvests the corn, but my father insists on personally mulching the corn once the harvest is done.

And so they toil on, together but separate.

Garden without end, amen.

The peculiar truce of my parents’ garden brings to mind a book that a friend of mine, a psychologist named Deborah Luepnitz, published several years ago called Schopenhauer’s Porcupines. The operative metaphor of Deborah’s book was a story that the pre-Freudian philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer told about the essential dilemma of modern human intimacy. Schopenhauer believed that humans, in their love relationships, were like porcupines out on a cold winter night. In order to keep from freezing, the animals huddle close together. But as soon as they are near enough to provide critical warmth, they get poked by each other’s quills. Reflexively, to stop the pain and irritation of too much closeness, the porcupines separate. But once they separate, they become cold again. The chill sends them back toward each other once more, only to be impaled all over again by each other’s quills. So they retreat again. And then approach again. Endlessly.

“And the cycle repeats,” Deborah wrote, “as they struggle to find a comfortable distance between entanglement and freezing.”

Dividing and subdividing their control over such consequential matters as money and children, but also over such seemingly inconsequential matters as beets and blueberries, my parents weave their own version of the porcupine dance, advancing and retreating on each other’s territory, still negotiating, still recalibrating, still working after all these years to find the correct distance between autonomy and cooperation—seeking a subtle and elusive balance that will somehow keep this strange plot of intimacy growing. They compromise a lot in the process—sometimes compromising away precious time and energy that they might have preferred to spend doing different things, separate things, if only the other person wasn’t in the way. Felipe and I will have to do the same thing when it comes to our own spheres of cultivation—and certainly we would need to learn our own steps of the porcupine dance around the subject of travel.

Still, when it came time to discuss with Felipe my idea of going off to Cambodia without him for a spell, I broached the topic with a degree of skittishness that surprised me. For a few days, I could not seem to find the right approach. I didn’t want to feel as though I were asking his permission to go, since that placed him in the role of a master or a parent—and that wouldn’t be fair to me. Nor, though, could I imagine sitting down with this nice, considerate man and bluntly informing him that I was heading off alone whether he liked it or not. This would place me in the role of a willful tyrant, which was obviously unfair to him.

The fact was, I was out of practice for this kind of thing. I had been on my own for a while before I’d met Felipe, and I had grown accustomed to shaping my own agenda without having to take account of somebody else’s wishes. What’s more, up until this point in our love story, our externally mandated travel restrictions (as well as our lives led on separate continents) had always ensured that the two of us had plenty of time alone. But with marriage, everything would now change. We would be together all the time now, and that togetherness would bring trying new limits, because marriage is a binding thing, a taming thing, by its very nature. Marriage has a bonsai energy: It’s a tree in a pot with trimmed roots and clipped limbs. Mind you, bonsai can live for centuries, and their unearthly beauty is a direct result of such constriction, but nobody would ever mistake a bonsai for a free-climbing vine.

The Polish philosopher and sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has written exquisitely about this subject. He believes that modern couples have been sold a bill of goods when they’re told that they can and should have it both ways—that we should all have equal parts intimacy and autonomy in our lives. Somehow, Bauman suggests, we have mistakenly come to believe in our culture that if only we manage our emotional lives correctly we should each be able to experience all the reassuring constancy of marriage without ever once feeling remotely confined or limited. The magic word here—the almost fetishized word here—is “balance,” and just about everybody I know these days seems to be seeking that balance with a near-desperate urgency. We are all trying, as Bauman writes, to force our marriages to “empower without disempowering, enable without disabling, fulfill without burdening.”

But perhaps this is an unrealistic aspiration? Because love limits, almost by definition. Love narrows. The great expansion we feel in our hearts when we fall in love is matched only by the great restrictions that will necessarily follow. Felipe and I have one of the most easygoing relationships you could possibly imagine, but please do not be fooled: I have utterly claimed this man as my own, and I have therefore fenced him off from the rest of the herd. His energies (sexual, emotional, creative) belong in large part to me, not to anybody else—not even entirely to himself anymore. He owes me things like information, explanations, fidelity, constancy, and details about the most mundane little aspects of his life. It’s not like I keep the man in a radio collar, but make no mistake about it—he belongs to me now. And I belong to him, in exactly the same measure.

Which does not mean that I cannot go to Cambodia by myself. It does mean, however, that I need to discuss my plans with Felipe before I leave—as he would do with me were our situations reversed. If he objects to my desire to travel alone, I can argue my point with him, but I am obliged to at least listen to his objections. If he strenuously objects, I can just as strenuously overrule him, but I must select my battles—as must he. If he protests my wishes too often, our marriage will surely break apart. On the other hand, if I constantly demand to live my life away from him, our marriage will just as surely break apart. It’s delicate, then, this operation of mutual, quiet, almost velvety oppression. Out of respect, we must learn how to release and confine each other with the most exquisite care, but we should never—not even for a moment—pretend that we are not confined.

After a good deal of thinking, I finally brought up the subject of Cambodia with Felipe one morning over breakfast in Bangkok. I selected my words with a ridiculous amount of mindfulness, using such abstruse language that for a time the poor man clearly had no idea what I was talking about. With a good dose of stiff formality and a whole lot of preamble, I awkwardly tried to explain that, while I loved him and was hesitant to leave him alone right now at such a tenuous moment in our lives, I really would like to see the temples in Cambodia . . . and maybe, since he finds ancient ruins so tedious, this was a trip I should perhaps consider undertaking by myself? . . . and maybe it wouldn’t kill us to spend a few days apart, given how stressful all the traveling had become?

It took Felipe a few moments to catch the drift of what I was saying, but when the penny finally dropped, he put down his toast and stared at me in frank puzzlement.

“My God, darling!” he said. “What are you even asking me for? Just go!”

S o I went.

And my trip to Cambodia was . . .

How shall I explain this?

Cambodia is not a day at the beach. Cambodia is not even a day at the beach if you happen to be spending a day at an actual beach there. Cambodia is hard. Everything about the place felt hard to me. The landscape is hard, beaten down to within an inch of its life. The history is hard, with genocide lingering in recent memory. The faces of the children are hard. The dogs are hard. The poverty was harder than anything I’d ever seen before. It was like the poverty of rural India, but without the verve of India. It was like the poverty of urban Brazil, but without the flash of Brazil. This was just poverty of the dusty and exhausted variety.

Most of all, though, my guide was hard.

Once I’d secured myself a hotel in Siem Reap, I set out to hire a guide to show me the temples of Angkor Wat, and ended up with a man named Narith—an articulate, knowledgeable, and extremely stern gentleman in his early forties who politely showed me the magnificent ancient ruins, but who, to put it mildly, did not enjoy my company. We did not become friends, Narith and I, though I dearly wished us to. I do not like to meet a new person and not make a new friend, but friendship was never going to grow between Narith and me. Part of the problem was Narith’s extraordinarily intimidating demeanor. Everyone has a default emotion, and Narith’s was quiet disapproval, which he radiated at every turn. This threw off my composure so much that after two days I barely dared to open my mouth anymore. He made me feel like a foolish child, which was not surprising given that his other job—aside from being a tour guide—was schoolmaster. I’m willing to wager he’s terrifyingly effective at it. He admitted to me that he sometimes feels nostalgic for the good old days before the war, when Cambodian families were more intact, and when children were kept well disciplined by regular beatings.

But it wasn’t merely Narith’s austerity that prohibited us from developing a warm human connection; it was also my fault. I honestly could not figure out how to talk to this man. I was keenly aware of the fact that I was in the presence of a person who had grown up during one of the most brutal spasms of violence the world has ever witnessed. No Cambodian family was left unaffected by the genocide of the 1970s. Anyone who was not tortured or executed in Cambodia during the Pol Pot years merely starved and suffered. You can safely assume, then, that any Cambodian who is forty years old today lived through an absolute inferno of a childhood. Knowing all this, I found it difficult to generate casual conversation with Narith. I could not find any topics that were not freighted with potential references to the not-so-distant past. Traveling through Cambodia with a Cambodian, I decided, must be something like exploring a house that had recently been the scene of a grisly family mass murder, guided along on your tour by the only relative who had managed to escape death. This leaves one rather desperate to avoid asking questions like “So—is this the bedroom where your brother murdered your sisters?” or “Is this the garage where your father tortured your cousins?” Instead, you just follow along politely behind your guide, and when he says, “Here is a particularly nice old feature of our house,” you merely nod and murmur, “Yes, the pergola is lovely . . .”

And you wonder.

Meanwhile, as Narith and I toured the ancient ruins and avoided discussing modern history, we stumbled everywhere on groups of unattended children, whole tattered gangs of them, openly begging. Some of them were missing limbs. The kids without limbs would sit on the corner of an abandoned old edifice, pointing at their amputated legs and calling out, “Land mine! Land mine! Land mine!” As we walked by, the more able-bodied children would follow us, trying to sell me postcards, bracelets, trinkets. Some were pushy, but others tried more subtle angles. “What state are you from in America?” one little boy demanded of me. “If I tell you the capital, you can give me a dollar!” That particular boy followed me for long stretches of the day, throwing out the names of American states and capitals like a shrill, strange poem: “Illinois, madam! Springfield! New York, madam! Albany!” As the day passed, he became increasingly despondent: “California, madam! SACRAMENTO! Texas, madam! AUSTIN!”

Strangled by grief, I offered these kids money, but Narith would only scold me for my handouts. I was to ignore the children, he lectured. I was only making things worse by giving out cash, he warned. I was encouraging a culture of begging, which would spell the end of Cambodia. There were too many of these wild children to help, anyhow, and my boon would only attract more of them. True enough, more children gathered whenever they saw me pulling out bills and coins, and once my Cambodian currency was gone, they still flocked around me. I felt poisoned by the constant repetition of the word “NO” coming out of my own mouth again and again: an awful incantation. The kids became more insistent until Narith decided he’d had enough and scattered them back across the ruins with a barking dismissal.

One afternoon, walking back to our car from a tour of another thirteenth-century palace and trying to change the subject from the begging children, I asked about the nearby forest, wondering about its history. Narith replied, in an apparent non sequitur, “When my father was killed by the Khmer Rouge, the soldiers took our house as a trophy.”

I could summon no reply for this, so we walked along in silence.

After a spell, he added, “My mother was sent into the forest with us, with all her children, to try to survive.”

I waited for the rest of the story, but there was no rest of the story—or at least nothing more that he wanted to share.

“I’m sorry,” I said finally. “That must have been terrible.”

Narith shot me a dark look of . . . what? Pity? Contempt? Then it passed. “Let us continue with our tour,” he said, pointing to a fetid swamp on our left. “This was once a reflecting pool, used by King Jayavarman VII during the twelfth century to study the mirror image of the stars by night . . .”

The next morning, wanting to offer up something to this battered country, I tried to donate blood at the local hospital. I had seen signs all over town announcing a blood shortage and asking tourists for help, but I didn’t even have any luck with this venture. The strict Swiss nurse on duty took one look at my low iron levels and refused to accept my blood. She wouldn’t even take a half pint from me.

“You are too weak!” she accused me. “You have obviously not been taking care of yourself! You should not be traveling around like this! You should be home, resting!”

That evening—my last evening alone in Cambodia—I wandered around the streets of Siem Reap, trying to relax into the place. But it did not feel safe to be alone in that city. A peculiar feeling of composure and harmony usually settles on me when I’m moving solo through a new landscape (in fact, that very sensation is what I had come to Cambodia to find), but I never reached it on that trip. If anything, I felt like I was in the way, that I was an irritant, an idiot, or even a target. I felt pathetic and bloodless. As I was walking back to my hotel after dinner, a small swarm of children gathered around me, begging again. One boy was missing a foot, and as he hobbled gamely along he stuck out his crutch in front of me, deliberately tripping me. I stumbled, arms flapping clownishly, but did not quite fall.

“Money,” said the boy in a flat tone. “Money.”

I tried stepping around him again. Nimbly, he stuck out his crutch once more, and I had to basically leap over the thing to dodge it, which seemed awful and insane. The children laughed, and then more children gathered: now it was a spectacle. I picked up my pace and walked faster toward the hotel. The crowd of kids tagged behind me, around me, in front of me. Some of them were laughing and blocking my way, but one very little girl kept pulling at my sleeve and crying out, “Food! Food! Food!” By the time I neared the hotel, I was running. It was shameful.

Whatever equanimity I’d proudly and stubbornly been holding together over the last few chaotic months caved in Cambodia, and caved fast. All my expert-traveler’s composure fell to bits—along with all my patience and basic human compassion, apparently—as I found myself panicked and adrenalized and running full-speed away from small, hungry children who were openly begging me for food. When I reached my hotel, I dived into my room and locked the door behind me and pushed my face into a towel and trembled like a shitty little coward for the rest of the night.

S o that was my big trip to Cambodia.

One obvious way to read this story, of course, is that perhaps I should never have gone there in the first place—or at least not at that moment. Perhaps my trip had been an excessively willful or even reckless move, given that I was already fatigued from months of travel, and given the strain of Felipe’s and my uncertain circumstances. Perhaps this had been no time for me to go proving my independence, or laying down precedents for future freedoms, or testing the boundaries of intimacy. Perhaps I should have just stayed there in Bangkok with Felipe by the swimming pool the whole time, drinking beer and relaxing, and waiting for our next move together.

Except that I don’t like beer and I would not have relaxed. Had I reined in my impulses and stuck around in Bangkok that week, drinking beer and watching the two of us getting on each other’s nerves, I might have buried something important within me—something that may have ultimately turned fetid, like King Jayavarman’s pool, creating contaminating ramifications for the future. I went to Cambodia because I had to go. It may have been a messy and botched experience, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have gone. Sometimes life is messy and botched. We do our best. We don’t always know the right move.

What I do know is that the day after my encounter with the begging children I flew back to Bangkok and reunited with a Felipe who was calm and relaxed, and who had clearly enjoyed a restorative break from my company. He had passed the days of my absence happily learning how to make balloon animals in order to keep himself busy. Upon my return, therefore, he presented me with a giraffe, a dachshund, and a rattlesnake. He was extraordinarily proud of himself. I, on the other hand, was feeling more than a little undone, and was not at all proud of my performance in Cambodia. But I was awfully glad to see this guy. And I was awfully grateful to him for encouraging me to attempt things that are not always entirely safe and that are not always fully explainable and that do not always work out quite as perfectly as I may have dreamed. I am more grateful for that than I can ever say—because, truth be told, I am certain to do this kind of thing again.

So I praised Felipe for his marvelous balloon menagerie, and he listened carefully to my sad stories about Cambodia, and when we were both good and tired we climbed into bed with each other and lashed our lifeboat together once more and continued on with our story.

CHAPTER SEVEN

M arriage and S ubversion

Of all the actions of a man’s life, his marriage does least concern other people; yet of all the actions of our life, ’tis the most meddled with by other people.

—John Selden, 1689

By late October 2006, we had returned to Bali and settled back into Felipe’s old house in the rice fields. There, we planned to wait out the rest of his immigration process quietly, with our heads down, inciting no more stress or conflict. It felt good to be in a more familiar place, good to stop moving. This was the house where, almost three years earlier, we had first fallen in love. This was the house that Felipe had given up only one year earlier in order to move in with me “permanently” in Philadelphia. This house was the closest thing to a real home that we could find right now, and man, were we happy to see it.

I watched Felipe melt with relief as he wandered around the old place, touching and smelling every familiar object with an almost canine pleasure. Everything was the same as he had left it. There was the open terrace upstairs with the rattan couch where Felipe had, as he likes to say, seduced me. There was the comfortable bed where we had made love for the first time. There was the dinky kitchen filled with plates and dishes that I had bought for Felipe right after we met because his bachelor accoutrements depressed me. There was the quiet desk in the corner where I had worked on my last book. There was Raja, the neighbor’s friendly old orange dog (whom Felipe had always called “Roger”), limping about happily, growling at his own shadow. There were the ducks in the rice field, wandering about and muttering among themselves about some recent poultry scandal.

There was even a coffeepot.

Just like that, Felipe became himself again: kind, attentive, nice. He had his little corner and his routines. I had my books. We both had a familiar bed to share. We relaxed as much as possible into a period of waiting for the Department of Homeland Security to decide Felipe’s fate. We fell into an almost narcotic pause during the next two months—something like our friend Keo’s meditating frogs. I read, Felipe cooked, sometimes we took a slow walk around the village and visited old friends. But what I remember most about that spell of time in Bali were the nights.

Here’s something you wouldn’t necessarily expect of Bali: The place is bloody loud. I once lived in a Manhattan apartment facing 14th Street, and that place was not nearly as loud as this rural Balinese village. There were nights in Bali when the two of us would be simultaneously awakened by the sound of dogs fighting, or roosters arguing, or an enthusiastic ceremonial procession. Other times, we were pulled out of sleep by the weather, which could behave with startling drama. We always slept with the windows open, and there were nights when the wind blew so hard that we would wake to find ourselves all twisted up in the fabric of our mosquito netting, like seaweed trapped in a sailboat’s rigging. Then we would untangle each other and lie in the hot darkness, talking.

One of my favorite passages in literature is from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. In it, Calvino described an imaginary town called Eufemia, where the merchants of all nations gather at every solstice and every equinox to exchange goods. But these merchants do not come together merely to trade spices or jewels or livestock or textiles. Rather, they come to this town to exchange stories with each other—to literally trade in personal intimacies. The way it works, Calvino wrote, is that the men gather around the desert bonfires at night, and each man offers up a word, like “sister,” or “wolf,” or “buried treasure.” Then all the other men take turns telling their own personal stories of sisters, of wolves, of buried treasures. And in the months to come, long after the merchants leave Eufemia, when they ride their camels alone across the desert or sail the long route to China, each man combats his boredom by dredging through his old memories. And that’s when the men discover that their memories really have been traded—that, as Calvino wrote, “their sister had been exchanged for another’s sister, their wolf for another’s wolf.”

This is what intimacy does to us over time. That’s what a long marriage can do: It causes us to inherit and trade each other’s stories. This, in part, is how we become annexes of each other, trellises on which each other’s biography can grow. Felipe’s private history becomes a piece of my memory; my life gets woven into the material of his. Recalling that imaginary story-trading town of Eufemia, and thinking of the tiny narrative stitches that comprise human intimacy, I would sometimes—at three o’clock in the morning on a sleepless night in Bali—feed Felipe a specific word, just to see what memories I could summon out of him. At my cue, at the word I had offered up to him, Felipe would lie there beside me in the dark telling me his scattered stories of sisters, of buried treasures, of wolves, and also more—of beaches, birds, feet, princes, competitions . . .

I remember one hot, damp night when I woke up after a motorcycle without a muffler had blasted past our window, and I sensed that Felipe was also awake. Once more, I selected a word at random.

“Please tell me a story about fish,” I requested.

Felipe thought for a long while.

Then he took his time in the moonlit room to recount a memory of going fishing with his father on overnight trips when he was just a little kid back in Brazil. They would head off to some wild river together, just the child and the man, and they would camp there for days—barefoot and shirtless the whole time, living on what they caught. Felipe wasn’t as smart as his older brother Gildo (everyone agreed on this), and he wasn’t as charming as his big sister Lily (everyone agreed on that, too), but he was known in the family to be the best helper and so he was the only one who ever got to go on the fishing trips alone with his father, even though he was very small.

Felipe’s main job on those expeditions was to help his dad set the nets across the river. It was all about strategy. His dad wouldn’t talk to him much during the day (too busy focusing on the fishing), but every night over the open fire, he would lay out his plan—man to man—for the next day about where they would fish. Felipe’s father would ask his six-year-old son, “Did you see that tree about a mile up the river that’s halfway submerged? What do you think about us going there tomorrow, to investigate?” and Felipe would squat there by the fire, all alert and serious, listening manfully, focusing on the plan, nodding his approval.

Felipe’s father was not an ambitious guy, not a great thinker, not a captain of industry. Truthfully, he was not very industrious at all. But he was a fearless swimmer. He would clench his big hunting knife in his teeth and swim across those wide rivers, checking his nets and traps while he left his little boy alone back on the bank. It was both terrifying and thrilling for Felipe to watch his father strip down to his shorts, bite that knife, and fight his way across the swift current—knowing all the while that if his father was swept away, he himself would be abandoned there in the middle of nowhere.

But his father was never swept away. He was too strong. In the nighttime heat of our bedroom in Bali, under our damp and billowing mosquito nets, Felipe showed me what a strong swimmer his dad had been. He imitated his father’s beautiful stroke, lying there on his back in the humid night air, swimming, his arms faint and ghostly. Across all these lost decades, Felipe could still replicate the exact sound that his father’s arms made as they sliced through the fast dark waters: “Shush-a, shush-a, shush-a . . .”

And now that memory—that sound—swam through me, too. I even felt as though I could remember it, despite having never met Felipe’s father, who died years ago. In fact, there are probably only about four people alive in the whole world who remember Felipe’s father at all anymore, and only one of them—until the moment Felipe shared this story with me—recalled exactly how that man had looked and sounded when he used to swim across wide Brazilian rivers in the middle years of the last century. But now I felt that I could remember it, too, in a strange and personal way.

This is intimacy: the trading of stories in the dark.

This act, the act of quiet nighttime talking, illustrates for me more than anything else the curious alchemy of companionship. Because when Felipe described his father’s swimming stroke, I took that watery image and I stitched it carefully into the hem of my own life, and now I will carry that around with me forever. As long as I live, and even long after Felipe has gone, his childhood memory, his father, his river, his Brazil—all of this, too, has somehow become me.

A few weeks into our sojourn in Bali, there was finally a breakthrough in the immigration case.

According to our lawyer back in Philadelphia, the FBI had cleared my criminal background report. I’d passed cleanly. I was now considered a safe risk for marrying a foreigner, which meant that the Department of Homeland Security could finally begin processing Felipe’s immigration application. If all went well—if they granted him the elusive golden ticket of a fiancé visa—he might be allowed to return to America within the space of three months. The end was now in sight. Our marriage had now become imminent. The immigration documents, assuming Felipe secured them, would stipulate quite clearly that this man was allowed to enter America again, but for only and exactly thirty days, during which time he had to marry a particular citizen named Elizabeth Gilbert, and only a particular citizen named Elizabeth Gilbert, or he would face permanent deportation. The government would not be issuing an actual shotgun along with all the paperwork, but it did sort of have that feeling.

As this news filtered back to all our family members and friends around the world, we started getting questions from people about what kind of wedding ceremony we were planning. When would the wedding be? Where would it be? Who would be invited? I dodged everyone’s questions. Truthfully, I hadn’t planned anything special around a wedding ceremony simply because I found the whole idea of a public wedding entirely agitating.

I had stumbled in my studies on a letter that Anton Chekhov wrote to his fiancée, Olga Knipper, on April 26, 1901, a letter that perfectly expressed the sum of all my fears. Chekhov wrote, “If you give me your word that not a soul in Moscow will know about our wedding until after it has taken place, I am ready to marry you on the very day of my arrival. For some reason I am horribly afraid of the wedding ceremony and the congratulations and the Champagne that you must hold in your hand while you smile vaguely. I wish we could go straight from the church to Zvenigorod. Or perhaps we could get married in Zvenigorod. Think, think, darling! You are clever, they say.”

Yes! Think!

I, too, wanted to skip all the fuss and go straight to Zvenigorod—and I’d never even heard of Zvenigorod! I just wanted to get married as furtively and privately as possible, perhaps without even telling anyone. Weren’t there judges and mayors out there who could execute such a job painlessly enough? When I confided these thoughts in an e-mail to my sister Catherine, she replied, “You make marriage sound like a colonoscopy.” But I can attest that after months of intrusive questions from the Homeland Security Department, a colonoscopy was exactly what our upcoming wedding was beginning to feel like.

Still, as it turned out, there were some people in our lives who felt this event should be honored with a proper ceremony, and my sister was foremost among them. She sent me gentle but frequent e-mails from Philadelphia concerning the possibility of throwing a wedding party for us at her house when we returned home. It wouldn’t have to be anything fancy, she promised, but still . . .

My palms dampened at the very thought of it. I protested that this really was not necessary, that Felipe and I didn’t really roll that way. Catherine wrote in her next message, “What if I just happened to throw a big birthday party for myself, and you and Felipe happened to come? Would I be allowed to at least make a toast to your marriage?”

I committed to no such thing.

She tried again: “What if I just happened to throw a big party while you guys were at my house, but you and Felipe wouldn’t even have to come downstairs? You could just lock yourselves upstairs with the lights off. And when I made the wedding toast, I would casually wave my champagne glass in the general direction of the attic door? Is even that too threatening?”

Oddly, indefensibly, perversely: yes.

When I tried to sort out my resistance to a public wedding ceremony, I had to admit that part of the issue was simple embarrassment. How very awkward to stand in front of one’s family and friends (many of whom had been guests at one’s first wedding) and swear solemn vows for life all over again. Hadn’t they all seen this film already? One’s credibility does begin to tarnish after too much of this sort of thing. And Felipe, too, had once before sworn lifetime vows only to leave the marriage after seventeen years. What a pair we made! To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: One divorce may be regarded as a misfortune, but two begins to smack of carelessness.

Furthermore, I could never forget what the etiquette columnist Miss Manners has to say on this very subject. While expressing her conviction that people should be allowed to marry as many times as they like, she does believe that each of us is entitled to only one big fanfare wedding ceremony per lifetime. (This may seem a bit overly Protestant and repressive, I know—but curiously enough, the Hmong feel the same way. When I’d asked that grandmother back in Vietnam about the traditional Hmong procedure for second marriages, she had replied, “Second weddings are exactly the same as first weddings—except with not as many pigs.”)

Moreover, a second or third big wedding puts family members and friends in the awkward position of wondering if they must shower repeat brides with gifts and abundant attention all over again. The answer, apparently, is no. As Miss Manners once coolly explained to a reader, the proper technique for congratulating a serial bride-to-be is to eschew all the gifts and galas and simply write the lady a note expressing how very delighted you are for her happiness, wishing her all the luck in the world, and being very careful to avoid using the words “this time.”

My God, how those two indicting little words—this time—make me cringe. Yet it was true. The recollections of last time felt all too recent for me, all too painful. Also, I didn’t like the idea that guests at a bride’s second wedding are just as likely to be thinking about her first spouse as they are to be thinking about her new spouse—and that the bride, too, will probably be remembering her ex-husband on that day. First spouses, I have learned, don’t ever really go away—even if you aren’t speaking to them anymore. They are phantoms who dwell in the corners of our new love stories, never entirely vanishing from sight, materializing in our minds whenever they please, offering up unwelcome comments or bits of painfully accurate criticism. “We know you better than you know yourselves” is what the ghosts of our ex-spouses like to remind us, and what they know about us, unfortunately, is often not pretty.

“There are four minds in the bed of a divorced man who marries a divorced woman,” says a fourth-century Talmudic document—and indeed, our former spouses do often haunt our beds. I still dream about my ex-husband, for instance, far more than I would ever have imagined back when I left him. Usually these dreams are agitating and confusing. On rare occasions, they are warm or conciliatory. It doesn’t really matter, though: I can neither control the dreams nor stop them. He shows up in my subconscious whenever he pleases, entering without knocking. He still has the keys to that house. Felipe dreams about his ex-wife, too. I dream about Felipe’s ex-wife, for heaven’s sake. I sometimes even dream about my ex-husband’s new wife, whom I have never met, whose photograph I have never even seen—yet she appears in my dreams sometimes, and we converse there. (In fact, we hold summit meetings.) And I wouldn’t be surprised if somewhere in this world my ex-husband’s second wife is intermittently dreaming about me—trying in her subconscious to work out the strange folds and seams of our connection.

My friend Ann—divorced twenty years ago and happily remarried since to a wonderful, older man—assures me that this will all go away over time. She swears that the ghosts do recede, that there will come a time when I never think about my ex-husband again. I don’t know, though. I find that hard to picture. I can imagine it easing, but I can’t imagine it ever going away completely, especially because my first marriage ended so sloppily, with so much left unresolved. My ex-husband and I never once agreed on what had gone wrong with our relationship. It was shocking, our total absence of consensus. Such completely different worldviews are probably also an indication of why we should never have been together in the first place; we were the only two eyewitnesses to the death of our marriage, and we each walked away with a completely different testimony as to what had happened.

Thus, perhaps, the dim sense of haunting. So we lead separate lives now, my ex-husband and I, yet he still visits my dreams in the form of an avatar who probes and debates and reconsiders from a thousand different angles an eternal docket of unfinished business. It’s awkward. It’s eerie. It’s ghostly, and I didn’t want to provoke that ghost with a big loud ceremony or celebration.

Maybe another reason Felipe and I were so resistant to exchanging ceremonial vows was that we felt we’d already done it. We’d already exchanged vows in an utterly private ceremony of our own devising. This had happened back in Knoxville, in April 2005—back when Felipe first came to live with me in that odd decaying hotel on the square. We had gone out one day and bought ourselves a pair of simple gold rings. Then we’d written out our promises to each other and read them aloud. We put the rings on each other’s fingers, sealed our commitment with a kiss and tears, and that was it. Both of us had felt like that was enough. In all the ways that mattered, then, we believed that we were already married.

Nobody saw this happen except the two of us (and—one hopes—God). And needless to say, nobody respected those vows of ours in any way whatsoever (except the two of us and—again, one hopes—God). I invite you to imagine how the deputies of the Homeland Security Department, for instance, might have responded back at the Dallas/ Fort Worth Airport if I had tried to convince them that a private commitment ceremony held in a Knoxville hotel room had somehow rendered Felipe and me as good as legally married.

Truth be told, it seemed mostly irritating to people—even to people who loved us—that Felipe and I were walking around wearing wedding rings without having had an official and legal marriage ceremony. The consensus was that our actions were confusing at best, pathetic at worst. “No!” declared my old friend Brian in an e-mail from North Carolina when I told him that Felipe and I had recently exchanged private vows. “No, you cannot just do it that way!” he insisted. “That’s not enough! You must have some kind of real wedding!”

Brian and I argued over this subject for weeks, and I was surprised to discover his adamancy on the topic. I thought that he, of all people, would understand why Felipe and I shouldn’t need to marry publicly or legally just to satisfy other people’s conventions. Brian is one of the happiest married men I know (his devotion to Linda makes him the living definition of the marvelous word uxorious, or “wife-worshiping”), but he’s also quite possibly my most naturally nonconformist friend. He bends comfortably to no socially accepted norm whatsoever. He’s basically a pagan with a Ph.D. who lives in a cabin in the woods with a composting toilet; this was hardly Miss Manners. But Brian was uncompromising in his insistence that private vows spoken only before God do not count as marriage.

“MARRIAGE IS NOT PRAYER!” he insisted (italics and capitals his). “That’s why you have to do it in front of others, even in front of your aunt who smells like cat litter. It’s a paradox, but marriage actually reconciles a lot of paradoxes: freedom with commitment, strength with subordination, wisdom with utter nincompoopery, etc. And you’re missing the main point—it’s not just to ‘satisfy’ other people. Rather, you have to hold your wedding guests to their end of the deal. They have to help you with your marriage; they have to support you or Felipe, if one of you falters.”

The only person who seemed more annoyed than Brian about our private commitment ceremony was my niece Mimi, age seven. First of all, Mimi felt prodigiously ripped off that I hadn’t thrown a real wedding, because she really wanted to be a flower girl at least once in her life and had never yet been given the chance. Meanwhile, her best friend and rival Moriya had already been a flower girl twice—and Mimi wasn’t getting any younger here, people.

Moreover, our actions in Tennessee offended my niece on an almost semantic level. It had been suggested to Mimi that she could now, after that exchange of private vows in Knoxville, refer to Felipe as her uncle—but she wasn’t having it. Nor did her older brother Nick buy it. It wasn’t that my sister’s kids didn’t like Felipe. It’s just that an uncle, as Nick (age ten) instructed me sternly, is either the brother of your father or mother, or he is the man who is legally married to your aunt. Felipe, therefore, was not officially Nick and Mimi’s uncle any more than he was officially my husband, and there was nothing I could do to convince them otherwise. Children at that age are nothing if not sticklers for convention. Hell, they’re practically census takers. To punish me for my civil disobedience, Mimi took to calling Felipe her “uncle” using the sarcastic air quotes every time. Sometimes she even referred to him as my “husband”—again with the air quotes and the hint of irritated disdain.

One night back in 2005, when Felipe and I were having dinner at Catherine’s house, I had asked Mimi what it would take for her to consider my commitment to Felipe a valid one. She was unyielding in her certainty. “You need to have a real wedding,” she said.

“But what makes something a real wedding?” I asked.

“You need to have a person there.” Now she was frankly exasperated. “You can’t just make promises with nobody seeing it. There has to be a person who watches when you make promises.”

Curiously enough, Mimi was making a strong intellectual and historical point there. As the philosopher David Hume explained, witnesses are necessary in all societies when it comes to important vows. The reason is that it’s not possible to tell whether a person is telling the truth or lying when he speaks a promise. The speaker may have, as Hume called it, “a secret direction of thought” hidden behind the noble and high-flown words. The presence of the witness, though, negates any concealed intentions. It doesn’t matter anymore whether you meant what you said; it matters merely that you said what you said, and that a third party witnessed you saying it. It is the witness, then, who becomes the living seal of the promise, notarizing the vow with real weight. Even in the early European Middle Ages, before the times of official church or government weddings, the expression of a vow before a single witness was all it took to seal a couple together forever in a state of legal matrimony. Even then, you couldn’t do it entirely on your own. Even then, somebody had to watch.

“Would it satisfy you,” I asked Mimi, “if Felipe and I promised wedding vows to each other, right here in your kitchen, in front of you?”

“Yeah, but who would be the person?” she asked.

“Why don’t you be the person?” I suggested. “That way you can be sure it’s done properly.”

This was a brilliant plan. Making sure that things are done properly is Mimi’s specialty. This is a girl who was veritably born to be the person. And I’m proud to report that she rose to the occasion. Right there in the kitchen, while her mother cooked dinner, Mimi asked Felipe and me if we would please rise and face her. She asked us to please hand her the gold “wedding” rings (again with the air quotes) that we had already been wearing for months. These rings she promised to hold safely until the ceremony was over.

Then she improvised a matrimonial ritual, cobbled together, I supposed, from various movies she had seen in her seven long years of life.

“Do you promise to love each other all the time?” she asked.

We promised.

“Do you promise to love each other through sick and not sick?”

We promised.

“Do you promise to love each other through mad and not mad?”

We promised.

“Do you promise to love each other through rich and not so rich?” (The idea of flat-out poor, apparently, was not something Mimi cared to wish upon us; thus “not so rich” would have to suffice.)

We promised.

We all stood there for a moment in silence. It was evident that Mimi would have liked to remain in the authoritative position of the person for a bit longer, but she couldn’t come up with anything else that needed promising. So she gave us back our rings and instructed us to place them on each other’s fingers.

“You may now kiss the bride,” she pronounced.

Felipe kissed me. Catherine gave a small cheer and went back to stirring the clam sauce. Thus concluded, right there in my sister’s kitchen, the second non-legally-binding commitment ceremony of Liz and Felipe. This time with an actual witness.

I hugged Mimi. “Satisfied?”

She nodded.

But plainly—you could read it all over her face—she was not.

What is it about a public, legal wedding ceremony that means so much to everybody anyhow? And why was I so stubbornly—almost belligerently—resistant to it? My aversion made even less sense, considering that I happen to be somebody who loves ritual and ceremony to an inordinate degree. Look, I’ve studied my Joseph Campbell, I’ve read The Golden Bough, and I get it. I thoroughly recognize that ceremony is essential to humans: It’s a circle that we draw around important events to separate the momentous from the ordinary. And ritual is a sort of magical safety harness that guides us from one stage of our lives into the next, making sure we don’t stumble or lose ourselves along the way. Ceremony and ritual march us carefully right through the center of our deepest fears about change, much the same way that a stable boy can lead a blindfolded horse right through the center of a fire, whispering, “Don’t overthink this, buddy, okay? Just put one hoof in front of the other and you’ll come out on the other side just fine.”

I even understand why people feel it’s so important to witness each other’s ritualistic ceremonies. My father—not an especially conventional man by any means—was always adamant that we must attend the wakes and funerals of anyone in our hometown who ever died. The point, he explained, was not necessarily to honor the dead or to comfort the living. Instead, you went to these ceremonies so that you could be seen—specifically seen, for instance, by the wife of the deceased. You needed to make sure that she catalogued your face and registered the fact that you had attended her husband’s funeral. This was not so you could earn social points or get extra credit for being a nice person, but rather so that the next time you ran into the widow at the supermarket she would be spared the awful uncertainty of wondering whether you had heard her sad news. Having seen you at her husband’s funeral, she would already know that you knew. She would therefore not have to repeat the story of her loss to you all over again, and you would be saved the awkward necessity of expressing your condolences right there in the middle of the produce aisle because you had already expressed them at the church, where such words are appropriate. This public ceremony of death, therefore, somehow squared you and the widow with each other—and also somehow spared the two of you social discomfort and uncertainty. Your business with each other was settled. You were safe.

This is what my friends and family wanted, I realized, when they were asking for a public wedding ceremony between Felipe and me. It wasn’t that they wanted to dress in fine clothing, dance in uncomfortable shoes, or dine on the chicken or the fish. What my friends and family really wanted was to be able to move on with their lives knowing with certainty where everybody stood in relationship to everybody else. This was what Mimi wanted—to be squared and spared. She wanted the clear assurance that she could now take the words “uncle” and “husband” out of air quotes and continue her life without awkwardly wondering whether she was now required to honor Felipe as a family member or not. And it was quite clear that the only way she was ever going to offer up her full loyalty to this union was if she could personally witness the exchange of legal vows.

I knew all this, and I understood it. Still, I resisted. The main problem was that—even after several months spent reading about marriage and thinking about marriage and talking about marriage—I was still not yet entirely convinced about marriage. I was not yet sure that I bought the package of goods that matrimony was selling. Truthfully, I was still feeling resentful that Felipe and I had to marry at all merely because the government demanded it of us. And probably the reason this all bothered me so deeply and at such a fundamental level, I finally realized, is that I am Greek.

Please understand, I do not mean that I am literally Greek, as in: from the country of Greece, or a member of a collegiate fraternity, or enamored of the sexual passion that bonds two men in love. Instead, I mean that I am Greek in the way I think. Because here’s the thing: It has long been understood by philosophers that the entire bedrock of Western culture is based on two rival worldviews—the Greek and the Hebrew—and whichever side you embrace more strongly determines to a large extent how you see life.

From the Greeks—specifically from the glory days of ancient Athens—we have inherited our ideas about secular humanism and the sanctity of the individual. The Greeks gave us all our notions about democracy and equality and personal liberty and scientific reason and intellectual freedom and open-mindedness and what we might call today “multiculturalism.” The Greek take on life, therefore, is urban, sophisticated, and exploratory, always leaving plenty of room for doubt and debate.

On the other hand, there is the Hebrew way of seeing the world. When I say “Hebrew” here, I’m not specifically referring to the tenets of Judaism. (In fact, most of the contemporary American Jews I know are very Greek in their thinking, while it’s the American fundamentalist Christians these days who are profoundly Hebrew.) “Hebrew,” in the sense that philosophers use it here, is shorthand for an ancient world-view that is all about tribalism, faith, obedience, and respect. The Hebrew credo is clannish, patriarchal, authoritarian, moralistic, ritualistic, and instinctively suspicious of outsiders. Hebrew thinkers see the world as a clear play between good and evil, with God always firmly on “our” side. Human actions are either right or wrong. There is no gray area. The collective is more important than the individual, morality is more important than happiness, and vows are inviolable.

The problem is that modern Western culture has somehow inherited both these ancient worldviews—though we have never entirely reconciled them because they aren’t reconcilable. (Have you followed an American election cycle recently?) American society is therefore a funny amalgam of both Greek and Hebrew thinking. Our legal code is mostly Greek; our moral code is mostly Hebrew. We have no way of thinking about independence and intellect and the sanctity of the individual that is not Greek. We have no way of thinking about righteousness and God’s will that is not Hebrew. Our sense of fairness is Greek; our sense of justice is Hebrew.

And when it comes to our ideas about love—well, we are a tangled mess of both. In survey after survey, Americans express their belief in two completely contradictory ideas about marriage. On one hand (the Hebrew hand), we overwhelmingly believe as a nation that marriage should be a lifetime vow, never broken. On the other, Greek, hand, we equally believe that an individual should always have the right to get divorced, for his or her own personal reasons.

How can both these ideas be simultaneously true? No wonder we’re so confused. No wonder Americans get married more often, and get divorced more often, than any other people in any other nation on earth. We keep ping-ponging back and forth between two rival views of love. Our Hebrew (or biblical/moral) view of love is based on devotion to God—which is all about submission before a sacrosanct creed, and we absolutely believe in that. Our Greek (or philosophical/ethical) view of love is based on devotion to nature—which is all about exploration, beauty, and a deep reverence for self-expression. And we absolutely believe in that, too.

The perfect Greek lover is erotic; the perfect Hebrew lover is faithful.

Passion is Greek; fidelity is Hebrew.

This idea came to haunt me because, on the Greek-Hebrew spectrum, I fall much closer to the Greek end. Did this make me an especially poor candidate for matrimony? I worried that it did. We Greeks don’t feel comfortable sacrificing the Self upon the altar of tradition; it just feels oppressive and scary to us. I worried about all this even more after I stumbled on one tiny but critical piece of information from that massive Rutgers study on matrimony. Apparently the researchers found evidence to support the notion that marriages in which both husband and wife wholeheartedly respect the sanctity of matrimony itself are more likely to endure than marriages where couples are perhaps a bit more suspicious of the institution. It seems, then, that respecting marriage is a precondition for staying married.

Though I suppose that makes sense, right? You need to believe in what you’re pledging, don’t you, for a promise to have any weight? Because marriage is not merely a vow made to another individual; that’s the easy part. Marriage is also a vow made to a vow. I know for certain that there are people who stay married forever not necessarily because they love their spouses, but because they love their principles. They will go to their graves still bound in loyal matrimony to somebody they may actively loathe just because they promised something before God to that person, and they would no longer recognize themselves if they dishonored such a promise.

Clearly, I am not such a being. In the past, I was given the clear choice between honoring my vow and honoring my own life, and I chose myself over the promise. I refuse to say that this necessarily makes me an unethical person (one could argue that choosing liberation over misery is a way of honoring life’s miracle), but it did bring up a dilemma when it came to getting married to Felipe. While I was just Hebrew enough to dearly wish that I would stay married forever this time (yes, let’s just go ahead and use those shaming words: this time), I had not yet found a way to respect wholeheartedly the institution of matrimony itself. I had not yet found a place for myself within the history of marriage where I felt that I belonged, where I felt that I could recognize myself. This absence of respect and self-recognition caused me to fear that not even I would believe my own sworn vows on my own wedding day.

Trying to sort this out, I brought up the question with Felipe. Now I should say here that Felipe was considerably more relaxed about all this than I was. While he didn’t hold any more affection for the institution of marriage than I did, he kept telling me, “At this point, darling, it’s all just a game. The government has set the rules and now we have to play their game in order to get what we want. Personally, I’m willing to play any game whatsoever, as long as it means that I ultimately can live my life with you in peace.”

That mode of thinking worked for him, but gamesmanship wasn’t what I was looking for here; I needed a certain level of earnestness and authenticity. Still, Felipe could see my agitation on this subject, and—God bless the man—he was kind enough to listen to me muse for quite a long while on the rival philosophies of Western civilization and how they were affecting my views on matrimony. But when I asked Felipe whether he felt himself to be more Greek or more Hebrew in his thinking, he replied, “Darling—none of this really applies to me.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“I’m not Greek or Hebrew.”

“What are you then?”

“I’m Brazilian.”

“But what does that even mean?”

Felipe laughed. “Nobody knows! That’s the wonderful thing about being Brazilian. It doesn’t mean anything! So you can use your Brazilianness as an excuse to live your life any way you want. It’s a brilliant strategy, actually. It’s taken me far.”

“So how does that help me?”

“Perhaps it can help you to relax! You’re about to marry a Brazilian. Why don’t you start thinking like a Brazilian?”

“How?”

“By choosing what you want! That’s the Brazilian way, isn’t it? We borrow everyone’s ideas, mix it all up, and then we create something new out of it. Listen—what is it that you like so much about the Greeks?”

“Their sense of humanity,” I said.

“And what is it that you like—if anything—about the Hebrews?”

“Their sense of honor,” I said.

“Okay, so that’s settled—we’ll take them both. Humanity and honor. We’ll make a marriage out of that combination. We’ll call it a Brazilian blend. We’ll shape this thing to our own code.”

“Can we just do that?”

“Darling!” Felipe said, and he took my face between his hands with a sudden, frustrated urgency. “When are you going to understand? As soon as we secure this bloody visa and get ourselves safely married back in America, we can do whatever the hell we want.”

C an we, though?

I prayed that Felipe was right, but I wasn’t sure. My deepest fear about marriage, when I dug right down to the very bottom of it, was that matrimony would end up shaping us far more than we could ever possibly shape it. All my months of studying marriage had only caused me to fear this potentiality more than ever. I had come to believe that matrimony as an institution was impressively powerful. It was certainly far bigger and older and deeper and more complicated than Felipe or I could ever possibly be. No matter how modern and sophisticated Felipe and I might feel, I feared we would step onto the assembly line of marriage and soon enough find ourselves molded into spouses—crammed into some deeply conventional shape that benefited society, even if it did not entirely benefit us.

All this was disquieting because, as annoying as it may sound, I do like to think of myself as vaguely bohemian. I’m not an anarchist or anything, but it does comfort me to regard my life in terms of a certain instinctive resistance to conformity. Felipe, to be honest, likes to think of himself in much the same way. Okay, let’s all be truthful here and admit that most of us probably like to think of ourselves in these terms, right? It’s charming, after all, to imagine oneself as an eccentric nonconformist, even when one has just purchased a coffeepot. So maybe the whole idea of bending under the convention of marriage stung a bit for me—stung at that stubborn old level of antiauthoritarian Greek pride. Honestly, I wasn’t sure I would ever get around that issue.

That is, until I discovered Ferdinand Mount.

P awing through the Web one day for further clues on marriage, I stumbled on a curious-looking academic work titled The Subversive Family by a British author named Ferdinand Mount. I promptly ordered the book and had my sister ship it to me in Bali. I loved the title and was certain this text would relay inspiring stories of couples who had somehow figured out ways to beat the system and undermine social authority, keeping true to their rebel roots, all within the institution of marriage. Perhaps I would find my role models here!

Indeed, subversion was the topic of this book, but not at all in the manner I’d expected. This was hardly a seditious manifesto, which shouldn’t have been surprising given that it turns out Ferdinand Mount (beg pardon—make that Sir William Robert Ferdinand Mount, 3rd Baronet) is a conservative columnist for the London Sunday Times. I can honestly say that I never would have ordered this book had I known that fact in advance. But I’m happy that I did find it, because sometimes salvation comes to us in the most unlikely of forms, and Sir Mount (surmount?) did provide me with a sort of rescue, offering up an idea about matrimony that was radically different from anything I’d unearthed before.

Mount—I’ll eschew his title from here on out—suggests that all marriages are automatic acts of subversion against authority. (All non-arranged marriages, that is. Which is to say all nontribal, nonclannish, non-property-based marriages. Which is to say Western marriage.) The families that grow out of such willful and personal unions are subversive units, too. As Mount puts it: “The family is a subversive organization. In fact, it is the ultimate and only consistently subversive organization. Only the family has continued throughout history, and still continues, to undermine the State. The family is the enduring permanent enemy of all hierarchies, churches and ideologies. Not only dictators, bishops and commissars but also humble parish priests and café intellectuals find themselves repeatedly coming up against the stony hostility of the family and its determination to resist interference to the last.”

Now that is some seriously strong language, but Mount builds a compelling case. He suggests that because couples in nonarranged marriages join together for such deeply private reasons, and because those couples create such secret lives for themselves within their union, they are innately threatening to anybody who wants to rule the world. The first goal of any given authoritarian body is to inflict control on any given population, through coercion, indoctrination, intimidation, or propaganda. But authority figures, much to their frustration, have never been able to entirely control, or even monitor, the most secret intimacies that pass between two people who sleep together on a regular basis.

Even the Stasi of communist East Germany—the most effective totalitarian police force the world has ever known—could not listen in on every single private conversation in every single private household at three o’clock in the morning. Nobody has ever been able to do this. No matter how modest or trivial or serious the pillow talk, such hushed hours belong exclusively to the two people who are sharing them with each other. What passes between a couple alone in the dark is the very definition of the word “privacy.” And I’m talking not just about sex here but about its far more subversive aspect: intimacy. Every couple in the world has the potential over time to become a small and isolated nation of two—creating their own culture, their own language, and their own moral code, to which nobody else can be privy.

Emily Dickinson wrote, “Of all the Souls that stand create—/ I have elected—One.” That right there—the idea that, for our own private reasons, many of us do end up electing one person to love and defend above all others—is a situation that has exasperated family, friends, religious institutions, political movements, immigration officials, and military bodies forever. That selection, that narrowness of intimacy is maddening to anyone who longs to control you. Why do you think American slaves were never legally permitted to marry? Because it was far too dangerous for slave owners to even consider allowing a person held in captivity to experience the wide range of emotional freedom and innate secrecy that marriage can cultivate. Marriage represented a kind of liberty of the heart, and none of that business could be tolerated within an enslaved population.

For this reason, as Mount argues, powerful entities across the ages have always tried to undercut natural human bonds in order to increase their own power. Whenever a new revolutionary movement or cult or religion comes to town, the game always begins the same way: with an effort to separate you—the individual—from your preexisting loyalties. You must swear a blood oath of utter allegiance to your new overlords, masters, dogma, godhead, or nation. As Mount writes, “You are to renounce all other worldly goods and attachments and follow the Flag or the Cross or the Crescent or the Hammer and Sickle.” In short, you must disown your real family and swear that we are your family now. In addition, you must embrace the new, externally mandated, family-like arrangements that have been imposed on you (like the monastery, the kibbutz, the party cadre, the commune, the platoon, the gang, etc.). And if you choose to honor your wife or husband or lover above the collective, you have somehow failed and betrayed the movement, and you shall be denounced as selfish, backwards, or even treasonous.

But people keep doing it anyhow. They keep on resisting the collective and electing one person among the masses to love. We saw this happen in the early days of Christianity—remember? The early church fathers instructed quite clearly that people were now to choose celibacy over marriage. That was to be the new social construct. While it’s true that some early converts did become celibate, most decidedly did not. Eventually the Christian leadership had to cave and accept that marriage was not going away. The Marxists encountered the same problem when they tried to create a new world order in which children would be raised in communal nurseries, and where there would be no particular attachments whatsoever between couples. But the communists didn’t have any more luck enforcing that idea than the early Christians had. The fascists didn’t have any luck with it either. They influenced the shape of marriage, but they couldn’t eliminate marriage.

Nor could the feminists, I must admit in all fairness. Early on in the feminist revolution, some of the more radical activists shared a utopian dream in which, given the choice, liberated women would forever select bonds of sisterhood and solidarity over the repressive institution of marriage. Some of those activists, like the feminist separatist Barbara Lipschutz, went so far as to suggest that women should quit having sex altogether—not only with men, but also with other women—because sex was always going to be a demeaning and oppressive act. Celibacy and friendship, therefore, would be the new models for female relationships. “Nobody Needs to Get Fucked” was the title of Lipschutz’s infamous essay—which is not exactly how Saint Paul might have phrased it, but essentially came down to the exact same principles: that carnal encounters are always tarnishing, and that romantic partners, at the very least, distract us from our loftier and more honorable destinies. But Lipschutz and her followers didn’t have any more luck eradicating the desire for private sexual intimacy than the early Christians, or the communists or the fascists. A lot of women—even very smart and liberated women—ended up choosing private partnerships with men anyhow. And what are today’s most activist feminist lesbians fighting for? The right to get married. The right to become parents, to create families, to have access to legally binding unions. They want to be inside matrimony, shaping its history from within, not standing outside the thing throwing stones at its grotty old façade.

Even Gloria Steinem, the very face of the American feminist movement, decided to get married for the first time in the year 2000. She was sixty-six years old on her wedding day and just as brilliant as ever; one has to assume she knew exactly what she was doing. To some of her followers, though, it felt like a betrayal, as though a saint had fallen from grace. But it’s important to note that Steinem herself saw her marriage as a celebration of feminism’s victories. As she explained, had she gotten married back in the 1950s, back when she was “supposed to,” she would have effectively become her husband’s chattel—or at the very most his clever helpmeet, like Phyllis the math whiz. By the year 2000, though, thanks in no small part to her own tireless efforts, marriage in America had evolved to the point where a woman could be both a wife and a human being, with all her civil rights and liberties intact. But Steinem’s decision still disappointed a lot of passionate feminists, who could not get over the stinging insult that their fearless leader had chosen a man over the collective sisterhood. Of all the souls in creation, even Gloria had elected one—and that decision left everybody else out.

But you cannot stop people from wanting what they want, and a lot of people, as it turns out, want intimacy with one special person. And since there is no such thing as intimacy without privacy, people tend to push back very hard against anybody or anything that interferes with the simple desire to be left alone with a loved one. Although authoritarian figures throughout history have tried to curb this desire, they can’t get us to quit it. We just keep insisting on the right to link ourselves up to another soul legally, emotionally, physically, materially. We just keep on trying, again and again, no matter how ill-advised it may be, to recreate Aristophanes’ two-headed, eight-limbed figure of seamless human union.

I see this urge playing out everywhere around me, and sometimes in the most surprising forms. Some of the most unconventional, heavily tattooed, antiestablishmentarian, and socially rebellious people I know get married. Some of the most sexually promiscuous people I know get married (often to disastrous effect—but still, they do try). Some of the most misanthropic people I know get married, despite what appears to be their equal-opportunity distaste for humanity. In fact, I know of very few people who haven’t attempted a long-term monogamous partnership at least once in their lives, in one form or another—even if they never legally or officially sealed those vows inside a church or a judge’s chambers. In fact, most people I know have experimented with long-term monogamous partnerships several times over—even if their hearts may have been utterly destroyed by this effort before.

Even Felipe and I—two dodgy survivors of divorce who prided ourselves on a certain degree of bohemian autonomy—had started creating a little world for ourselves that looked suspiciously like marriage long before the immigration authorities ever got involved. Before we’d ever heard of Officer Tom, we had been living together, making plans together, sleeping together, sharing resources, building lives around each other, excluding other people from our relationship—and what do you call that, if not marriage? We’d even had a ceremony to seal our fidelity. (Hell, we’d had two!) We were shaping our lives in that particular form of partnership because we yearned for something. As so many of us do. We yearn for private intimacy even though it’s emotionally risky. We yearn for private intimacy even when we suck at it. We yearn for private intimacy even when it’s illegal for us to love the person we love. We yearn for private intimacy even when we are told that we should yearn for something else, something finer, something nobler. We just keep on yearning for private intimacy, and for our own deeply personal set of reasons. Nobody has ever been able to completely sort out that mystery, and nobody has ever been able to stop us from wanting it.

As Ferdinand Mount writes, “Despite all official efforts to downgrade the family, to reduce its role and even to stamp it out, men and women obstinately continue not merely to mate and produce children but to insist on living in pairs together.” (And I would add to this thought, by the way, that men and men also keep insisting on living in pairs together. And that women and women also keep insisting on living in pairs together. All of which just drives the authorities crazier still.)

Faced with this reality, repressive authorities always eventually surrender in the end, bowing at last to the inevitability of human partnership. But they don’t go down without a fight, those pesky powers-that-be. There is a pattern to their surrender, a pattern that Mount suggests is consistent across Western history. First, the authorities slowly glean that they are unable to stop people from choosing loyalty to a partner over allegiance to some higher cause, and that marriage is therefore not going away. But once they have given up trying to eliminate marriage, the authorities now attempt to control it by establishing all sorts of restrictive laws and limits around the custom. When the church fathers finally surrendered to matrimony’s existence in the Middle Ages, for instance, they immediately heaped on the institution a giant pile of tough new conditions: There would be no divorce; marriage would now be an inviolable holy sacrament; nobody would be allowed to marry outside of a priest’s purview; women must bow to the laws of coverture; etc. And then the church went a little crazy, trying to enforce all this control over marriage, right down to the most intimate level of private marital sexuality.

In Florence during the 1600s, for instance, a monk (ergo celibate) named Brother Cherubino was entrusted with the extraordinary task of writing a handbook for Christian husbands and wives that would clarify rules for what was considered acceptable sexual intercourse within Christian marriage and what was not. “Sexual activity,” Brother Cherubino instructed, “should not involve the eyes, nose, ears, tongue, or any other part of the body that is in no way necessary for procreation.” The wife could look at her husband’s private parts, but only if he was sick, and not because it was exciting, and “never allow yourself, woman, to be seen in the nude by your husband.” And while it was permissible for Christians to bathe every now and again, it was, of course, terribly wicked to try to make yourself smell good in order to be sexually attractive to your spouse. Also, you must never kiss your spouse using your tongue. Not anywhere! “The devil knows how to do so much between husband and wife,” Brother Cherubino lamented. “He makes them touch and kiss not only the honest parts but the dishonest ones as well. Even just to think about it, I am overwhelmed by horror, fright and bewilderment . . .”

Of course, as far as the church was concerned, the most horrible, frightening, and bewildering thing of all was that the matrimonial bed was so private and therefore so ultimately uncontrollable. Not even the most vigilant of Florentine monks could stop the explorations of two private tongues in one private bedroom in the middle of the night. Nor could any one monk control what all those tongues were talking about once the lovemaking was over—and this was perhaps the most threatening reality of all. Even in that most repressive age, once the doors were closed and the people could make their own choices, each couple defined its own terms of intimate expression.

In the end, the couples tend to win.

Once the authorities have failed at eliminating marriage, and once they have failed at controlling marriage, they give up and embrace the matrimonial tradition completely. (Amusingly, Ferdinand Mount calls this the signing of a “one-sided peace treaty.”) But then comes an even more curious stage: Like clockwork, the powers-that-be will now try to co-opt the notion of matrimony, going so far as to pretend that they invented marriage in the first place. This is what conservative Christian leadership has been doing in the Western world for several centuries now—acting as though they personally created the whole tradition of marriage and family values when in fact their religion began with a quite serious attack on marriage and family values.

This is the pattern that happened with the Soviets and with the twentieth-century Chinese, too. First, the communists tried to eliminate marriage; then they tried to control marriage; then they fabricated an entirely new mythology claiming that “the family” had always been the backbone of good communistic society anyhow, don’t you know.

Meanwhile, throughout all this contorted history, throughout all the thrashing and frothing of dictators and despots and priests and bullies, people just keep on getting married—or whatever you want to call it at any given time. Dysfunctional and disruptive and ill-advised though their unions may be—or even secret, illegal, unnamed, and renamed—people continue to insist on merging with each other on their own terms. They cope with all the changing laws and work around all the limiting restrictions of the day in order to get what they want. Or they flat-out ignore all the limiting restrictions of the day! As one Anglican minister in the American colony of Maryland complained in 1750, if he had been forced to recognize as “married” only those couples who had legally sealed their vows in a church, he would have had to “bastardize nine-tenths of the People in this County.”

People don’t wait for permission; they go ahead and create what they need. Even African slaves in early America invented a profoundly subversive form of marriage called the “besom wedding,” in which a couple jumped over a broomstick stuck aslant in a doorway and called themselves married. And nobody could stop those slaves from making this hidden commitment in a moment of stolen invisibility.

Seen in this light, then, the whole notion of Western marriage changes for me—changes to a degree that feels quietly and personally revolutionary. It’s as if the entire historical picture shifts one delicate inch, and suddenly everything aligns itself into a different shape. Suddenly, legal matrimony starts to look less like an institution (a strict, immovable, hidebound, and dehumanizing system imposed by powerful authorities on helpless individuals) and starts to look more like a rather desperate concession (a scramble by helpless authorities to monitor the unmanageable behavior of two awfully powerful individuals).

It is not we as individuals, then, who must bend uncomfortably around the institution of marriage; rather, it is the institution of marriage that has to bend uncomfortably around us. Because “they” (the powers-that-be) have never been entirely able to stop “us” (two people) from connecting our lives together and creating a secret world of our own. And so “they” eventually have no choice but to legally permit “us” to marry, in some shape or form, no matter how restrictive their ordinances may appear. The government hops along behind its people, struggling to keep up, desperately and belatedly (and often ineffectually and even comically) creating rules and mores around something we were always going to do anyhow, like it or not.

So perhaps I’ve had this story deliciously backwards the whole time. To somehow suggest that society invented marriage, and then forced human beings to bond with each other, is perhaps absurd. It’s like suggesting that society invented dentists, and then forced people to grow teeth. We invented marriage. Couples invented marriage. We also invented divorce, mind you. And we invented infidelity, too, as well as romantic misery. In fact, we invented the whole damn sloppy mess of love and intimacy and aversion and euphoria and failure. But most importantly of all, most subversively of all, most stubbornly of all, we invented privacy.

To a certain extent, then, Felipe was right: Marriage is a game. They (the anxious and powerful) set the rules. We (the ordinary and subversive) bow obediently before those rules. And then we go home and do whatever the hell we want anyhow.

D o I sound like I’m trying to talk myself into something here?

People, I am trying to talk myself into something here.

This entire book—every single page of it—has been an effort to search through the complex history of Western marriage until I could find some small place of comfort in there for myself. Such comfort is not necessarily always an easy thing to find. On my friend Jean’s wedding day over thirty years ago, she asked her mother, “Do all brides feel this terrified when they’re about to get married?” and her mother replied, even as she calmly buttoned up her daughter’s white dress, “No, dear. Only the ones who are actually thinking.”

Well, I have been thinking very hard about all this. The leap into marriage has not come easily for me, but perhaps it shouldn’t be easy. Perhaps it’s fitting that I needed to be persuaded into marriage—even vigorously persuaded—especially because I am a woman, and because matrimony has not always treated women kindly.

Some cultures seem to understand the need for feminine marital persuasion better than others. In some cultures, the task of vigorously enticing a woman to accept a marriage proposal has evolved into a ceremony, or even an art form, in its own right. In Rome, in the working-class neighborhood of Trastevere, a powerful tradition still dictates that a young man who wants to marry a young woman must publicly serenade his lover outside her home. He must beg for her hand in song, right out there in the open where everyone can witness it. Of course, a lot of Mediterranean cultures have this kind of tradition, but in Trastevere, they really go all out with it.

The scene always begins the same way. The young man comes to his beloved’s house with a group of male friends and any number of guitars. They gather under the young woman’s window and belt out—in loud, rough, local dialect—a song with the decidedly unromantic title “Roma, nun fa’la stupida stasera!” (“Rome, don’t be an idiot tonight!”) Because the young man is not, in fact, singing directly to his beloved; he doesn’t dare to. What he wants from her (her hand, her life, her body, her soul, her devotion) is so monumental that it’s too terrifying to speak the request directly. Instead, he directs his song to the entire city of Rome, shouting at Rome with an emotional urgency that is raw, crass, and insistent. With all his heart, he begs the city itself to please help him tonight in beguiling this woman into marriage.

“Rome, don’t be an idiot tonight!” the young man sings beneath the girl’s window. “Give me some help! Take the clouds away from the face of the moon, just for us! Shine forth your most brilliant stars! Blow, you son-of-a-bitch Western wind! Blow your perfumed air! Make it feel like spring!”

When the first strains of this familiar song start wafting through the neighborhood, everyone comes to their windows, and thus commences the amazing audience-participation portion of the evening’s entertainment. All the men within earshot lean out of their apartments and shake their fists at the sky, scolding the city of Rome for not assisting the boy more actively with his marriage plea. All the men belt out in unison, “Rome, don’t be an idiot tonight! Give him some help!”

Then the young woman herself—the object of desire—comes to her window. She has a verse of the song to sing, too, but her words are critically different. When her chorus comes around, she also begs Rome not to be an idiot tonight. She also begs the city to help her. But what she is begging for is something else altogether. She is begging for the strength to refuse the offer of marriage.

“Rome, don’t be an idiot tonight!” she implores in song. “Please put those clouds back across the moon! Hide your most brilliant stars! Stop blowing, you son-of-a-bitch Western wind! Hide the perfumed air of spring! Help me to resist!”

All the women in the neighborhood lean out their apartment windows and sing along loudly with the girl, “Please, Rome—give her some help!”

It becomes a desperate duel between the men’s voices and the women’s voices. The scene becomes so pitched that it honestly starts to feel as though all the women of Trastevere are begging for their lives. Strangely, though, it feels like all the men of Trastevere are begging for their lives, too.

In the fervor of the exchange, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that, in the end, this is just a game. From the first moment of the serenade, after all, everyone knows how the story will conclude. If the young woman has come to her window at all, if she has even glanced down at her suitor in the street, it means she has already accepted his wedding proposal. By merely engaging in her half of the spectacle, the girl has demonstrated her love. But out of some sense of pride (or perhaps out of some very justifiable sense of fear), the young woman must stall—if only to give voice to her doubts and hesitations. She must make it perfectly clear that it will take all the mighty powers of this young man’s love, combined with all the epic beauty of Rome, and all the brilliance of the starlight, and all the seduction of the full moon, and all the perfume of that son-of-a-bitch Western wind before she concedes her yes.

Given what she is agreeing to, one might argue that all this spectacle and all this resistance is necessary.

In any case, that is what I’ve needed, too—a clamorous song of self-persuasion about marriage, belted out in my own street, underneath my own window, until I could finally relax into my own acceptance. That has been the purpose of this effort all along. Forgive me, then, if, at the end of my story, I seem to be grasping at straws in order to reach comforting conclusions about matrimony. I need those straws; I need that comfort. Certainly I have needed Ferdinand Mount’s reassuring theory that, if you look at marriage in a certain light, you can make a case for the institution being intrinsically subversive. I received that theory as a great and soothing balm. Now, maybe that theory doesn’t work for you personally. Maybe you don’t need it the way I needed it. Maybe Mount’s thesis isn’t even entirely historically accurate. Nonetheless, I will take it. Like a good almost-Brazilian, I will take this one verse of the persuasion song and make it my own—not only because it heartens me, but because it actually also excites me.

In so doing, I have finally found my own little corner within matrimony’s long and curious history. So that is where I will park myself—right there in this place of quiet subversion, in full remembrance of all the other stubbornly loving couples across time who also endured all manner of irritating and invasive bullshit in order to get what they ultimately wanted: a little bit of privacy in which to practice love.

Alone in that corner with my sweetheart at last, all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

CHAPTER EIGHT

M arriage and C eremony

Nothing new here except my marrying,

which to me is a matter of profound wonder.

—Abraham Lincoln,

in an 1842 letter to Samuel Marshall

Things moved very quickly after that.

By December 2006, Felipe still hadn’t secured his immigration papers, but we sensed that victory was coming. Actually, we decided that victory was coming and so we went ahead and did the one specific thing the Department of Homeland Security expressly tells you not to do if you are waiting for a partner’s immigration visa to be cleared: We made plans.

The first priority? We needed a place to settle permanently once we were married. Enough renting, enough wandering. We needed a house of our own. So while I was still there in Bali with Felipe, I started seriously and openly searching for homes on the Internet, looking for something rural and quiet located within a comfortable driving distance of my sister in Philadelphia. It’s a crazy thing to look at houses when you can’t, in fact, look at any of the houses, but I had a clear vision of what we needed—a home inspired by a poem my friend Kate Light once wrote about her version of perfect domesticity: “A house in the country to find out what’s true / a few linen shirts, some good art / and you.”

I knew I would recognize the place when I found it. And then I did find it, hidden in a small mill town in New Jersey. Or rather, it wasn’t really a house, but a church—a tiny, square Presbyterian chapel, built in 1802, that somebody had cleverly converted into a living space. Two bedrooms, a compact kitchen, and one big open sanctuary where the congregation used to gather. Fifteen-foot-tall wavy glass windows. A big maple tree in the front yard. This was it. From the other side of the planet, I put down a bid without ever having seen the property in person. A few days later, over there in distant New Jersey, the owners accepted my offer.

“We have a house!” I announced triumphantly to Felipe.

“That’s marvelous, darling,” he said. “Now all we need is a country.”

So I set forth to secure us a country, damn it. I went back to the States alone, right before Christmas, and took care of all our business. I signed the closing papers on our new house, got our belongings out of storage, leased a car, bought a mattress. I found warehouse space in a nearby village where we could relocate Felipe’s gemstones and goods. I registered his business as a New Jersey corporation. All this before we even knew for sure if he would be allowed back into the country. I settled us in, in other words, before we were even officially an “us.”

Meanwhile, back in Bali, Felipe plunged into the last frantic preparations for his upcoming interview at the American Consulate in Sydney. As the date for his interview approached (it was alleged to be sometime in January), our long-distance conversations became almost entirely administrative. We lost all sense of romance—there was no time for it—as I studied the bureaucratic checklists a dozen times over, making sure he had assembled every single piece of paper that he would eventually need to turn over to the American authorities. Instead of sending him messages of love, I was now sending e-mails that read, “Darling, the lawyer says that I need to drive to Philly and pick up the forms from him in person, since they have a special barcode and cannot be faxed. Once I mail these to you, the first thing you need to do is sign/ date Form DS-230 Part I and send it to the consulate with the addendum. You will need to bring the original DS-156 document and all the other immigration documents to the interview—but remember: Until you are right there in the presence of the American interviewing officer, DO NOT SIGN FORM DS-156!!!!”

At the next-to-last minute, though, only a few days before the scheduled interview, we realized we had fumbled. We were missing a copy of Felipe’s police record from Brazil. Or, rather, we were missing a document that would prove that Felipe did not have a police record in Brazil. Somehow this critical piece of the dossier had escaped our attention. What followed was a horrible flurry of panic. Would this delay the whole process? Was it even possible to secure a Brazilian police report without Felipe’s having to fly to Brazil to pick it up in person?

After a few days of incredibly complicated transglobal phone calls, Felipe managed to convince our Brazilian friend Armenia—a woman of celebrated charisma and resourcefulness—to stand in line all day at a Rio de Janeiro police station and sweet-talk an official there into releasing Felipe’s clean Brazilian police records over to her. (There was a certain poetic symmetry to the fact that she rescued us in the end, given that she was the person who had introduced us to each other three years before at a dinner party in Bali.) Then Armenia overnighted those documents from Brazil to Felipe in Bali—just in time for him to fly to Jakarta during a monsoon in order to find an authorized translator who could render all his Brazilian paperwork into the necessary English in the presence of the only American-government-authorized Portuguese-speaking legal notary in the entire nation of Indonesia.

“It’s all very straightforward,” Felipe assured me, calling me in the middle of the night from a bicycle rickshaw in the pouring Javanese rain. “We can do this. We can do this. We can do this.”

On the morning of January 18, 2007, Felipe was the first person in line at the U.S. Consulate in Sydney. He hadn’t slept in days but he was ready, carrying a terrifyingly complex stack of papers: government records, medical exams, birth certificates, and masses of other sundry evidence. He hadn’t gotten a haircut in a long while and he was still wearing his travel sandals. But it was fine. They didn’t care how he looked, only that he was legitimate. And despite a few testy questions from the immigration official about what exactly Felipe had been doing in the Sinai Peninsula in 1975 (the answer? falling in love with a beautiful seventeen-year-old Israeli girl, naturally), the interview went well. At the end of it all, finally—with that satisfying, librarian-like thunk in his passport—they gave him the visa.

“Good luck on your marriage,” said the American official to my Brazilian fiancé, and Felipe was free.

He caught a Chinese Airlines flight the next morning from Sydney, which took him through Taipei and then over to Alaska. In Anchorage, he successfully passed through American customs and immigration and boarded a plane for JFK. A few hours later, I drove through an icy-cold winter’s night to meet him.

And while I would like to think that I had held myself together with a modicum of stoicism during the previous ten months, I must confess that I now absolutely fell apart as soon as I arrived at the airport. All the fears that I had been suppressing since Felipe’s arrest came spilling out in the open now that he was so close to being safely home. I became dizzy and shaky, and I was suddenly afraid of everything. I was afraid that I was in the wrong airport, at the wrong hour, on the wrong day. (I must have looked at the itinerary seventy-five times, but I still worried.) I was afraid that Felipe’s plane had crashed. I was retroactively and quite insanely afraid that he would fail his immigration interview back in Australia—when he had, in fact, just passed his immigration interview back in Australia only a day earlier.

And even now, even though the Arrivals board clearly announced that his flight had landed, I was perversely afraid that his flight had not landed, and that it would never land. What if he didn’t get off the plane? What if he got off the plane and they arrested him again? Why was it taking him so long to get off the plane? I scanned the faces of every passenger who came down that Arrivals corridor, searching for Felipe in the most preposterous of forms. Irrationally, I had to look twice at every single old Chinese lady with a cane and every single toddling child, just to make doubly sure that it wasn’t him. I was having trouble breathing. Like a lost kid, I almost ran over to a policeman and asked for help—but help with what?

Then, suddenly, it was him.

I would know him anywhere. The most familiar face in the world to me. He was running down the Arrivals corridor, looking for me with the same anxious expression that I was surely sporting myself. He had on the same clothes he’d been wearing the day he’d been arrested back in Dallas ten months earlier—the same clothes he’d been wearing pretty much every day of this whole year, all over the world. He was a bit tattered around the edges, yes, but somehow he seemed mighty to me nonetheless, his eyes burning with the effort to spot me in the crowd. He was not an old Chinese lady, he was not a toddling child, he was not anybody else. He was Felipe—my Felipe, my human, my cannonball—and then he saw me and he barreled down on me and almost knocked me over with the sheer force of his impact.

“We have circled and circled till we have arrived home again, we two,” wrote Walt Whitman. “We have voided all but freedom and all but our own joy.”

And now we could not let go of each other, and for some reason I simply could not stop sobbing.

W ithin a handful of days, we were married.

We got married in our new home—in that odd, old church—on a cold Sunday afternoon in February. It’s very convenient, it turns out, to own a church when one has to get married.

The marriage license cost us twenty-eight dollars and a photocopy of one utility bill. The guests were: my parents (married forty years); my Uncle Terry and Aunt Deborah (married twenty years); my sister and her husband (married fifteen years); my friend Jim Smith (divorced for twenty-five years); and Toby the family dog (never married, bi-curious). We all wished that Felipe’s children (unmarried) could have joined us, too, but the wedding happened on such short notice that there was no way to get them over in time from Australia. We had to make do with a few excited phone calls, but could not risk a delay. We needed to seal this deal immediately to protect Felipe’s place on American soil with an inviolable legal bond.

In the end, we had decided that we wanted a few witnesses at our wedding after all. My friend Brian was right: Marriage is not an act of private prayer. Instead, it is both a public and a private concern, with real-world consequences. While the intimate terms of our relationship would always belong solely to Felipe and me, it was important to remember that a small share of our marriage would always belong to our families as well—to all those people who would be most seriously affected by our success or our failure. They needed to be present on that day, then, in order to emphasize this point. I also had to admit that another small share of our vows, like it or not, would always belong to the State. That’s what made this a legal wedding in the first place after all.

But the smallest and most curiously shaped share of our vows belonged to history—at whose impressively large feet we all must kneel eventually. Wherever you have landed in history determines to a large extent what your marriage vows will look like and sound like. Since Felipe and I happened to have landed right there, in that little Garden State mill town, in the year 2007, we decided not to write our own idiosyncratic personal promises (we had done that back in Knoxville anyhow), but to acknowledge our place in history by repeating the basic, secular vows of the State of New Jersey. It just felt like an appropriate nod to reality.

Of course, my niece and nephew attended the wedding, too. Nick, the theatrical genius, was on hand to read a commemorative poem. And Mimi? She had cornered me a week earlier and asked, “Is this going to be a real wedding or not?”

“That all depends,” I’d said. “What do you think constitutes a real wedding?”

“A real wedding means there will be a flower girl,” Mimi replied. “And the flower girl will be wearing a pink dress. And the flower girl will be carrying flowers. Not a bouquet of flowers, but a basket of rose petals. And not pink rose petals, either, but yellow rose petals. And the flower girl will walk in front of the bride, and she will throw the yellow rose petals on the ground. Will you be having anything like that?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I guess it just depends on whether we can find a girl somewhere who might be capable of doing that job. Can you think of anyone?”

“I suppose I could do it,” she replied slowly, looking away with a terrific show of false indifference. “I mean, if you can’t find anyone else . . .”

So it turned out that we did have a real wedding, even by Mimi’s exacting standards. Aside from our extremely decked-out flower girl, though, it was a pretty casual affair. I wore my favorite red sweater. The groom wore his blue shirt (the clean one). Jim Smith played his guitar, and my Aunt Deborah—a trained opera singer—sang “La Vie en Rose” just for Felipe’s benefit. Nobody seemed to mind that the house was still unpacked and largely unfurnished. The only room that was fully usable thus far was the kitchen, and that was only so that Felipe could prepare a wedding lunch for everyone. He’d been cooking for two days, and we had to remind him to take off his apron when it came time to actually get married. (“A very good sign,” my mother noted.)

Our wedding vows were administered by a nice man named Harry Furstenberger, the mayor of this small New Jersey township. When Mayor Harry first walked in the door, my father asked him directly, “Are you a Democrat or a Republican?” because he knew that this would matter to me.

“I’m a Republican,” said Mayor Harry.

There followed a moment of tense silence. Then my sister whispered, “Actually, Liz, for this kind of thing, you sort of want a Republican. Just to make sure the marriage really sticks with Homeland Security, you know?”

So we proceeded.

You all know the gist of the standard American wedding vows, so I need not repeat them here. Suffice it to say, we repeated them there. Without irony or hesitation, we exchanged our vows in the presence of my family, in the presence of our friendly Republican mayor, in the presence of an actual flower girl, and in the presence of Toby the dog. In fact, Toby—sensing an important moment here—curled up on the floor right between Felipe and me just as we were sealing these promises. We had to lean over the dog in order to kiss each other. This felt auspicious; in medieval wedding portraits, you will often see the image of a dog painted between the figures of a newly wed couple—the ultimate symbol of fidelity.

By the end of it all—and it really doesn’t take very much time, considering the magnitude of the event—Felipe and I were finally legally married. Then we all sat down for a long lunch together—the mayor and my friend Jim and my family and the kids and my new husband. I did not have any way of knowing with certainty on that afternoon what peace and contentment were awaiting me in this marriage (reader: I know it now), but I did feel calm and grateful all the same. It was a lovely day. There was much wine and there were many toasts. The balloons that Nick and Mimi had brought with them drifted slowly up to the dusty old church ceiling and bobbed there above us all. People might have lingered even longer, but by dusk it had begun to sleet, so our guests gathered together their coats and belongings, eager to get on the road while the getting was still good.

Soon enough, everyone was gone.

And Felipe and I were left alone together at last, to clean up the lunch dishes and begin unpacking our home.

Acknowledgments

This book is a work of nonfiction. I have re-created all conversations and incidents to the best of my ability, but sometimes—for the sake of narrative coherence—I have edited down events or discussions that may have taken place over several days into one passage. Moreover, I have changed some—but not all—of the names of the characters in this story in order to protect the privacy of certain people who may not have intended, when their paths accidentally crossed mine, to show up later in a book. I thank Chris Langford for helping me track down appropriate aliases for these good people.

I am not a professional academic, nor a sociologist, nor a psychologist, nor an expert on marriage. I have done my best in this book to discuss the history of matrimony as accurately as possible, but in order to do so, I had to rely a great deal on the work of scholars and writers who have dedicated their entire professional lives to this topic. I won’t list a full bibliography here, but I must offer special gratitude to a few specific authors:

The work of the historian Stephanie Coontz has been a shining beacon for me over these last three years of study, and I cannot recommend highly enough her fascinating and extremely readable book Marriage: A History. I also owe an enormous debt to Nancy Cott, Eileen Powers, William Jordan, Erika Uitz, Rudolph M. Bell, Deborah Luepnitz, Zygmunt Bauman, Leonard Shlain, Helen Fisher, John Gottman and Julie Schwartz-Gottman, Evan Wolfson, Shirley Glass, Andrew J. Cherkin, Ferdinand Mount, Anne Fadiman (for her extraordinary writing on the Hmong), Allan Bloom (for his contemplations on the Greek-Hebrew philosophical divide), the many authors of the Rutgers University study on marriage, and—most delightfully and unexpectedly of all—Honoré de Balzac.

Aside from these authors, the single most influential person in the shaping of this book has been my friend Anne Connell, who copyedited, fact-checked, and corrected this manuscript to within an inch of its life, using her bionic eyes, her magical golden pencil, and her unparalleled expertise with “the Web nets.” Nobody—and I mean nobody—rivals the Scrutatrix for such editorial thoroughness. I have Anne to thank for the fact that this book is divided into chapters, that the word “actually” does not appear four times in every paragraph, and that every frog within these pages has been correctly identified as an amphibian and not a reptile.

I thank my sister Catherine Gilbert Murdock, who is not only a gifted writer of young adult fiction (her wonderful book Dairy Queen is a must-read for any thinking girl between the ages of ten and sixteen), but who is also my dearly beloved friend and the greatest intellectual role model of my life. She, too, read this book with time-consuming care, saving me from many errors of thought and sequence. That said, it is not so much Catherine’s comprehensive grasp of Western history that amazes me but her uncanny talent for somehow knowing when her homesick sister needs to be airmailed a new pair of pajamas, even when that sister is all the way over in Bangkok and feeling very lonely. In return for all Catherine’s kindness and generosity, I have offered her one lovingly crafted footnote.

I thank all the other early readers of this book for their insights and encouragement: Darcey, Cat, Ann (the word “pachyderm” is for her), Cree, Brian (this book will always be known as Weddings and Evictions just between us), Mom, Dad, Sheryl, Iva, Bernadette, Terry, Deborah (who gently suggested that I might want to mention the word “feminism” in a book about marriage), Uncle Nick (my most loyal supporter since forever), Susan, Shea (who listened to hours and hours and hours of my early ideas on this subject), Margaret, Sarah, Jonny, and John.

I thank Michael Knight for offering me a job and a room in Knoxville in 2005, and for knowing me well enough to realize that I would much prefer living in a crazy old residency hotel than anywhere else in town.

I thank Peter and Marianne Blythe for sharing their couch and their encouragement with Felipe when he landed in Australia desperate and fresh out of jail. With two new babies, a dog, a bird, and the wonderful young Tayla all living under one roof, the Blythes’ house was already overflowing, but somehow Peter and Marianne made room for one more needy refugee. I also thank Rick and Clare Hinton in Canberra, for guiding the Australian end of Felipe’s immigration process, and for watching diligently over the mail. Even from half a world away, they are perfect neighbors.

On the subject of great Australians, I thank Erica, Zo, and Tara—my amazing stepkids and daughter-in-law—for welcoming me so warmly into their lives. I must especially credit Erica for giving me the sweetest compliment of my life: “Thank you, Liz, for not being a bimbo.” (My pleasure, sweetheart. And right back at you.)

I thank Ernie Sesskin and Brian Foster and Eileen Marolla for guiding—purely out of the real estate–loving goodness of their hearts—the entire complicated transaction of helping Felipe and me buy a house in New Jersey from the other side of the world. There’s nothing like receiving a hand-drawn floor plan at three o’clock in the morning to know that somebody’s got your back.

I thank Armenia de Oliveira for leaping into action in Rio de Janeiro to save Felipe’s immigration process on that end. Also holding up the Brazilian front, as always, have been the wonderful Claucia and Fernando Chevarria—who were just as relentless in their pursuit of antique military records as they were in their encouragement and love.

I thank Brian Getson, our immigration lawyer, for his thoroughness and patience, and I thank Andrew Brenner for helping us find Brian in the first place.

I thank Tanya Hughes (for offering me a room of my own at the beginning of this process) and Rayya Elias (for offering me a room of my own at the end).

I thank Roger LaPhoque and Dr. Charles Henn for their hospitality and elegance at the budget oasis of the Atlanta Hotel in Bangkok. The Atlanta is a wonder that must be seen to be believed, and even then it cannot really be believed.

I thank Sarah Chalfant for her endless confidence in me, and for her years of constant encircling protection. I thank Kassie Evashevski, Ernie Marshall, Miriam Feuerle, and Julie Mancini for completing that circle.

I thank Paul Slovak, Clare Ferraro, Kathryn Court, and everyone else at Viking Penguin for their patience as I wrote this book. There are not many people left in the world of publishing who would have said “Take as much time as you need” to a writer who had just missed a major deadline. Throughout this entire process, nobody (except myself) has put any pressure on me whatsoever, and that has been a rare gift. Their care hearkens back to an earlier and more gracious way of doing business, and I am grateful to have been the recipient of such decency.

I thank my family—especially my parents and my grandmother, Maude Olson—for not hesitating to allow me to explore in print my very personal feelings about some of their most complicated life decisions.

I thank Officer Tom of the United States Department of Homeland Security for treating Felipe with such an unexpected degree of kindness during his arrest and detention. And that is the most surreal sentence I have ever written in my life, but there it is. (We’re not really sure that your name was actually “Tom,” sir, but that’s how we both remembered it, and I hope that at least you know who you are: a most unlikely agent of destiny who made a bad experience far less bad than it might have been.)

I thank Frenchtown for bringing us home.

Lastly, I offer my greatest gratitude to the man who is now my husband. He is a private person by nature, but unfortunately his privacy ended the day he met me. (He is now known to an awful lot of strangers around the world as “that Brazilian guy from Eat, Pray, Love.”) In my defense, I have to say that I did give him an early chance to dodge all this exposure. Back when we were first courting, there came an awkward moment when I had to confess that I was a writer, and what that meant for him. If he stayed with me, I warned, he would eventually end up revealed in my books and in my stories. There was no way of getting around it; that’s simply how it goes. His best chance, I made clear, would be to leave right then, while there was still time to escape with dignity and discretion intact.

Despite all my warnings, though, he stayed. And he stays with me still. I believe this has been a great act of love and compassion on his part. Somewhere along the line, this wonderful man seems to have recognized that my life would not have a coherent story line anymore without him at the center of it.

ELIZABETH GILBERT

The

Last

American

Man

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

CHAPTER ONE

What a wild life! What a fresh kind of existence!

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, considering the possibility of

writing an epic poem about the American explorer John Frémont

By the time Eustace Conway was seven years old, he could throw a knife accurately enough to nail a chipmunk to a tree. By the time he was ten, he could hit a running squirrel at fifty feet with a bow and arrow. When he turned twelve, he went out into the woods, alone and empty-handed, built himself a shelter, and survived off the land for a week. When he turned seventeen, he moved out of his family’s home altogether and headed into the mountains, where he lived in a teepee of his own design, made fire by rubbing two sticks together, bathed in icy streams, and dressed in the skins of the animals he had hunted and eaten.

This move occurred in 1977, by the way. Which was the same year the film Star Wars was released.

The following year, when he was eighteen, Eustace Conway traveled the Mississippi River in a handmade wooden canoe, battling eddies so fierce, they could suck down a forty-foot tree and not release it to the surface again until a mile downriver. The next year, he set off on the two-thousand-mile Appalachian Trail, walking from Maine to Georgia and surviving almost exclusively on what he hunted and gathered along the way. And in the years that followed, Eustace hiked across the German Alps (in sneakers), kayaked across Alaska, scaled cliffs in New Zealand, and lived with the Navajo of New Mexico. When he was in his mid-twenties, he decided to study a primitive culture more closely in order to learn even more ancient skills. So he flew to Guatemala, got off the plane, and basically started asking, “Where are the primitive people at?” He was pointed toward the jungle, where he hiked for days and days until he found the remotest village of Mayan Indians, many of whom had never before seen a white person. He lived with the Maya for about five months, learning the language, studying the religion, perfecting his weaving skills.

But his coolest adventure was probably in 1995, when Eustace got the notion to ride his horse across America. His younger brother, Judson, and a close family friend went with him. It was a mad act of whim. Eustace wasn’t sure if it was possible or even legal to ride a horse across America. He just ate a big Christmas dinner with his family, strapped on his gun, hauled out an eighty-year-old U.S. Cavalry saddle (rubbed so thin in places that he could feel the heat of the animal between his legs as he rode), mounted his horse, and headed out. He reckoned that he and his partners could make it to the Pacific by Easter, although everyone he told this to laughed in his face.

The three riders galloped along, burning away nearly fifty miles a day. They ate roadkill deer and squirrel soup. They slept in barns and in the homes of awestruck locals, but when they reached the dry, open West, they fell off their horses every night and slept on the ground where they fell. They were nearly killed by swerving eighteen-wheelers when their horses went wild on a busy interstate bridge one afternoon. They were nearly arrested in Mississippi for not wearing shirts. In San Diego, they picketed their horses along a patch of grass between a mall and an eight-lane highway. They slept there that night and arrived at the Pacific Ocean the next afternoon. Eustace Conway rode his horse right into the surf. It was ten hours before Easter. He had crossed the country in 103 days, setting, while he was at it, a world record.

From coast to coast, Americans of every conceivable background had looked up at Eustace Conway on his horse and said wistfully, “I wish I could do what you’re doing.”

And to every last citizen, Eustace had replied, “You can.”

But I’m getting ahead of my story here.

Eustace Conway was born in South Carolina in 1961. The Conways lived in a comfortable suburban home in a new neighborhood full of the same, but there was a fine patch of woods, standing right behind their house, that had not yet been cleared for development. It was, in fact, a wild, undisturbed, first-growth forest without so much as a trail cut through it. It was an old world forest, still filled with quicksand and bears. And it was here that Eustace Conway’s father—whose name was also Eustace Conway and who knew everything—used to take his young son to teach him how to identify the plants, birds, and mammals of the American South. They would wander together in those woods for hours, looking up into the trees and discussing the shapes of the leaves. So these are Eustace Conway’s first memories: the cosmic scope of the woods; the stipple of sunlight slanting through a verdant natural awning; the enlightening voice of the father; the loveliness of the words locust, birch, and tulip poplar; the new intellectual pleasure of study enhanced by the distinct physical sensation of his wobbly toddler’s head tilting so far back that he might have toppled over from the effort of looking up so hard at so many trees for such a long time.

As for the rest, and over the years, it was his mother who taught Eustace. She taught him how to camp, bait a hook, build a fire, handle wildlife, weave grasses into rope, and find clay in river bottoms. She taught him how to read books with wonderful titles, like Davy Crockett: Young Adventurer and Wild Wood Wisdom. She taught him to sew buckskin. She taught him how to execute every task with ardent perfection. Eustace Conway’s mother was not exactly like the other mothers of the day. She was a little gutsier than the average mom in the American South in the early 1960s. She’d been raised like a boy at a summer camp that her family had owned in the mountains of Asheville, North Carolina. She was an unrepentant tomboy, a proficient horseback rider, and a capable woodsman who, at the age of twenty-two, had sold her silver flute for passage to Alaska, where she lived in a tent by a river with her gun and her dog.

By the time Eustace was five years old, the forest behind his house had been leveled by the real estate market, but the family soon moved to a four-bedroom home in another suburban development. It was in Gastonia, North Carolina, and had its own dense forest standing behind it. Mrs. Conway let Eustace and his young siblings have the run of the woods from the time they could walk—barefoot and shirtless and without supervision—from sunup to sundown, every moment of their childhood, except for those few interruptions for mandatory schooling and churchgoing (because it wasn’t as though she were raising savages).

“I suppose I was a bad mother,” Mrs. Conway says today, not very convincingly.

The other mothers of Gastonia naturally were horrified by this childrearing technique, such as it was. Some of them, alarmed, would call Mrs. Conway on the telephone and say, “You can’t let your babies play in those woods! There are poisonous snakes out there!”

Thirty years later, Mrs. Conway still finds their concern amusing and adorable.

“For heaven’s sake!” she says. “My children always knew the difference between poisonous snakes and regular snakes! They did just fine out there.”

Briefly, the history of America goes like this: there was a frontier, and then there was no longer a frontier. It all happened rather quickly. There were Indians, then explorers, then settlers, then towns, then cities. Nobody was really paying attention until the moment the wilderness was officially tamed, at which point everybody wanted it back. Within the general spasm of nostalgia that ensued (Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, Frederic Remington’s cowboy paintings) there came a very specific cultural panic, rooted in the question What will become of our boys?

The problem was that, while the classic European coming-of-age story generally featured a provincial boy who moved to the city and was transformed into a refined gentleman, the American tradition had evolved into the opposite. The American boy came of age by leaving civilization and striking out toward the hills. There, he shed his cosmopolitan manners and became a robust and proficient man. Not a gentleman, mind you, but a man.

This was a particular kind of man, this wilderness-bred American. He was no intellectual. He had no interest in study or reflection. He had, as de Tocqueville noticed, “a sort of distaste for what is ancient.” Instead, he could sterotypically be found, as the explorer John Frémont described the über-frontiersman Kit Carson, “mounted on a fine horse, without a saddle and scouring bare-headed over the prairies.” Either that, or whipping his mighty ax over his shoulder and casually “throwing cedars and oaks to the ground,” as one extremely impressed nineteenth-century foreign visitor observed.

In fact, to all the foreign visitors during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the American Man was a virtual tourist attraction in his own right, almost as fascinating as Niagara Falls or that ambitious new railroad system or those exotic Indians. Not everybody was a fan, of course. (“There are perhaps no people, not even excepting the French, who are so vain as the Americans,” griped one British observer in 1818. “Every American considers that it’s impossible for a foreigner to teach him anything, and that his head contains a perfect encyclopedia.”) Still, for better or worse, everyone seemed to agree that this was a new kind of human being and that what defined the American Man more than anything else was his resourcefulness, born out of the challenges of wrenching a New World from virgin wilderness. Unhindered by class restrictions, bureaucracy, or urban squalor, these Americans simply got more done in a single day than anyone had imagined possible. That was the bottom line: nobody could believe how fast these guys worked.

German-born Gottfried Duden, who traveled to the West in 1824 to identify suitable homesteads for German families interested in immigrating to America, reported home in wonder: “In North America, construction jobs which the European countries do not accomplish in centuries are completed in a few years, through the voluntary cooperation of individual citizens.” At the time of Duden’s visit, for instance, the farmers of Ohio were busy constructing a 230-mile-long canal without the help of a single licensed engineer. Duden saw “beautiful cities” thriving where not even towns had stood two years before. He saw new roads, new bridges, “thousands of new farms,” and “a hundred more steamships”—all new, handmade, ingeniously designed, and perfectly operative. Did the American Man need something done? Well, then, he simply made it happen.

It was such an attractive idea, this notion of the bold and competent New World citizen. The English travel writer Isabel Bird, famous for her cool and detached prose, seemed scarcely able to keep from exclaiming hubba-hubba as she checked out the rugged men she kept encountering on her trip to America in the 1850s:

“It is impossible to give an idea of the ‘Western Men’ to anyone who has not seen one at least as specimen . . . tall, handsome, broad-chested, and athletic, with aquiline noses, piercing grey eyes, and brown curling hair and beards. They wore leather jackets, leather smallclothes, large boots with embroidered tops, silver spurs, and caps of scarlet cloth, worked with somewhat tarnished gold thread, doubtless the gifts of some fair ones enamored of the handsome physiognomies and reckless bearing of the hunters. Dullness fled from their presence; they could tell stories, whistle melodies, and sing . . . Blithe, cheerful souls they were, telling racy stories of Western life, chivalrous in the manners and free as the winds.”

Look, I wasn’t there. It’s hard to know how much of this rhetoric was based on truth and how much was the product of an excitable foreign press eager to testify on the Next Big Thing. What I do know is that we, the Americans, bought the hype. We bought it and added it to the already hearty stew of our homegrown self-mythology until we cooked up a perfectly universal notion of who the American Man was and how the American Man was made. He was Pecos Bill. He was Paul Bunyan. He altered the course of rivers with the help of his mighty blue ox, he broke wild horses using rattlesnakes as reins, and he was an omnipotent hero created through revelatory communion with the frontier. Everyone knew that.

So Frederick Jackson Turner wasn’t the only person who got nervous when the news came in 1890 from the Census Department that the American frontier was suddenly and officially closed. But he was the first to ask what this closure would mean to future generations. His nervousness spread; the questions expanded. Without the wilderness as proving ground, what would become of our boys?

Why, they might become effete, pampered, decadent.

Lord help us, they might become Europeans.

I first met Eustace Conway in New York City, of all places. This was 1993.

I met Eustace through his brother Judson, who is a cowboy. Judson and I used to work together on a ranch out in the Wyoming Rockies. This was back when I was twenty-two years old, acting as if I were a Western cowgirl—an act that took considerable pretense, given the inconvenient reality that I was actually a former field hockey player from Connecticut. But I was out there in Wyoming because I was seeking an education and an authenticity that I thought could not be found anywhere but on the American frontier, or what remained of it.

I was searching for this American frontier as earnestly as my parents had sought it two decades earlier, when they’d purchased three acres of land in New England and pretended to be pioneers—raising chickens and goats and bees, growing all our food, sewing all our clothing, washing our hair in a rain barrel, and heating our house (and only two rooms of it) with hand-split firewood. My parents gave me and my sister as rugged a nineteenth-century upbringing as they could manage, even though we were living out the Reagan years in one of Connecticut’s wealthiest communities and our insular little frontier farmhouse happened to be located on a major highway only a mile away from the country club.

Well, what of it? My sister and I were encouraged to ignore this reality. We picked blackberries in the ditches alongside that highway in our handmade dresses while the cars raced by and the passing eighteen-wheelers shook the ground. We went to school with goat’s milk dried on our sleeves from the morning chores. We were taught to disregard the values of the culture that surrounded us and to concentrate instead on this sacred and more ancient American tenet: Resourcefulness Is Next to Godliness.

It is probably not surprising, then, that when I turned twenty-two I decided that I would not be satisfied by going on to graduate school or settling into some respectable career. I had other aspirations. I wanted to learn the boundaries of my own resourcefulness, and these, I believed, I could learn only in a place like Wyoming. I was inspired by the example of my parents and by Walt Whitman’s stirring advice to American boys of the nineteenth century: “Ascend no longer from the textbook! Ascend to your own country! Go to the West and the South! Go among men, in the spirit of men! Master horses, become a good marksman and a strong oarsman . . .”

I went to Wyoming, in other words, to make a man of myself.

I loved ranch work. I was a trail cook. I was ridin’ horses into the wilderness, I was sittin’ around campfires, I was drinkin’ and tellin’ stories and cussin’ and droppin’ all my g’s and basically puttin’ on a classic act of phony authenticity. When strangers in Wyoming asked me where I hailed from, I’d say, “Lubbock, Texas.” As long as nobody asked a single follow-up question, I was generally able to pass as an authentic cowgirl. The other wranglers on the ranch even had an authentic cowgirl nickname for me. They all called me Blaze.

But only because I’d asked ’em to.

I was a complete and thoroughgoing faker. But this fakery, I submit, was merely my right and privilege as a young American citizen. I was following the national ritual. I was no more counterfeit than Teddy Roosevelt had been a century earlier, when he left New York City as a cosseted dandy and headed West to become a robust man. He sent the most self-satisfied and self-conscious letters back home, boasting about his rugged experiences, as well as his macho wardrobe. (“You would be amused to see me,” Roosevelt wrote to one Eastern friend, “in my broad sombrero hat, fringed and beaded buckskin shirt, horsehide chaparajos or riding trousers, and cowhide boots, with braided bridle and silver spurs.”) I know this letter. I wrote it myself, dozens of times, to dozens of people. (“I bought a pair of rattlesnake boots last week,” I wrote to my parents from the ranch in 1991, “and I’ve beat them to shit already doing chores in the corral, but, hell, that’s what they’re for.”)

I met Judson Conway the first day I came to the ranch. He was the first thing I set eyes on after that long drive up that big Wyoming mountain, and I kind of fell in love with him. I didn’t fall in love with Judson like “Let’s get married!” I fell in love with him like “Mercy!” Because here was Judson Conway at that moment: slim, handsome, hidden slightly under a cowboy hat, and appealingly dusty. All he had to do was stroll by me with his sexy swagger (classically executed, in the Hollywood manner of Pardon-me-ma’am-but-I-just-came-off-a-long-ride), and I was a believer.

I was attracted to Judson because I was a girl and he was beautiful and I wasn’t friggin’ blind, but I also recognized in him an immediate commonality. Like me, Judson was twenty-two years old and a complete and thoroughgoing faker. He was no more authentically Western than his new friend Blaze. Nor were we more authentically Western than Frank Brown, the other twenty-two-year-old cowboy working on the ranch. He was a college kid from Massachusetts currently going by the moniker Buck. And then there was our head cowboy Hank, who’d always holler, “Let’s pound leather, y’all!” when it was time to ride out, but whose father happened to be the assistant attorney general of Utah. We were all putting on the same show.

But Judson was my favorite, because he enjoyed the show better than anyone. He did have the slight cultural advantage of at least being from the South, so he could drawl. He was so damn cool. Walt Whitman would’ve loved how Judson was living. He was mastering marksmanship and oarsmanship, but he had also traveled across America in boxcars and hitchhiked back, had kissed girls from everywhere, and had learned to be a great storyteller and a talented hunter. And so lucid a horseman! He’d taught himself tricks like swinging his body up and off his horse while it was running along, and many other diversions that weren’t entirely practical for ranch work but were most entertaining.

He and I had a ball together two years in a row, out there in Wyoming, and then we went our separate ways. But we stayed in touch. Like a good Civil War soldier, Judson corresponded eloquently and loyally by post. Never called; always wrote. And he had a lot to write about, because this was the excellent life he’d made for himself: he spent his springtimes dove-hunting at home in North Carolina, summers as a fishing guide in Alaska, autumns as an elk-hunting guide in Wyoming, and winters helping tourists catch trophy fish in the Florida Keys.

“Intent on learning how to fish saltwater and in hopes of getting a job on a charter boat,” he wrote to me, on his first trip to Florida. “I’m staying with a couple I took horseback riding one day in Wyoming. Got to talking, and here I am . . . Been spending a lot of time in the Everglades National Park, birdwatching and wrestling alligators.”

“Not making a living,” he wrote, on his first trip to Alaska, “just living.”

Judson always swore he’d come and see me sometime in New York City, where I had since moved. (“Does the Hudson have fish in it?”) But the years passed, and he didn’t swing by, and I never quite expected him to. (“Gettin’ married, huh?” he finally wrote, after a long letter of mine. “Guess I waited too long to visit . . .”) And then one day, years after we’d last spoken in person, he called. This was in itself astonishing. Judson doesn’t use telephones, not when there are perfectly good stamps to be had. But the call was urgent. He told me he was flying to New York the very next day, to visit. Just a whim, he said. Just wanted to see what a big city was like, he said. And then he added that his older brother, Eustace, would be coming along, too.

Sure enough, the Conway boys arrived the next morning. They stepped out of a yellow cab right in front of my apartment and made the most outrageous, incongruous sight. There was handsome Judson, looking like a young swain from “Bonanza.” And there, right beside him, was his brother, Davy Fuckin’ Crockett.

I knew this was Davy Fuckin’ Crockett because that’s what everyone on the streets of New York City started calling the guy right away.

“Yo, man! It’s Davy Fuckin’ Crockett!”

“Check out Davy Fuckin’ Crockett!”

“King of the wild motherfuckin’ frontier!”

Of course, some New Yorkers mistook him for Daniel Fuckin’ Boone, but everyone had something to say about this curious visitor, who moved stealthily through the streets of Manhattan, wearing handmade buckskin clothing and carrying an impressive knife on his belt.

Davy Fuckin’ Crockett.

So that’s how I met Eustace Conway.

Over the next two days, against the unlikely backdrop of New York City, I heard all about Eustace Conway’s life. One night, Judson and Eustace and I went drinking in a lowdown bar in the East Village, and while Judson kept busy dancing with all the pretty girls and telling thrilling stories of life on the range, Eustace sat in a corner with me and quietly explained how he had been living for the last seventeen years in a teepee, hidden away in the Southern Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. He called his home Turtle Island, named for the Native American creationist legend of the sturdy turtle who carries the entire weight of the earth on his back. Eustace told me he owned a thousand acres of land back there in the woods—a perfectly contained and unspoiled basin, with a protected watershed.

It seemed curious to me that somebody who eats possum and wipes his butt with leaves could have managed to acquire a thousand acres of pristine wilderness. But Eustace Conway was, as I would discover, a most cunning man. He had amassed that property slowly and over time with money he made by going into the local school systems and talking to riveted schoolchildren about eating possum and wiping one’s butt with leaves. Land, he declared, was his only major expense in life. Everything else he needed he could make, build, grow, or kill. He hunted for his own food, drank water from the ground, made his own clothing . . .

Eustace told me that people tended to romanticize his lifestyle. Because when people first ask him what he does for a living, he invariably replies, “I live in the woods.” Then people get all dreamy and say, “Ah! The woods! The woods! I love the woods!” as if Eustace spends his days sipping the dew off clover blossoms. But that’s not what living in the woods means to Eustace Conway.

Some years ago, for instance, out hunting for his winter deer, he came upon a gorgeous eight-point buck grazing through the brush. He shot. The buck went down. Not knowing if he had killed the animal, he waited and waited to see whether it would struggle up from where it had fallen and try to run. There was no movement. Slowly, quietly, Eustace crept toward the spot where the animal had gone down and found the massive buck, lying on its side, breathing a thin, red vapor of blood through its nose. The animal’s eyes were moving; it was alive.

“Get up, brother!” Eustace shouted. “Get up and I’ll finish you off!”

The animal didn’t move. Eustace hated to see it lying there, alive and injured, but he also hated to blow off its beautiful head at pointblank range, so he took his knife from his belt and stabbed into the buck’s jugular vein. Up came the buck, very much alive, whipping its rack of antlers. Eustace clung to the antlers, still holding his knife, and the two began a wrestling match, thrashing through the brush, rolling down the hill, the buck lunging, Eustace trying to deflect its heavy antlers into trees and rocks. Finally, he let go with one hand and sliced his knife completely across the buck’s neck, gashing open veins, arteries, and windpipe. But the buck kept fighting, until Eustace ground its face into the dirt, kneeling on its head and suffocating the dying creature. And then he plunged his hands into the animal’s neck and smeared the blood all over his own face, weeping and laughing and offering up an ecstatic prayer of thanksgiving to the universe for the magnificent phenomenon of this creature who had so valiantly sacrificed its life to sustain his own.

That’s what living in the woods means to Eustace Conway.

The morning after our conversation in the bar, I took the Conway brothers on a walk through Tompkins Square Park. There, I lost Eustace. I couldn’t find him anywhere, and I got worried, concerned that he was out of his environment and therefore helpless and vulnerable. But when I found him, he was in pleasant conversation with the scariest posse of drug dealers you’d ever want to meet. They had offered Eustace Conway crack, which he had politely declined, but he was engaging with them, nonetheless, about other issues.

“Yo, man,” the drug dealers were asking as I arrived, “where’d you buy that dope shirt?”

Eustace explained to the drug dealers that he had not, in fact, bought the shirt; he had made it. Out of a deer. He described exactly how he’d shot the deer with a black powder musket, skinned the deer (“with this very knife!”), softened the hide with the deer’s own brains, and then sewed the shirt together, using strands of sinew taken from alongside the deer’s spine. He told the drug dealers that it wasn’t such a difficult process, and that they could do it, too. And if they came to visit him in his mountain home of Turtle Island, he’d teach them all sorts of marvelous ways to live off nature.

I said, “Eustace, we gotta go.”

The drug dealers shook his hand and said, “Damn, Hustice. You something else.”

But this is how Eustace interacts with all the world all the time— taking any opportunity to teach people about nature. Which is to say that Eustace is not merely a hermit or a hippie or even a survivalist. He does not live in the woods because he’s hiding from us, or because he’s growing excellent weed, or because he’s storing guns for the imminent race war. He lives in the woods because he belongs there. Moreover, he tries to get other people to move into the woods with him, because he believes that is his particular calling—nothing less than to save our nation’s collective soul by reintroducing Americans to the concept of revelatory communion with the frontier. Which is to say that Eustace Conway believes that he is a Man of Destiny.

Eustace created Turtle Island—the thousand-acre perfect cosmos of his own design—as the ultimate teaching facility, a university-in-the-raw, a wild monastery. Because, after years of studying primitive societies and after countless experiences of personal transformation within the wilderness, Eustace has formed a mighty dogma. He is convinced that the only way modern America can begin to reverse its inherent corruption and greed and malaise is by feeling the rapture that comes from face-to-face encounters with what he calls “the high art and godliness of nature.”

It is his belief that we Americans, through our constant striving for convenience, are eradicating the raucous and edifying beauty of our true environment and replacing that beauty with a safe but completely faux “environment.” What Eustace sees is a society steadily undoing itself, it might be argued, by its own over-resourcefulness. Clever, ambitious, and always in search of greater efficiency, we Americans have, in two short centuries, created a world of push-button, round-the-clock comfort for ourselves. The basic needs of humanity—food, clothing, shelter, entertainment, transportation, and even sexual pleasure—no longer need to be personally labored for or ritualized or even understood. All these things are available to us now for mere cash. Or credit. Which means that nobody needs to know how to do anything anymore, except the one narrow skill that will earn enough money to pay for the conveniences and services of modern living.

But in replacing every challenge with a shortcut we seem to have lost something, and Eustace isn’t the only person feeling that loss. We are an increasingly depressed and anxious people—and not for nothing. Arguably, all these modern conveniences have been adopted to save us time. But time for what? Having created a system that tends to our every need without causing us undue exertion or labor, we can now fill these hours with . . . ?

Well, for one thing, television—loads of it, hours of it, days and weeks and months of it in every American’s lifetime. Also, work. Americans spend more and more hours at their jobs every year; in almost every household both parents (if there are two parents) must work full-time outside the home to pay for all these goods and services. Which means a lot of commuting. Which means a lot of stress. Less connection to family and community. Fast-food meals eaten in cars on the way to and from work. Poorer health all the time. (America is certainly the fattest and most inactive society in history, and we’re packing on more pounds every year. We seem to have the same disregard for our bodies as we do for our other natural resources; if a vital organ breaks down, after all, we always believe we can just buy a new one. Somebody else will take care of it. Same way we believe that somebody else will plant another forest someday if we use this one up. That is, if we even notice that we’re using it up.)

There’s an arrogance to such an attitude, but—more than that— there’s a profound alienation. We have fallen out of rhythm. It’s this simple. If we don’t cultivate our own food supply anymore, do we need to pay attention to the idea of, say, seasons? Is there any difference between winter and summer if we can eat strawberries every day? If we can keep the temperature of our house set at a comfortable 70 degrees all year, do we need to notice that fall is coming? Do we have to prepare for that? Respect that? Much less contemplate what it means for our own mortality that things die in nature every autumn? And when spring does come round again, do we need to notice that rebirth? Do we need to take a moment and maybe thank anybody for that? Celebrate it? If we never leave our house except to drive to work, do we need to be even remotely aware of this powerful, humbling, extraordinary, and eternal life force that surges and ebbs around us all the time?

Apparently not. Because we seem to have stopped paying attention. Or this is what Eustace Conway perceives when he looks around America. He sees a people who have fallen out of step with the natural cycles that have defined humanity’s existence and culture for millennia. Having lost that vital connection with nature, the nation is in danger of losing its humanity. We are not alien visitors to this planet, after all, but natural residents and relatives of every living entity here. This earth is where we came from and where we’ll all end up when we die, and, during the interim, it is our home. And there’s no way we can ever hope to understand ourselves if we don’t at least marginally understand our home. That is the understanding we need to put our lives in some bigger metaphysical context.

Instead, Eustace sees a chilling sight—a citizenry so removed from the rhythms of nature that we march through our lives as mere sleepwalkers, blinded, deafened, and senseless. Robotically existing in sterilized surroundings that numb the mind, weaken the body, and atrophy the soul. But Eustace believes we can get our humanity back. When we contemplate the venerable age of a mountain, we get it. When we observe the superb order of water and sunlight, we get it. When we experience firsthand the brutal poetry of the food chain, we get it. When we are mindful of every nuance of our natural world, we finally get the picture: that we are each given only one dazzling moment of life here on Earth, and we must stand before that reality both humbled and elevated, subject to every law of our universe and grateful for our brief but intrinsic participation within it.

Granted, this is not a radical concept. Every environmentalist in the world operates on a philosophy based on these same hypotheses. But what sets Eustace Conway apart from every other environmentalist is the peculiar confidence he’s had since earliest childhood that it is his personal destiny to snap his countrymen out of their sleepwalk. He has always believed that he alone has this power and this responsibility, that he was to be the vessel of change. One man, one vision.

And this was his precise vision—that, one by one, Americans would come to his mystical utopia in the woods. There, under his guidance, they would shed the frailty, ignorance, and pettiness brought about by their contemporary upbringing. Using his charisma as a lure, he would lead people back into the wilderness, uncoil their blindfolds, point them toward the stunning vista of the unspoiled frontier, and say, “Behold!” Then he would stand back and watch the awakening.

Eustace always envisioned groups of children coming to participate in primitive summer camps, but he would also welcome adults— apprentices—who, for extended periods of time, would seriously study a natural way of life under his leadership. Of course he knows it’s impossible to drag every single American into the woods with him, which is why he is also committed to going out into the world with his message and delivering the woods directly to the people himself—carrying the very smell of the wilderness in his hair and on his skin and within his words. He would preach and teach his doctrine in every school, at every state fair, in every mall and parking lot and gas station he could find. He would passionately speak to any businessman, baby-sitter, housewife, hooker, millionaire, and crackhead in America.

With Eustace’s energy and through his example—he has always been certain of it—Americans would gradually be transformed. They would grow and learn and once again be strong and resourceful. Then they would leave Eustace’s side and disseminate their newfound knowledge among their brethren. In this evangelical manner, Eustace Conway’s vision of perfect concordance with nature would spread and spread across families, towns, counties, and states until we would all be living like Eustace—growing our food, fabricating our clothes, making fire with two sticks, and recognizing our blessed humanity. Thus both our grand nation and our sacred planet would be saved.

That was his plan, anyway.

Audacious? Sure. Still, there is something about the guy . . .

Eustace is not easily dismissed. As his brother Judson would attest in awe, and as I later came to witness in person, Eustace’s skills in the wilderness are truly legion. He is wildly competent. He is physically and intellectually predestined to acquire proficiency. He has perfect eyesight, perfect hearing, perfect balance, perfect reflexes, and perfect focus. He has long muscles on a light but strongly constructed frame, like a natural middle-distance runner. His body can do anything he asks of it. His mind, too. He has to be exposed to an idea or shown a process only once to get it right, to lock it in, and immediately begin improving on its principles. He pays closer attention to his surroundings than anyone I’ve ever seen. His mind operates, as Henry Adams wrote of the minds of the earliest American settlers, like “a mere cutting instrument, practical, economical, sharp, and direct.”

And that kind of mind makes for a hard honesty. So that when I once asked him, “Is there anything you can’t do?” Eustace replied, “Well, I’ve never found anything to be particularly difficult.” In other words, he’s got the self-assurance to back up his conviction that he can change the world. That, in addition to the unshakable will and airtight world view of a natural-born reformer. And he’s got charisma, too, which he unleashes brazenly in every interaction he has with anyone.

I first visited Eustace at Turtle Island back in 1995. Midway through my stay, Eustace had to leave the mountain, and I went with him. He had to leave the woods, as he often does, to teach about the woods, to make some money and spread the gospel. So we drove across North Carolina to a small summer camp that specialized in environmental education. A group of teenagers skulked into the camp’s dining room for the evening’s event, and to me they all looked like jerks—loud, disrespectful, shoving, shrieking, laughing. Eustace was supposed to get these kids excited about nature.

I thought, This is not gonna end well.

Eustace, wearing jeans and a plaid shirt, not buckskin, walked across the stage toward the microphone. Around his neck hung two large coyote teeth. On his belt, the knife.

The shoving and shrieking and laughing continued.

Eustace, thin and serious, stood at the microphone with his hands in his pockets. After a long moment, he said, “I am a quiet-spoken man, so I am going to have to speak quietly tonight.”

The shoving and shrieking and laughing stopped. The jerky teenagers stared at Eustace Conway, riveted. Just like that—dead silence. I swear it. It was like goddamn To Sir with Love.

“I moved into the woods when I was seventeen years old,” Eustace began.“Not much older than you are today . . .” And he talked about his life. Those kids were so transfixed, you could have operated on them and they wouldn’t have noticed. Eustace told them about wilderness survival and his adventures, but he also gave his speech about the difference between the world of boxes and the world of circles.

“I live,” Eustace said, “in nature, where everything is connected, circular. The seasons are circular. The planet is circular, and so is its passage around the sun. The course of water over the earth is circular, coming down from the sky and circulating through the world to spread life and then evaporating up again. I live in a circular teepee and I build my fire in a circle, and when my loved ones visit me, we sit in a circle and talk. The life cycles of plants and animals are circular. I live outside where I can see this. The ancient people understood that our world is a circle, but we modern people have lost sight of that. I don’t live inside buildings, because buildings are dead places where nothing grows, where water doesn’t flow, and where life stops. I don’t want to live in a dead place. People say that I don’t live in the real world, but it’s modern Americans who live in a fake world, because they’ve stepped outside the natural circle of life.

“I saw the circle of life most clearly when I was riding my horse across America and I came across the body of a coyote that had recently died. The animal was mummified from the desert heat, but all around it, in a lush circle, was a small band of fresh green grass. The earth was borrowing the nutrients from the animal and regenerating itself. This wasn’t about death, I realized; this was about eternal life. I took the teeth from that coyote and made myself this necklace right here, which always circles my neck, so I’d never forget that lesson.

“Do people live in circles today? No. They live in boxes. They wake up every morning in the box of their bedroom because a box next to them started making beeping noises to tell them it was time to get up. They eat their breakfast out of a box and then they throw that box away into another box. Then they leave the box where they live and get into a box with wheels and drive to work, which is just another big box broken up into lots of little cubicle boxes where a bunch of people spend their days sitting and staring at the computer boxes in front of them. When the day is over, everyone gets into the box with wheels again and goes home to their house boxes and spends the evening staring at the television boxes for entertainment. They get their music from a box, they get their food from a box, they keep their clothing in a box, they live their lives in a box! Does that sound like anybody you know?”

By now the kids were laughing and applauding.

“Break out of the box!” Eustace said. “You don’t have to live like this because people tell you it’s the only way. You’re not handcuffed to your culture! This is not the way humanity lived for thousands and thousands of years, and it is not the only way you can live today!”

Another hour of this, then uncontained applause, like at a revival meeting. After the talk, Eustace sat on the edge of the stage, drinking from the glass jug filled with fresh Turtle Island spring water that he carries with him everywhere. The teenagers approached reverently, awed, as the camp director gave Eustace an enthusiastic handshake and a discreetly enveloped generous check. The teenagers gathered around more closely. The toughest, baddest-ass gangsta boy of them all came to stand right beside Eustace. He put his fist on his heart and announced, with real solemnity, “You rule, man. You da bomb.” Eustace threw back his head and laughed. The other campers lined up to shake his hand and then detonated with questions.

“Could you make fire right now if you had to?”

“Yes.”

“If someone dropped you naked into the middle of Alaska, could you survive?”

“I suppose so. But it’d be a lot easier if I had a knife.”

“Were you scared when you first moved into the woods?”

“No. The civilized world is much scarier than the woods.”

“Were your parents mad at you when you moved into the woods?”

“My father didn’t know why I’d want to leave a comfortable modern house, but my mother understood.”

“Do you ever get sick?”

“Rarely.”

“Do you ever go to the doctor?”

“Never.”

“Do you know how to drive a car?”

“How do you think I got here tonight?”

“Do you use any modern tools?”

“I use chain saws all the time to take care of my land. I use telephones. And plastic buckets. My God, but plastic buckets are great! I’ve made plenty of my own baskets and containers out of tree bark and grasses—I mean, I know how to do it and I’ve used those primitive means of hauling water around lots of time—but I tell you, there’s nothing like a plastic bucket to get the job done faster. Wow! Plastic buckets! Glorious! I love ’em!”

“Do you have a toothbrush?”

“Not at the moment.”

“Do you have a hairbrush?”

“I used to have a porcupine hairbrush. I don’t have it anymore, though.”

“What’s a porcupine hairbrush?”

“A hairbrush made out of porcupine bristles.”

“Where’d you get that?”

“A porcupine saved my life once when I was hiking on the Appalachian Trail, so I made the hairbrush out of its bristles, to honor it.”

“How could a porcupine save your life?”

“By giving me something to eat when I was starving to death.”

Here, there was an extended silence, as the kids tried to figure that one out. Then they all kind of said, “Ohhh . . .” at the same time, and the questioning continued.

“Why were you starving to death?”

“Because there wasn’t any food.”

“Why wasn’t there any food?”

“Because it was winter.”

“What’s the longest you’ve ever gone without eating?”

“Probably the two weeks before I killed that porcupine.”

“Can you show us your porcupine hairbrush?”

“I don’t have it anymore. I brought it to a demonstration like this one, to show it to some kids your age, and somebody stole it. Can you imagine how sad that made me feel?”

“Do you have a gun?”

“I have several guns.”

“Have you ever killed a person?”

“No.”

“Are you married?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I guess I haven’t found the right woman yet.”

“Do you wish you were married?”

“More than anything in the world.”

“Do you ever get lonely out there in the woods?”

Eustace hesitated, smiled wistfully. “Only in the evenings.”

Later that night, when we were alone, Eustace told me how heartbroken he gets whenever he spends time around modern American teenagers. Yes, he can communicate with them, but people never understand that it rips him up inside to see how ignorant the kids are, how undisciplined in their personal interactions and how disrespectful of their elders, how consumed they are by material desire and how helplessly incompetent in a way that you would never see with, say, Amish children.

But I wasn’t listening carefully to Eustace’s lament, because I had another question on my mind. “Hey, about what happened there tonight. Do you get that kind of response everywhere you speak?”

“Yes.”

“From all age groups; from all backgrounds?”

“Yes.”

I thought this over. “So tell me specifically. Why do you think these particular teenagers were so hypnotized by you tonight?”

Eustace’s reply was so immediate, so uncompromising, and so coldly delivered that it sent a quick little chill right through me.

“Because,” he said, “they recognized right away that I was a real person. And they’ve probably never met one before.”

CHAPTER TWO

My son, my executioner,

I take you in my arms,

Quiet and small and just astir,

And whom my body warms.

—“My Son, My Executioner,” Donald Hall

In the winter of 1975, when Eustace Conway was fourteen, he began a new diary and wrote this statement, by means of an introduction:

“I, Eustace Conway, live in a fairly large house in Gastonia, North Carolina. I have a mother and a father living at this time, and I also have two brothers (Walton and Judson) and one sister (Martha). I have a very strong hobby of Indian crafts and lore. I have organized an Indian dance team of four people, including myself. The people are: me, my brother Walton, who is the older of my two brothers, Tommy Morris, who is a close friend living about two blocks away, and also Pete Morris, who is his brother. Their father killed himself about two years ago but their mother is going to remarry soon. I go to the Scheile Museum of Natural History every chance I get because I love it there and I love the people there. I have nearly become a member of the staff . . . My bedroom is itself a museum. I have covered it with Indian paintings and pictures, bear skins from my uncle in Alaska, and many Indian crafts I have made. There is no room in my room for anything else and it is really stuffed and I have many more things that I can’t put in.”

He was an unusual kid. He was busy all the time. He went to school every day, of course, but only because they made him go. After school, he would ride his bicycle over to the Scheile Museum, a small natural history museum filled with dusty World War I–era dioramas of North Carolina flora and fauna. And that was where the day’s real schooling started for Eustace; Mr. Alan Stout, the museum’s director, had taken a liking to him and always welcomed him into the marvelous inner asylum of the Scheile.

Eustace was hard to resist. The kid had a wonderful big smile, on the occasions when he’d actually crack one. Such an uncommonly focused child! So highly motivated and interested in geology, anthropology, history, biology—anything you could offer him. Mr. Stout used to let Eustace hang around in the back rooms of the museum for hours every day, to the boy’s supreme bliss. (“Mr. Stout knows more about Indians than anyone I know,” Eustace raved in his diary. “And he is a very good watercolor painter, and paints scenes of Tennessee, where he was born and raised.”) Eustace was like no child Mr. Stout had ever met; indeed, like no child he would ever meet again. If you gave him a book to look at, he’d study it, ask a dozen questions, and then request another book the next afternoon. If Mr. Warren Kimsey, the museum’s resident taxidermist, showed Eustace how to skin and flesh a rabbit, he’d do it with a fanatical perfection and ask for another rabbit so that he could try to improve on the skill.

“Warren is new,” Eustace confided to his diary, “but he has swiftly become closest to me. In fact, I like him more than any other person in this world.”

And he was a terrific helper. A regular eager beaver. Always happy to sweep out the storage rooms or take over any chore nobody else would do. Mr. Stout even let Eustace use the museum as a practice space for his Indian dance troupe. Eustace was the president of the troupe, but Mr. Stout coached the dancers, drove them to competitions, helped show the boys how to sew and bead the intricate, traditional Indian dance costumes. As Eustace got older, Mr. Stout took him on canoe trips on the Catawba South Fork River, to collect water samples for government environmental studies. He took Eustace on camping trips all alone sometimes, and watched in wordless admiration as the teenager caught, killed, skinned, cooked, and ate rattlesnakes.

Mr. Stout more than liked Eustace; he respected him. He thought he was brilliant. He carefully observed the development of Eustace Conway much as Thomas Jefferson had carefully observed the development of a young neighbor named Meriwether Lewis (a child whom the president would always recall as having been “remarkable, even in infancy, for enterprise, boldness and discretion”). And, anyway, Mr. Stout had a sense that Eustace had a desperate need for someplace to go in the afternoons, someplace other than home. He didn’t know the details of the family situation, but he had met the father, and it didn’t take any genius to recognize that life was not easy in that fairly large house on Deerwood Drive.

So Eustace would spend his afternoons at the museum and then take off and hit the little forest behind his house. Check his traps, hunt for turtles, create trails. He made notes of what he saw during those forays into the woods. He’d been keeping a diary for years, but it wasn’t so much a means of personal expression as a compulsive chronicle of everything he had accomplished that day (whether related to wildlife or to the more mundane) and a long list of what he intended to accomplish the next day.

“Today I fed worms to my baby snapping turtle. I watched a movie about a boy and a homing pigeon, practiced on the hoop dance, and started working on the feathers for my coup stick. Then I was developing my skills in table tennis. I have become quite good. I am going to read my Bible every night until I finish it. I may make a feather crest out of real turkey tail feathers.”

“Today I found a cougar track that was 3 days old. I caught a corn snake that was 51.2 feet. I also set a snare for a coon where I saw 3-day old coon tracks. I hope to catch it for the skin.”

“I began reading a book, Fighting Indians of the West. After a while of that, I mounted two deer feet . . . Martha told me that a squirrel had been hit on Gardner Park Drive. I skinned it, but froze it to flesh later.”

A whole page in one of his childhood diaries was headlined frogs, full of information and observation on the same. (“Today I caught 3 tree frogs and put them in my 10-gallon terrarium. The next day I found some bunches of eggs in the water bowl. I also caught a salamander and put him in there with the frogs. One of the frogs is thought to be dead, for I have not seen three of them together at the same time for a while . . .”)

It was as though Eustace were some kind of baby Thoreau. Or maybe not. Although he was attentive to his environment, Eustace didn’t have then, and never would develop, Thoreau’s languid communion with nature. (For instance: “Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath,” Thoreau mused, “I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in reverie, amidst the pines and hickories and sumacs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness.”) No way would Eustace Conway endure that kind of decadent repose. Even as a child, he was far too compulsive to sit for weeks on end to watch the light change. Instead, Eustace was driven to engage. It’s more to the point to say that he was like the young Teddy Roosevelt, another energetic and determined child, who also studied under a master taxidermist, who also zealously created a natural history museum in his bedroom, and who also wrote conscientious, academic observations in preadolescent diaries. Like Teddy Roosevelt, the young Eustace Conway could be described as having been “pure act.”

Eustace didn’t have a lot of friends. He wasn’t much like anybody else, and he already knew this, even at the age of ten. When he looked at other boys his age, he saw kids who spent hours watching television, talking about what they saw on television, and imitating characters from television. None of their references made any sense to him.

The other boys also had strange hobbies. In the cafeterias, they’d play this elaborate pencil-breaking game, trying to steal each other’s pencils and snap them in half, keeping score of how many pencils each boy broke. This was both puzzling and upsetting to Eustace. How could anyone have such disrespect for property? Pencils were made out of trees, after all, and were worth something. He also watched boys in his classroom fritter away whole semesters by drawing picture after picture of race cars in their school notebooks—and using only one side of the paper, too! Eustace, even back then, would think, What a waste of time . . . and what a waste of paper. These boys just seemed so damn bored. All they could think of doing was to fight and wreck stuff. But Eustace could always think of something useful; there weren’t enough hours in the day for all he wanted to do and learn.

Many children in the neighborhood knew Eustace and were involved with his life, but they weren’t friends in the typical way of children; they were more like early versions of apprentices. Eustace used to do things like traipse down his sidewalk with a massive black rat snake draped around his neck, which naturally garnered attention. The kids would gather and ask questions and he’d tell them about the habits and nature of the snake, enlist them to gather food for the animal, or—if they demonstrated more interest—take them back into the woods and show them how to catch snakes of their own. Even the children who were older than Eustace would follow him into the woods to build forts under his supervision or wade through swamps to find food for his turtles.

But in school? Eustace had no friends. Without the conversation piece of a snake, without the backdrop of a forest as proof of his expertise, Eustace was pretty hopeless at connecting with his peers. He’d sit at the lunch table with the other outcasts—the mentally retarded children, the children with the braces on their legs, and the sad children of Gastonia’s poorest families. He wasn’t friends with these kids. They didn’t even know one another’s names. They would eat together every day but then look away in shameful relief when someone else was singled out for bullying.

There was this one boy, though. Randy Cable, who was new to Gastonia. His parents were hill people, rural Appalachian people, who had moved down from the mountains to this affluent suburban town to find work in the local mills. Randy didn’t know anybody, either. One day during seventh grade, Randy was, as usual, playing alone at recess on the periphery of the playground, where the pavement stopped and the woods began. The other kids were involved in a loud baseball game, but Randy Cable didn’t know how to play baseball. So he was kicking around near the woods and found a turtle. He was messing with it, poking at it, when Eustace Conway, a thin, dark, serious boy, came over.

“You like turtles?” asked Eustace.

“Sure,” said Randy.

“I know everything about turtles. I have more than a hundred turtles in my backyard,” Eustace said.

“No, you don’t.”

“Yes, I do. If you come over to my house, I’ll show you.”

Randy Cable thought, Yeah, right.

But he rode his bike over there that afternoon, and found that it was true. In the backyard of Eustace’s house was a vast, orderly turtle community. Irrigated and shaded, it was a network of dozens of cages and crates filled with more than a hundred turtles, of different breeds, that Eustace had been feeding and tending to, on a carefully documented rotational system, since he was six years old.

Eustace loved turtles. He loved their character, their calmness, their perfect spiritual balance, and their comforting and ancient aura. Eustace had a genius for turtles. He could find turtles anywhere. He could spot a turtle hidden in dense camouflage with only one fingernail-size piece of its shell showing. Several times in his young life, Eustace had heard turtles. Walking silently through the woods, he could hear the almost soundless hiss of air made by a turtle quickly pulling its head and legs into its shell. Then Eustace would stop, freeze, and look around until he spotted it. Sure enough, there was a small box turtle, three feet away, hidden in the forest duff, all tucked up in itself.

Eustace had even developed a system for capturing skittish painted turtles out of ponds and lakes. He’d lurk in the woods at the edge of the water with a rod-and-reel fishing pole, baited with a large chunk of fatback bacon. He’d cast the bacon a few feet in front of the sunning turtle and then slowly drag it before the animal’s eyes until the turtle smelled the bait and eased itself into the water to follow. Inch by inch, Eustace would lure the turtle closer to the shore and then jump out of the woods, leap into the water with a net, and snag the turtle before it dove in fear.

Back home, he’d put his new find in one of his plywood pens, each custom-designed with the appropriate balance of shade, water, and grass for the species. He had mud turtles, musk turtles, box turtles, painted turtles. He fed them crawfish and vegetables and worms (harvested from under the dozens of orderly logs Eustace had arranged in the woods behind his yard), and his turtles were so content in their habitats that they bred while in captivity. And he had snakes housed back there in his yard, too, as well as an orphaned baby fox named Sputnik. (Mr. Stout had given Eustace the fox after a local Gastonian found the animal and brought it into the Scheile Museum for care.) This well-ordered empire was what he showed his new friend Randy Cable that afternoon. And all of it was, for a rural kid like Randy, something close to heaven. The two boys became good buddies.

“Today for the first time I went to Randy Cable’s house,” Eustace wrote in his diary not long after the turtle display. “He showed me his woods and a stream where we saw muskrat, coon, bird, and cat tracks. He showed me a muskrat den in a clay bank. We built a bird trap out of a basket and baited it with bread. We used a long string and a wooden pull-trigger. We had a lot of blackbirds walking around it, but we never caught one because they never went in. We made a set of deadfall trigger sticks. I skinned a cottontail rabbit for a vest.”

And so it went for months and years. Randy remembers Eustace as a strange and fascinating kid, full of knowledge and keenly sensitive to his world in a way unlike most other twelve-year-olds. His focus was intense on the smallest detail. For instance, Eustace told Randy, “Do you like chocolate? Do you want to know the best way to eat it? Just put a tiny square of it under your tongue and let it melt there. That way, you’ll get the most flavor over the longest time and never take any of it for granted.”

Eustace was crazy about Randy Cable and about Randy’s father, a mountain-raised man who knew everything about hunting and fishing and what kind of wild greens you could collect from the river banks for food. Eustace went to Randy’s house as often as he could. Randy visited the Conways’ place far less often. It wasn’t as comfortable there. Mrs. Conway was nice, but Mr. Conway was scary. Dinnertime was an especially terrifying event. The children rarely spoke during the meal and neither did their mom. Mr. Conway, seated at the head of the table, was stern and sarcastic, with a hair-trigger temper. All his attention, it seemed, was concentrated on Eustace. If the boy even started to speak, Mr. Conway would ridicule his grammar. If the boy mentioned something about his day, Mr. Conway would laugh it off as “ridiculous, childish.” If Mr. Conway asked Eustace how he’d done on a recent math test, and got an answer he didn’t like, he would release a barrage of insults and ridicule.

“You are stupid,” Eustace recalls his father saying. “I’ve never met a child more dimwitted. I don’t know how I could have sired so idiotic a son. What are we to surmise? I believe you are simply incompetent and will never learn anything.”

And then Mr. Conway would encourage the younger children to laugh along with him at the ludicrous stupidity of their worthless older brother. Which they would willingly do, in the manner of the outcast kids at the lunch table with the braces on their legs who are always relieved to see another child bullied in their stead.

The other matter that stood out to Randy Cable was the incessant harping on table manners. He’d never been in a “proper” household before or experienced such rigid formality at mealtime. If Eustace ate too fast or used a utensil incorrectly, the father would come down on him with both feet for his “absurd and primitive” table manners. It made Randy nervous to pick up his fork; he never got in trouble for anything like this at home. Thirty years later, Randy is still puzzled by Mr. Conway’s emphasis on mealtime etiquette. “At our dinner table,” Randy recalls, “it was every guy for himself.”

Yeah, well. It was something like that at Eustace’s dinner table, too.

The reasoning behind a man’s decision to name his firstborn son after himself has, I think, many factors. I understand that the custom is generally seen as a mere societal convention (particularly in the American South) but it seems to me more loaded. Some interpret the custom as vanity, but I wonder whether it’s vanity’s opposite: insecurity. To me, it seems a touching and hopeful wish, as if the father—frightened by the importance of having created a new life, a new man, a new rival—utters a small prayer that in the naming of his baby there will be a kind of twinship between himself and the child. In wearing this most familiar name, the child is no longer a stranger or a possible usurper. It’s as though the father can look upon his newborn son without fear and proclaim: You are me; I am you.

But he is not you, and you are not him. Which is why there is ultimately as much danger in this custom as there is comfort.

Mr. Conway’s full name is Eustace Robinson Conway III, and he named his son Eustace Robinson Conway IV. From the beginning, the two were differentiated only by an adjective: Big vs. Little. They even looked alike, the Big and Little Eustaces, with the same wide and intelligent hooded brown eyes. At first, Big Eustace was beside himself with joy at having a Little Eustace in the house. He was wonderful with his baby, charmed by him, proud as could be, attentive, patient, affectionate, boastful. Wanted to play with him all the time. And when the baby got a little bigger, he’d take him out to the woods behind the family’s house and point up into the trees and say, “Look . . .”

Little Eustace was bright and keen, and that certainly made sense, because Big Eustace was an acknowledged genius. The pride of an old, wealthy family of Southern landowners and businessmen, Big Eustace was a chemical engineer with a doctoral degree from MIT. (He had skipped grades in high school, skipped more grades in college, and had walked out of MIT with his doctorate in his early twenties.) He had a true gift for numbers and for science. More than a gift, it was a love. Calculus, to Big Eustace, unfolded its mysteries as easily as harmony unfolds for those who are blessed with musical instinct. As for physics? Gorgeous. Trigonometry? A pleasure. Chemistry? Why, there was nothing hidden in chemistry but ease, fascination, and excitement. He lived for puzzles and figures and tables and equations. He was, in his favorite self-description, a man whose “whole being is controlled by pure logic.” Was he vain? Perhaps. If so, only because it was logical to be vain in a world where other humans were amusingly careless creatures who made choices based on whims and emotion instead of precise reason.

Eustace Robinson Conway III was, through his twenties, on the faculty of the University of South Carolina and North Carolina State, where he taught chemical engineering to students not much younger than he was. It was good work, but he didn’t like the politicized world of academia. He always had trouble working with people. Eventually he left teaching and found employment in the private sector, at a chemical plant. He did not socialize with his peers there, either, but his intellect was respected and a bit feared. A former co-worker, who remembers Big Eustace as Dr. Conway, recalls coming to him one day with a quick question about a specific chemical formula. Eager to give the answer with explicit thoroughness, Dr. Conway started writing an equation on a blackboard, and kept writing and adding more data until the equation snaked across the whole blackboard, expanding into new chemical concepts, until, giddy with excitement, he ran out of blackboard to write on. By which point, of course, he had long since lost the comprehension of his co-worker.

Frankly, he was in love with his brain, so he must have delighted in watching the evolution of his son’s brain. Surely it was exciting for him to see his namesake cleverly solving all those wonderful dilemmas encountered in human infant development. See how he learns to tell sunlight from shadow? See how he learns to identify faces and objects? See how he pulls himself up to stand? How he tries to make sentences? How you can show him the shape of a leaf and he’ll tell you the name of the tree? What a genius! Any minute now, he should be ready to solve calculus problems for fun!

And then Little Eustace turned two.

At breakfast on the birthday morning, Big Eustace gave a present to his son, who was still in the highchair. Big Eustace was eager to see his boy play with the gift before he left for work. It was a jigsaw puzzle. But it was far too sophisticated for a two-year-old, and Little Eustace, frustrated after a few attempts to put it together, quickly lost interest. As Mrs. Conway remembers, her husband went crazy on the kid. “He started screaming at him and saying terrible things.” The child, horrified and confused, was howling at the top of his voice, and when Mrs. Conway tried to intervene, her husband screamed at her, too, for spoiling the baby and encouraging him to be a quitter and an imbecile. Jesus Christ! The puzzle was simple! It was obvious! What kind of mentally retarded child can’t put together a simple jigsaw puzzle?

As perhaps goes without saying, things didn’t get better as time passed. Only horribly worse. Mr. Conway decided that his son was goading him by acting stupid out of “stubbornness,” and that what the boy needed, therefore, was more discipline. So it is that Eustace remembers— and his mother and siblings confirm—an upbringing that was more like a stint in a POW camp than a real childhood. If Little Eustace so much as touched a hammer from Big Eustace’s toolshed without asking permission, he would be sent to his room and forced to stay there for hours without food or water. If Little Eustace didn’t finish every morsel on his plate in proper time, Big Eustace would force him to sit at the dinner table all night, even if it meant the child had to sleep upright in his chair. If Little Eustace, in his play, accidentally kicked up a divot of grass from his father’s lawn, he would be beaten with a wooden paddle. If Little Eustace, in doing his chores, dared to mow the grass in a counterclockwise pattern instead of the clockwise pattern his father had commanded, there would be a huge scene and hell to pay.

Looking back on it now—and he is surprisingly willing to do so— Mr. Conway concedes that mistakes may have been made. Maybe he was a little hard on the boy. But his interest was only in producing a perfect child, and his anger was the result of the keen disappointments he suffered through his son’s unanticipated shortfalls.

“It is very human,” he told me, “to think that you can control your children, but now I realize it’s an impossible proposition. The best plan is to have no plan at all; just let them go and become the people they were meant to be. But I didn’t realize that when I was a young parent. I was excited to have a son, and I figured I could manipulate Eustace to be the way I wanted him to be. But he turned out to have all these personality problems. I wanted him to be just like me!”

“How so?” I asked.

“I expected him to be a good student, at the very least, as I had been. I certainly thought that a son of mine would be able to count! I used to work with him for hours, trying to teach him how to count a stack of pennies, but he was incapable of learning. He was the antithesis of what I’d expected. I wanted to work on projects with him, but he was impossible to work with. Always a problem child. I don’t understand him at all. We cannot understand each other.”

On another occasion, I asked Mr. Conway, “Do you ever wish that things were different between you and Eustace?”

He answered immediately, as though he had been waiting for this very question.

“It has been a true disappointment for me to have this flawed relationship with Eustace. It is the greatest disappointment of my life. And I don’t know what to do about it. I don’t think there’s any hope of my having a good relationship with him.”

“No hope? No hope whatsoever?”

“I hesitate to subscribe to the theory that I did not love my son enough. Perhaps people will say this is true. I don’t know. But I believe that I loved my son very much. I was excited to have a son. Did I tell you that? I could not wait for him to be born.”

Eustace Conway, it must be said, also remembers those stacks of pennies. Night after night, on the living room floor, hour after hour, his father would amass and divide piles of pennies and demand of Eustace the answers to division and addition and multiplication problems. He remembers the horrifying blankness that his mind would retreat to, and his father’s refusal to allow him to go to bed until he got it right, forcing him to stay up past midnight with those frightful stacks of pennies. Then his own weeping and his father’s screaming. The humiliation and the endless ridicule.

There was something both extreme and personal about Mr. Conway’s reactions to his oldest son. It was as if he had early made a decision to refuse to validate this child, to the point of flat-out bizarreness. When Eustace’s picture began to appear in the newspaper for successes in competition with his Indian dance troupe, his father wouldn’t read the articles. (“Ridiculous, in my opinion,” he would say, “but nobody’s listening to me.”) When Eustace was presented with a national youth achievement award from the Smithsonian Institution, his father did not attend the ceremony.

At Christmas one year Little Eustace, having saved all his money, bought his father peanuts and chewing gum as a gift because he knew his father loved peanuts and chewing gum. On Christmas morning, he nervously presented his father with the gift. Big Eustace accepted the package, said “Thank you,” set it aside, but never unwrapped it.

To make everything worse, Eustace was not a good student. He did all right in kindergarten (his report card shows that he could satisfactorily hop, tie his shoes, get along with others, obey orders cheerfully, and recite his telephone number), but by second grade he was getting straight C’s, making only average progress, and needing, his teacher suggested, “a great deal more help at home with his work.”

“Eustace puts forth little effort in his work,” reported his third-grade teacher.“He needs to memorize his addition-number facts.”

What a prescription! The seven-year-old was already locked down at the kitchen table for four hours a night with a father who would shut the doors and pull down the window shades (thus isolating both Big and Little Eustace from the rest of the family) and yell at his son over the arithmetic homework in dead privacy. More help at home? Eustace was already wound up like an eight-day clock over the whole concept of school, scared to death of homework, gripped in panic over the dreaded nightly cycle of effort and failure and punishment. It wasn’t the brand of child abuse you read about in the papers; it wasn’t as if Little Eustace was collecting cigarette burns on his arms. But make no mistake about it: he was utterly traumatized. He was so distressed that his fear manifested itself in a particular physical grip; he was constipated throughout his whole childhood, “too terrified to even take a shit.”

“Night after night,” Eustace remembers, “week after week, month after month, year after year, it was as if my father would cut my legs off. Then he’d cut off the stumps where the legs had been. Then he’d cut off my arms. Then he would run the sword through my body.”

* * *

There were three other children in the house—Walton, Martha, and cute baby Judson. Their experiences were all different, which makes sense if you subscribe to the theory that every child in every family is basically raised in a different country, given how vastly events may vary over the years. When the other children came along, they never took the kind of heat from their father that Eustace suffered.

Judson, the youngest, seems to have missed out more than anyone on the hardest drama of the family, the way that the lucky and oblivious youngest child always seems to do. His father was “stubborn and selfish,” but Judson was never terrified of him. He was an adorable child, whom his father loved and called Little Bug. Anyway, by the time Judson was born, his father had essentially given up on raising perfect children, had turned them over to his wife, and, in his own words, had “abdicated down to the basement” to brood in resentful silence. So Judson never saw the worst of it.

Judson’s childhood, in effect, was an endless summer camp, because he had this older brother, Eustace, who took him out into the woods and made him climb mountains and taught him cool things about nature. Judson was, from birth, Eustace’s special project; Eustace was always getting him out of the house and into the woods, where things were safer. He was trying to keep Judson hidden from the radar of Big Eustace. It was a deliberate decision that Eustace clearly remembers making. He knew it was too late to save Walton and Martha (he felt they had already been “brainwashed” by their father), but when Judson was born, Eustace took one look at him and said to himself, “This one’s mine. I’m going to save his life.” In return, Judson worshipped Eustace, although, he admits, “I was never the achiever Eustace wanted me to be. I was lazy. He’d be, like, ‘Let’s make buckskin!’ and I wanted to stay in my bedroom and play with my Star Wars action figures. But I’d do anything to have his company.”

Martha, the only daughter, was a serious and responsible child who remembers a girlhood wholly different from those of her girlfriends— one of snakes and turtles and baby foxes that had to be fed live birds and long expeditions with Eustace (“the ringleader”) out into the woods, where elaborate adventures took place. She remembers the dangers she and her brothers faced. All those afternoons spent messing around with raging rivers and poisonous spiders and homemade tree houses! Now, a highly organized and strictly protective suburban mother, she cannot even begin to comprehend why she and her brothers were allowed to glean such experiences unsupervised. She remembers a hard father, yes, but also an inconsistently permissive mother, and the fights that took place between the two parents over childrearing. (“Make up your minds!” Martha always wanted to yell at them.)

And she remembers Eustace as a child who “brought trouble on himself” by not doing as well in school as Daddy expected and by being “stubborn.” As for Walton Conway, he can barely remember the details of his childhood. It was “a blur, some paintbrush strokes of a dark color.” That, and a recurrent childhood nightmare that his father was going to take him down into the basement, tie him to a table, and saw off his limbs. That, and a specific middle-of-the-night episode where his parents were fighting and his father screamed at his mother that he was going to “drive an icepick through her heart.” That, and a remembrance of seeing his father towering over his ten-year-old brother Eustace, threatening to “beat him to a bloody pulp.”

But it wasn’t as bad as Eustace makes out, Walton says. His father was certainly capable of tender moments, like drying the tears of a child with a skinned knee. And what about that horrible night when Walton threatened to run away from home and his father broke down the bedroom door, caught his son slipping over the windowsill to escape, and then shoved Walton out the window? Well, it wasn’t really a shove. It wasn’t as if Mr. Conway intentionally threw his young son out a second-story window; he “just kind of pushed me a little bit.”

Anyhow. What Walton does not remember is the sense that his father was the prime source of the discontent and problems around the house. No, that was Eustace. Eustace was always the problem. Even as a young child, he made everything harder than it had to be. He was sullen, unhappy, and willful, and he “didn’t do his homework.” Daddy was moody and strict, yes, but he could be appeased with obedience. To both Walton and Martha, who were superior students and always at the top of their classes, the solution to the family’s unhappiness was pretty obvious: if Eustace would excel in school, Daddy would be happy. If Eustace would stop being so stubborn, Daddy would stop yelling at Mother and everybody else.

“Why couldn’t you give him any authority?” Walton would demand of Eustace, years later. “Why couldn’t you bend? Why did you always have to do things your own way, even as a toddler, just to spite him? Why did you always have to stand up to him and make him so mad?”

When asked for examples, though, Walton can’t remember a single specific instance of Eustace standing up to his father. Yet he feels certain that it must have happened. In fact, his image of Eustace as an aggressive challenger to his father, as an equally matched and willful adversary (“even as a toddler”), is one that Mr. Conway depicts and that the younger Conway siblings have all faithfully embraced. However, the notion of a combative Little Eustace is hardly consistent with the reports of outside adults who visited the Conway household during those years. Mr. Stout, of the Scheile Museum, remembers being invited to dinners at the Conways’ home, where he watched young Eustace eat in petrified silence, submissive and nervous and careful to “never make eye contact with his father.”

One of Eustace’s aunts remembers Mr. Conway waking four-year-old Eustace late at night and bringing him down to meet the company, then tossing difficult math questions to the child and grilling him to perform. Each time Little Eustace answered incorrectly, he was mocked and humiliated by Big Eustace, because this verbal batting-around was supposed to be entertainment for the guests, mind you. And so it went, on and on, until the boy was in a tearful meltdown, at which point the aunt left the room, thinking she could watch no more of this, thinking it “sadistic, the worst abuse of a child” she had ever witnessed, and promising herself that she would never return to this house again.

And, like Mr. Stout, the aunt apparently does not remember Little Eustace, at any point in the evening, saying anything to his father along the lines of “Up yours, Dad.”

Still, when Walton remembers hearing his father threaten to beat his brother to a bloody pulp, the question he asks is, What did Eustace do to make Daddy so angry that time?When Walton remembers hearing his father threaten to drive an icepick through his mother’s heart, he supposes, They must have been fighting about Eustace again. And if Eustace had to spend hours locked in his room without food or water, Well, the boy really must have misbehaved something fierce that time.

Perhaps the more difficult part of this story to understand is where the mother was during all this pain. How could it be that Karen Conway— who had once been Karen Johnson, the unrepentant tomboy horseback-champion able-bodied woodsman of a girl who sold her silver flute for passage to Alaska at the age of twenty-two—had grown into a woman who could not protect her son? Why was she never able to shield Little Eustace from Big Eustace?

She herself cannot explain it today. Such are the mysteries of a marriage, I suppose, and such are the tragedies of a family. Mrs. Conway says now that she was afraid of her husband. She was catching a lot of the same kind of abuse as her son. (Her husband seemed to love nothing more than egging his children on to make fun of their mother by calling her a “big fat hippo.”) Her friends and family encouraged her to leave the marriage, but she never found the courage to go away for long.

Some of this was surely due to Mrs. Conway’s sincere Christianity, which had her convinced that divorce was a mortal sin. And some of it was due to . . . who knows? Who knows why women stay? What she does remember is that whenever she did try to defend her son, it only made her husband more furious and more extreme in his punishments of Little Eustace. So she decided early on that it was kinder not to step in or interfere.

Instead, she devised ways to deliver secret help to her son. As though Eustace were a jailed dissident doing time in the solitary confinement block of a totalitarian prison, she would slip clandestine encouragement to him, under the door and through the chinks in the walls. Sometimes she literally slipped him notes (“with love from the one who has faith in you and cares most about you . . .”), and she also showed him affection privately, when nobody was looking. She gave him both the skills and freedom to explore the woods, where he could not only excel, but could breathe in a sense of safety far away from the tornado alley that was home. And what she also gave her son, more vital than anything else, was the secret but persistent idea that no matter what his father might do or say, Eustace Robinson Conway IV would grow up to be a Man of Destiny.

The Man of Destiny theory wasn’t Karen Conway’s invention. She had absorbed it from her father, an extraordinary idealist named C. Walton Johnson. This character, Eustace’s maternal grandfather, was an upright World War I veteran whom everyone called Chief. Immediately on returning home from the war, Chief Johnson founded the North Carolina branch of the Boy Scouts of America. He wanted to work with boys because of his strong idea—no, let’s go ahead and call it an inflexible and didactic dogma—about the process by which weak little boys could be transformed into powerful Men of Destiny. He believed that this evolution was best accomplished in the challenges of a frontier-like environment, and, like many Americans before and after him, he was apprehensive about how the evaporation of the wilderness would affect the development of American manhood. And Chief Johnson was not about to stand back and let America’s boys grow up effete, decadent, and pampered by the “softening and vision-curbing influence of the city.”

No, sir. Not on his watch.

So the first Boy Scout troop in North Carolina was a good start, but Chief quickly grew disillusioned with the program, feeling that it pampered the boys. Therefore, in 1924, he founded an extremely rigorous private summer camp on 125 mountainous acres near Asheville. He named it Camp Sequoyah for Boys: Where the Weak Become Strong and the Strong Become Great. (Unfortunately, it is nowhere recorded whether the Weak ever became Great, but I’d be willing to bet they tried.) He asked of his campers and his staff only one thing: that they ceaselessly strive to achieve physical, moral, and intellectual perfection in every aspect of their lives. Then, and only then, could they become Men of Destiny.

“Every age has need for Men of Destiny,” Chief wrote, in one of his many published tracts on the topic, “and in every age, some men will respond to the need, as did Aristotle, Galileo, and Wilson. . . . These men believed they were Men of Destiny, and prepared themselves for the task that lay ahead. They were gripped by a compulsion that they could not resist. No man becomes a Man of Destiny unless he believes, with great conviction, that he has a unique contribution to make to the society of his day. Conceit? No! Just a sense of mission and the courage to follow through. He who is compelled by an inner conviction that he has a mission which he must accomplish, that he was born for this purpose, that he must and will follow through; that man will be a Man of Destiny.”

The best way to groom such heroic figures was to start with the young, Chief believed, and in the wild. After all, he wrote, “the real American boy has inherited too much of the pioneer spirit to feel at home in the city.” So he suggested that parents remove their boys from the “emotional stress of life” and relocate them to “a Camp with a Purpose,” where the “grandeur of the mountains,” combined with the guidance of counselors selected by the director for their “mature, wholesome, intelligent, responsible leadership,” would help the boys grow, “as nature and God intended, into the full stature of manhood.”

Camp Sequoyah was no Hitler Youth Camp. Chief believed that no boy in America, no matter how weak or how flawed (or, incredibly, given the era, no matter what race or religion), should be excluded from the opportunity to become a Man of Destiny through attending Camp Sequoyah. Was your son a “regular healthy boy” already blessed with a “superb physique”? Why, he would naturally return from Sequoyah “with his splendid powers multiplied.” Was your son “over-bright, sullen, and sometimes antagonistic?” Don’t hesitate to enroll him in Sequoyah; the fresh air will teach him “the necessity of developing his body and keeping it on par with his mind.” Was your son “timid, diffident, and slow to make friends?” Sequoyah would teach him to socialize. Was your son a bully? Sequoyah’s counselors would teach him that picking on others was “cowardly and despicable.” Why, even if your son was “big and fat and always being teased,” Camp Sequoyah was where he should go, if not to achieve a superb physique, then at least to learn how to “take a joke and to make the best of being teased.”

Eustace Conway’s mother was Chief Johnson’s only daughter. (There’s a wonderful photograph of Sequoyah in the 1940s, with the whole camp gathered in rows according to age. It’s all ramrod-straight men and earnest crewcut boys grinning at the camera, with one exception— the little blond girl in a white dress seated at the center of the throng—Chief’s daughter, Eustace Conway’s mother, age five.) Karen grew up at Camp Sequoyah, surrounded not only by woods and boys, but by ideals. She loved her father and, more than either of her siblings, obediently accepted his dogma. When it came time for Karen to marry, she even chose one of her father’s favorite counselors as a husband. She fell in love with the brilliant young Eustace Conway III, who, with his strict personal discipline, physical grace, MIT degree, and keen love of the outdoors, must have seemed the incarnation of Chief’s dearest principles.

And though her husband put aside his dreams of teaching the natural world when he entered corporate life, she never lost her belief in the woods. So when Karen Conway’s first son was born, there was no question as to how she would raise him. Free, challenged, inspired to attempt heroic feats, and always outdoors. It was due to his mother’s hand that Eustace could throw a knife accurately enough at the age of seven to nail a chipmunk to a tree. And kill a running squirrel at fifty feet with a bow and arrow by the time he was ten. And set forth into the woods, alone and empty-handed, when he was twelve, to live off the land and build his own shelter.

While Mr. Conway kept patiently explaining to young Eustace what a feeble idiot the boy was, Mrs. Conway went to the library every day and brought home bigger and bigger piles of inspiring American biographies for Eustace to read. George Washington, Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Abraham Lincoln, Kit Carson, John Frémont, Andrew Jackson, Geronimo, Red Cloud, Sitting Bull—bold, unironic tales of heroism and wilderness and fortitude. These were the lives to emulate, she told her son when Big Eustace wasn’t listening. This is the kind of man you can be: a Man of Destiny.

Eustace Conway was a literal-minded creature even as a child (especially as a child), and he absorbed the morals of these stories as purely as though his mother were holding a funnel to his ear and pouring them straight into his brain. When he read that Indian braves tested their mental and physical endurance by running miles across the desert holding water in their mouths but not swallowing it, he tried to run miles through the forest doing the same. When he read that frontiersmen used to wear the same pair of buckskin trousers for years at a time, he resolved to make himself a pair and never wear anything else. When he read that Lewis and Clark brought as much paper and ink on their journey as food and bullets, he started keeping his diary. When he read of the Indian brave left behind enemy lines in a battle with settlers— wounded and abandoned with a bullet through his knee—who survived the entire winter by hiding in a ditch, covered by leaves, and eating the rodents who crawled over him . . . well, that scenario was impossible to follow exactly, but Eustace imitated the spirit of the story by asking the family dentist to please not use Novocain when filling his cavities. He wanted to learn how to endure physical pain.

Back when he was in grammar school, Eustace would bring about six such heroic biographies and action-adventure books into the classroom every day. He’d read a book until the teacher confiscated it, and then he’d start on another. When she snatched that one, he’d begin another and then another. When all the books were gone, he’d stare out the window and plan projects inspired by his readings. He was only in second grade, for instance, when he started building himself a five-story tree house (complete with a basement and walkways that extended into branches of the tree next door), modeled after the descriptions in The Swiss Family Robinson.

Naturally, the schoolteachers had no idea of what to do with this odd boy who would not pay attention in class. When he was in fifth grade, his teacher had to call Mrs. Conway in for a conference.

She said, “I don’t think Eustace is capable of learning.”

But it was too late; he was already learned, certainly in the skills and morals his mother had taught him. And if her ideas about raising her son conflicted with her husband’s ideas, the trick was not to combine their philosophies into one childrearing doctrine, but to apply each individually— one loud and public, the other secretive and steadfast. The father’s strict humiliations were applied only in the evenings and over the weekends; the mother’s stirring challenges were reserved for the long and free days in the woods. The trait these parents shared was absolute emphasism. Both placed Eustace in the center of their attention, where he received either high praise or demeaning shame. Eustace’s mother told him that he was a Man of Destiny and there was no achievement on this planet too lofty for him; his father told him he was useless.

Literal-minded creature that he was, the poor kid believed them both. How his head didn’t explode from the contradictions, it’s hard to say. But it is little wonder that Eustace spent a significant number of his youthful hours pondering the possibility that he might be the subject of a vast and sadistic science experiment. Maybe his whole life was playing out in some grand laboratory, where he was being tested, his reactions studied closely by scientists he could neither see nor understand. What other explanation could make sense of this? That one afternoon Eustace got a letter from his mother on the sly telling him he was “a handsome, bold, fearless, interesting, loving son of whom to be proud and for whom to be grateful,” and yet, maybe later the same day, would report in his diary that his father had told him he was “no smarter ‘than a nigger in the slums.’ I felt like killing him. I wonder what is to happen to me.”

He slept only a few hours every night. After the rest of the family had gone to bed, Eustace would stay up until two or three or four in the morning. He would finish his schoolwork, which was always drudgery for him except the rare circumstances when he had the opportunity to write term papers on topics like “The Teepee Then and Now.” When his homework was done, he would write in his diary, cramming the pages with his deeds and observations.

“Today, I went to Robinwood Lake for the first time this year and I caught a big female painted turtle I had let go last winter for hibernating.”

“Today, I finally saw all three tree frogs in my terrarium at the same time.”

“Today, Randy Cable caught an albino salamander and I put it in alcohol.”

“The black rat snake is happy in his new cage.”

He would read over his journal, trying to record his progress in becoming a competent woodsman. Every day he set higher challenges for himself in the wilderness because, as he later said, “I grew up in a culture and a family that had no way of providing me with rites of passage into manhood, so I had to invent them for myself.”

After writing in his journal, Eustace would stay up long into the night, obsessively perfecting his skills at beadwork and weaving. He’d sometimes spend months working on a single pair of buckskin moccasins, distracting his mind by sitting in low light with an old book about Plains Indian artifacts lying open across his bed, replicating the complicated beaded patterns in the pictures of antique Indian clothing.

His unhappy world of extremes had fostered in Eustace a fierce perfectionism. It was important for him to live every moment of his life completely free of mistakes, both to minimize his father’s opportunities to ridicule him and to prove to his mother that her intense praise was earned. The bar he set for himself was incredibly high. (He would lament in his journals years later that he never felt the “timeless freedom of youth” but was instead haunted by the “overhanging threat of incompletion.”) Even in his private moments, even in the middle of the night, when he was working secretly on his beloved projects of Indian beadwork, his efforts had to be faultlessly executed, or the work would bring him no comfort. Tearing up his stitches when they were imperfect and trying again, Eustace refined each line of beads across his moccasins until the patterns exactly matched those of the ancient Cheyenne masters. He was making art back there in his bedroom on Deerwood Drive that a child had no business even attempting.

When he was finally exhausted, he would turn off his light and consider sleep. Sometimes he’d listen to his parents arguing as he lay in the dark. Often, he would cry. Just as often, he would hold a hunting knife pressed against his throat as he was falling asleep. It was strangely consoling to feel the blade across his neck. It was somehow comforting to know that he could kill himself at a moment’s notice if things got too bad. Having that option somehow always gave him the peace he needed to finally drift off.

CHAPTER THREE

Thus situated, many hundred miles from our families in the howling wilderness, I believe few would have equally enjoyed the happiness we experienced. I often observed to my brother, you see how little nature requires to be satisfied? Felicity, the companion of content, is rather found in our breasts than in the enjoyment of external things.

—Daniel Boone

Davy Crockett ran away from home when he was thirteen years old, to escape an irate father. Daniel Boone’s father used to beat his sons until they begged for mercy, but Daniel would never break. (“Canst thou not beg?” his father would demand.) Instead, young Daniel spent whole days alone in the woods to get away from his father’s domain and, by the age of fifteen, had earned a reputation as one of the best hunters in the Pennsylvania wilderness. The explorer John Frémont was five when he lost his father. Kit Carson lost his father (who was killed by the falling limb of a burning tree and left his wife to raise eight children alone), and Kit ran away from home when he was sixteen. The mountain man Jim Bridger was on his own at fourteen.

None of this was unusual for the time. The wagon trails to the West were filled with young boys who had left home for any number of reasons—but no small number of them, we can be sure, hit the frontier because they believed that even the most dangerous unknowns in the world were more appealing than whatever business was going on back there in that small cabin in New England or Virginia or Tennessee. There is a lot of talk in our history books about what drew young men to the frontier, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if bad relationships with tough fathers was one of the major factors that pushed them out there.

And so it is that every generation finds a new wave of boys busting out of their homes, just dying to go anywhere that takes them away from Dad. It sure is a good way to populate a country pretty fast, although perhaps not ideal for the emotional lives of our families. Eustace Conway was trying to do the same—trying to escape. His adolescent years were an endless trauma, and he dreamed constantly of running away.

“Right before I went to bed,” he wrote in his diary as a fourteen-year-old, “daddy came in and lectured me about how I should act toward people and about how I only care about myself. He said that nobody will like me and that I boss everybody and that I do not do anything for anybody else. Although it would be a dumb thing to run away, I think I would be happier anywhere in the woods. If I do leave, I will try my best not to come back, even if I am starving. Anything is better than this.”

But he didn’t bolt. He stuck it out for three more years. Only when he had dutifully finished high school did Eustace Conway split. He took the teepee he’d made by hand (an older Native American woman who knew Eustace at the time described it as “the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen”) and he took his knife and he took some books and he was gone.

“I hope that I am right,” he confided to his diary when he moved out of his parents’ home, “and that I am following a path that is indeed good for me.”

What followed were probably the happiest years of Eustace’s life. And the freest. He owned a teepee and he owned a motorcycle, and that was about it. He lived in and around the mountains near Gastonia. He rebuilt the motorcycle to learn about the workings of an engine. He sewed all his own clothes. He ate nettles and hunted small game with a Cherokee blowgun, using darts he made from sticks, thistledown, and strands of deer tendon. He carved his bowls and plates from wood polished with beaver fat. He made his water jugs out of the clay he dug from the basins of creeks, the same creeks where he bathed. He slept on the ground, on animal skins. He wove ropes out of bark and his own hair. He split white oak and wove it into baskets. He cooked and warmed himself over fire, and he did not touch a match for three years.

“My lodge looks in passable shape,” he wrote in his diary, once his new home was in order. “And I hope that I grow to know it and myself better through the lifestyle that I am taking up at the present.” His new life did take some getting used to (“In the middle of the night it began to rain and so I reluctantly got out of bed and closed the smoke flaps, which should have been taken care of earlier”), but Eustace Conway felt almost immediately that he was at last living on this earth as he had been meant to live. “I slept until seven in the morning,” he wrote after one of his first nights in the teepee, “when the sun beaming down on the smoky canvas called my attention to the world. I got up and washed my face in spring water. Oh, how my body loves me! Happy day to all!”

His teepee was wonderful—a fort and a temple, a home so satisfyingly light and transient that it had none of the psychological impact of a house’s overstability. He could put it together or break it down in a matter of minutes. He could pack it up, load it onto the top of a friend’s car, drive it to an elementary school, and throw it together again on the playground for the delight of some grammar school kids he’d been hired to teach about nature that day. He could haul his teepee off to a powwow in another state for a weekend of dancing and fellowship with the Native Americans he had befriended over the years. He could pack it in storage while he went hitchhiking across the country on a whim, or he could hang out in his teepee, hidden somewhere in the woods, completely jazzed by the knowledge that nobody could find him.

He took a job after high school, but only for a little while. He headed down to Tennessee to work as a nature educator for learning-disabled and troubled kids at a place called the Bodine School. He was brilliant with the students, even though he was not much older than they were. He had terrific rapport with them, but he didn’t hit it off so well with his bosses. Eustace Conway, it should be said, does not take much truck in working under the authority of other people. It rubs him wrong. He quickly got into a dispute with the principal, who had promised Eustace that he could live in his teepee on the grounds of the campus but had reneged on the promise. And Eustace Conway does not take much truck from people who renege on their promises.

So, restless and irritated, he took off to visit a woodsy young guy he knew named Frank, who was going to college in Alabama. They had a good weekend visit. Kicked around in the forest and shot at things with an old-fashioned black powder rifle and made jokes. But Eustace had a sense that his friend was bothered by something, and, indeed, it emerged in subsequent conversation that Frank had broken up with his girlfriend and was floundering wildly—had quit doing sports, quit going to school, then quit working at his job. He didn’t have the first idea of what to do with himself next. When he finished telling Eustace his sad story, Eustace said (“and the words just leaped out of my mouth like a frog leaping out of a hot frying pan”), Let’s hike the Appalachian Trail.

He couldn’t even say where the idea had come from. But suddenly it was out there.

“Sure,” Frank said. “Let’s do it.”

So Eustace called the principal of the Bodine School and quit his teaching job (no big deal; the guy was a jerk who broke his word, and who needs a damn job, anyhow?), and four days later the two young men were standing in a bus station in Montgomery, Alabama, waiting for a Greyhound to take them up to Bangor, Maine. The suddenness and brashness of the decision surprised even Eustace’s mother, who could usually be counted on to encourage such adventures.

“Your phone call with news came as a big surprise,” she wrote to him in a quick note, trying to catch him before he was gone. “I have mixed feelings about your planned hiking trip. I can understand why you desire to make such a trip and agree with the good aspects of it, but on the other side of the seesaw, it shows irresponsibility at keeping your word and inability to put important things first.” What she then added was a little provocative (in addition to being obvious) but she probably threw it in there to punctuate her own concerns: “Your father feels that you are a playboy and will never settle down if you don’t start taking life seriously and think more about preparing for your future. He thinks you should be working more and being more dependable to keep your promises of commitment. He disapproves!”

Well, tough. That’s what people turn nineteen for.

Their adventure started right off with an adventure. Eustace and Frank bought their bus tickets but couldn’t get on the bus until one last problem was solved. They were waiting at the station for a girl, a friend of Frank’s, to show up with his sleeping bag, a vital piece of equipment. They waited and waited, but the girl never showed. They begged the Greyhound driver to stall, but he finally had to take off to keep to his schedule. Frank and Eustace were devastated. And then, only moments after the bus pulled away, the girl and sleeping bag arrived. Frank and Eustace jumped into the girl’s station wagon and took off down the interstate, chasing the bus. When they caught up with it, Eustace told the girl to pull up alongside. They honked and waved, but, though the other passengers were staring, riveted, the driver pretended that they didn’t exist. Eustace Conway wasn’t going to be ignored and he damn sure wasn’t going to miss this Greyhound to Maine. So he told the girl to pull her car—speeding away at seventy-five miles an hour—right up under the bus driver’s window. Eustace rolled down his passenger-side window, pulled himself out, and stood on top of the station wagon, gripping the roof rack with one hand and clutching his and Frank’s bus tickets with the other. He waved the tickets in front of the driver’s face and kept hollering into the wind, “Let us on this bus!”

“At that point,” Eustace remembers, “the driver decided maybe he’d better pull over and let us on. All the passengers were cheering, and as we walked down the aisle this one big fat lady shouted, ‘Lawd! Y’all coulda been in a movie!’”

They got to Maine and hitchhiked to Bangor and found that they had arrived too early in the year. The rangers warned them not to even think about going over the timberline while there was so much deep snow and heavy ice on the ground. Of course, they ignored the warning and headed up the mountain before dawn the next day, and on that afternoon they saw a bald eagle careening in the cold and thin air, and they were on their way, a month ahead of other climbers.

Here’s what they hadn’t figured on: they never had enough to eat on that trail. Never, never, never. They were ravenous. They were hiking twenty-five and thirty miles a day on barely any food. They had some oatmeal with them, and that was about it. Each would have a cup of oatmeal every morning. Frank would gulp down his puny meal and then stare mournfully at Eustace while Eustace savored every flake as if it were a precious square of chocolate. On the first leg of the trip they found virtually no game on the trail to hunt; it was too early in the year for the animals to come up this high above the timberline, and, moreover, the ground was solid ice, with no edible plants in sight.

When they got to New Hampshire, half mad with hunger, Eustace spotted some partridges in the underbrush. He whipped out a length of string he’d been keeping in his pocket, fashioned a noose about eight inches in diameter, wrapped the string around a long stick, and sneaked up on the next partridge he spotted. He dropped that noose over the bird, tightened the string, made a grab, and ripped off its head. Frank was screaming and dancing and shouting and hugging and kissing Eustace while the still-flapping bird sprayed blood over the packed, white snow. “My God,” Eustace recalls, “but we ate the hell out of that bird.”

They ate its meat; they ate its brains; they ate its feet; and, still famished, they ate every last one of its bones. They were so driven by hunger that they became great hunters. Eustace taught Frank how to catch a bird with a noose (thank goodness for this skill, an old game he’d played with Randy Cable), and together they scrounged the trail as they headed south. They also took to eating crawfish and trout and berries, nettles, anything. They killed rattlesnakes and opened them up to see if there were baby rabbits or something else yummy inside the bellies; they’d eat the snake and whatever the snake had just eaten. Eustace even killed a spruce partridge one day with a rock. He saw the bird, thought to himself, I need to eat that, grabbed the nearest rock, chucked it, nailed the bird dead, and then ate every part of that blessed creature except the feathers.

They were determined to be hunters and gatherers. It was hard going and a weird place to try this out; the heavily traveled corridor of the Appalachian Trail was already so stripped by human beings that food was harder to find than in normal forests. And Eustace well knew it wouldn’t make any environmental sense if every hiker on the A.T. further stripped the land by doing what he was doing. Conscious of all that and maybe feeling a little guilty about overtaxing some already overtaxed land, he continued the experiment. He knew that primitive people had traveled huge distances on foot in millennia past, eating only what they could find along the journey, and he was sure that he and Frank could endure it, too. But that didn’t change the fact that they were starving to death.

They ate whatever they could hunt, pick, scavenge, or sometimes steal. When they hit Bear Mountain Park in New York State, they happened to swing through on the Fourth of July, when hundreds of Puerto Rican and Dominican families were picnicking and celebrating. It was a food bonanza for Eustace and Frank. They were dizzy with the discovery that every garbage can in the park was spilling over with beautiful tins of rice and beans and half-eaten chicken and popcorn and cake. The two of them were like Templeton the rat in that state fair scene from Charlotte’s Web—a couple of omnivores in paradise, shouting at each other from distant garbage cans over the din of salsa music, “I found an entire ham! Oh, my God! Sweet potatoes!”

But they’d had their most desperate food experience back in Maine, when they climbed off the trail for a few days and stayed in a small town with a family who kept the community hog in the backyard. The way the community hog system worked was that everyone in the town fed the hog their table scraps and then, come butchering time, split the meat for the winter. Frank and Eustace learned of this interesting custom the day the lady of the house baked some apple pies and gave the boys a bucket of apple peelings to take out back for the hog to eat. Outside, Frank and Eustace looked at each other, looked at the apple peelings, and said, “Fuck that.” They hid behind the barn and scarfed down the peelings. After that, they graciously offered to take over the feeding of the hog. To this day, all they will report about this experience is that the kind people of that small Maine town sure did throw away a lot of perfectly good food, and that the handsome community hog sure didn’t gain any weight while Eustace Conway and Frank Chambless were around.

In every way, the journey was a triumph. Hiking, delight, revelation, challenge, and epiphany—day after day. Frank and Eustace found all this heightened communication with each other, a tight sense of kinship. They were on the same page about nature and what was wrong with America, and they were both heavily into Native American lore and teachings. Eustace could talk to Frank about problems with his father, and Frank could talk to Eustace about problems with his father and about his feelings for his girlfriend, Lori. There was an earnestness to these two young men, a perfect absence of the cynicism, detachment, and coolness that defined their generation as a whole. Each was shamelessly open with the other.

They weren’t even embarrassed to talk about God. Both had been raised in Southern Baptist households, where devotion and fundamentalism were the default mode. Eustace’s grandfather Chief Johnson had been a rock-solid Christian, a man of blindingly intense morals, and Eustace’s mother had tried to pass those convictions along to her firstborn. Eustace had excelled in church as a kid. He was the early star of Sunday school—sharp, inquisitive, attentive. He was always a big fan of Jesus Christ. Eustace had a powerful response to the idea of Jesus going into the temple of money lenders and “knocking all the fucking tables over,” and he particularly liked that bit where the Savior went deep into the wilderness to seek the big answers.

But as he grew older, he became disillusioned with the congregation and leadership of his church. He smelled insincerity and deceit everywhere. He would sit between his parents every Sunday as they bowed their heads and took in the pious sermon. Sunday after Sunday, Eustace became sadly aware of what an act this was, and how grave was the contrast between this public image of familial sanctity and the reality of the familial discord—a savage discord that was packed away in a hidden container every Sabbath so as not to disturb the neighbors. Soon, he took to looking around at the other holy-seeming families in their pews, all nicely dressed, with their heads bowed, and he couldn’t help wondering what horrors were hidden behind their hymnals.

Increasingly, too, he began to take issue with the Christian cycle of pray-sin-repent-pray-sin-repent-pray-sin-repent. It seemed obvious to him that this was nothing more than a moral cop-out, writ large. You sin; you are immediately forgiven; you go out and sin some more, armed with the understanding that you’ll be forgiven once again. He found it stupid, weak, and cheap. Why was there this assumption that people were destined to sin, anyhow? If people loved the Bible so much, Eustace wondered, why couldn’t they just obey the clear instructions it offers and quit lying, cheating, stealing, murdering, and whore-mongering? How many times you gotta read the friggin’ Ten Commandments before you get them right? Stop sinning! Live the way you’ve been taught to live! Then you won’t have to come to church every Sunday and kneel and weep and repent. And you’ll have a lot more time to spend outside in the forest, where, as Eustace believed, “there is only truth to be found—no lies, no shams, no illusions, no hypocrisy. Just a truthful place, where all beings are governed by a set of perfect laws that have never changed and never will.”

Of course, given his disposition and his personal force, it wasn’t long before Eustace refused to go to church and started looking for his own answers. He spent his teen years studying every religion he could find, keeping the lessons of Christianity that he liked and adding to them some bits from other beliefs. He was inspired by the ecstatic love celebrations of the ancient Sufi mystics, while his attentive inner perfectionist instinctively responded to the central tenet of Buddhism—namely, that one will achieve enlightenment only through constant mindfulness.

He liked the Taoist notion that people should try to be like water, should flow around hard surfaces, altering form to fit the shapes of nature and patiently wearing away at stone. He liked the spiritual lessons of the Eastern martial arts, about bending before the aggression of others and letting them hurt themselves without harming you. He found something in almost every religion to keep, and would talk to anyone (Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Krishnas in the airports) about God. It was always the spirituality of Native Americans, though, that Eustace responded to most fully. He’d had exposure to it through the local Native American leaders he’d met at the Scheille Museum and through his study of anthropology. He could fully accept the idea that God—indeed, godliness—is to be found in every living being on this planet, and that every thing on this planet is a living being. Not only animals, but the trees and the air and even dense stones, all of them ancient and integral.

And this is where Eustace and his Appalachian Trail partner Frank had an intersection of belief, in their mutual conviction that God is to be found only in nature. That, of course, is why they were out there on the trail, the better to find this godliness within themselves and the larger world. Nor were they embarrassed to talk about this godliness, night after night. Or to take out their handmade Indian pipes in the evenings and smoke and pray, connected with each other through their belief that the pipe was the vehicle of prayer and the smoke only the sacred representation of what they were offering up to the cosmos. They knew that some might consider the idea of a couple of white guys praying with an Indian pipe to be foolish or even offensive, but Eustace and Frank weren’t merely playing Indian—they were there on the brink of their manhood, living in the most earnest way they could, facing together every day’s revelations and challenges. And it was this togetherness, more than anything, that Eustace cherished about the journey.

And then, in Pennsylvania, Eustace Conway met a girl.

Her name was Donna Henry. She was a nineteen-year-old college student from Pittsburgh, and she and Eustace ran into each other on the Pennsylvania leg of the Appalachian Trail. Donna was on a weekend hike with her aunt and her cousin, and their little journey was going like hell, because the aunt and the cousin were wholly out of shape and they’d overstuffed their backpacks with way too much food and gear. So, at the moment of the encounter, Donna Henry wasn’t hiking; she was sitting on the edge of the trail, taking a break because her relatives had demanded one. There she sat, trying not to listen to her aunt and her cousin bitch about their sore feet and sore legs and sore backs, and along comes Eustace Conway.

By this point, Eustace had begun to shed whatever possessions he considered useless. As he raced farther south and closer toward Georgia, he’d become tired of carrying stuff, so—operating on the old favorite principle of “the more you know, the less you need”—he’d slowly rid himself of everything but his sleeping bag, a knife, some rope, and a small cooking pot. He even shed some of his clothing. He completed the last thousand miles of his journey wearing nothing but two bandanas knotted together to cover his private bits. He didn’t keep so much as a jacket for warmth. As long as he was walking, he wasn’t cold; when he wasn’t walking, he was sleeping. When it rained, he wore a garbage bag. When he grew tired of his tedious pace (even the pace of a man burning through almost thirty miles a day), he sprinted along the trail at full speed.

So this was the apparition that loomed before Donna Henry that day on the trail: a lean, brown, bearded, and feral creature, stripped nearly bare, wearing sneakers, and tearing through the woods like a coyote. He was skinny, sure, but he rippled with muscle. And he had a terrific face. He stopped running when he saw Donna. She said hello. Eustace said hello. Then he let fly one of his world-class smiles, and Donna felt her aunt and her cousin and her heavy backpack disappear in the glow of that smile, all replaced by the certainty that her life was never going to be the same.

Now, I have a habit of speculating about the sex life of every single person I meet. Call it a hobby; call it a perversion—I’m not defending myself. I’m stating a fact. Still, I must confess that I spent months contemplating Eustace Conway before I gave the slightest thought to the possibility that he might actually be a carnal being. Particularly in comparison with his brother Judson, who is nothing but a carnal being, Eustace seemed somehow above such worldly and corporeal nonsense. As if he didn’t need it.

The first time I saw the two brothers together, I noted that extreme contrast. There was Judson in the East Village bar, flirting and dancing with every female who moved through his line of vision, and there was Eustace, sitting upright in the corner, earnestly telling me about the pleasure of drinking water straight out of the ground, and about how the quality of sunlight filtered through Appalachian foliage changes your body’s chemistry, and about how only those who live in the wilderness can recognize the central truth of existence, which is that death lives right beside us at all times, as close and as relevant as life itself, and that this reality is nothing to fear but is a sacred truth to be praised.

I am the Teacher of all the People, he seemed to say as he drifted out of his world and hovered over ours. I am to be trusted and I am to be followed but I am not to be frenched . . .

And he does, after all, bathe in icy streams, so the whole libido problem is a little hard to picture. Still—and this is what got me—Eustace Conway presented himself as an epic American masculine hero, and the whole notion of romantic or sexual love is something that is entirely missing from the classic American masculine epic.

As the writer Leslie Fielder pointed out in his seminal tome Love and Death in the American Novel, we Americans have the only major culture in the known world that never held romantic love to be a sacred precept. The rest of the world gets Don Juan; we get Paul Bunyan. There’s no love story in Moby-Dick; Huckleberry Finn doesn’t get the girl in the end; John Wayne never dreamed of giving up his horse for the constraints of a wife; and Davy Fuckin’ Crockett doesn’t date.

Whatever conflict and whatever evolution these men undergo, they do it in the company of their one true love, nature, and they do it by themselves or with the help of a trusted male sidekick. Women are for rescuing and also for tipping your hat to as you ride off into the sunset without them. And sometimes this leads to an odd circumstance— namely, that while the women in most of world literature are depicted as carefully protecting their sacred virginity, in American heroic stories, the men are just as often steadfastly chaste.

Consider, as a textbook example, James Fenimore Cooper’s Deerslayer. Handsome, wise, brave, and eligible Natty Bumppo never marries, because if he did, he would have to leave his world of perfect solitude at the edge of the frontier, where he is always free. Not only does the Deerslayer not marry; he doesn’t really seem to like girls. When the drop-dead gorgeous and spirited and brave heroine, Judith Hutter, basically throws her slim, brunette, and flashing-eyed self at his feet, he politely declines her advances, even though he’s been holed up in the mountains without female company for an awfully long time. True, he does proclaim that he will always respect her and will always be on call to save her life should she need him.

Judith, of course, doesn’t get it. What an inscrutable man is this wild, buckskin-clad hero! So unlike the dashing city-born captains of the guard who live in the barracks nearby and who love to flirt and dance! She even offers to live in the middle of the woods with Natty forever, far away from the comforts of civilization, and he still turns her down. Has Deerslayer never known love?

“And where, then, is your sweetheart, Deerslayer?” Judith wants to know, trying to make sense of the situation.

“She’s in the forest, Judith,” Deerslayer replies (in a speech that exemplifies not only the relationship of the epic American man toward women and the environment, but also exemplifies really bad writing), “hanging from the boughs of the trees, in a soft rain—in the dew on the open grass—in clouds that float about in the blue heavens—the birds that sing in the woods—the sweet springs where I slake my thirst—and in all the other glorious gifts of God’s providence!”

“You mean that, as yet, you’ve never loved one of my sex, but love best your haunts and your own manner of life?” Judith asks. (The women in these novels may be a little dense sometimes, but they’re terribly helpful with exposition.)

“That’s it—that’s it,” Deerslayer replies.

And thus he sends fair Judith on her way to go slake her thirst at some other guy’s sweet spring.

So. I’m fairly well read and I’m extremely impressionable. Who could blame me for imagining at first glance that Eustace Conway would be the same man as Natty Bumppo, the Deerslayer? They even look alike (“about six feet in his moccasins, but his frame was comparatively light and slender, showing muscles, however, that promised unusual agility”) and dress alike. And Eustace, remember, is the man who used to write me letters packed with such sexy-but-chaste news as “Daybreak found me looking down on my saddled horse from atop a tree full of ripe cherries—mouth full and hands full of them—and plenty more to pick.” Yes, the wilderness must be Eustace’s only love and God’s providence his only need.

Well, I was mistaken.

So there’s Eustace Conway on the Appalachian Trail in 1981, crossing paths with Donna Henry. Donna, healthy and friendly and cute as all get-out, caught Eustace’s eye, and likewise. There was the greeting, then the smile. Donna didn’t know why he was wearing those two handkerchiefs, but she offered him food right away, fascinated. Partly, her motive in feeding Eustace was to get him to stick around longer, because she was immediately attracted to him; partly, she wanted to lighten the packs of her crybaby aunt and whining cousin. Whatever food she gave Eustace, he ate. He ate bottomlessly, as if he was starved. Which he was.

When he said he had to fill his water bottle, Donna said,“Me, too!” and they hiked a mile to a nearby stream while he talked of the adventures he’d had on his hike from Maine. Engrossed, Donna Henry invited him to stay with her and her relatives that night for dinner. Again, he ate them out of pack and sack, all the while telling more about his daring escapades and his teepee and his primitive lifestyle.

Donna told Eustace he was welcome to camp with them that night, too. He accepted the invite, and when the sky was good and dark and the fire was good and low, Eustace crawled into Donna’s tent and sidled his long, lean body right up to hers. And she was done for.

The next day, now officially in love, Donna sent her aunt and cousin down the trail with all their gear, and she hiked the next twenty-five miles with Eustace. She was in great shape—she had hiked the previous summer with some college friends—so she had no trouble keeping up with him. They talked and walked and ate blackberries right off the bushes, and Eustace taught her about every plant and rock and twig they passed along the way.

At the end of the hike, Donna had to get back to her real life in Pittsburgh, but she didn’t want to leave. Eustace told her they were a good team, and she agreed—yes, they were! And the timing was good, too. Because, as it turns out, Eustace was about to lose his traveling partner. Frank Chambless was bowing out of the journey because he missed his girlfriend Lori so much and Frank felt he had a chance right now to make their love work, if he could just get out of the hike and dedicate his energy to reconciling with her. Eustace understood and accepted his friend’s sincerest apologies for quitting. Still, he was very sorry to lose his traveling companion when there were still 1000 miles left to finish off. So—of course—seeing what a good hiker Donna was (not to mention a charming tent-companion), he had an inspiration. Eustace asked Donna if she might want to meet up with him in Virginia in a few weeks and join the hike. She was all for it. Donna Henry, at this moment, would have gladly agreed to hike to Islamabad for the chance to see Eustace Conway again.

A few weeks later, she got on a bus in the middle of the night with her backpack and sleeping bag and headed south to meet him. Her mother was so angry with her for running off on a whim with a skinny man dressed in bandanas that she wouldn’t even say goodbye.

Well, tough. That’s what people turn nineteen for.

Here’s what Donna thought it would be like to hike the Appalachian Trail with Eustace Conway—more talking and walking and berry-picking and nature observations and romance and so on for the rest of time. And, yes, on the first day of the hike, Eustace did stay right beside her, and he taught her many things about trees and flowers. On the second morning of their journey, though, he woke up early and said, “I’m going on ahead of you today. I want to cover thirty miles. I’ll meet you at our campsite for dinner.” And they never hiked together again. Day after day, she didn’t see him on the trail. He’d take off at dawn, and she’d follow. Their only communication was the instructive little notes he’d leave for her along the trail: “Donna—there’s water 20 ft. down to the left. This is a good place to rest.” Or, “I know this is a hard climb—you’re doing great!”

Late each evening, she’d catch up with him at the camp he’d already set for them. They’d eat whatever scavenged or hunted or rotten food was on hand and then they’d sleep. Sometimes Eustace would stay up and talk deep into the night about his dreams of changing the world, which she loved to hear. Donna was never happier than at those moments, except maybe when Eustace told her with pride that she was his “tough little Italian.”

All this nature stuff was new to Donna (she once asked Eustace, while they passed a herd of cattle in a mountain pasture, “Now, are those cows or horses?”), but she was open to it and was completely game. One day, after hiking twenty-five miles, they were eating dinner together while the sun was setting, and the sky looked pretty. Donna said, “Hey, Eustace, let’s run up that mountain and watch the sun go down!” After hiking twenty-five miles! She was, as he often told her, “a solid sculpture of muscle” as well as a trouble-free traveling companion. There was nothing she wouldn’t do to keep up with her man. Moreover, Donna believed in every dream Eustace Conway had and wanted to help him achieve it. She was inspired and invigorated by him. When morning came, he’d strike out ahead of her on the trails, and again she’d follow without hesitation or questions—and that, Donna says now, “was symbolic of the relationship.”

“I just snapped right into it,” she remembers. “I was drawn along behind him like a magnetic force, walking twenty-five, thirty miles a day. I was lean and mean and eager to show him that I could keep up. I was completely in love with this man. I’d have followed him to the ends of the earth.”

When Eustace Conway casts his mind back on his trip down the Appalachian Trail, it’s not Donna Henry or Frank Chambless whom he pictures. While he’s quick to give his traveling companions their due for hauling ass and never complaining, what he mostly remembers about those wonderful months in the woods are images of himself, alone. At last—alone. Out of his family’s house and out from under his father’s thumb and finally on his own.

He remembers his feet aching so much that tears fell down his face as he hiked, but he never stopped walking, because he had taught himself as a child to endure physical pain like an Indian brave. He remembers times when he was so dehydrated, he’d see spots before his eyes. He remembers hiking into the town of Pearisburg, Virginia, which is right along the trail and has a hostel as well as a general store. He had been famished for so long that he decided—what the hell—to treat himself to a meal. A real meal, paid for with American currency, not some damn survivalist meal of half-digested baby rabbit borrowed from the stomach of a rattlesnake. Here’s what he bought:

“The ripest, biggest, most beautiful cantaloupe you ever saw. I bought a flat of eggs, which is two and a half dozen. These were not small eggs. These were not medium eggs. These were not large eggs. These were extra large eggs. I bought a loaf of the heartiest wheat bread I could find. I bought a gallon of milk and a container of yogurt. I bought a round of margarine, a brick of cheese, and one big yellow onion. Then I went to the hostel kitchen and I sautéed the onion in the margarine and I scrambled up those eggs into a huge omelet, which I filled with half the brick of cheese. I ate that. Then I toasted every slice of the loaf of bread and shredded the remainder of the cheese on the toast. Then I drank the gallon of milk. Then I ate the yogurt. And then I ate the beautiful ripe melon. When I was finished, all the food was gone, but I wasn’t stuffed. I just felt satisfied for the first time in months. I felt, Yes, now I’ve finally had enough to eat.”

He remembers another long day in Virginia, when he ended up hiking late at night to make his allotted daily miles, hiking along a dark country road in the most rural countryside. It was a Friday evening, so all the local rednecks were driving around in their trucks, listening to music and drinking and heading to parties. They kept stopping to see what Eustace was up to.

“You need a ride, son?” the good ol’ boys asked.

“No, thanks,” Eustace answered.

“Where you walkin’ from?”

“Maine.”

That answer didn’t make much of an impression on the good ol’ boys.

“Well, where you headed to?”

“Georgia,” Eustace told them, and the guys positively flipped out, whoopin’ in disbelief.

“This damn fool’s walkin’ all the way to Georgia!”

Clearly, they had never heard of Maine.

Then, feeling sorry for Eustace, they gave him a beer and drove off. Eustace walked along in the dark, drinking the beer and humming to himself and listening to the night insects of Virginia sing. About the time he finished the beer, along came another truckload of rednecks.

“You need a ride, son?”

And the conversation was repeated, word for word, right down to the punch line. “This damn fool’s walkin’ all the way to Georgia!”

Eustace finished hiking the trail in September 1981, right around his twentieth birthday. It had taken him four and a half months to complete the journey. He wrote himself a letter of congratulations—a dramatic letter such as a man can write only on his twentieth birthday, proud and earnest and swollen with amazement over the magnitude of what he’d just accomplished.

The sun has gone behind the ridge and the shadows are starting to play games in the forest. This is the last night on the Appalachian Trail, a “Long Journey of Always and Forever.” It was so long ago I started, it seems only a foggy dream. My ways have changed. I have become a man. In the Indian way, I have taken a new name—it is Eagle Chaser. I am aspiring to the highest goals and morals of the King of the Winged Beings. Many tales I can tell. I have seen many places, I have seen many people, all different but mostly good. I have learned to pray often and have accepted many gifts from the most Holy Provider. I believe God helped plan this trip before I even knew of it . . . My reason for doing the trail started out fairly simple and grew in depth with time and experience. I originally wanted to get close to nature in a good wholesome way and, number two, to find more of myself. I believe that I have done well at both of these. I am very satisfied. I wish the light of day would give me more strength to finish these written thoughts but the night is rising and the shadows are no longer visible. The night animals are out and I must go forth into the cycle that I have chosen.

Eustace R. Conway.

And, indeed, he did go forth into the cycle that he had chosen. Every other voyage and accomplishment in his life would grow out of this one. For instance, when Eustace found himself a few months later sitting on a picnic table in North Carolina, skinning a raccoon, a man came up to him and said, “You’re Eustace Conway, right? The last time I saw you was on the Appalachian Trail and you were skinning a snake. I remember talking to you about wilderness adventure.” The man introduced himself as Alan York, and the two talked for a while, and then Alan said, “Hey, let’s hike across Alaska together.” Eustace replied, “I don’t think it’s possible to hike across Alaska, but I’m pretty sure you can kayak it,” and that’s what they did. Eustace and Alan glided across the state, fighting cold and brutal surf, hovering inches over herring and salmon and kelp and whales.

After that, how hard could it be to travel into rural Mexico to study pottery and weaving? And that successful trip to Mexico gave the enterprising young man the confidence to fly to Guatemala, step off the plane, and ask, “Where are all the primitive people at?” It all started with the Appalachian Trail, though. And what Eustace particularly pictures when he thinks about being nineteen years old on the Appalachian Trail is one moment, a moment he will always hold as the happiest of his life.

He is in New Hampshire. He has made it out of Maine without starving or freezing to death. He comes over a ridge. Everywhere he looks, he sees exquisite pink morning light cast over snow and ice and granite. That’s all. A typical view of the White Mountains in late winter. As the years pass by, Eustace will travel to many places more interesting than this, and he will see some of the spectacular views of the world, from Alaska to Australia to Arizona, so perhaps this is not the most beautiful sight he will see. Nor is it as heroic and chest-thumping a moment as he’ll experience when he completes the trail months later, down in Georgia, where he can haul out the heavy-duty “many-tales-I-can-tell” rhetoric. But this is better. Because this is the backdrop for the moment when Eustace Conway first comprehends that he is free. He’s a man, and he is exactly where he wants to be, accomplishing what he’s always known he could accomplish if he made his own decisions. He’s humbled and exalted and simplified and purified and saved by this moment, because it holds the realization that—so far up here on this handsome mountain—his father isn’t anywhere in sight. His father can’t reach him anymore. Nobody can reach him. Nobody can control him and nobody can ever punish him again.

Eustace stands there, paralyzed by joy, patting himself down in wonder. He feels like a man who has walked away from a firing squad whose guns have jammed, and he’s checking himself for bullet holes— and there are none. The air smells sweet and he can feel his own heartbeat and he’s laughing and laughing at the realization that he’s intact.

It’s the best moment of his life, because it’s the moment when Eustace Conway first grasps the concept that he has survived.

CHAPTER FOUR

We are a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform. Not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

When Eustace Conway got back to North Carolina in the autumn of 1981, he started looking for a new place to set up his teepee. He knew he could find a great spot if he took the time to search. During these years of his early adulthood, whenever Eustace needed to settle down for any significant period, he found it easy to live on (and live off) the land of people who were kind enough to let him squat there.

“I am unique in that I live in an Indian teepee,” Eustace wrote in an unsolicited letter, by means of introducing himself to a North Carolina landowner whose fine acreage he had just spied. “While looking for a piece of land to stay on this coming fall I came upon your place and I would like to know if you would consider letting me set up my camp beside the creek on your property. I don’t have a lot of money, but would be able to pay a small rent. I could look after your property as a caretaker. I would be very respectful and understanding of your wishes. I have enclosed a self-addressed, stamped envelope for you to respond with. I have also enclosed a newspaper article for benefit of more information on my lifestyle.”

It must have been quite a chore for Eustace to decide exactly which newspaper article to send the man; many had recently been written about him. He was getting lots of public attention and was the darling of the North Carolina reporters, who liked to visit this “quiet, unassuming, very modest young man” living “more severely than a Spartan, not even allowing himself the luxury of matches for his campfire.”

The press loved him because he was perfect. Eloquent, intelligent, courteous, intriguing, and blessedly photogenic, young Eustace Conway in his teepee was the dream of any human-interest story editor. He lived off the land like an old-time mountain man, but he wasn’t some scary supremacist refusing to pay his taxes and ranting about the imminent extinction of the white man. He was gentle and idealistic about nature, but he wasn’t a wimpy hippie, encouraging people to take off their clothes and make out with trees. He was attractively isolated from society, but he was no hermit on the run, as his gracious welcome of the press always showed. Yes, he challenged his peers to question the assumptions of modern Americans, but he was polite and well-spoken, and could hold up his status as a straight-A college student to prove his respectability.

That’s right—a straight-A college student. Interestingly, Eustace had decided to go to college after he finished hiking the Appalachian Trail. Strange choice for someone who’d hated school as much as Eustace had. But he’d always believed he could be a decent scholar if he could get his father’s foot off his neck, and, indeed, he got perfect grades in college from the start, even in the math courses. It’s probably safe to assume there were no other students at Gaston Community College quite like Eustace. He was a celebrity around campus, what with his teepee and his frontier clothing and calm voice and tales of adventures in the mountains and along the Mississippi River. From his fellow students, he began to get the kind of reaction he could expect for the rest of his life. The chicks, I don’t know how else to say it, absolutely dug him; the guys wanted to be just like him. He was growing into his looks, becoming both more unusual and more cool in appearance—broad facial bones and a strong mouth, wide-set and hooded dark eyes, and a long, arched nose. His body was in superb shape—a friend who saw Eustace after he got off the Appalachian Trail said he looked like “a tall, hard rock”—and his hair was more black than brown. His skin was dark; his teeth were white. There was no ambiguity in this face; it was all slant and shadow and plane. He was a creature of striking vigor, one who looked to have been carved from hardwood. He smelled like an animal, but like a clean one. He turned heads. He was popular and interesting.

Scott Taylor, a student with Eustace during those years, remembers seeing him around campus with “that big smile and that buckskin and he seemed like the coolest guy in the world. I was dying to see his teepee, but you don’t just invite yourself to a man’s teepee.” Over time, Scott did wrangle himself an invitation on a “beautiful, rainy fall day,” and Eustace had Scott sit by the creek and cut up vegetables for stew. Scott had never done anything like this before and was electrified by it. He was a conservative suburban kid who had married young and was going to college to study chemistry, and he was shocked and awakened by everything Eustace said or did.

Scott remembers, “I was nineteen and so was my wife, and we had this little apartment we were trying to set up to look like the home of a typical middle-class American married couple. We were imitating our parents, not even thinking about our lives with any kind of depth. Then I invited Eustace Conway over one day, and he walked around quietly, looking at everything, and said, ‘Man, you guys have a lot of material possessions.’ I’d never once considered that there was any other way to live. Eustace said, ‘Just imagine if you took all the money you’ve spent on these things and traveled around the world with it, instead, or bought books and read them. Think about how much you’d know about life.’ I’m telling you, I’d never heard ideas like this. He loaned me books about carpentry, tanning, woodworking, to show me that I could learn skills and build things on my own. He’d say, ‘You know, Scott, there are things you can do in your summers away from school besides just work in an office. You can hitchhike across America, or you can go see Europe.’ Europe! Hitchhiking! These were the most exotic words I’d ever heard!”

In his two years at Gaston Community College, Eustace achieved strong grades and was able to transfer to the four-year Appalachian State University, located in the mountain town of Boone, North Carolina. He was nervous at first about how he would do at ASU, knowing that the institution would ask more of him intellectually than the community college had, and was still feeling a little hamstrung by the years of criticism from his father, and intimidated, too, by the prospect of having so many classmates.

On the first day of classes, he didn’t even wear his buckskin; he was that afraid of drawing attention to himself. He dressed in street clothes, jumped on his motorcycle, and left his teepee early enough to have time to check out the campus and orient himself. As he was riding down into Boone, though, he noticed a freshly roadkilled rabbit on the side of the highway and, out of habit, stopped and picked it up. (Eustace had long since made roadkill a staple of his diet. His rule of thumb was that if the fleas were still alive and jumping on the pelt, the meat was fresh enough to eat.) He stuck the rabbit in his backpack, drove on, and was the first one to arrive in class, Archeology 101. He was the first to arrive by a whole hour actually, because he’d been so intent on having time to find his way around. With some major time to kill, and not eager to sit around doing nothing, he wondered if he should go ahead and skin the rabbit.

Then he had an inspiration! He remembered that his mother had often told him that “school is only what you make of it.” So he decided to make something of it. He did some asking around, tracked down the professor whose class he was about to take, and introduced himself. He must have startled her. She was Professor Clawson, right out of Harvard University, and this was not only her first day of class, it was her first teaching gig ever, as well as her first time living in the South.

“Listen,” Eustace said, “I know this is your class, but I have an idea. I thought maybe we could teach something interesting about archeology together today if I explain that I live in a primitive, traditional manner, you know? And I’ve got this rabbit that I just found dead on the side of the road and it needs to be skinned so that I can eat it tonight. How about you let me skin the rabbit in front of the class as a lesson? I’ll use the tools that I’ve made out of rocks, just like the ones ancient people used. I could even make the tools right in front of the class. That would be a great archeology lesson, don’t you think?”

She stared at him for a good, long time. Then she recovered herself and said, “OK. Let’s do it.”

They hiked down to the geology lab, found some good, flinty rocks, and headed over to the class. When the other students arrived, Professor Clawson introduced herself, handed out some paperwork, and said, “And now I’m turning the class over to one of your fellow students, who’ll show you how to skin a rabbit in the primitive manner.”

Eustace jumped up out of his seat, pulled the rabbit from his backpack with the polish of a practiced magician, picked up his rocks, and started talking enthusiastically as he chipped away to form the tools. “Careful you don’t get any of those chips in your eyes, now, people!” he said, and explained how primitive man flint-napped rocks to achieve an edge so sharp that he could dismember and butcher an adult deer with two small stones; Eustace himself had done that many times. In fact, the Aztecs, he told his classmates, used to get their stone tools sharp and precise enough to perform brain surgery on one another—“Successful brain surgery!” For archeologists, Eustace said, the study of these stone tools is crucial not only for their own significance, but also because an animal butchered with them bears a specific pattern of marks on its bones, and that can help researchers determine whether the ancient creature had died a natural death or had been killed and eaten by humans.

Then Eustace strung up his roadkill rabbit with a tidy slipknot to one of the cords on the classroom’s old beige venetian blinds. He quickly gutted it, discussing how the animal’s large intestine was typically fairly clean, as it held only hard black fecal pellets, but that you had to be careful with the small intestine and stomach, since these contained the more brackish and foul fluids of digestion. If you accidentally nick those organs open, “that nasty stuff gets all over your meat, which is really gross.”

As Eustace worked, he talked about the physiology of a wild rabbit, about how the skin is as delicate as crepe paper and therefore a challenge to handle without tearing. It’s not like deerskin, he explained as he made a neat incision from the hind foot down to the anus and back up to the other foot. Deerskin is strong and supple and useful for dozens of purposes, Eustace said, but not rabbit. You can’t get a wild rabbit’s skin off in one piece and then just fold it over and make a mitten out of it. Carefully peeling away the rabbit’s skin, which had the fragility of a damp paper towel, he pointed out that the trick with rabbit was to remove the skin in a single long strip, as if you’re peeling an apple. That way, you can end up with an eight-foot strip of fur from a single rabbit, just like this!

Eustace passed the pelt around the classroom so that everyone could handle it. The students asked what one could do with such a fragile strip of fur. Naturally, he had the answer. The native people would take this strip of rabbit fur and wrap it tightly around a string of woven grass, with the skin facing in and the fur facing out. And when this dried, the grass and the flesh would have melded perfectly, and the people would end up with a long, strong rope. If you weave together a few dozen of these ropes, you can make a blanket that will be not only lightweight and soft, but exceedingly warm. And if you explore ancient cave dwellings in New Mexico, as Eustace Conway had done many times, you might find such a blanket hidden in a dark corner, preserved for over a thousand years in the arid desert climate.

After that day, Eustace Conway was famous all over again. He had his confidence back and even started wearing his buckskin around campus. That very first night, in fact, Professor Clawson had gone to Eustace’s teepee and eaten a big bowl of roadkill rabbit stew with him.

“And she’d been a strict vegetarian until that moment!” Eustace recalls. “But she sure did enjoy that rabbit.”

Welcome to the South, Professor.

Eustace lived in the teepee throughout his college years, becoming increasingly knowledgable about the science of outdoor living even as he became more educated in the classrooms of ASU. Most of the skills he needed to be comfortable in the wilderness he had mastered in childhood and adolescence. All those attentive hours of exploration and discovery in forests behind various Conway homes had paid off, as had his experiences on the Appalachian Trail. What Eustace himself calls his innate “vigilant, aggressive mindfulness” had already brought him expertise at an early age.

He also spent a great deal of time during those years mastering his hunting skills. He became a student of deer behavior, recognizing that the more he knew about the animals, the better he’d be at finding them. Years later, having become a truly adept hunter, he would look back on those college days and realize that he must have missed dozens of deer; that he must have been within twenty feet of deer on numerous occasions and simply not noticed. Eustace had to learn not to just scan the forest looking for “a huge pair of antlers and a massive animal in a clearing with a big sign pointing to it saying there’s a deer right here, eustace!” Instead, he learned to spot deer as he had once spotted turtles—by attentively looking for tiny differences in color or movement in the underbrush. He learned how to catch the corner of a deer’s ear flicking; how to notice small, pale patches of white belly highlighted against the autumn camouflage and recognize them for what they were. Like a musical mastermind who can pick out each nuance of every instrument in an orchestra, Eustace got so that he could hear a twig snap in the forest and know by the sound the diameter of that twig, which told him whether it had been stepped on by a heavy deer or a squirrel. Or was the snap merely the sound of a dry branch falling out of a tree in the morning breeze? Eustace learned to tell the difference.

During his years in the teepee, he also came to respect and appreciate every kind of weather that nature delivered to his home. If it rained for three weeks, there was no use objecting to it; obviously, that was what nature needed right then. Eustace would try to adapt himself and use the time indoors making clothing, reading, praying, or practicing his beadwork. He came to understand thoroughly how winter is as important and beautiful a season as spring; how ice storms are as relevant and necessary as summer sunshine. Eustace would hear his peers at school complain about the weather, and he’d go back to his teepee and write in his journal long entries about his discovery that “there is no such thing as a ‘bad’ day in nature. You can’t stand in judgment of nature like that because she always does what she needs to do.”

“My fire has been fed well tonight,” Eustace Conway, college student, wrote in his journal on a frigid day in December, “and I am reaping a beautiful harvest of HEAT. Love it. I am living in a way that would be hard for many modern people to handle. For example, yesterday evening as darkness was falling I kindled a fire and proceeded to heat my water and cook my dinner. When the water was warm, I took off my upper body wear (in the freezing temperatures) and washed my hair and body. It would be too much for my fellow classmates to handle!”

This was probably true. Although, to be fair, there were some young modern people who could have related to the scene, no problem. Donna Henry, for one. Although her name doesn’t appear often in the journals, Donna was there beside Eustace a lot of the time, right there in the teepee next to him, stripping off her upper body wear, too, and washing her hair in the same frigid temperatures.

Donna stuck around with Eustace after they had conquered the Appalachian Trail together. The following summer, the two of them had hiked the national parks of the West together, again at breakneck speed (he leading; she scrambling to follow), and she discovered, after all their time in the wilderness, that she desperately wanted to marry this guy. She was frank with him about it. She told him straight out that “we have a connection, we’re soulmates, we’re partners. This is a once-in-a-lifetime relationship.” But Eustace felt he was far too immature to consider marriage. Second only perhaps to the possibility of moving back home with Dad, marriage was the last thing on Eustace’s mind when he was twenty years old. This whole journey of schooling and traveling and living in the teepee was about the opposite of marriage for Eustace; it was about reaching perfect liberty.

Still, he loved Donna and appreciated her company, so he let her stick around. She moved into his teepee with him for some time while he attended college and she embraced his interests as her own. She learned to sew buckskin, took up the study of Native American culture, and started going to powwows with him, meeting his friends and playing teepee hostess.

Donna Henry was turning into Donna Reed. And she was lonely and confused about this. The fact is, she didn’t get to see Eustace very much. He was powering up on a double major in anthropology and English, and when he wasn’t in class, he was busy becoming the activist and teacher he increasingly felt ordained to be. Eustace Conway, in his early twenties, was a Man of Destiny in Training, and that didn’t leave much time for a girlfriend. He’d begun to travel all over the South, teaching in the public schools, developing what he would later call his “dog and pony show”—a hands-on, interactive program of nature education and awareness. He was brilliant at this. He could move a conference of the most jaded businessmen to standing ovations. And kids? Kids loved Eustace as if he were a kind of woodsy Santa: “Mr. Conway you are a very nice man . . . Thank you for attending Heritage Day . . . I enjoyed learning about Indians. I especially enjoyed hearing about how they lived and what they ate . . . It was very interesting to see that you can sew your clothing together . . . When I grow up I might try to be like you . . . I think you taught me more in one day than I’ve learned in the eight years I’ve been going to school.”

Eustace was also consumed by the effort of pulling together the details of his personal philosophy. He knew he was destined to be a teacher, but what was it precisely that he needed to teach the world? He wanted to alert people to the woeful beating that the modern consumer-driven life delivers to the earth. Teach people how to achieve freedom from what his grandfather had called the “softening and vision-curbing influence of the city.” Train them to pay attention to their choices. (“Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle are good ideas,” he would lecture, “but those three concepts should only be the last resort. What you really need to focus on are two other words that also begin with R—Reconsider and Refuse. Before you even acquire the disposable good, ask yourself why you need this consumer product. And then turn it down. Refuse it. You can.”) What it came down to was the idea that people had to change. They had to get back to living eye-to-eye with nature, or else the world was finished. Eustace Conway believed he could show them how.

So he also spent his college years working away on the manuscript for a book—a how-to book, for lack of a better description—called Walk in Beauty: Living Outside. It was a detailed policy plan for Americans to make the transition from insipid modern culture to a richer natural life, where they and their children could prosper far away from “smog, plastic, and a never-ending babble of nonsense enough to scramble brains, raise blood pressure, create ulcers, and sponsor heart disease.” He understood that an abrupt move to the wilderness would be terrifying for most Americans, but he felt certain that if he could write a clear phase-by-phase guide, he could help even the most pampered families move back into the woods comfortably and safely. Walk in Beauty has a marvelous tone of you-can-do-it optimism. Every word shows how confident Eustace was, at the age of twenty-one, not only that he had the answers, but that he would be carefully listened to.

The book is organized into tidy topics, like Heating, Lighting, Wellness, Bedding (“Understanding the principles of insulation is a good starting point”), Cleanliness, Clothing, Tools, Cooking, Children, Water, Animals, Community, Fire, Solitude, Foraging, Spiritual and World View. His prose is clean and authoritative. His constant message is that the more educated one becomes in the wilderness, the less one is “roughing it” and therefore the more comfortable one’s life can be. There is no reason, he assures the reader, to suffer in the woods once you know what you’re doing.

“It can’t be fun being miserable in the wilderness! To walk in beauty means to harmoniously fit yourself into the natural scene, producing happy, content, memorable times. Not memorable because you burned up your shoes by the fire and got dysentery from drinking bad water! But memorable in a sense of smoothing the wilderness over and making it nice, good, peaceful, beneficial, and snug—the way a home ought to be.”

Go easy, Eustace reassures us. Take it step by step. “Use your backyard as a place to develop basic skills.” When learning how to make warm bedding from natural materials, “try sleeping out on a cold night on your back porch at first, where you can retreat back to the bedroom and figure out what went wrong if you have to.” Ready to start foraging for food and cooking on an open fire? Try it in a local park before you move to the Australian outback. “You can always order pizza if you burn your dinner. Or you can start over and do it right the second time, or the third time, getting better each time.” Above all, no matter how small the detail may seem, “Pay Attention! It took me 3½ years in the woods before I realized the great difference a truly clean globe on an oil light can make. It wasn’t that I didn’t clean the globe before—I just didn’t do a good enough job. But now that I keep it spotless, I can see a lot better at night.”

All it takes, Eustace promises, is practice, common sense, and some basic American willingness to try something new. Stick to it, believe in yourself, and in no time at all you and your family can be living in a “hidden home in the forest [as] wonderfully peaceful” as Eustace Conway’s home.

The tricky part was that his schooling and his activities and his writing all combined to keep this most natural of woodsmen out of the woods a lot of the time. There’s only so much advocacy you can do from within a teepee. If you’re hellbent on changing the world, then you’ve got to put yourself out there in the world. You must let no campaign opportunity slip by. Eustace saw everywhere opportunities to campaign, almost to the point of distraction. He wrote a blissful observation in his journal one January day: “I was glad to see the morning star through the smoke flaps this morning.” But he was quick to add, “I am beginning to try and write a story about teepee life for a magazine.”

He was collecting so many obligations and appointments that he was often away from his hidden home in the forest for days at a time. This meant leaving his girlfriend and old hiking partner Donna Henry in the teepee all by herself most of the day, day after day. She was the one sitting there observing nature while her man was busy teaching or studying or dancing at some powwow or being surrounded by admirers, and she was feeling less and less wonderfully peaceful about the whole deal. Donna (who today concedes that she has only herself to blame for not building an independent life from the man she worshipped) had little to do with her time but try to please Eustace and tend to the teepee in his absence.

And sometimes when Eustace did see Donna, he could be hard on her. His perfectionism didn’t stop with himself. He might be irritated that she hadn’t completed all her chores or didn’t know how to make pancakes correctly over the fire or hadn’t kept the globe of the oil lamp clean enough. And he was far too busy with his obligations to constantly show her how to do things right. She should be learning all this on her own. She should be taking the initiative!

As the months went by, Donna felt more and more that she was always screwing something up and that her best efforts would never be enough to please this man. She was nervous every day about what he was going to come down on her for. And then, one cold January afternoon, she finally broke. Eustace came into the teepee with some dead squirrels he’d found on the side of the road. He tossed them on the ground, and said, “Make soup out of these for dinner tonight.” And he left, already late for his next appointment.

“Now, remember,” says Donna today, thinking back on it. “This life was his dream, and I was following him and living in the teepee because I loved him. But I didn’t know how to make squirrel soup. I mean, I’m from Pittsburgh, right? All he told me was to leave the heads on so that no meat would be wasted. So I tried to cut the meat off the bones, not knowing it would be better to boil the whole animal so that the meat would fall off the bone. Of course, hardly any meat came off with my knife. But I did the best I could, left the heads in the soup, and then buried the bones in the woods behind the teepee. When Eustace came home and looked at the soup with the heads floating around, he asked, ‘Where’s all the meat? And where are the rest of the bones?’ I told him what I had done, and he was furious at me. So furious that he made me go out there, in the middle of January, in the middle of the night, and dig up those goddamn squirrel bones and show them to him, to prove how much meat I’d wasted. Then he made me wash the carcasses off and cook them up. Four days later, I left him.”

It was six full years before Donna and Eustace spoke again. Donna buried herself in the study of Native American culture. She moved to an Indian reservation and married a Lakota Sioux, mostly because she thought he would be a substitute for Eustace. But the marriage was unhappy. For the sake of her son, named Tony, she pulled herself together and set out on her own. Eventually she married again—a good man, this time—started a successful publishing company, and had another child.

Yet twenty years later, Donna still loves Eustace. She thinks there’s a level at which they were made for each other, and that he was a fool not to have married her. Despite the “significant emotional relationship” she shares with her decent second husband (who has gracefully accepted his wife’s lasting feelings for this old lover as part of the Donna Henry package) and despite her fears that Eustace “doesn’t know how to love, only how to command,” she believes that she was put on this earth to be Eustace Conway’s “most excellent partner.” And that maybe their story isn’t over. Someday, she thinks, she may live on that mountain with him again. In the meantime, she sends her son to Eustace’s summer camp at Turtle Island every year to learn how to be a man.

“Eustace Conway is my son’s hero,” she says. “I don’t know if Eustace will ever have any children of his own, but if he has any children in his heart, my Tony is one of them.”

As for Eustace, he has the fondest memories of Donna, who was “the most extraordinary natural athlete I’ve ever met—such a strong and willing partner.” She was great, he says, and probably would have made a terrific wife, but he was too young for marriage. When I asked if he remembered the famous squirrel-bone incident (my exact question was, “Please tell me you didn’t really do that, Eustace!”), he sighed and supposed that it was not only a true story, but exactly the kind of story that repeats itself in his life “time and again, with many different people.” He sounded thoroughly remorseful about it, about the heightened expectations he has of everyone and the way his uncompromising personality sometimes fails to make good people feel good about themselves. Then we changed the subject and finished our conversation.

But when I returned home that evening, I found a message from Eustace on my answering machine. He’d been contemplating the squirrel-bone incident and “hated to think” I didn’t understand the situation. He remembered it now. And he remembered that the reason he’d made Donna dig up the squirrel bones in the middle of the night was the excellent opportunity it gave him to educate her further on the proper way to handle a squirrel carcass.

“And why waste perfectly good meat?” he went on. “And the fact that it was January was really to our advantage, because the temperature was so low. This meant the meat would have been preserved nicely in the cold ground. Whereas, if it had been the middle of summer, I might have just let it go, because the meat might have been spoiling in the sun and been covered with maggots and insects. I must have taken all this into consideration and realized that the meat was still good and that it was a good teaching opportunity and then I must have decided that it would’ve been a waste to just throw it out, see? So when I asked her to bring the bones back, I was only being logical.”

Concluding with the hope that this all made more sense to me now, Eustace wished me a pleasant evening and hung up.

“What is this modern-day Mountain Man trying to prove?” asked one of the many newspapermen who visited Eustace Conway in his teepee during those college years. Then he quoted Eustace’s reply: “Nothing. Most people like to live in houses and watch television and go to movies. I like to live in my teepee and watch the rain or snow falling and listen to the language of nature. If they feel that money and materialism are the major virtues of life, how can I sit in judgment of them? All I ask in return is the same consideration for my life.”

But it wasn’t quite that simple. Eustace was asking for much more than the inalienable right to be left alone to live his life in peace away from society’s judging eye. Being left alone can be pretty easy—don’t talk to anyone, don’t go out in public, don’t invite newspapermen into your home, don’t tell the world how quiet the sound of the rainfall is, and don’t write papers informing people how to transform their lives. If you want to be left alone, move into the woods and sit there, still and quiet. That’s called becoming a hermit, and until you start mailing out letter bombs, it’s a highly effective means of being ignored. If that’s really what you want.

But that’s not what Eustace wanted. What he wanted was the opposite of what he’d told the reporter: he wanted people to sit in judgment of him, because he believed he knew of a better way of life for all Americans, one that people should judge with great care in order to see the truth of his vision. He wanted the people who watched TV and movies to see how he lived, to ask questions about his life, witness how content and healthy he was, give his ideas serious contemplation, and try them. He wanted to reach out to them—to all of them.

Because that’s what Men of Destiny do, and Eustace Conway still had his eye on that Man of Destiny title. As did his mother. When he graduated from college in 1984, with honors, Mrs. Conway wrote her son to congratulate him on his achievement and to remind him that the pressure was not off yet.

“You have reached a new milestone in your journey—one of outstanding accomplishment from long and hard work,” she wrote. “As one who best understands and appreciates the circumstances under which you attained a college degree with two major studies, I applaud and congratulate you with great pride and awe! But remember, education should be an ongoing process until you die. You have just done a great piece of groundwork—may you also seek wisdom which is greater than knowledge. I pray for God’s guidance, protection, and blessings on you as you continue your journey on this good earth. Your proud and devoted Mother.”

Not that Eustace needed to be reminded. He was already impatient. “I want to do something great, to feel that I’ve made it, that I’ve arrived,” he wrote in his journal.

And he was becoming more troubled by what he saw. There was a particularly sad incident one night when a gang of local rednecks came down to his teepee to ask if they could borrow some .22 shells to finish off a big raccoon they’d treed up on the ridge behind where Eustace was living. Seemed they’d been out drinking and hunting and having themselves a ball. But they were such incompetent hunters, they admitted to Eustace, that they’d fired at the raccoon more than twenty times without killing it and getting it out of that tree. Surely the stubborn bugger was wounded up there. Could Eustace give them the ammo to help them finish off the sumbitch once and for all?

Eustace hated everything about this scene—the dogs baying, the cacophony of gunfire (“It sounded like a war up there,” he mourned later in his journal), the ineptitude of the men, and their total disregard for the animal’s spirit. How could they fire away at a living creature as if it were a plastic target in a carnival game and then leave it to suffer while they dicked around for an hour looking for more ammo? And what kind of sloppy bungling jackasses could miss their shot twenty times? And, by the way, why should he have to deal with these idiots invading his privacy in the middle of the night, when he was trying to live far away from human society?

Silent on all these concerns, Eustace got up, got dressed. He didn’t have any .22 shells, but he took his black powder rifle and followed the dogs and men and the moonlit forest path to the tree. One shot from his antique gun, and the raccoon was cleanly finished.

“It wasn’t until I skinned him,” he wrote, “that I realized mine was the only hole in the skin.”

The rednecks had never even grazed the animal. Not once in twenty shots. Not that the good ol’ boys cared. All they wanted was the pelt, which Eustace skinned for them and handed over so that they could sell it. He almost wept as he skinned the animal, and he kept the meat to eat later, solemnly thanking the raccoon for giving over its life. These rednecks weren’t about to eat no damn raccoon meat.

The whole incident depressed him. The disregard for nature. The greed. The stupidity. The waste. The disregard for another being’s spirit, the lack of reverence for nature’s laws—it all sickened Eustace, whose mission on earth was to uphold the ancient ideas about life’s inherent sacredness. But where do you start with people so callow and oblivious? People who shoot at animals for drunken sport and don’t even want the meat?

“Hell damn fire,” he wrote in his journal. “What am I to do? They would just write me off as a Grizzly Adams nature freak if I tried to explain it to them.”

And that was another thing bugging Eustace. He was getting a little tired of being seen as an eccentric, some Grizzly Adams nature freak, when he had so much more to offer the world. He was becoming more contemplative and agitated and he was no longer gaining satisfaction by making his own clothes or shooting his game with a blowgun. He was ready for something bigger, something bolder.

“I need something new, fresh, alive, stimulating,” he wrote in his journal. “I need life, close-up, tooth and claw. Alive, real, power, exertion. There are more real, fulfilling, and satisfying things to do than sitting around talking to a bunch of good old boys about the same old things, year after year. I don’t want to talk about doing things, I want to be doing things, and I want to know the realities and limits of life by their measure! I don’t want my life to be nothing, to not make a difference. And people tell me all the time how I am doing so much, but I don’t feel I’m even scratching the surface. Hell no, I’m not! And life is so short, I could be gone tomorrow. Vision, concentration, center . . . what? How to do it? What to do? Can I? Where do I go? Escape isn’t the answer. There is only one way—destiny, destiny. To trust destiny.”

It wasn’t enough for him, in other words, to sit around his teepee working on moccasins and listening to the rainfall. And, speaking of his teepee, he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life moving it from one piece of someone’s land to another piece of someone else’s land. Every place he had ever set up camp got sold out from under him and developed into neighborhoods right before his eyes. It was dreadful, having this happen. It was like standing on a sand bar and watching the tide lift. Where could he go that would be invulnerable to commercial development? And he wanted to keep teaching, but on his own terms and not necessarily for the forty-five minutes allotted to him by the principal of whatever public school he was visiting that day. He needed more challenges, more power, more people to reach. He needed more land.

Years later, when people would ask Eustace Conway why he lived up at Turtle Island and spent so much energy conserving his thousand acres, he would deliver his speech of explanation. It eventually became one of the most powerful segments of his public presentations.

“There is a book I used to love as a child,” he would begin, “called Return to Shady Grove. It’s about these animals who live in a wonderful forest. Life is perfect and happy and safe for them, until one day the bulldozers come and tear up their home to build a road for humans. They have nowhere to go, and their homes have been destroyed. But then one day the animals get on the boxcar of a train and head West. When they get there, they find a new forest, just like the home they lost, and everyone lives happily ever after.

“I could always relate to that book, because everywhere I ever lived has been destroyed. When I was a small child, I lived in Columbia, South Carolina, near the wilds and the woods and the swamps. Then the developers came and raped the land and destroyed it. So my family moved to Gastonia, North Carolina, where they bought a house bordering on hundreds of acres of land, divided by a clean and beautiful stream. I fell in love with that forest. I knew that forest better than I have ever known any place, because I spent every day there, playing and exploring. I enjoyed that land during my whole young life. I built forts, developed trails, trained myself to run at breakneck speed through the woods and to roll if I fell and jump up and run some more. I climbed through the underbrush and swung from tree to tree, like Tarzan. I knew the textures of the leaves and the warmth of the soil. I knew the sounds, color, and sensations of the forest.

“And then one day the surveyor’s stakes started to appear all through the forest. I didn’t know what the stakes were for, but I knew they were bad. I knew it was a violation of nature, and I tried to pull up the stakes wherever they appeared. But I was a child—how could I stop it? The developers tore out my forest and built hundreds and hundreds of homes slowly over the whole area until the land I loved was leveled and the stream was just polluted water. They named the development Gardner Woods, but it was a lie. There were no more woods. Gardner Woods had been decimated. The only thing left of the woods was the name.

“Then I moved into a teepee on a piece of land owned by some friends near the hardwood forest of Allen’s Knob, and I lived there until the developers cleared away the forest for homes. Then I found an old mountain man in Boone named Jay Miller, and he let me put my teepee up on his beautiful Appalachian land. I loved it there. I lived on the side of Howard’s Knob, a forest filled with bears, turkeys, and ginseng root. There was a natural spring just outside my teepee where I would drink every morning. And it was wonderful there until the day old Jay Miller decided to chase the mighty dollar, and he sold his land for lumber. And the timber company came and set up their sawmill right near me—a mill that got closer and closer as they dropped to the ground every last tree that stood between me and them. I was finishing my senior year of college at the time, and I literally had to wear earplugs in order to study for my exams, the saw was so loud. By the time I left, the forest I had loved, where I had gotten my life and food and clothing, was nothing but a vast field of stumps. And the beautiful spring where I used to drink was spoiled and silted.

“So what was I to do? That’s when I realized that the moral of Return to Shady Grove was a lie. It’s a bald-faced lie invented to reassure children that there is always another forest for another home somewhere out there in the West, just over the hill somewhere. It’s a lie that says it’s OK that the bulldozers keep coming. But it’s not OK, and we need to teach people that it’s a lie, because the bulldozers will keep coming until every tree is gone. There is no place that is safe. And when I realized that? Well, that’s when I decided to get a forest of my own and fight to the death anyone who ever tried to destroy it. That was the only answer and the most important thing I could do with my life on this earth.”

It was time to find Turtle Island.

“The land,” he wrote in his diary throughout the early 1980s, as though he had to be reminded. “I need to get the land. The land! I dream it. I want it. I will sacrifice for it.”

CHAPTER FIVE

This is the place!

—Brigham Young, on first seeing the valley

of Great Salt Lake

America has always lent herself generously—lent both her body and her capacious character—to the visions of utopians. It could be argued that anyone who ever came to America of free will has been a junior utopian, an individual with a personal idea about creating a measure of paradise in this New World, no matter how modest that idea might be. Of course, it could also be argued that this country had been a utopia for millennia before the Europeans arrived and started wrecking everything to suit their rigid plans for the space. But consider how the country must have looked to those early Europeans—free, endless, empty. Surely it was tempting to think about the kind of a society one could create here.

Of course Americans didn’t originate the idea of a utopia. As usual, that would be the Greeks. And Europeans were scheming of perfect societies since before the Renaissance. Sir Thomas More, Tommaso Campanella, and Francis Bacon had their visions, as, later, did Rabelais, Montaigne, Hobbes. But what these men didn’t do was turn their blueprints into reality. They were thinkers and writers, not charismatic leaders. Besides, there was no place on the battle-weary map of the Old World where one could try to found an actual utopia. Politically, geographically, and socially, it was an impossibility. So these were men who designed ships when they’d never seen an ocean. They could imagine their dream vessels to be of any size or shape they wanted; the things would never have to set sail.

But when America was discovered—or, rather, when the concept of America was invented—that’s when thinkers and writers and charismatic leaders alike started to get themselves in trouble. Because this was the place to do it. If you could get yourself some land and talk enough people into joining you, you could establish your paradise. And so, in addition to the grand utopian schemes of men like Jefferson (schemes that ultimately became known as “government”), we got dozens of smaller and weirder utopian schemes scattered over the land.

Between 1800 and 1900, more than a hundred such communities rose in waves of enthusiasm across America. The Inspirationist Society of Amana was first envisioned in Germany by a stocking-weaver, a carpenter, and an illiterate serving maid. But their dream became reality only when the Amanists came to the United States, in 1842, and bought five thousand acres outside Buffalo. This strict, mostly silent, highly skilled, sober, and well-organized population thrived, and eventually sold their land at a profit and moved to Iowa, where they prospered until 1932. The Shakers also flourished, longer than anyone might have expected of a celibate community. And the industrious Rappites of Harmony impressively constructed, in their first year in Pennsylvania’s Conoquenessing Valley, fifty log houses, a church, a school, a gristmill, and a barn, in addition to clearing 150 acres of land.

But most of America’s model communities didn’t do so well. Generally, they crumbled under the decidedly nonutopian realities of bankruptcy, internal power struggles, irresoluble philosophical disagreements, and basic human misery. New Harmony was founded in Indiana around 1825 by Robert Owen, who called his project “a new empire of goodwill,” which would spread “from Community to Community, from State to State, from Continent to Continent, finally overshadowing the whole earth, shedding light, fragrance and abundance, intelligence and happiness, upon the sons of man.” Hundreds upon hundreds of devotees followed Owen, but he had no sound economic plan for his community, and he quickly slunk back to England when things started falling apart. His followers went through five constitutions in a single year, split into four rival communities, and finally imploded under the pressure of a dozen lawsuits.

Bishop Hill was founded by Eric Janson, a Swede, who brought his eight hundred followers to America in 1846 to form a theoretical socialist community. The believers spent their first winter in caves in Illinois, where 144 of them died of cholera in a single fortnight, while Janson watched over them, cheerfully saying, “Go, die in peace” as his flock keeled over, one after another. The Mountain Cove Community of Spiritualists set up their perfect society in rural Virginia, exactly on the spot, they calculated, where the Garden of Eden had once stood. Like Adam and Eve, however, the Spiritualists were cast out of Eden before they knew what hit them; their experiment lasted only two years. The carefree Fruitlanders were founded by Bronson Alcott, a charming believer in “deep discussion,” who thought that work should be done only when the “spirit dictates.” The Fruitlanders may have set a national utopia-dismantling record; their project lasted over the summer of 1843, until everyone went home when it started getting cold.

The Icarians hurried over here from France. Their leader, Étienne Cabet, sent them off with this proclamation: “The third of February, 1848, will be an epoch-making date, for on that day, one of the grandest acts in the history of the human race was accomplished—the advance guard, departing on the ship Rome has left for Icaria . . . May the winds and waves be propitious to you, soldiers of humanity!” Maybe no soldiers of humanity ever suffered quite as hard as the Icarians, who ended up on 100,000 acres of hot swampland outside New Orleans, decimated by malaria, fatigue, starvation, desertion, and death by lightning.

Still, everyone’s favorite utopian has to be Charles Fourier. Fourier had it all figured out, as he explained in several enormous books. His followers sprang up everywhere across the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, especially in New England, where a severe economic crisis had put hordes of men out of work. Of the forty separate Fourierist societies formed in America, though, only three lasted for more than two years. Looking back on the phenomenon, it’s hard to imagine that Fourier’s ideas could have spread anywhere beyond the recesses of his own beautifully insane head. Yet there must have been something in the alluring orderliness of his vision that reassured Americans when they needed it most, when people were seeking tidy answers.

The only hope for mankind, Charles Fourier had proclaimed quite clearly, lay in a highly organized social structure—almost insect-like in its detail and hierarchy—of human associations. The smallest association, called a Group, would comprise seven people, two of whom would hover at each wing to represent “ascending” and “descending” extremes of taste, while the other three would stay in the middle to maintain equilibrium. In the ideal society, there would be a Group for every occupation (raising children, tending poultry, growing roses, etc.). Five Groups of seven made a Series, each of which, again, would have a center and two wings. And a Phalanx—the ultimate in human organization— was to be constructed of several Series joined together to create battalions of between 1620 and 1800 individuals. Each Phalanx would cover three square acres of gardens and orchards, and the members of each Phalanx would reside in a splendid Phalanstery, consisting of bedrooms, ballrooms, council chambers, libraries, and nurseries.

In Fourier’s perfect society, work would be valued according to its usefulness. Therefore, the most unpleasant and necessary work (sewage maintenance, grave digging) would earn the highest pay and the highest esteem. People would work according to their natural affinities. Since children, for example, have a natural affinity for digging around in dirt and filth, they would become special garbage-scavenging groups called the Little Hordes, and they would earn high pay, as well as taking their place at the heads of every parade, where they would regularly be honored by the other citizens with the venerable “Salute of Esteem.”

Fourier went so far as to claim that he had the entire workings of the universe figured out, in addition to merely understanding the workings of the perfect human society. Every planet, he said, lasted for 80,000 years, and these epochs were naturally divided into stages. When the Earth entered its eighth stage, he speculated that men would grow tails equipped with eyes, that dead bodies would be transformed into “aromatic airs,” that the polar icecaps would emit perfumed dew, that six new moons would form, and that unpleasant beasts would be replaced by their harmless opposites (called “anti-sharks,” for instance, or “anti-fleas”). And it would be during this episode—the glorious eighth stage of Earth—that the Fourier Phalanxes would at last spread over the entire planet, until there were exactly 2,985,984 of them, united in one brotherhood and one language.

So. As you see, one can take one’s utopian ideals absolutely as far as one wants.

Still, there seems to have been a time for this kind of dreaming, and that time was the nineteenth century. By 1900, not only had most of America’s idealistic communities vanished, but nobody was talking anymore about buying up land in the middle of nowhere and creating a model society with a handful of believers. As with the decline of so much else in this country, the industrial age was probably to blame. The mass production of goods, the move from an agrarian to an urban economy, the decline of individual craftsmanship—all were eroding away Americans’ idea of self-sufficiency. It was getting harder to believe that one person (or one congregation, or one Phalanx) could break off from the big machine of America. The grid had begun to emerge. Or the noose had begun to tighten, if you prefer to feel that way about it. By the turn of the century, American culture—loud, strong, established, uniform, ubiquitous—hardly seemed worth trying to alter. It would not be until the 1960s, in fact, that Americans would again summon the energy (or the madness) to attempt once more the mass formation of utopian societies.

The 1960s, of course, really began in the 1950s. It all started with the rise of the Beat movement, which brought a change in music, a questioning of society, a serious interest in experimentation with drugs and sex, and a general attitude of resistance to conventionality. By the middle of the 1950s, those old romantic nineteenth-century American ideas about separating oneself from the corruptions of larger society were starting to look good again. Poets like Allen Ginsberg (heir to Walt Whitman) and writers like Jack Kerouac (who called himself an “urban Thoreau”) set forth to redefine and rediscover ways to live in America without slogging through what Kerouac called the endless system of “work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume . . .”

The Beats are often associated with city life, particularly with San Francisco. But in the classic nineteenth-century style of Teddy Roosevelt, the Beat poets dutifully turned their backs on the sissifying influence of cities to seek more rugged experiences and make real men of themselves. The poet Lew Welch quit a solid copy-editing job in Chicago in the early 1960s and became a hermit in the foothills of the Sierra Mountains. The young Jack Kerouac found work in the National Forest Service, manning a fire lookout in the Cascade Mountains. (He also worked on a merchant marine ship and was a brakeman on the Southern Pacific Railroad.) Allen Ginsberg and the poet Gary Snyder took jobs on ships in the 1940s and 1950s. (“I’ve held employment on all levels of society,” boasted Snyder. “I can pride myself on the fact that I worked nine months on a tanker at sea and nobody once ever guessed I had been to college.”)

The Beats were frustrated by the numbing consumer values of contemporary America and found the wilderness and manual labor to be fine ways to, as Kerouac said, “work the blood clots right out of existence.” It was back to the frontier for cleansing all over again. By the middle of the 1960s, these ideas were spreading among a wider and wider range of American youth. Kerouac’s novels alone sent no end of young men scrambling across the country to find their destinies, but Walden—a long-neglected work celebrating both nature and nonconformity— was also rediscovered around this time, as were the essays of the great nineteenth-century naturalist John Muir. A counterculture revolution was brewing once more, and on the heels of that resistance came, almost inevitably, the new utopias.

From 1965 to 1975, tens of thousands of young Americans tried their hands at idealistic communal-living experiments. The communes were more colorful and outlandish than their nineteenth-century counterparts had been. Most failed quickly, often comically, although it’s hard to not feel affection for their high idealistic notions.

There was the famous Drop City of Colorado, founded by some wild poverty-loving hippie artists, who built structures out of bottle caps and tarp (I’m not kidding) and whose short-lived utopia was filled with “all kinds of drum music and bell ringing, jingling, jangling, and chanting.” Drop City’s founders so loathed rules and judgments that they insisted on accepting anybody and everybody into their utopia. Which is why the place eventually burned itself out as a crash pad for drug addicts and scary biker gangs. The same fate struck the good-hearted Californians of Gorda Mountain, who founded a wide-open community in 1962, anticipating that their welcoming policy would attract lots of artists and dreamers. Instead, the commune had to close in 1968 after being overrun by junkies, derelicts, runaways, and criminals.

The great LSD guru Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters founded a casual, miniature utopia in his California home (although Kesey eventually grew so tired of his community, calling it nothing more than “a communal lie,” that he put the whole crowd on buses to Woodstock in 1969, with strict orders to never come back). Timothy Leary founded a more elaborate psychedelic utopia. His was on a lush estate in Millbrook, New York, which had once belonged to Andrew Mellon’s family. Leary’s experiment was described as “a school, a commune, and a house party of unparalleled dimensions,” and—while serious academics did come to Millbrook to discuss culture and poetry—nobody did the chores, and the dream disintegrated by 1965.

Other 1960s communes were defined by a similar lack of internal structure. Black Bear Ranch, initially founded on the notion of no rules whatsoever, finally caved in and created two very strict rules: (1) no sitting on the kitchen counters, and (2) no turning the handle on the cream separator, because, as one old hippie recalled, “it used to drive people crazy when people would sit on the kitchen counter and play with the handle on the cream separator.” Other than that, you could pretty much do what you wanted at Black Bear Ranch.

It was not easy going, keeping these utopias running. The kids who founded them were just that—kids. White, middle-class, college-educated kids, most of whom had no practical farm skills. Their communes folded left and right, assaulted from the inside by drug abuse, disorganization, apathy, resentment, and bankruptcy, and attacked from the outside by mainstream America’s values and laws. Morning Star Ranch in California, for example, had no end of trouble from the local sheriff, who, in 1967, arrested the commune’s leader, Lou Gottlieb, for the crime of “running an organized camp in violation of state sanitary regulations.” Gottlieb—who was a fantastic wiseass, in addition to being a utopian idealist—quipped at the time of his arrest, “If they can find any evidence of organization here, I wish they would show it to me.”

Yes, officer, it would have been difficult to find any evidence of organization in most of these 1960s utopias. It’s all too easy now to look back at them as nothing more than a spastic side effect of a feral youth movement that was really only seeking new and creative ways to avoid adult responsibility. Although, on closer examination, it must be said that not every American commune of the 1960s was a madcap carnival. Some communes were founded on serious religious principles; some had intense political agendas; some were blessed with members who soberly and conscientiously tried to lead the good and simple life. And a few hippie communes did hammer out enough management skills to ensure their long-term survival.

The simply named Farm has been communally productive in Tennessee since 1971, after some major adjustments in its original policy of total anarchy. Over the years more traditional rules and restrictions have been introduced, and more realistic ideas about maintaining the rights of the individual within the larger framework of utopian communal living have kept its members sane and relatively free of bitterness and resentment. As with any communal experiment that lasts more than a year, the Farm had to trade in much of its early romanticism for a more pragmatic organizational principle. Still, the Farm’s long-running and successful social projects (several environmental teaching programs; a public advocacy law firm) reflect the original founders’ idealistic dreams.

Indeed, that sense of thriving idealism seems to be as critical a factor in keeping a commune alive over the years as good bookkeeping practices and strict visitors’ policies—just as, in a good marriage, a couple will more easily endure the hardships of decades if an original spark of their youthful romance can survive. As one long-term member of the Farm explained, “We’ve been through some pretty hard times together. There’s a certain amount of sentimentality toward seeing it succeed.”

On such lines, consider the famous Hog Farm of California. Hog Farm is still thriving some twenty-five years after its founding, an endurance largely credited to the charismatic guidance of its great hippie visionary leader, Hugh Romney, AKA Wavy Gravy (proudly the only American utopian ever to have had a Ben and Jerry’s ice cream flavor named in his honor). Wavy Gravy has stubbornly refused over the years to compromise his free-for-all, do-gooder 1960s values, and his dream utopia thrives as a monument to the power of pure idealism. Hog Farm’s summer camp (Camp Winnarainbow) is a flourishing California institution, as is the charitable-works arm of the commune, which has been successfully fighting blindness in Third World countries for years.

All those who live at Hog Farm today still follow both their charming leader and their serious political agenda steadfastly and with good humor. Their enduring success defies those who insist that conformity to society’s norms is the only way to survive in modern America. For all the concessions and disappointments they may have experienced over the decades, the Hog Farmers still fight the good fight together, insistently holding true to the original irreverent notion of themselves as “an extended family, a mobile hallucination, an army of clowns.”

Eustace Conway was born at the beginning of the 1960s. He passed his formative years right in the middle of this major counterculture revolution, but the freewheeling values of the time seem to have had little effect on his ideas. Modern-day hippie types respond to Eustace positively because they think he’s one of them. He does seem to be a hippie at first glance, what with his long hair and his thick beard and his back-to-nature ethic and the friendly bumper sticker on his truck that reads “Friends Come in All Colors.” That said, Eustace is actually quite conservative. He loathes drugs and drug-users, has no patience with sexual swingers, and has sometimes been accused of cherishing discipline over freedom. If you wanted to take his gun from him, for instance, you’d probably find yourself prying it out of his cold, dead fingers. So, no, our Eustace Conway is not exactly a mobile hallucination or a tripped-out foot soldier from some army of clowns.

But what Eustace does share with the hippie utopian dreamers of the 1960s (as well as with their romantic utopian ancestors of the 1860s) is this most American of ideals: that society is both capable of transforming and willing to transform. If you can get yourself a piece of land and some serious motivation, you can start a small project that will grow and inspire a massive change across an entire country. Eustace Conway, like any good utopian, was not afraid to try this. He was not afraid to claim that he had all the answers. He was not afraid to formulate an entirely new world view.

What he wanted Turtle Island to be was more than just a nature preserve. More than what his grandfather had made of Sequoyah. This land was not to be a summer camp where children could temporarily escape the evils of the city and grow into strong citizens. No, Eustace wanted Turtle Island to be the setting of a colossal utopian experiment in which he would try to do nothing less than change and save America. It was to be the very blueprint for the future. Time and again, he had heard that old touchy-feely adage, “If you touch only one life, then you’ve had an effect on the world.”

Well, frankly, Eustace Conway thought that was bullshit. No reason to think so small, people! Why be content to touch only one life? Why not save the whole planet? Certainly this must be his destiny.

“God only made one person in the world like you,” wrote Eustace’s mother, who was always right there on the scene to remind her son of his singular calling. “And He has a special job for you to do, to use the talents He gave you.”

Eustace couldn’t have agreed more, and by the time he was in his mid-twenties, he was on fire with the desire to found his own utopia. The will was there; all he needed was the land.

He never expected to find his beloved Turtle Island in North Carolina, where real estate was already getting expensive and overpopulation already a problem. But, as it turned out, hidden up in the mountains behind the college and resort town of Boone were all kinds of shady little hollers where life had not altered in decades. Property was cheap, and people were quiet up there in the hills, so Eustace asked around to see if anyone had a big tract of land for sale. When he heard “the old Alley Church place” was available, he took a ride up there with a former college professor of his who knew a lot about buying land and reading tax maps—two skills Eustace did not have at the time but would soon acquire.

What they found up at the end of that rugged dirt road was perfection. It was 107 acres of what Eustace describes now as “a classic Southern Appalachian reclaimed hardwood forest,” and it was mind-alteringly beautiful. It had everything Eustace was looking for—fresh spring water, good solar exposure, attractive ridge-to-ridge property lines, level ground for farming, plenty of timber for constructing buildings, and an excitingly diverse ecosystem. It was a mixed woodland landscape, dominated by locust, birch, and sourwood. The air was wet and heavy, and the understory was fern-laden and lush. It was a wonderful climate for poison ivy and also for copperheads, although there were mild species thriving here, too—trout, woodpecker, pink and yellow ladyslipper, ginseng, orchid, bloodroot, rhododendron. . . .

The soil below his feet was vigorous and black and damp. Like most woodland on the East Coast of America, this was not original-growth forest. It was a second-growth forest that was healing itself, forest that had taken over once again after having been cleared more than a century ago, farmed steadily, and then abandoned for decades (in this case, when the local hillbillies were lured down to the town below to work in factories). Wild animals had made a healthy comeback, as had the trees. There were plenty of squirrels and every sign of an increasing deer population. The density of the birds was extraordinary, and, in the damp air of early morning, it sounded to Eustace like a jungle-worthy outcry of life. He suspected that there were mountain lions nearby, too. And bears.

It was the winter of 1986 when Eustace inspected the land for the first time. The instant he pulled his truck off the main highway, he found himself in serious Appalachia, all of which became more apparent as he climbed higher and higher into the Blue Ridge Mountains. The few people who did live back here were first-growth. Authentic, old-timey, genuine hillbillies. Their homes were tin-roof shacks barely adhering to the walls of these steep mountain hollers. Their yards were full of fossilized appliances and prehistoric cars, and the people kept livestock like rabbits and chickens up on their roofs, up away from the foxes. The word “hardscrabble” doesn’t begin to describe how hard and how scrabbled these lives appeared.

The roads were winding and unmarked, and Eustace wasn’t sure whether he was in the right location, so he pulled his truck into the yard of one of these beat-down shacks and knocked on the door to ask where the old Alley Church place was. A pale, lightweight woman in a calico apron came to the door and stared at Eustace in pure terror from behind the screen. She had probably never seen a man at her door who wasn’t a family member.

“She’d been making biscuit dough,” he remembers, “and her hands were covered with flour, but her face was as white as the flour on her hands, and she was shaking with fear at the sight of me. When she finally spoke, her voice was so faint and breathless, I was afraid she might pass out. It was like talking to somebody who’s sick in the hospital but who’s still trying to speak. You want to say, ‘Save your strength! Don’t try to talk!’ That’s how shy she was.”

The woman at the door was Susie Barlow, a member of the interconnected network of Appalachian families who were soon to become Eustace’s neighbors. The Barlow clan, Carlton clan, and the (quite literally named) Hicks clan had all lived in this craggy mountain holler for as long as remembered history. They were kind, reclusive people, who still yanked their teeth out with homemade iron pliers when the need arose. They raised hogs and made the most magnificent fifty-pound salt-cured hams. They bred hound dogs for hunting and for sale. They kept their dog litters in their living rooms, the pups staggering about blindly in a big wooden crate, peeing all over a faded handmade patchwork quilt, which could have surely fetched several hundred dollars at auction in New York City. The Carltons and Hickses and Barlows were poor but deeply religious people who honored the Sabbath with reverence and handled the Bible with humility.

“I’ll tell you this much,” Eustace says. “You know that I have issues with Christianity, right? But when I go visit my Appalachian neighbors and they say, ‘Will you pray with us, brother Eustace?’ I hit that floor and I pray. I get down there on my knees in their kitchens, down on that worn linoleum, and I take their hard-working hands, and I pray my heart out, because these are the truest believers I have ever known.”

They were perfect neighbors. It was a perfect piece of land. Eustace was ready to begin his utopian journey. But he didn’t want to do it alone.

For all that he was the American romantic archetype of the solo man in the wilderness, Eustace still desperately craved a female partner to share his dream. Just as he was imagining his ideal utopian home, he was also designing (in equally precise and fantastic detail) his ideal utopian bride. He knew exactly who she would be, how she would look, what she would bring to his life.

She would be beautiful, brilliant, strong, loving, capable, and his faithful partner, the gentle touch that would humanize his brilliantly executed life plan and support his vision. She showed up in his dreams often as a young Native American beauty, quiet and loving and peaceful. She was the Eve who would help Eustace build his Eden. She was the same dream girl, by the way, that Henry David Thoreau used to fantasize about back when he was holed up alone at Walden Pond—a faultless child of nature, a paragon modeled after the mythical Greek demigoddess “Hebe, cup-bearer to Jupiter, who was the daughter of Juno and wild lettuce, and who had the power of restoring gods and men to the vigor of their youth . . . probably the only thoroughly sound-conditioned, healthy and robust young lady that ever walked the globe, and wherever she came it was spring.”

This was the woman of Eustace’s dreams, the very picture of lushness and fertility and grace. But he wasn’t having an easy time finding her. Not that he had trouble meeting women. He met loads of women; it was just hard to find the right one.

His relationship with a woman named Belinda, for instance, typified his experience with the opposite sex. Belinda, who lived in Arizona, had seen Eustace Conway talking about his life in the woods on a national television program called “PM Magazine.” She immediately fell in love with him, transported by the romantic notion of this wild and articulate mountain man, and she tracked him down through the mail. They wrote passionate letters to each other, and Eustace went to stay with her briefly out West, but it never turned into something real. Belinda had a child already, which was only one of the reasons they ultimately split. Eustace was never entirely sure whether Belinda loved him as a person or as a notion.

Then there was Frances “the strong girl from England,” and Eustace fell in love with her, too.

“She seems to have the wisdom, strength, and tenacity that would make a good partner,” Eustace wrote of Frances in his journal. “I need the love and companionship that I have gotten so little of. I know I’m a romantic. Sometimes I think and feel that I am so logical and in ways cool-hearted and methodical, yet I can also be so young, naïve, and unrealistic.”

But Frances was soon gone, and then came Bitsy, with whom Eustace fell overpoweringly in love. Bitsy was a beautiful and mysterious Apache doctor. Not just any Apache, but a descendant of Geromino’s band, and she had everything Eustace always fell for: the wide smile, the long hair, the dark skin, the athletic body, the “eyes that would melt you,” the confidence, the grace. But things didn’t work out with Bitsy, either.

“I desire you still,” she wrote, in a letter finally severing the relationship. “Yet I have been unable to come to you. You are a charmer. But I feel you want me for your needs. I do not desire to be saved or taught or led in any direction but my own at this time. You are a giver, a teacher. This is good, for some. But I feel you want me as a glorification for you. Forgive me if this seems harsh. I do not mean it in that way. Your needs shadow mine.”

He didn’t take the breakup well.

“OH! GOD DAMN! BITSY!” he exploded in his journal in February of 1986. “I am crying, hitting the floor, shouting out in pain. Oh, damn, there is no release. I am not getting over it! You! I need to see you. You are the only key . . . my heart is bleeding for you. I love you like life itself, the whole universe! I am dreadful sick in love with you! What can I do? Nothing I can do. Nothing nothing nothing NOTHING NOTHING. Oh, how can I bear to lose you? I want you for a wife, a partner, to share the adventures of life. I will never find another like you . . . what does fate, God, the flowing energy of the universe have to say about this?”

Then, from Eustace Conway’s journal, February 1987: “Valarie Spratlin. Love. New Love. Where did you come from? Did God send you? Are you real? Are you really mine? Do I love you as much as I think I do, or do I just love the love you give me? I would love to think you are the answer to prayers I have been sending. Are you the next step in my moving, educating, predestined life? Is fate that strong a ruler and are we planned for soul mates?”

Valarie Spratlin, an attractive and energetic woman ten years Eustace’s senior, was working in 1987 with the Department of Natural Resources in Georgia. She was in charge of one-fifth of the state’s parks. She had heard about Eustace Conway and his “dog and pony show” from a friend in North Carolina, so she invited him to Georgia to conduct some workshops in her park system. They fell in love fast. She was intrigued by his life, by his magnetism, and by his bold plans for rescuing the world. She wrote him letters addressed to “My Primitive Savage Pagan.” She was into the whole iconographic picture of him—the buckskin, the teepee, the works. Her previous boyfriend had been a musician with the Allman Brothers, and she’d spent the last ten years of her life traveling around the country with the band, so she had already established herself as someone who was up for adventure.

“I know we just met a mere two weeks ago,” Valarie wrote Eustace in a spontaneous little poem, “but my feelings for you continue to grow.”

Soon after they met, Eustace asked Valarie to join him on a three-week tour of the Southwest, down to Mesa Verde and all the old Indian sites. “Heck, yeah,” she said, and they packed up her little Toyota and headed out. She remembers that he never once let them buy any food; they had to scrounge for meals or else dine three times a day on oatmeal and raisins. “Damn,” she recalls, “but he was the penny-pinchingest man I ever saw.” He took her hiking down in the Grand Canyon—“not for a nice little stroll, but for the entire day, with nothing to eat again but freakin’ oatmeal and raisins”—and the next day headed into Bryce Canyon for three more days of nonstop hiking. These were Eustace-style hikes: twenty-five miles at a stretch and no breaks.

“Eustace Conway,” she finally said, when he insisted one evening that they climb yet another ridge to see yet another sunset, “you are pushing me too hard.”

He looked at her, incredulous. “But, Valarie, you may never be here again. I can’t believe you’d give up the chance to see such a beautiful view.”

“I’ll make you a deal,” she told him. “I’ll climb that last goddamn mountain with you if you promise me that when we get out of here, you’ll take me to a real restaurant and buy me a hamburger and french fries and a Coke immediately.”

He laughed and agreed, and she made the climb. She was romantic and smitten, but she was no pushover. She was cool and spunky. She knew how to draw a line with Eustace where others found it impossible to stand up to him. And she was crazy about him. She was an environmentalist by disposition and an educator by training, and here was this guy who took every belief she had about the world and multiplied it by fifty. She was behind him on all his plans, and there soon came about a subtle pronoun shift in discussions of the future. Eustace no longer talked of “my need to find good land,” but “our need to find good land.” This woman seemed in every way to be what he had always hoped to find: a true partner. Together, Eustace and Valarie looked all over the South for a spot that would work for his—for their—utopia.

And so it came to pass that, in the late winter of 1986, Eustace Conway drove Valarie Spratlin up into the mountains behind Boone to show her the place he was interested in buying. It was nighttime. It was freezing rain. They drove in a dilapidated old van Eustace had recently purchased, with holes in the floorboards where exhaust kept pouring in. The road up the mountain was more like a dry creek bed of boulders and ditches than anything designed for a car’s passage. They finally stepped out of the van, and Eustace, delighted, shouted to Valarie, “We’re here! This is it!”

It was freezing. It was dark. The wind was howling. Valarie could see nothing. She ducked under a big hemlock to get out of the weather, but some wild chickens roosting in the tree started squawking around, and their movements dumped more icy water down her back.

“I don’t like it here, Eustace,” she said.

“You’ll like it in the morning,” he promised.

There wasn’t a single structure on the land. They slept under a tarp that night, and it started to snow. Around midnight, Eustace climbed alone to the highest point of the property and smoked a pipe in a prayer of thanksgiving for having found his destiny. Valarie, shivering under the tarp, was thinking, “It’s snowing and I don’t know where the hell I am and I’m freezing to death and that goddamn man just left me to go smoke a pipe?”

In the morning, though, when Eustace took her for a walk around the whole property, she began to see what he loved about the place. It was nothing but dense forest, yet Eustace was already mapping out the 107 acres of his personal world—bridges to go here; a teepee camp to fit there; this would make wonderful pasture; here’s where the barn could go; here’s where we can build cabins for guests; someday I’ll buy the land on the other side of the ridge, and we’ll plant buckwheat over here . . .

He could see it all. And the way he explained it so clearly? Why, she could see it, too.

The land was going to cost him nearly $80,000.

Eustace had saved some money, but not that kind of money. And there was no banker in the world who’d give a second glance to a kid in buckskin who lived in a teepee. So where can a modern mountain man get $80,000 when he needs it fast? The only person Eustace Conway knew for sure had that kind of money was his father.

Eustace didn’t feel remotely comfortable hitting the old man up for money. He didn’t feel comfortable around the old man at all. His father had still never said a kind word to him. Had never acknowledged that his “idiot” son had graduated with honors from college. Had never gone to hear Eustace speak before auditoriums full of captivated audiences; listened to a single story or looked at a single photograph from any of Eustace’s adventures; read any of the newspaper and magazine articles written about his son. (Mrs. Conway would cut them out and leave them on the coffee table for her husband to see, but he wouldn’t touch them; he’d just set his Wall Street Journal or his glass of water down on them, as if they were invisible.) In every way, Big Eustace was more detached from his children now that they were out of his house.

“I wish Dad would write to you,” Eustace’s mother wrote to her son when he was away in college, “but he seems to have a lot of hang-ups. Martha received her first letter ever from him on her birthday, and it was so shocking that she said she bawled while reading it.”

Eustace was amazed to realize that even now, when he was in his early twenties, he was still haunted by the pain of his childhood. He had thought this would all go away once he got older, once his physical body had left the environment of home. Why was it that his father could still make him cry? Why was he still having dreams that woke him at four o’clock in the morning, “rooting up old memories of grief and pain”? Eustace was shocked to discover, during one Christmas visit to Gastonia, that his dad remained “the rudest man I have ever met, the most judgmental man I have ever met, the most critical man I have ever met.”

It’s not that Eustace hadn’t tried to reconcile with the old man. As far back as his adolescence, he’d tried. His mother was always encouraging Little Eustace to “bend over backward” to improve his relationship with Big Eustace.

“I hope and pray so much that everything will go better for you and all of us at home next year,” she had written to Eustace before his senior year of high school. “Just as you so greatly want Dad’s love and respect, so does he want your love, respect and obedience. Which a child owes his parents. I feel sure one of the big reasons why Dad has always been hard for you to get along with is because he has always been ‘second fiddle’ all through your life, since you gave me most of your attention, time and dependence for all the things you need, and for affection. It started from way back when you were a little boy and, due to the fact that I gave you too much time and attention, it snowballed into a very unhappy relationship. At this point, there is still a possibility for a new happy relationship to develop between you and your Dad, but it is up to you to bring it about. In youth you are more able to be flexible in changing your behavior patterns and attitudes. Swallow all your pride to humble yourself before Dad and admit that you have done and said things in the past which have displeased him, but that you are willing now to try to please him to the best of your ability.”

So Eustace, from the time he was twelve, wrote letters to his father. He knew that his father thought himself a gifted communicator, and he hoped that he could improve their relationship if he expressed himself properly. He would work on those letters for weeks, trying to find the most mature and respectful way to approach Big Eustace. He would write that he believed they had a difficult relationship and would like to work on healing it. He would suggest that perhaps someone could help them talk to each other. He would tell his father he was sorry to have disappointed him, and maybe if they discussed their problems without anybody yelling, he could change his behavior to make his father happier.

His father never responded to any of the letters, although occasionally he read one aloud in a mocking fashion, to entertain Eustace’s siblings. There was so much to make fun of: Eustace’s spelling, grammar, his audacity in speaking as an equal—that kind of thing. Big Eustace was particularly entertained by a letter Little Eustace wrote back in high school, in which he suggested that his brother Walton, who had a brilliant mind and a sensitive nature, might thrive at a private school, where he would not be bullied by the redneck kids of Gastonia High. What a laugh! Big Eustace read that one over and over to the other kids, and everyone, even Walton, was encouraged to mock Little Eustace for presuming to tell his father what might be best for the family.

Yet, when he reached adulthood, Eustace often found himself trying again.

“I do not write to bring you pain or discouragement,” he wrote once, man to man. “On the contrary. I apologize for bringing pain or anything but goodness into your life. I always have wanted to be good. Good for you, good for Mom, good for everyone. I have an overwhelming need to be accepted by you, to be appreciated, acknowledged, recognized for something better than trash (stupid, ignorant, wrong, worthless). I have a great void where I look for love. All I have ever wanted is your love. I feel like a moth near a candle. Perhaps I should accept defeat and stay away from you. But denial and distance do not satisfy the need for your acceptance.”

Again, no response.

So, no, the relationship was hardly prospering, but Eustace needed to borrow a lot of money, and his father, frugal and shrewd, had it. Eustace had never asked his father for a dime; it had been a point of pride. When Mr. Conway once told young Eustace they should discuss the terms of an allowance, Eustace said, “I don’t think I deserve an allowance,” and that was the end of that. Eustace never asked his father for help with college tuition, although Mr. Conway happily paid the college fees for his younger children. How, then, was Eustace Conway to come to his dad in 1987 as an adult and ask for a loan? A pretty big loan.

The conversation, as we can imagine, was not genteel. Eustace got an earful from the old man: he was destined to fail in this venture; he should expect no mercy from his father when the sheriff came calling with bankruptcy papers; and who did he think he was, anyhow, to believe he could handle the responsibilities of caring for 107 acres and running a business?

“You’re wrong to think you can succeed at this,” his father said, over and over again.

Eustace sat like a rock in a stream, letting the cold deluge rush right by him, keeping his mouth shut and his face blank, repeating to himself the comforting chant I know I’m right, I know I’m right, I know I’m right . . . And, in the end, his father lent him the money.

At a competitive interest rate, of course.

On October 15, 1987, Eustace Conway bought his first piece of Turtle Island. And immediately set to work trying to pay his father back. Within one year, they were square again. He made that enormous sum of money in so short a time by driving himself through an insane deluge of work, traveling all over the South on a physically and emotionally punishing speaking tour, to teach, preach, and reach. Valarie used her connections with the Park Service to get him gigs in schools and nature centers, and Eustace turned into a driven self-promoter.

“It was an exciting time,” Valarie remembers now, “those first two years up at Turtle Island. Eustace lived with me in my nice suburban house in Georgia for a while, getting his speaking arrangements together and trying to pay his father back. I acted as his agent, getting him booked all over the state. And eventually I quit my good job and sold my good house and moved up to Turtle Island. I was following my bliss. That’s where I wanted to be. We worked hard to get the place going. I helped him with the first building up there, a toolshed, because the most important thing for Eustace was a place where he could gather the tools he’d need to create the rest of his vision. We lived in a teepee, and I cooked our meals on an old woodstove every day, but I was happy to be living this way because I wanted to learn those skills. I believed in what we were doing. I believed in what we were teaching. I was on a spiritual mission of my own, and mine paralleled his.”

The way they lived was a nightmare and a comedy. Eustace was on the road so much of the time, he’d have to carry every piece of paper, every check, calendar, and pile of mail in an old leather satchel. They kept files of school addresses and fliers in boxes in the teepee, which would get soaked in the rain and then eaten by mice, mold, and grubs. They had no phone. One time, Eustace walked down the holler to ask one of his neighbors, old Lonnie Carlton, if he could borrow his phone to make some long-distance business calls and pay him back later. For an old Appalachian farmer like Lonnie, a long-distance phone call was maybe a once-a-year event, probably having to do with a death in the family and certainly never lasting more than two minutes. Well, Eustace got on that phone and talked to school principals and Boy Scout leaders and newspaper reporters all over the South for six straight hours. Old Lonnie just sat there watching him the entire time, slack-jawed.

When it became obvious that he’d need a phone of his own, Eustace ran a phone line from a neighbor’s house up into a nearby cave, which became his office. He would hike down the mountain and climb into that cave at night during the winter and do what he remembers as “some pretty slick little business deals,” networking and taking notes and lighting his work all the while with a crackling fire. Later, he got permission to run a phone line into a pole barn that belonged to his neighbor Will Hicks. Valarie put the phone in a Styrofoam cooler so that it wouldn’t rust out from moisture. She remembers making business calls and negotiating hard-line fees for speaking engagements up there in the hayloft while the cows were mooing below her.

“Guys on the other end would ask, ‘What’s that noise I keep hearing?’ and I’d say, ‘Oh, it’s just the television going in the other room.’ I’m telling you, it was a real ‘Green Acres’ arrangement we had going there. Then the phone got wet and ruined. I tried to dry it out by putting it in the warm woodstove. Of course, it melted all over the place, like some kind of Salvador Dali deal. That’s the way we lived.”

Something was going to have to change. One night Eustace took Valarie out for a nice dinner down in Boone at the Red Onion Café, to treat her for all the work she’d been doing. And over dinner he sketched out designs on napkins for the office building he had decided they needed. Recognizing that he had a forty-day break—a rare repose— from speaking engagements, he figured over dinner that he’d build the office during that little window of time. Otherwise, it would never happen. So the next morning, before daylight, Eustace started working on it.

The building would be passive solar, twenty square feet, and made of cinderblock, glass, and rough-hewn lumber. Eustace didn’t know exactly how to erect a solar building and had never built anything more sophisticated than a toolshed, but he was damn sure he could do this. He selected a good sunny spot close to the entrance of Turtle Island so that the office could serve as a welcome station and be far away from the more primitive center of camp, which was to be deeper into the woods. He dug three sides of the building down into the earth, to help contain the heat, and Valarie helped him lay a brick floor to absorb energy from the sun. The entrance was a set of handsome French doors Eustace had picked up at a flea market for five dollars. The door handles, he rebuilt from deer antlers. He placed large windows in the front of the office and set skylights, all salvaged from junkyards, into the roof for light and heat.

The front of the roof, which people can see, is covered in hand-split shingles, for aesthetic value. But the back of the roof is practical and tin. The interior walls are paneled with two-foot-wide planks of weathered white pine, which Eustace rescued from an abandoned old barn, and which give the room warmth and depth. He built two large desks from the rest of the barn planks and also built sturdy bookshelves that function as a wall, dividing the office into two separate and sunny workspaces. On the floor is an antique rug he found at a Navajo auction. High shelves along the tops of the walls hold rare baskets and pottery, including one ancient pueblo pot Eustace had noticed on the porch of an old house in Raleigh one afternoon. Immediately recognizing its worth, he offered the owner of the home twenty dollars for the piece. “Sure,” the lady of the house said. “Take it. I get tired of sweeping around that old thing.” Later, Eustace sent a photograph of the pot to an expert at Sotheby’s, who estimated its value at several thousand dollars.

It’s a lovely building, the Turtle Island office. Beautiful art and books are everywhere inside, and all around the outside grow Eustace’s wildflowers—iris, Indian paintbrush, and ladyslipper. It’s a warm, organic, welcoming, fully efficient passive solar structure, with its own telephone and answering machine. And Eustace designed, built, decorated, and landscaped the entire thing in forty days.

By now, Eustace was getting a reputation across the mountain range for being quite a little busybody. For instance, he bought his lumber from an old Appalachian mountain man named Taft Broyhill, who owned a sawmill. Eustace would work all day on the building and then work into the night, too, by the headlights of his truck. When he needed more lumber, he’d drive over to the next mountain and visit Taft Broyhill’s mill around midnight, wake the old farmer up, and deal with him right there in the wee hours, so as not to waste perfectly good daylight time conducting commerce. Then he’d head back to Turtle Island, sleep for three or four hours, and start working on the building again long before dawn.

One night when he drove over to Taft Broyhill’s place around midnight, he was accompanied by a friend who had come to help Eustace out for a few days. While the old man was piling up the lumber, Eustace noticed in a heap of scrap wood a gorgeous hickory log, far too nice a piece of wood to saw into lumber. He asked if he could buy that hunk of hickory, and would Mr. Broyhill mind sawing it down to some manageable lengths for him.

“Well, what do you want it for?” the old man asked.

“Why, sir,” Eustace explained, “I was just thinking to myself how nice it would be to use that solid hickory for carving tool handles and such.”

The old man obligingly started up his chain saw and, in the headlights of Eustace’s truck at midnight in the falling snow, began cutting up the hickory log. Suddenly he stopped, turned off his chain saw, and stood up. He stared for a while at Eustace and his friend. Eustace, wondering what was wrong, waited for Taft Broyhill to speak.

“You know,” the old man finally drawled, “I was just wonderin’— what do you boys do in your spare time?”

Eustace was killing himself with work. The minute the office was finished he was back on the road, making money by preaching about the bliss of primitive living and the wisdom of the Native Americans and the comforts of “the simple life.” He was bolting in a frenzy from state to state, trying to convince people to give up the rat race and bask in warm communion with nature. It was a brutal existence. One friend even bought him a radar detector so that he’d stop getting speeding tickets on his endless driving sprints to shows. And by February of 1988, Eustace seemed to be looking over the precipice into a chasm of madness when he wrote:

“Long run, the big trip, this endeavor to accomplish what I am doing now, a poor boy paying for a large tract of land. So much goes into it, every day I work, trying so hard, and even today—a day without a class or lecture—I spent 12 hours doing paperwork, responding and soliciting and getting more work, more more more MORE piled on. I can take it, like an enthusiastic weightlifter in hot adrenaline—I am working even in my sleep—work-sleep, I call it—giving up time for love with Valarie, giving up time to pick the flowers . . . Atlanta, then Augusta, working in Toccoa and then Clarksville—prostitution of my time to hundreds of people—day after day pounding on stage, on stage, on stage YEELLLLING!

“I live on stage power and energy flowing, pulling it together . . . sleep 7 minutes, then get up—drive—be great. You are the best! They are on your strings like a puppet to be worked, controlled, listened to, and told—back and forth . . . ah, but the lack of understanding! Don’t you know I need rest? Don’t you know I need air? I need to breathe, damn it! Leave me alone, you stupid bastards! Can’t you see? You stupid people, can’t you understand? That is the best program I have ever seen, you really did good! I have heard it so many times, it’s like subsisting on cardboard. What the hell. I get my land. I have a quiet nature preserve to sleep in someday at the end of a long tunnel—what a dichotomy . . . How much will I let others in? Oh, my good people of the world, I LOVE YOU—give me strength, Lord, to do my trek. Someday I will find the soft ferns and sunshine to lie down in and rest. Peace.”

And at the end of a similar rant in his journal a few weeks later, Eustace added, “Not to mention trying to figure out if I want Valarie to be my mate for life.”

In the summer of 1989, Eustace had his first campers at Turtle Island.

Turtle Island was no longer an idea—it was an institution. Eustace had got himself brochures, business cards, insurance plans, first-aid kits, not-for-profit status. It was real. And the kids loved it, every year. Instead of having parents drive the campers up the mountain to the makeshift parking lot, Eustace had his staff meet the families down on the road and then hike in to Turtle Island. If the parents couldn’t make the hike? Well, too bad. Say your goodbyes down here, folks. This way, the kids would come into the fertile valley of Turtle Island through the woods, on foot, entering the kingdom as though through a sacred and secret door. The woods would finally open into the sunny meadows of the camp, and there would be this marvelous new-old world, different from anything these kids had ever known. No electricity, no running water, no traffic, no commerce.

And when they arrived, Eustace Conway was there to meet them, wearing his buckskin and his calmest smile. Over the course of the summer, he taught the children to eat foods they had never known, to sharpen and use knives, to carve their own spoons, to make knots and play Indian games and—every time they cut a branch off a living tree— to cut away a small lock of their own hair, to leave as an offering of thanks. He taught them to be respectful of one another and of nature. He worked to heal what he considered the spiritual damage inflicted on them by modern American culture. He’d be walking in the woods with a group of kids, for instance, and come on a patch of sweet briar. He’d no sooner tell the children how delicious the leaves tasted than they’d swarm on the plant like locusts, ripping off handfuls of branches.

“No,” Eustace would say.“Don’t destroy the entire plant! Be considerate of limited resources. Take one leaf, nibble a little bit of it, pass it around. Remember that the whole world isn’t here for you to consume and destroy. Remember that you aren’t the last person who will walk through these woods. Or the last person who will live on this planet. You’ve got to leave something behind.”

He even taught them how to pray. After the campers woke at dawn, Eustace would lead them up to the very same hill where he had prayed with his pipe the first winter he’d slept at Turtle Island. They called the place “sunrise hill,” and they would sit in silence, watching the sun come up, all of them meditating on the day. He took them on hikes to waterfalls and to ponds, and he bought an old horse for them to ride around. He taught them how to catch and eat crawdads from the stream and how to set traps for small game.

If a child said, “I don’t want to kill a defenseless animal,” Eustace would smile and explain, “I’ll tell you a little secret, my friend. You’ll never find in all of nature such a thing as a ‘defenseless’ animal. Except maybe some human beings I’ve known.”

He finally had his place, a place where he could teach in an interactive and twenty-four-hour environment, with no distractions and no limits on his time or resources. Everything he wanted to show his students was right on hand. It was as if they were living inside an encyclopedia.

On a nature walk he might say, “That mushroom right there is lacteria. You have to be very careful with this species, though, because there are four mushrooms in the world that look just like that. Two of them are poisonous and two of them aren’t. So don’t make any hasty decisions about which ones to eat! The only way you can tell the difference is to break the mushroom open and put your tongue to the milky substance right here inside. See that? If it tastes bitter, it’s poison, so stay away from it.”

Or he might tell them how primitive people took care of their health with witch hazel. “It’s growing right there, and it’s good for all kinds of wounds.”

Or he’d say, “That’s black birch. Why don’t you chew on that? It tastes good, right? The inner bark is the most valuable part. It’s what the old-time Appalachian people used to make birch beer out of. Maybe we should do that later.”

He was in bliss over the success of what he had created. There seemed no limit to what he could teach up here. The campers would return home to their suburban lives, and their parents would write letters to Eustace: “What did you do to my son, that he’s so much more mature now? What did you teach him that has made him so interested in his world?”

Eustace also held week-long seminars for adults. When he took one such group out for a hike through the forest, they were walking along a river, and one of the women, who had never been in the woods before, started to scream. She saw a snake swimming against the current. Eustace was wearing only a breechcloth, so he dove into the water and caught the snake with his hands and quietly explained its physiology to the woman from the city. He had her touch it and look inside its mouth. Eventually she held the snake in her hands while her friends took photographs.

On another occasion, Eustace took a small group of kindergarteners for a walk in the woods. He pointed up at the dense overhang of foliage and told them about the different kinds of trees. He let them drink from a spring, to show them that water comes out of the ground, not just out of faucets. He let them chew on sourwood, and they were amazed that he was right, that it did taste like tart candy. As they walked through the forest, he explained how the forest floor works, its circularity. The leaves fall from the trees and crumble and decompose and turn into soil. He explained how water seeps into the ground and feeds the roots of the trees; how the insects and animals live on the forest floor, eating each other and all the organic material they can find, keeping the cycle going.

“The woods are alive,” he said, but he could see that the children didn’t quite get it. Then, he asked a question. “Who wants to be my helper?” When a small boy stepped forward, Eustace—with the help of the children—dug two long shallow trenches in the forest floor. And he and the little boy lay down in the trenches and the other children buried them so that only their faces were sticking out of the ground, looking straight up.

“Now, we are the forest floor,” Eustace said. “And let’s tell the others what we see and feel. Let’s explain what’s happening to us.”

They lay there for some time in the soft forest duff, Eustace and a five-year-old child, and described what they saw and felt. How the sun hit their faces for a little while and then shade came with the waving of branches above them. They described dead pine needles falling on them and the drops of moisture from past rainfall landing on their cheeks and the insects and spiders marching over their faces. It was amazing. The children were mesmerized. And then, of course, they all wanted to be buried. So Eustace took turns burying each of them, transforming each child for a short while into the forest floor and smiling encouragingly as their sharp voices of comprehension filled the damp, clean air.

“It is alive!” they kept saying. “It is alive!”

They could scarcely believe it.

CHAPTER SIX

My public engagements consume all my time . . . I was much gratified to hear that the first editions of my book were entirely sold out . . . I wish to know if you have an agent in New Orleans and in the towns on the Mississippi, there it will sell better than other places . . . send me 10 copies as I wish that number for distribution among my immediate friends. I also wish you to understand that the Hon. Thos. Chilton of Kentucky is entitled to one equl half of the 62½ percent of the entire profits of the work as by the agreement between you and myself . . .

—From a business letter written by Davy Crockett

to the publisher of his memoirs

In May of 2000, I sat across a desk from Eustace Conway in his sunny office. Between us was a large cardboard box that had once contained— if its original label was to be believed—Stilh Chain Saw Bar and Chain Lubricant. This is the box where Eustace stores the information about all his land parcels, which now add up to over a thousand acres. The box is full of manila envelopes marked, in no particular order, “Blank Land Deeds,” “Johnson Maps,” “Land Tax Bills,” “Cabell Gragg’s Land,” “Right-of-Way Information,” “Forest Management,” and a particularly thick envelope labeled “People Who Want Land and Land For Sale.”

A few months earlier, Eustace and I had ridden horses together through a foot-deep cover of crisp snow and circled the perimeter of Turtle Island. The ride took us several hours, and at some points we’d get off our horses to make it up or down the almost sheer sides of hills, but Eustace didn’t once stop talking during the whole tour. He pointed out each tree and stone that marked his property line and told me who currently owned the property on the other side of the line, what those people were doing with their land, and how much he might be willing to pay for it someday. Having seen Turtle Island in the raw, I now wanted to understand it on a map.

So Eustace pulled out a huge map and unfolded it before him, as if he were a pirate. His land was blocked out in small and large connected parcels, and he told me how he’d acquired each piece over the years. What emerged was a portrait of genius. Eustace had put the thing together like a chess master. He first bought the 107 acres that made up the valley of Turtle Island, and then, as he earned money over the years, he slowly bought the peaks of each hill that surrounded the valley. The peaks of a hill are the most valuable real estate to developers, after all, since everyone wants a home right on top of a mountain. By securing these peaks, then, Eustace had made the hills below them much less attractive to any roving land speculator and therefore much less likely to be sold to someone else before he could afford to grab it.

“I wanted the crests of every ridge around me,” Eustace said. “I wanted to be able to look up from my valley and see no light pollution, no homes, no erosion to destroy the forest, and I wanted to hear no sounds except nature. The crests of the ridges were key, also, because ridges are where developers build roads, and once a road has been stuck through a forest, you’re finished. Roads bring people and people bring destruction, and I needed to prevent that. So I bought up all the crests. If I hadn’t done that, there’d be a road running past here right now, I can promise you.”

Once he owned the crests, he filled in the gaps, buying the slopes that connected his valley to the surrounding mountaintops. In this way, he guarded his watershed. What he was doing, actually, was transforming his holdings from a small, flat, low-lying basin into a large teacup—a perfect valley—which would be protected by mountains on every side. He bought up a crucial 114 acres called the Johnson Land. (“Dick Johnson owned 40,000 acres next to me, and he put it up for sale. Obviously, I couldn’t afford to buy it all, but I had to secure this one small piece right on the perimeter of Turtle Island, to keep a buffer between my nature preserve and whatever some developers might do on the other side.” The Johnson Land was an emergency buy; Eustace had to come up with the cash for it in two days, and he did.) Then he bought another small chunk of land he calls the Whale’s Tail, because of its shape. (“It’s a beautiful acreage, with a big drop-off vista, and I knew someday somebody was going to take a look at it and think what a nice place it would be for a house, so I had to secure it.”) Then he bought his most expensive and tiny piece of land, a mere five acres, for which he paid an arm and a leg. (“I realized that if I bought it, I’d control the access to the huge property on the other side of me, since this tiny spot is the only place where you can put a road. I couldn’t afford to buy the big property, but I could afford to quietly buy this little roadblock here. It was just a security measure. And maybe someday I can buy up the remainder without any serious competition.”)

But the most critical portion of Turtle Island was a 156.16-acre lot called the Cabell Gragg Land. Cabell Gragg was a sly old Appalachian farmer who owned this small spit of land right behind Turtle Island. It was the last piece Eustace needed to complete the watershed that would make his valley inviolable. From the first time Eustace had seen these woods, he knew this to be the place where he would someday build his home. It wasn’t the most alluring 156.16 acres in the world, but if someone else got hold of it, stripped it, polluted it, or developed it, Turtle Island would be poisoned through proximity. The piece was critical. It was Eustace’s Achilles’ heel.

“If I couldn’t nail that Cabell Gragg Land,” Eustace said, “my dream was over. If someone else bought the property, that would’ve been it for me. I would’ve turned around the next day and sold all my land and walked away from this whole vision, because it would’ve been ruined. I’d just have to start all over again somewhere else. So here I was, waking up every day of my life for almost ten years and working my brains out to make this place successful—putting up buildings and clearing pastures and constructing bridges—knowing all the while that if I couldn’t buy the Cabell Gragg Land, all that work would be for nothing.”

From 1987 until 1997, Eustace tried hard to get his hands on those 156.16 acres. You can’t read ten consecutive pages of his journals from that decade without hitting at least one reference to the Cabell Gragg Land. Eustace wrote Cabell Gragg countless letters, took him on tours of Turtle Island, sent him gifts, and even, as the years went on, visited him in his nursing home to negotiate terms. A dozen times Eustace thought he had a deal, and then old Cabell Gragg would back out or double the price or say he’d found a better offer. It was maddening. Eustace had a bottle of champagne he was keeping to drink in celebration of buying that land, and after ten years, the bottle had accumulated (as he puts it in his typically Eustacian precise manner) “1.16th of an inch of dust on its surface.” He was willing to put together any crazy proposal to secure the property. At one point, when Gragg expressed an interest in a fancy Victorian house down in Boone, Eustace came close to buying it in order to trade it with Cabell for the land, but the deal fell through.

In the end, Eustace got his precious Cabell Gragg Land. But at a huge personal price and in the most daring and dangerous of ways.

He got it by sleeping with the devil.

There’s a mountain right next to the mountains where Eustace lives, and for years and years it was nothing but forest. Tens of thousands of acres of this mountain bumped plumb up against Eustace’s land, and he had a dream from the first time he saw Turtle Island to buy it all up and multiply his holdings immensely. He didn’t know how he was going to do this, but he had every intention of figuring out a way. Every time he drove up to Turtle Island on the road from Boone, he passed a particular lookout point where he could pull his truck over and stand for a while and see over the ravine and valleys to a perfect view of both his property and the beautiful and enormous and forested mountain right beside it. He could think, Someday . . . somehow . . .

And then, one afternoon in 1994, while driving his truck from Boone to Turtle Island, he saw a Cadillac parked at his favorite lookout point. Four men in suits were standing outside the car, looking through binoculars across the ravine to that beautiful and enormous and forested mountain. Eustace felt his heart stop. He knew right then that his dream of owning the mountain was, as of this moment, officially over. He didn’t know who the men were, but he knew damn sure what they were, and he knew what they’d come for. It was the moral of Return to Shady Grove repeating itself. There’s no reason on earth that men in suits scrutinize forests with binoculars clutched to their faces in this distant corner of Appalachia unless they mean to buy something. Eustace pulled his truck up right behind the Cadillac and got out. Startled, the suits turned. They lowered their binoculars and looked at him. Standing with his hands on his hips, Eustace stared them down. One of the men flushed nervously, another coughed. It was as though they’d been caught stealing something or having sex.

“Can I help you with anything, gentlemen?” Eustace asked, grimly.

But it was too late; they were already helping themselves.

They didn’t say a word to Eustace that day, but the truth came out over the next months. A guy named David Kaplan had come to town looking to buy up all available land in the area in order to build an expensive and exclusive resort called Heavenly Mountain, where well-heeled believers could come and practice transcendental meditation in the lap of luxury. Heavenly Mountain would need roads and a helicopter pad and a golf course and a tennis court and lots of property for buildings.

David Kaplan was smart and ambitious and seemed to have all the money in the world. Acre by acre, he acquired the land he needed. Old farms and lost ravines and clean rivers and pastures and rocky valleys— he bought them all. The joke around the hollers was that David Kaplan’s land deals went this way: he’d pull up in his Jaguar at some run-down old shack and say to some run-down old hillbilly at the door, “Hi. I’m David Kaplan. Money is no object. How do you do?”

Well, look. What’s done is done. Spilled milk is exactly that. Eustace put Heavenly Mountain out of his head as far as he could. He even made jokes about it. When the trees came down and the palatial medittation center went up, Eustace started calling the land Less-Heavenly Mountain, as in “Doesn’t it look a lot less heavenly now?” He’d also poke fun at his new neighbors by doing a spot-on impression of the children’s TV host Mr. Rogers, droning, in that unmistakable patter, “Heavenly Mountain is our neighbor. Can you say ‘neigh-bor,’ children? Heavenly Mountain builds roads that are hard on our environment. Can you say ‘hard-on,’ children?”

Anyway, he told himself, a transcendental meditation center wouldn’t be the worst neighbor; that was definitely better than thousands of acres of one-family homes. The transcendentalists were coming to Heavenly Mountain to commune with nature, after all, and, what with their Vedic architecture and vegetarian lives, they were sincerely seeking a more harmonious relationship with the universe (even if they were building 4,000-square-foot homes in which to seek that harmony). And David Kaplan would be developing only 10 percent of his land, saving the rest of the forest from logging, hunting, and road construction. And since the resort was a place for people to come to seek peace, there would be a built-in interest in keeping the nearby property wooded and quiet, and that served Eustace’s interests, too. So the arrival of David Kaplan wasn’t the worst possible event in Eustace’s life.

He came to see it this way: OK, so David Kaplan wanted all the property in the world. Fine; Eustace couldn’t blame him for wanting it. What Eustace had to concentrate on, instead, was protecting what he already owned. Which meant that David Kaplan was welcome to buy every inch of North Carolina except the 156.16 acres of the Cabell Gragg Land.

But then Cabell Gragg started getting cute. When Eustace went to discuss the property, Cabell now started saying, “Well, you know, those transcendental meditation folks are interested in buying it.” Eustace couldn’t imagine this to be true; the land had no value to anyone but himself. But then he realized what was happening. As Cabell Gragg watched his neighbors get rich by selling off their valuable farms to David Kaplan, with his slick Jaguar, Cabell decided never to sell to Eustace Conway, with his beat-up 1974 pickup. Cabell wanted the satisfaction of feeling that he was in on this real estate boom, too. He was holding out for the richer man’s offer.

Thereupon, Eustace called a summit meeting with David Kaplan. Now, it’s not that David Kaplan and Eustace Conway were exactly in love with each other. They were direct competitors—the new-age mountain man verses the new-age real estate developer—and they were probably the two sharpest guys in the county. They’d already had some unpleasant little run-ins. David Kaplan had built himself a big fancy house on Heavenly Mountain, and his porch steps were merely four feet away from Eustace’s property line. Eustace thought that was pretty rude, and said so. Moreover, one of the Heavenly Mountain Resort helicopters kept buzzing low over Eustace’s nature preserve, day after day, kicking up wind and noise. Christ, how Eustace hated that! How can you keep the sanctuary of Turtle Island with a helicopter flying low overhead? But no matter how many angry phone calls Eustace made, it never stopped. He finally got so fed up that he went after the helicopter one day with a shotgun, put the pilot’s face right in his sights, and shouted, “Get the fuck off my fucking head!”

Which David Kaplan thought was pretty rude.

So for Eustace to request a favor of David Kaplan was quite an event. It wasn’t just a favor; it was a plea. Eustace, recognizing that he had no other choice, just rolled over and showed his neck to his adversary. He told David Kaplan all about the Cabell Gragg Land. He told him exactly how much acreage there was and how much it cost and how many years he had wanted it and why he needed it and what he’d do if he didn’t get it. He gave this information, remember, to a man who was openly trying to obtain every inch of land he could get. Then Eustace asked David Kaplan to please buy the Cabell Gragg Land. After which, Eustace would buy the land from David Kaplan. Cabell would have the satisfaction of selling to a rich developer; Eustace would have the land he needed to preserve his dream; and David Kaplan would have . . . ? Well, there wasn’t anything in this deal for David Kaplan at all, but it sure would be nice of him to do it.

David Kaplan agreed. The two men didn’t sign a single piece of paper; they shook hands on the deal. “If you screw me,” Eustace explained politely, “I’m finished.” And he walked away, knowing that his life was in the hands of his biggest rival. It was a trapeze act. It was Russian roulette. It was like betting the farm on a pair of deuces. But it was this risk or no chance. Anyhow, he secretly suspected that David Kaplan was a decent man. Not only decent, but surely smart enough to know better than to make a lifelong enemy of a guy like Eustace Conway.

In the end, the gamble worked. David made his offer to Cabell Gragg—the same offer Eustace had been making for years—and Cabell took the bait. David Kaplan bought that crucial piece of land and two days later turned around and sold it with complete honor to Eustace.

Whose empire was now safe.

Granted, Eustace Conway may not be very current. He may not read the newspapers or listen to the radio, and it is true that he did once reply, when asked by a schoolchild in 1995 whether he knew who Bill Clinton was, “I believe Bill Clinton is an American political figure, but I’m not certain.” So he’s not up to the minute on the latest information, but that doesn’t mean he’s not as adept a businessman as any guy in a suit with a subscription to the Economist. Eustace is a shrewd, keen, and potentially ruthless operator—in the best sense of that word.

Still, this business side is an aspect of Eustace that people generally do not see, not unless they happen to be the people who draw the tax maps down in the Town Hall of Boone, North Carolina. People don’t see that calculating side of Eustace Conway because he doesn’t talk about it as much as he talks about listening to the sound of the drizzling rain and how to start a fire without a match. Hey, that’s not what he’s getting paid to talk about. But that’s not the only reason people don’t see it. For the most part, people don’t see that hard business edge of Eustace because they don’t want to see it. Because they’re afraid that if they look too closely at that side of him, it might spoil the nice image of the buckskin, the teepee, the single shot with the antique musket, the hand-carved wooden bowl, and the wide-open and peaceful smile. That’s the image they need today, the image they’ve always needed.

“Chivalrous in the manners and free as the winds,” as the British travel writer Isabel Lucy Bird described the men of the nineteenth-century American West.

“My Primitive Pagan Savage,” as Valarie Spratlin said, back when she was first falling in love with Eustace.

It’s what we all think to ourselves, back when we’re first falling in love with Eustace. Those of us who do, anyway. And we are legion. I know the feeling. I too had that moment of thinking this was the first truly authentic man I’d ever met, the kind of person I’d traveled to Wyoming as a twenty-two-year-old to find (indeed, to become)—a genuine soul uncontaminated by modern rust. What makes Eustace seem, on first encounter, like the last of some noble species is that there is nothing “virtual” about his reality. This is a guy who lives, quite literally, the life that, for the rest of the country, has largely become a metaphor.

Think of the many articles one can find every year in the Wall Street Journal describing some entrepreneur or businessman as being a “pioneer” or a “maverick” or a “cowboy.” Think of the many times these ambitious modern men are described as “staking their claim” or boldly pushing themselves “beyond the frontier” or even “riding into the sunset.” We still use this nineteenth-century lexicon to describe our boldest citizens, but it’s really a code now, because these guys aren’t actually pioneers; they are talented computer programmers, biogenetic researchers, politicians, or media moguls making a big splash in a fast modern economy.

But when Eustace Conway talks about staking a claim, the guy is literally staking a goddamn claim. Other frontier expressions that the rest of us use as metaphors, Eustace uses literally. He does sit tall in the saddle; he does keep his powder dry; he is carving out a homestead. When he talks about reining in horses or calling off the dogs or mending fences, you can be sure that there are real horses, real dogs, or real fences in the picture. And when Eustace goes in for the kill, he’s not talking about a hostile takeover of a rival company; he’s talking about really killing something.

I remember one time when I was at Turtle Island helping Eustace with some blacksmithing. Eustace’s little blacksmith shop is always in action. He’s a competent smith in the old-style farm manner, which is to say that he’s not crafting fine iron filigree; he’s repairing his farm equipment and fitting shoes to his horses. On this day, Eustace was heating iron rods to fix a broken piece on his antique mower. He had a number of irons cooking in his forge at the same time and, distracted by trying to teach me the basics of blacksmithing, he allowed several of them to get too hot, to the point of compromising the strength of the metal. When he saw this, he said, “Damn! I have too many irons in the fire.”

Which was the first time I had ever heard that expression used in its proper context. But such is the satisfaction of being around Eustace; everything suddenly seems to be in its proper context. He makes true a notion of frontier identity that has long since passed most men of his generation, most of whom are left with nothing but the vocabulary. And the frontier vocabulary has outlived our actual frontier, because we’ve based our American masculine identity on that brief age of exploration and romantic independence and westward settlement. We hold on to that identity, long after it has any actual relevance, because we like the idea so much. That’s why, I believe, so many men in this country carry a residual notion of themselves as pioneers.

I think particularly of my Uncle Terry, who was born on a farm in Minnesota and raised by the children of American pioneers. Terry, a sensitive and intelligent baby boomer, couldn’t get off that homestead fast enough. He came East, started his own business, and now spends his days working as a computer expert. Several years ago Terry got into the computer game called Oregon Trail. The idea of the game was that you, the player, are a nineteenth-century American pioneer, heading West on a wagon trail with your family. To win the game, you have to make it to the Pacific, surviving a large number of virtual hardships, including disease, unexpected snowstorms, attacks by Indians, and starvation across rugged mountain passes. The better prepared you are—in terms of having packed the correct supplies and having selected the safest route—the better your chance of survival.

Uncle Terry loved this game and spent hours at the computer struggling to virtually head westward, much as his grandparents had struggled to literally head in the same direction a century earlier. But there was one thing that frustrated Terry about the game: the computer program didn’t allow him to improvise in the face of disaster. He’d suddenly get a message on the screen telling him that the axle on his wagon had broken and that he was going to die because he couldn’t proceed. The computer had proclaimed this virtual pioneer a failure. Game over, Terry would stand up from his desk and head to the refrigerator, cursing in annoyance. He’d fetch himself another beer and disparage the game’s designers, comically offended.

“If I were really out there on the Oregon Trail, I know I could solve this!” he’d say. “I could figure out how to fix a damn axle. I’m not an idiot! I’d cut down a tree, rig something up!”

He probably could. Not only was Terry raised on a farm; he spent his idealistic youth tramping through the wilderness of America seeking his own kind of independence. Faced with the trials of the Oregon Trail, Terry probably would survive. But he’s not out there proving this all day long. On the other hand, Eustace Conway is. Eustace does take his animals across the continent, does endure all manner of hardship, does figure out how to rig something up when the axle snaps.

Where it gets tricky is our deciding what we want Eustace Conway to be, in order to fulfill our notions of him, and then ignoring what doesn’t fit into our first-impression romantic image. My initial reaction on witnessing Eustace Conway’s life was relief. When I first heard of his life and his adventures, all I could think was Thank God. Thank God somebody in America was still living this way. Thank God there was at least one genuine mountain man, frontiersman, pioneer, maverick out there. Thank God there was one truly resourceful and independent wild soul left in this country. Because, at some deep emotional level, Eustace’s existence signified to me that somehow it’s still true, that we Americans are, against all other available evidence, a nation where people grow free and wild and strong and brave and willful, instead of lazy and fat and boring and unmotivated.

Or that’s how I felt when I first met Eustace, and that’s how I’ve since witnessed dozens of other people react when they first meet him. The initial reaction of many Americans, particularly men, when they catch a glimpse of Eustace Conway’s life is: “I want to do what you’re doing.” In fact, on closer examination, they probably don’t. While they’re a little embarrassed by the ease and convenience of their modern lives, chances are they’re not that ready to walk away from it all. Not so fast, buddy . . .

Most Americans probably don’t want to live off the land in any way that would involve real discomfort, but they still catch a thrill from Eustace’s continual assurance that “You can!” Because that’s what most of us want to hear. We don’t want to be out there in a snowstorm on the Oregon Trail, fixing the broken axle of a covered wagon; we want to feel as though we could do it if we had to. And Eustace lives as he does in order to provide us with that comforting proof.

“You can!” he keeps telling us.

And we keep believing him, because he does!

He is our mythical inner self, made flesh, which is why it’s comforting to meet him. Like seeing a bald eagle. (As long as there’s one left, we think, maybe things aren’t so bad, after all.) Of course, embodying the mythical hopes of an entire society is a pretty big job for one man, but Eustace has always been up for it. And people also sense that in him; they sense his self-assurance of being large enough to serve as a living metaphor, of being strong enough to carry all our desires on his back. So it’s safe to idolize him, which is an exciting experience in this callow, disillusioned age when it’s not safe to idolize anybody. And people get a little dizzy with that excitement, a little irrational. I know, because I’ve been there.

One of my favorite pastimes is to go back and reread the entry in my own journal from about the time Eustace and Judson Conway came to visit me in New York City. I especially like the part where I first meet Eustace and describe him as “Judson’s charming and wild and completely guileless older brother.”

Charming? No doubt.

Wild? Absolutely.

Guileless? Guess again, sister.

There is nothing remotely guileless about this guy, and nowhere is that more evident than in his land deals. People who go up the mountain to see Eustace Conway and his land seldom ask themselves where that land came from. Turtle Island matches Eustace so completely that people believe it grew out of him or he grew out of it. Like everything Eustace represents to the public, his land seems detached from the corruptive processes of our degraded modern society. Against all reason, people find Turtle Island to be a tiny last parcel of the American frontier. And Eustace certainly couldn’t have done anything as crass as buying the place; he must have just claimed it.

We can see Eustace through the eyes of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, a nineteenth-century Argentine intellectual who once visited America long enough to see how “this independent farmer looks for fertile lands, a picturesque spot, something beside a navigable river; and when he has made up his mind, as in the most primitive times in the world’s history, he says, ‘This is mine!’ and without further ado takes possession of the land in the name of the Kings of the World: Work and Good Will.” We love this idea so much that thinking any differently about Eustace or about how he nailed his domain would ruin our marvelous and reassuring vision of him as the Last American Man. But the story of Eustace Conway is the story of American manhood. Shrewd, ambitious, energetic, aggressive, expansive—he stands at the end of a long and illustrious line of the same.

There’s nothing anachronistic about his savvy ways. We want Eustace to be Davy Fuckin’ Crockett? Well, fine. Who exactly do we think Davy Crockett was? He was a congressman, that’s who. He was from the backwoods, sure, and he was a gifted hunter who had killed a bear with a knife (although probably not when he was a toddler), but he was also slick as all hell and he knew how to exploit his backwoods charisma for political advantage. In a debate with an aristocratic political opponent, the Tennessee woodsman was asked whether he agreed that there should be a radical change “in the judiciary at the next session of legislature.” Crockett (dressed in rugged buckskin) won over the local crowd by drawling innocently that he had no idea there was such a thing as a creature called “a judiciary.” Which was charming and funny, sure, although probably not true, since Crockett had been working in and around the judiciary for years—as a justice of the peace, a court referee, a town commissioner, and now as a member of the state legislature.

Crockett was a brilliant self-promoter who could always be counted on to give a reporter a witty, hillbilly sound bite or a dramatic tall tale about an encounter with some wild and dangerous “varmut.” He was cunning enough to carefully time the release of his heroic memoirs, The Life and Adventures of Colonel David Crockett of West Tennessee, to coincide with his 1833 congressional election campaign. “What a miserable place a city is,” moaned Crockett. And then went to live in Washington, D.C., anyhow, where he willingly got in bed with his Northeastern Whig rivals in order to see that, appropriately enough, his beloved land bill was passed.

In fact, these famous backwoods American guys all got to be famous backwoods American guys through their intelligence and ambition and carefully styled self-representations. Daniel Boone, the very model of a free-living frontiersman, was a real estate speculator (indeed, a developer) of the highest order. He founded the Kentucky town of Boonesborough and subsequently filed over twenty-nine legal claims to land, eventually owning thousands of acres. He embroiled himself in litigation over border disputes, including one nasty case that he fought through the colonial court system for more than twenty-three years. (Even in the eighteenth century, even for Daniel Boone, the process of landownership was more bureaucratically complicated than the statement “This is mine!” Boone knew how the world worked. As he wrote to one fellow settler, “No Dout you are Desireous your Land Bisness Should be Dunn, but that is a thing impossible without money.”)

There happen to be a lot of heroic moments in American history that would have been impossible without money. The reason Daniel Boone became famous was that he entered into a business deal with a schoolteacher from Pennsylvania named John Filson, whose family also owned a lot of land in Kentucky and who was looking for a way to publicize the state and thus increase the value of his property. Filson ended up writing a thrilling book, The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boone, which became a best seller and, as intended, a lure for settlers to come down to Kentucky and buy up all that good Boone-and Filson-owned land. It was a vastly profitable and clever venture on Boone’s part, and it also made him an icon in his own lifetime.

Both Boone and Crockett were much sharper businessmen than you might have guessed by watching their TV shows in the 1950s. (“The rippin’est, roarin’est, fightin’est man the frontier ever knew!”) And they weren’t the only clever ones. Kit Carson had dozens of adventure novels written about him and published in New York City while he was still alive (Kit Carson: Knight of the Plains; Kit Carson: The Prince of the Goldhunters, among others). And Carson’s old boss, the explorer John Frémont, was smart enough to add a little romantic dash to his congressionally commissioned exploration reports to make them national best-sellers. Even Lewis and Clark knew how to sell it. When they were returning from their famous expedition, they outfitted themselves all rugged and cool when they sailed up the river into St. Louis to be welcomed by a thousand cheering residents and no small number of newspaper reporters, one of whom wrote, with admiration, “They really did have the appearance of Robinson Crusoes—dressed entirely in buckskin.”

So when Eustace Conway hustles himself “a slick little business deal” or when he trades land for land or when he writes in his journal, “I just put together a big packet of news articles for publicity; there are probably 35 major news articles done on me over the years—this will be an impressive packet for selling myself,” or when he exploits his mountain man persona to get himself an audience, he is not betraying his frontier American forefathers in any way; he’s honoring them. They would recognize immediately what he’s up to, and they would admire it, because running that kind of savvy operation is what success has always been about on this continent.

“Working seven days a week, all hours of the day for a year now,” Eustace wrote in his journal after Turtle Island had been open a few years. “I guess I am a good example of striving for a high goal, dependent not on immediate returns but on the vision of the future, totally a part of my social and philosophical upbringing. My grand-dad set an example in many ways with Sequoyah. Even now, a horned owl calls, reminding me of him as the warmth of the fire lives with me.”

He didn’t owe his father money anymore (“and it is truly a happy day to be releasing this burden”), but there was no end of other chalt lenges facing him. It was an effort of organization to get Boys’ Camp and Girls’ Camp running at Turtle Island every summer. And there were the realities of dealing with the kids themselves. Someone would cut his hand on sharp obsidian and need stitches; someone would get poison ivy; someone would get caught smoking pot and have to be sent home because of Eustace’s lifelong straight-edge intolerance for drugs.

Not to mention the issues of staffing. His personal standards of excellence being what they were, Eustace soon realized it was going to be one difficult task to find solid workers whom he could trust. For a while, his brothers, Judson and Walton, worked for Eustace as counselors. They were great, but they had their own lives going and couldn’t be relied on to teach at Turtle Island forever. Walton had finished college and was heading to Europe, where he would live for several years. Judson was already yearning to spend his summers in the West and would soon take off on his own adventures, riding boxcars and hitchhiking. (“I was recently backpacking in the Wind River Range of Wyoming,” Judson wrote to Eustace in a typically exuberant postcard. “I fought an early blizzard for 15 miles above the timberline—12,000 feet. It came close to taking my life. It was great fun. I hope camp is going good. Oh, by the way, I’m a cowboy now.”)

Aside from his brothers, it was extremely tough for Eustace to find people who would work as hard (or nearly as hard) as he did and still give him the respect he felt he deserved. For a man who often said that he found the idea of a mere eight-hour workday “disgusting,” Eustace was rarely satisfied with his employees’ efforts. They would come to Turtle Island “awed, amazed, and in love with this place” (as one ex-employee wrote) and then seem shocked that they had to work so hard. Again and again, he lost his team, either by their deserting or by his firing them.

He wished he could magically have the staunch staff his grandfather had worked with at Camp Sequoyah back in the 1930s, instead of these petulant modern kids with all their feelings and needs. His grandfather had demanded purity and perfection, and, by and large, he got it. If Chief so much as heard a rumor that a counselor had been seen smoking a cigarette in town on his day off, that counselor would come back to camp and find his bags packed for him. Chief never concerned himself with trampling on people’s feelings or being labeled as “unfair.” He had ultimate authority, which was all Eustace was asking for. That, and a commitment from people to try to work as hard as he did. Which was a tall order.

I’ve worked with Eustace Conway. Nobody gets to visit Turtle Island without working. I spent a week up there one autumn helping Eustace build a cabin. There were three of us on the job—Eustace, myself, and a quiet and steadfast young apprentice named Christian Kaltrider. We worked twelve hours each day, and I don’t recall lunch breaks. Silent, steady work. The way Eustace works, it’s like a march—numbing and constant. You get the feeling you’re in a platoon. You stop thinking and just give in to the pace. Eustace is the only one who speaks at all when it’s work time, and that’s to issue commands, which he does with unassailable authority, although every command is polite. There was only one moment in the process where he stopped working. Eustace asked me to please go to his pile of tools and fetch him an adz.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I don’t know what that is.”

He described the adz for me—a tool that resembles an ax, but with a curved blade set at a right angle to the handle, used for dressing wood. I found the tool and was walking back toward the cabin to return it, when Eustace suddenly put down his hammer, stood up, wiped his forehead, and said, “I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the word ‘adz’ used in literature. Wasn’t it Hemingway who wrote about the sound of the adz coming from a front yard where someone was building a coffin?”

I slapped a horsefly on my neck and offered, “Are you possibly thinking of Faulkner? I think there’s a scene in As I Lay Dying where Faulkner describes the sound of someone building a coffin in a front yard.”

“Yes, of course,” Eustace said. “Faulkner.”

And he returned to work. Left me standing there with an adz in my hand, staring at him. Yes, of course. Faulkner. Now, back to work everybody.

Eustace wanted to finish the floor of the cabin by sundown that day, so we were working fast. He was so eager to get the job done that he used a chain saw to cut up the bigger logs. Eustace was sawing through a log when the chain saw hit a knot, kicked back, and jumped up toward his face. He deflected it with his left hand, sawing into two of his fingers.

He made one quick sound like “Rah!” and pulled back his hand. The blood started pumping out. Christian and I froze, silent. Eustace shook his hand once, sending out a shower of blood, and then recommenced sawing. We waited for him to say something or try to stop the bleeding, which was fairly prolific, but he didn’t. So we both kept at our work. He continued bleeding and sawing and hammering and bleeding and sawing more. By the end of the day, Eustace’s entire arm, the logs, the tools, both of my hands, and both of Christian’s hands were covered with blood.

And I thought, Ah, so this is what’s expected of us.

We worked until dusk and headed back to base camp. I walked next to Eustace, and his arm hung down, dripping. We passed a flowering bush and, always the teacher, he said, “Now, that’s an interesting sight. You don’t usually see jewelweed with both orange and yellow blossoms on one plant. You can make an ointment out of the stem, you know, to relieve the itching of poison ivy.”

“Very interesting,” I said.

Only after dinner did Eustace bandage his savaged hand. He mentioned the incident just once, saying, “I’m lucky I didn’t saw my fingers off.”

Later that night I asked Eustace what his most serious injury had been, and he said he’d never been seriously injured. One time he did slice open his thumb in a careless moment while dressing a deer carcass. It was a deep, long cut “with the meat hanging out and everything,” and it clearly needed stitches. So Eustace stitched it, using a needle and thread and the stitch he knows well from sewing buckskin. Healed just fine.

“I don’t think I could sew up my own skin,” I said.

“You can do anything you believe you can do.”

“I don’t believe I could sew up my own skin.”

Eustace laughed and conceded, “Then you probably couldn’t.”

“People have such a hard time getting things done out here,” Eustace complained in his journal in 1992. “The environment is so new. It really isn’t a problem for them. It is my stress over their slow, ignorant pace that bothers me. They’re blissfully enjoying every minute.”

Challenges were coming at Eustace from every direction. A friend pointed out that it was a mistake for Eustace not to carry personal health insurance. “But I’m healthy!” he protested. So his friend explained that if Eustace were to be seriously injured in an accident and needed intensive care, the hospital could raid all his assets, including the value of his land, to cover the expense. Jesus Christ! Eustace had never thought of such a thing before. Plus he had no end of taxes to manage and surveying to pay for. Plus he had to deal with poachers on his land. He ran down on foot some dumb young kid who dropped a buck out of season with an illegal gun just a few hundred feet from Eustace’s kitchen. Even more horrifying, he himself had been accused of poaching.

He was teaching a class of eighty young students one afternoon when four government cars and eight lawmen pulled up and arrested him for poaching deer. Tipped off by a resentful neighbor, the game warden went straight to Eustace’s cache of dozens of deerskins and accused Eustace of having killed the animals without a permit. In fact, the skins had been given to Eustace by people who wanted them tanned. It was a terrifying moment.

Eustace had to spend the next month collecting letters of evidence from every person who had given him a deerskin, as well as documents from environmentalists and politicians across the South swearing that Eustace Conway was a committed naturalist who would never hunt more than was legally allowed. On the day of his trial, though, he had the balls to wear his deerskin pants to the courtroom. Why not? It’s what he always wore. He strode into his trial looking like Jeremiah goddamn Johnson. Ma-Maw, the elderly Appalachian neighbor who lived down the holler and who hated the Law as much as the next hillbilly, came with Eustace to give him moral support. (“I’m afraid the judge might take these buckskin pants right off me and throw me in jail,” Eustace joked to Ma-Maw, who said sternly, “Don’t you worry. I have my bloomers on under this skirt. If they steal your pants, I’ll just take off my bloomers and give ’em to you. You can just wear my bloomers to jail, Houston!”) Ma-Maw loved all the Conway boys, but she never could get their names quite right . . .

When his time came to speak, Eustace gave the judge the most eloquent and impassioned earful about his life and dreams and visions of saving nature, until the judge—amazed and impressed—said, as he was signing the papers to dismiss the poaching charges, “Is there anything I can do to help you with Turtle Island, son?”

Eustace also had to deal with such trials as a letter that the Triangle Native American Society sent to the mayor of Garner, North Carolina. The letter expressed the society’s concern over “information we have received about an individual who will be participating in an event being sponsored by your town on October 12. The person in question is Mr. Eustace Conway . . . It is our understanding that Mr. Conway presents information to the general public and special interest groups on how to survive and live off Mother Earth in as simple a way as possible. He has also been known to set up structures commonly known as tepees. Indians living in the Northeast and Southeast sections of this country never lived in tepees. North Carolina Indians lived in structures called ‘long houses.’We are seriously concerned that individuals attending the special event will leave it with three very wrong impressions: (a) Mr. Conway is a Native American, (b) Mr. Conway represents and speaks for native people, and (c) North Carolina Indians lived in tepees. We humbly ask that Mr. Conway not be allowed to erect the structure commonly known as a tepee for the reasons cited above.”

This was exactly the kind of shit Eustace had no time for. For the love of God, if there was anyone on the planet who knew that North Carolina Indians didn’t live in teepees, it was Eustace Conway, who had studied the languages of most North Carolina Indian tribes, who could dance the most obscure dances of North Carolina Indian tribes, who regularly fed himself using the hunting techniques of North Carolina Indian tribes and who was always careful to explain to his audiences that he himself was the product of modern white American culture (in order to prove that anyone could live as he does) and that the teepee was a housing method of the Great Plains. Also, as he explained in his reply, “I am more than just ‘an Anglo imitating the ways of the Native American,’ not just a ‘hobbyist.’ I have a deep understanding and peace with the Indian way. . . . I guess you can’t convey such feelings in a written letter . . . but in passing the pipe, living on Mother Earth, and listening to the winged ones of the air and the four-legged ones of the ground, I am honoring all the powers of the universe.”

And then there were the goddamn health inspectors.

“One of the first days of camp,” he wrote in his journal in July 1992, “Judson came running up to get me. I thought someone was hurt. Instead, the health inspectors in suits were coming up to inspect camp. Well, I put on a white shirt and went down to meet the demons. I kept my attitude positive—explained how this was a unique camp. I showed them all around—the camp sites, latrine, kitchen (which was very clean)—and charmed them as much as I could. They got an admiration of what we are doing. David Shelly, a young camper, gave them a knife-sharpening demonstration and lesson—impressive. They told me they would ‘sleep on it’ to see if they could figure out a way to accept our nonstandard situation.”

His work was endless. For all his love of the winged ones of the air and the four-legged ones of the ground, he hardly had time to write his nature observations in his journals.

“I really enjoy seeing the pileated woodpecker fly over in its dipping flight,” he managed to finally scribble down one morning at four a.m. when his day’s work had ended. “I hear them all day long, it seems. Nice to have this treasured bird as background music. Crows aplenty and an occasional hawk. Ruby-crowned kinglets are about; one almost flew into my face when I was up on the sacred spot above the meadow-to-be. Deer tracks around, but I haven’t seen any turkey this year. I enjoy the change of seasons. I look forward (and I don’t say or think this enough) to the days I will be free to enjoy many of the subtle daily changes of weather and life of the Appalachian valley, here where my heart is, here where I am planting roots, here where I am fighting, here where I hope to die.”

For now, though, that was a distant dream. A more typical entry was, “I called and verified several school bookings last night, always doing paperwork. I think I could do 3 hours a day and not keep caught up. I had to tell a lady last night that I couldn’t do the program in the spring for her school. I had a strange feeling of pride to know I am in enough demand to have to turn work down, but I’m afraid I did not feel proper empathy for her position. I must understand the other side of the picture.”

He was getting so overbooked for speaking engagements that he spent some money on producing a 45-minute video called All My Relatives: The Circle of Life, which he described in a letter to school principals across the South as “a classroom resource that can be used any time of the year.” The video allowed Eustace to be in two places at once. “Not only for history classes, All My Relatives is also well suited for life sciences such as ecology and biology as well as anthropology,” Eustace wrote in the covering letter. “The enclosed flier provides more information, but reading about it does not do it justice; it needs to be seen. I am very pleased with the production and happy that it can be offered to your school at such a reasonable price.”

The fact is, though, that Eustace was becoming less convinced that his speaking tours were doing any good. For a man who had honestly thought he could change the world if he could borrow enough people’s ears for a long enough time, the numbing routine of brief classroom visits was no longer satisfying.

“I met with a sixth-grade class today,” he wrote after one unsettling encounter. “I could not believe the lack of education and inspiration I met with! They [the schoolchildren] were pitiful. . . . No motivation whatsoever. No understanding of their world. Just robots going through an established pattern of living to get by. We are truly on a survival level here—no arts or creativity. No passion. Just a slow monotone existence in oppressed ignorance. I asked if they knew what the word ‘sacred’ meant. They didn’t know. They put money, new cars, and telephones on their lists of what was valuable to them. One out of the fifty had an idea of sacredness. The boy said, ‘Life.’ One small soul in the class was on the right track away from greed as a motivator, and thank goodness for him . . . I was passionately challenged by the situation and gave it a big push, trying to get them to wake up and think, but I don’t feel I got very far. So here we are in the 1990s, where children are now less than human.”

Only two short years after founding Turtle Island, Eustace was starting to burn out. He wrote in his journal in July 1991, “I realize that I really crave time spent alone. I don’t want to be around people. The pressure of this community of folks here at Turtle Island is wearing on me. They take up my time and consume my life . . . The office—everyone wants to sit around, and I can’t get any work done. Yesterday while I was trying to do paperwork, Valarie, Ayal, and Jenny came in and started having a staff discussion. What an invasion of my space! Last night someone turned off the answering machine so it wouldn’t answer— after I have spent 200 hours working on the phone lines. I got ready to take a cold creek bath this morning to cool down but someone had taken my bucket from its place by the creek. I found a rotting sock in the yard. . . . The lambs were left in their pen today (not my responsibility). I let them out and thought of the day I had spent building the pen, and now nobody wants to take responsibility for the lambs.

“What am I to do? I need to figure out how to manage myself and my site so it won’t be so emotionally draining. One impulse is to quit all of the activities that we do here. That would solve the problem, but that would not be good for the camp and the purpose of the center. . . . What is important? Boundaries (personal) are at stake here. Should I please others or myself? I have worked very hard to make this place what it is. What have they done? What investment have they ever made in anything that is a challenge? How am I to put up with them? Should I? Money transfers is a way that people can help—to give something to me that I need . . . It is shocking how this takes a toll on me. I am back now after a six-hour depressed nap in the middle of the day . . . What to do? Ideas—delegate authority—get everyone aware of my needs emotionally and give them responsibility for keeping clear. I guess I could not even be here. That’s an idea. Imagine that. So many people to deal with . . . Well, good luck, Eustace.”

By the next year, Eustace was feeling plumb out of luck. He was too exhausted and disillusioned even to complain in his diary. He wrote only one bleak entry for the entire year: “What I feel inspired to write today is this deep emotional dissatisfaction with the reality of our times—corruption of government—fake people—sick values and unconscious people living meaningless lives.”

And, on the next page, written exactly twelve months later, this message: “Ditto, or is it spelled diddo, whatever, from last year’s entry. Except worse. Maybe more cynical.”

Worst of all, he was losing Valarie.

Consumed with his business and frequently on the road, Eustace was rarely with his girlfriend. She was working hard, too, and she was still in love with Eustace, but she was increasingly feeling that she had lost herself in him.

“I still love this man,” Valarie told me, looking back on the relationship with fifteen years of distance. “I still have every gift he made for me, from a knife sheath decorated with beads to a little hatchet I always used up at Turtle Island to a beautiful pair of earrings. If I died tomorrow, I’d want to be buried in those earrings. I loved learning from Eustace. I loved how he always gave me do-it-yourself birthday gifts. I told him one time that I wanted a pipe of my own for ceremonies and praying, and I came home one day to find a beautiful piece of soapstone on the kitchen counter. ‘What is that?’ I asked. He said, ‘It’s your pipe, Valarie.’ ‘I don’t get it,’ I said. ‘Where is it?’And he grinned that wonderful Eustace Conway grin and said, ‘It’s inside the stone, honey. We just have to get it out of there together.’

“I loved him, but I lost my identity in his, because he’s so overwhelming and powerful. I had my own thing going in life before I met him, but I quickly became the person who was beneath him, and my world started to revolve around his. He was and is a loving but intolerant person. Someone else’s opinion was never welcome. He was obsessed with making money, with buying land, with success, and he was always on the road. It got to the point where I never saw him. The only time we spoke was when he gave me orders.”

Valarie and Eustace had a good mutual friend, a Native American guy named Henry, who often went to powwows with them and who taught at Turtle Island. After a few years of loneliness and dissatisfaction, after feeling more and more that she was nothing but “the First Lady of Turtle Island,” Valarie had an affair with Henry. She hid the relationship from Eustace and denied that it had ever happened, even when, suspicious, he had asked her directly. Eustace, knowing something was up, took Henry off for a private evening to smoke a ceremonial pipe, and asked point blank whether he’d slept with Valarie. It is the most sacred tenet of Native American spiritually not to lie when smoking the pipe, but Henry looked Eustace in the eye and denied the affair.

Eustace was in torment. He knew in his heart that something was wrong and that he didn’t have all the facts. Devastated, he broke up with Valarie because he felt he couldn’t trust her. A few months after they split, Valarie came back, told him the truth, and begged for forgiveness.

But you don’t lie to Eustace Conway and then get a second chance. He was too horrified to even consider taking her back or transcending the injury. It blew him apart to learn that he could not find trust in this most intimate of relationships. And after all the pain he had suffered from his father, he had promised himself to banish from his life immediately anyone who would deliberately hurt or betray him. She would have to go. Eustace meditated and anguished for a year over the question of whether he could ever trust her again, and in the end he acknowledged that he could not reach that point of forgiveness.

“Truth is sacred to me,” he wrote to Valarie, telling her why they could no longer be together. “It is me. I live by it. I die by it. I asked you for the truth. I told you that you should always tell me the truth . . . that I did not care how much it would hurt. I begged for the truth. . . . You shit on me, you shit on our truth. What does this show about your ability to fulfill my needs? Go to hell. Goddamn! This is enough . . . How much abuse can I take? I have already witnessed my Dad’s cruelty . . . I needed your support—I got a backstabbing. I love you so much. You are precious. I could just hold you and pet your sweet head forever, but my truthful self has said, enough is enough!”

And as for his friend Henry?

“To smoke the pipe with me when I was coming in need and praying and asking for the truth? And you lied like a motherfucker. You need to die. Break the pipe in half and shove the stem through your heart and you will share an inkling of the pain I know. Now the woman I wanted to marry is a whore. You don’t deserve to be a human being. Fuck yourself and die.”

“I do see and understand,” Valarie wrote to Eustace, months after they’d separated, “how you can feel the need to avoid accepting any responsibility for the disintegration and ultimate failure of our relationship, because that would mean that you would have to admit that maybe, just maybe, you own a part in creating the pain which you and I now experience. To admit that might force you to take a good, hard look at yourself, and, as we both know, you don’t have the time, the willingness, or even, excuse my bluntness, the humility to consider this. Believe me, I’m not trying to lessen my responsibility for what I did, but only trying to help you see the whole picture. And, yes, it’s much easier to place all the blame for pain on another: ‘My folks made me this way,’ ‘The government is screwing up the planet,’ or ‘Valarie broke my heart’ . . . Your wanting to break up with me, because, as you said, ‘I shit on your heart,’ and you can’t go back on your promise to yourself not to accept anything but truth sounds great to you, I’m sure . . . But if love is real it endures all, forgives all, and even survives all. . . . In the process of going through a painful experience, you could have gained a woman who finally realized how to love and be loved, a woman who understood you, loved you, believed in you, supported you and gave up everything to be a part of your dream. Don’t you realize that you’re throwing away the greatest gift? A woman who accepts your faults, shortcomings, mental cruelties, and, yes, even your weirdness, and still loves you through it all. YOU GODDAMN STUPID CONCEITED ASSHOLE.”

It was a dreadful year.

But years pass. And so do heartaches. Soon after Valarie left, along came Mandy. “Hello, Beautiful,” Eustace wrote to this new love. “I appreciate getting to know you better . . . you have a lot to offer. When you can open up to this world we will be blessed for it. I feel dizzy learning you, dizzy meeting you. I do feel we were meant to come together. . . . When I am with you I feel young and innocent. I could smile into your eyes forever . . .”

Then Mandy left, and along came Marcia. “I am high from meeting Marcia. She has been a blessing to me—an inspiration and a new hope. I pray for God’s guidance in all that I do.”

Then along came Dale. “So kind, so supportive, she shares my vision as well as anyone.”

Then there was Jenny. “A beautiful girl with black hair and a long white linen dress . . . what will become of you, of me, of desires, of dreams?”

Then there was Amy. “Beautiful long hair, innocent, radiant smile, I met her when I was teaching a workshop in a school, and she was so beautiful I could hardly concentrate on my words. I just kept staring at her and then went up to her after class and said, ‘Can I spend some time with you?’”

Eustace ended up spending a good deal of time with Amy. She was a graduate student in science, brilliant and serious, and she turned out to be a great helper. He spent a week with her in her family’s summer house on Cape May, New Jersey, and wrote in his journal:

“We have been housebound the week I have been here. We have gotten into paperwork for Turtle Island, with Amy typing things out on her computer and printing out master copies for me to Xerox later or mail out or whatever is appropriate . . . summer camp brochure, summer camp application, medical information and release form, lists of what should be in first-aid kits, emergency plan cards and hospital maps . . . a letter to Cabell Gragg to encourage him to sell me the land in 1994, a letter to the Turtle Island staff to thank and encourage them, list of staff members, names and phone numbers for my calendar, workshop advertisement for spring classes, list of what to bring and not to bring (revised) and orientation for campers when they come . . . confirmation contracts and more . . . Wow. Amy is very good at coming up with first-class results—a bit slow, but top-quality finished product.”

Then Amy was gone, her letters filed away in an envelope that Eustace labeled: “A fantasy with Amy that was spoiled by reality—dreams turned into education. At least I lived it for what it is and learned.”

Then there was Tonya, the beautiful and mysterious Aboriginal rock-climber. Eustace and Tonya went off to New Zealand and Australia for a few months and climbed every cliff and mountain they could find. She was stunning and powerful, and Eustace truly loved her, but he believed there was something hidden in her soul that held back from loving him completely, and, anyway, it was hard for Eustace to give his heart to her as much as he might have liked to because of the recent memory of the one woman who had almost broken him in half with passion and desire and misery.

That was Carla. Carla, the beautiful and mysterious Appalachian folk singer, was the massive love of Eustace Conway’s life. He met her at a folk festival where he was speaking and she was singing. (“You should have seen this girl on stage playing her guitar with her long hair and miniskirts, dancing and grinding all over the place until you damn near had to mop up the whole world, she was that hot.”) Eustace withered and melted and collapsed into love for Carla, and to this day thinks she’s the closest to an ideal he’s ever encountered.

“She was amazing. Here was this beautiful, modern Appalachian woman, a genuine coal miner’s daughter from Kentucky who had skills from four generations back of the people I admire the most in my culture. She was like a goddess to me. She played music, wrote, danced, was the best cook I’ve ever met . . . was wild and free and brave and brilliant and confident and with an incredible, flexible, muscular, bronzed body. She worked with horses, could play any instrument, could cook a pie over an open fire, make medicinal herbs, make her own soap, could butcher livestock, wanted to have lots of children . . . was the most capable and generous and insatiable lover I’ve ever met. God, I could go on and on! . . . She was a true child of nature, and she wore sexy gingham old-timey dresses and danced through the woods like a young deer. And she was so talented it made me feel I would drop everything to help her advance her career as a musician. And she was much smarter than me! And she could sew and she could draw! And she could spell! She could do anything! This woman was a dream beyond even my capacity to dream, and I’m a goddamn dreamer!”

Almost immediately, Eustace asked Carla to marry him. And she threw back her head with laughter and said, “It would be my pleasure, Eustace.”

So they got engaged, and Carla moved up to Turtle Island. Now, looking back, Carla says there were serious problems from the start. “I felt he was a kindred spirit at first. But it was no more than six weeks into the relationship that I saw things about him that frightened me. I come from an old-fashioned and rigid Appalachian patriarchy, so I was very sensitive about some of the gender roles I saw Eustace playing out. In some ways, he had a true egalitarian sense about women, but every time he got furious at me for not putting dinner on the table exactly at the right time, it made me really nervous.

“Also, my family disliked Eustace intensely. They thought he was disingenuous, a con artist. They were concerned about the power he had over me. We’d only just met when he came to my family’s house, had a quick dinner with my parents, packed up my belongings, and took me away. My family is really close, and they felt like I’d been stolen. Eustace thought my family was turning me against him, so he tried to keep me isolated from them. Well, when my father and my brothers realized that, they practically loaded their guns onto their truck to come and get me back.”

It wasn’t long before Carla, a world-class free spirit, began to drift. Soon, she was involved with someone else. Eustace discovered her indiscretion in the strangest way. He got an enormous phone bill one month—hundreds of dollars of phone calls placed from his office in the middle of the night to the same number. Curious, Eustace dialed the number, and when a man answered, Eustace explained his situation. Then he had an inspiration.

“You don’t happen to know someone named Carla, do you?” he asked.

“Sure,” said the guy. “She’s my girlfriend.”

“No kidding,” Eustace said. “And here I thought she was my fiancée.”

It seems that Carla had been sneaking out of the teepee every night and hiking down to the office to call this sexy banjo player she’d been having an affair with. Another betrayal. This was not, as the old cowboy song goes, Eustace Conway’s first rodeo. And, as we know, Eustace is not a man who can live with someone he perceives to be a liar and cheat. Carla had to go. It had been a marathon love affair, and now it was over.

Eustace was unraveled by it. He was flattened. He was riven.

In December 1993, he wrote in his journal: “Fighting depression, resentment, and pain. It really hurts, the relationship with Carla, the rejection, the ‘not working out.’ I have never tried so hard—I gave it everything I had. I have never hurt so much.”

He was thirty-two years old and was shocked to look around and suddenly notice that, while he had accomplished much through sheer force of will, he didn’t have a wife and children. By this point, he should have been well into a family. Where was the beautiful woman with the loose curls and the gingham dress making buttermilk pancakes in the breaking light of dawn? Where were the strong and sturdy youngsters, playing quietly on the cabin floor and learning from their gentle father how to whittle hickory? Where had Eustace gone wrong? Why couldn’t he keep these women he fell in love with? They always seemed oppressed or overwhelmed by him. And he didn’t feel they understood him or supported him. Maybe he was picking the wrong kind of person. Maybe he was incapable of sustaining intimacy or was too fearful of being hurt to let a relationship take its often twisty turns. Maybe he needed to try a new approach. It was becoming clear that, in love, Eustace was failing to make this most essential connection.

He asked a friend who was a psychologist to come to Turtle Island for a walk one day. He took her in the woods and told her that he feared that there was something wrong with him emotionally, that he couldn’t make his relationships with other people work. The folks he labored with at Turtle Island were always angry at him or misunderstanding him, and he wasn’t as close to his brothers as he would like to be, and he was always driving women away or not getting close enough to trust people. He told her about his childhood and confessed that he still held a lot of pain about his father and wondered whether this was all connected.

“I think I need to talk to a professional,” he said.

The psychologist answered, “Everything you need to make you happy, Eustace, is right here in this forest. Modern psychology isn’t for you. You’re the healthiest person I know.”

Man, do people ever get a dream of Eustace Conway in their minds and then make it stick. This woman must have been so compelled by a Thoreau-inspired and idealized vision of life in the wilderness (“There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of nature and has his senses still”) that she didn’t want to take a closer look at someone who was not a concept, but a real and afflicted person. Maybe it would have cost her too much to let go of her idea of Eustace. It’s hard to blame her; she wouldn’t have been the first woman to deny all appearances to keep this pagan savage as pure in her heart as he was the day she first met him.

Not necessarily convinced, and still deeply depressed, Eustace tried his father one more time.

“I am psychologically sick,” he wrote to his dad, “beaten down by years of oppression. I am damaged. I hurt. Every day I wake up and I am in pain over this. Show this letter to a psychologist and see if they have any advice for me. Please don’t misunderstand my most sincere gratitude for the help you give me with chores like money management. I do very much appreciate it. I hope that rather than be interpreted as an ‘attack,’my emotional truths can be appreciated as fuel for growth and understanding. A healthier relationship is my goal, not a more aggravated one. Respectfully, Eustace.”

Again, no response.

I know Eustace Conway’s parents well. I’ve been a guest in their home and eaten dinner with them many times. Like everybody else, I call Mrs. Conway “Big Mom,” and, like everyone else, I adore her. I love her generosity and her stories about when she lived in Alaska. I love that, whenever I come to her door, she hugs me and says, “There’s our mountain girl!”

And I must admit that I enjoy being around Eustace Conway’s father. I like his intelligence and his wit, and I find him to be endlessly inquisitive in the same bizarre and precise way as his son; he wants to know exactly how many hours it took me to drive from Boone to Gastonia, and when I tell him, he calculates immediately (and correctly) that I must have stopped for forty-five minutes to have a meal or I would have arrived sooner. His precision, of course, is relentless. Being a “creature of perfect logic,” he doesn’t yield an inch and I can see where he would be impossible to live with. His conversations with his wife are filled with such baffling exchanges:

MRS. CONWAY: There’s a slight chance that Judson will come visit tomorrow.

MR. CONWAY: Why do you say that? You don’t know that to be true at all. Did he call to say he was coming?

MRS. CONWAY: No, but I left a message on his machine to invite him.

MR. CONWAY: Then it’s puzzling to me why you would say that there is a slight chance he’s coming to visit us. Exactly what percentage of a chance do you suppose that would be, Karen, when we haven’t heard from the boy at all? Obviously, we know nothing about whether he will be coming or not. To say that there is a “slight chance” is incorrect and misleading of you.

MRS. CONWAY: I’m sorry.

MR. CONWAY: But nobody listens to my opinions.

So you can imagine.

Still, I can talk to the man. When I visit the Conways, I often talk to Big Eustace about the Wizard of Oz books, the wonderful series of fantasy stories that L. Frank Baum wrote back at the turn of the century. It seems that Big Eustace and I were both raised reading the same beautiful hardcover editions of these books. (In Mr. Conway’s childhood, he received one book a year as a Christmas present, while I inherited the entire antique set from my grandmother.) Most people don’t know that there were sequels to the original Dorothy Gale story, so Big Eustace was delighted to find that I knew the stories well and could recall each lush Art Deco illustration and discuss the most obscure characters. Tik-Tok, Billina the Chicken, the Hungry Tiger, the Gnome King, the Rollers, and Polychrome (the rainbow’s daughter)—I know them all, and so does he, and we can talk about that stuff for hours.

Other times, he takes me out to his yard and teaches me about the birds of North Carolina. And once we went outside at midnight to look at the stars.“Have you seen Mars lately?” Mr. Conway asked. I admitted that I had not, so he pointed it out to me. He told me that he likes to come out every night to follow that planet’s orbit in order to see how close Mars is drifting toward Saturn.

“They’ve been getting closer and closer each day for three months,” he said. “After all, remember what the word ‘planet’ means—wandering body.”

So sometimes Big Eustace and I talk about books and sometimes we talk about opera and sometimes we talk about constellations. But mostly we talk about his son. Big Eustace always wants to know how Little Eustace is doing up there at Turtle Island. Who are his apprentices? Is he planning any big trips? Has he constructed more buildings? How does that treacherous road up the mountain look? Does he seem overworked or depressed?

I try to fill him in. And once—because I cannot stay away from the most silent intimacies of other people’s private lives—I said, “He’s doing well, Mr. Conway, but I believe he is desperate for your approval.”

“That’s nonsense.”

“No, it’s not nonsense. It’s true.”

“He doesn’t ever talk to me,” he answered, “so I never know what’s going on with him. He wants nothing to do with me, apparently.”

Indeed, the two Eustace Conways rarely talk and they see each other even less. The occasional Christmas will just about do it for the year between these two men, and Little Eustace is loath to sleep at his parents’ home because he so dislikes being around his father. Still, one evening in the spring of the year 2000, Eustace returned home to Gastonia to spend the night. It was odd to the point of shocking that he would appear on their doorstep in the middle of May, when there was no big family holiday as a motivator. But Eustace had some lumber he wanted to check out near Gastonia, so he thought he’d drop by for dinner. I went with him.

We pulled up to the house, the house where Eustace had lived the worst years of his life, and found his father standing in the front yard, picking at an old lawn mower, which was small, push-style, beat-up, and fully rusted. Eustace stepped out of the truck and smiled.

“What do you have there, Dad?” he asked.

“This is a perfectly good lawn mower that I found in someone’s trash last night when I was out riding my bicycle.”

“No kidding? Someone threw that away?”

“Isn’t that ridiculous? It’s perfectly good.”

“That’s a nice-looking lawn mower, Dad. Real nice.”

The mower actually looked as if it had been fished out of the bottom of a pond.

“Does it run?” Eustace asked.

“Naturally it runs.”

“Boy, that is nice.”

I had never before seen Eustace Conway and his father together. After all my years of connection to the family, this was the first face-to-face meeting I’d witnessed. I can’t say what I’d expected, but not this— not Eustace leaning against his truck with a casual smile, complimenting his father’s salvaged lawn mower. And not this beaming father, giddy to show off his latest find.

“You can see here, son, that there was a break in one of the handlebars, but I welded a piece of metal over it like so, and now it’s perfectly operable.”

“Nice.”

“Do you have a use for this at Turtle Island?”

“I’ll tell you what, Dad. I can find a use for that lawn mower. I could take the motor out for some other purpose, or I could disassemble it and use the parts, or I could use the mower myself or give it to one of my neighbors. That’d be great. I’d be happy to take it. I can always find a use for things; you know that.”

The next minute, father and son, both grinning, were loading the mower into the back of Eustace’s truck.

Lord, what a dinner it was in Gastonia that night! The two Eustaces entertained each other all evening. They had no eyes for anyone else. I had never seen Mr. Conway so animated, and Eustace, too, was in high form. I swear they were showing each other off to me. They were on fire for each other. And it was more heartbreaking for me to see these two men craving each other’s approval than it would have been to watch them fight. They could not, it seemed, have been more doggedly seeking closeness.

They nudged each other to tell favorite family stories. Eustace got his dad to tell about the time he went to the emergency room with a seriously cut leg and got so irritated that the nurses ignored him that he lay down on the floor in front of the triage desk and refused to move until he was attended to. Then Mr. Conway beamed while Eustace told adventure stories about hiking the Appalachian Trail, specifically about the time he was so thirsty, he drank water from around the carcass of a raccoon he’d found rotting in a stagnant puddle “with blue ribbons of putrefied flesh waving around in the water.” Mr. Conway howled, thrilled by the scene.

“I can’t imagine anyone else who would do such a thing!” he exclaimed.

After dinner, Eustace and his father stepped out into the yard to discuss the health of a certain holly bush that might need to be transplanted. It was a balmy Southern evening, and the sun hung so low in the sky against feathery clouds that the air was everywhere traced with a golden haze. The men stood in the yard, hands in their pockets, talking about the holly. Then, suddenly, there was a birdsong—long and melodic. Like actors cued by the same director, father and son looked up at the same moment.

“What is that?” Eustace asked. “Is that a mockingbird?”

“I don’t know . . .”

Again, the birdsong.

“Whoa,” Eustace said, standing quite still.

“I’ve never heard a mockingbird sing like that,” Mr. Conway said, in a low and intimate voice. “I think it may be a catbird.”

The melody played again—sweet, extended.

“That doesn’t sound like any catbird I’ve ever heard,” Eustace said.

“I have to admit, neither have I. It sounds like a flute, doesn’t it? I don’t know that it could be a mockingbird. I’d swear it was a catbird, but I’ve never heard a catbird sound so . . . harmonic.”

“I’ve heard birds singing like that only in rainforests,” said the son.

“It almost sounds operatic,” said the father.

Quietly, they stood together, heads titled back, gazing up into the dapple of lush foliage from the overgrown dogwood and magnolia. The bird sang as though reading from music, like a soprano warming up for a concert, running through scale after scale. What common North Carolina bird could possibly make such a superb song? They weighed the options. At this season, at this hour, what could it be? The men wore identical expressions of enraptured perplexity as they listened to the bird and heard out each other’s intelligent speculations.

“Can you see it?” Mr. Conway asked.

“You know, Dad, I think it’s coming from around the corner of the house,” Eustace whispered.

“Yes! I think you’re right.”

“Let me go see if I can spot him, figure out what he is.”

“Yes! Go!”

Eustace crept around the corner of his father’s house as the bird sang on. Mr. Conway watched his son with an expression of perfect and relaxed pleasure. His face was all pride and interest. It was a lovely moment.

So I had to ask. “Mr. Conway? Do you think Eustace will find the bird?”

Mr. Conway’s expression of pleasure erased itself swiftly, replaced by a hard and more familiar look—annoyance. The transformation took only an instant, but it was like watching an ugly metal garage door slam down over an attractive storefront. A most unsightly security measure. Clearly, he had forgotten I was there. Had I been eavesdropping? Had I watched the whole scene unfold? And was I now asking him to somehow validate his son?

“No,” Mr. Conway said, firmly. “He won’t find the bird. He’s no good at such things. Now, if one of his brothers was here, he’d find it. Those men have a talent for birds. But not Eustace. He’s hopeless at such things.”

With that, Mr. Conway walked away and into the house. Closed the door behind him. He walked right away from the finest hour of the evening. I was staggered. Would it have been so painful for this man, who was obviously brimming with pleasure, to say a kind word about his son? After all this time? Would it have killed him to yield a single goddamn centimeter once in his life?

Apparently so.

The conclusion of this story, needless to say, is that Eustace Conway did spot that bird. Of course he did. He sneaked up under the bird because he had decided to do so, and because he can do anything he decides to do. He caught it singing and confirmed that it was a catbird, after all—but what a voice! Had ever a catbird sung a prettier song? Eustace confirmed this and then came darting around the corner of the house, bursting with excitement.

“I saw it, Dad!” Little Eustace yelled to Big Eustace, but it was too late.

He glanced around the yard for a moment.

Where was Dad?

Gone.

But why?

Who the hell will ever know?

Eustace had come running around the house with such excitement because he wanted to tell his father what he had seen and learned. He wasn’t doing it for anybody else. But his father wouldn’t hear it, wouldn’t be present to witness it. So Eustace took a breath. Recovered himself. Then he adopted once more the voice of the world’s most sober and weary teacher.

And he told me all about it, instead.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Before him lies a boundless continent, and he urges forward as if time pressed and he was afraid of finding no room for his exertions.

—Alexis de Tocqueville

Eustace owns ten horses at the moment. He’s the first to admit that owning ten horses is absurd and decadent and completely unnecessary for the size of his little farm, but he can’t refuse them when they’re as beautiful as these.

Now, I’ve been around horses. I grew up with people who were magic with horses. My grandfather ran a fine stable, and I’ve worked on a ranch owned by a man who kept his seventy-five horses in line without the least bit of effort, but I have never seen anybody more naturally gifted with horses than Eustace. Horses listen to him. They pay attention. When Eustace walks through his pastures, the horses look up from their grazing to watch him pass, holding still, awaiting word—a devoted harem, a clutch of hopeful brides.

Which is all the more impressive considering that Eustace didn’t grow up with horses and he didn’t own one until ten years ago. He held off for a long time because horses are fussy and take up lots of acreage and money. When you’re living off the land, it’s much easier to feed yourself than it is to feed a horse. But he always knew he would get horses someday. It was part of the master plan. He bought an antique horse-drawn mowing machine, for instance, years before he had either a meadow to mow or a horse to mow it with.

When he’d finally cleared away enough trees to create suitable pastureland up at Turtle Island, he borrowed a big old Percheron mare from a local farmer and used the mare for his campers to ride and for him to practice farming with. The horse was slow and lumbering, but even being around that staid creature got Eustace’s blood going. He wanted more. So he bought himself a solid young draft horse named Bonnie and, with her, learned how to anticipate a horse’s anxiety and intellect, how to make split-second decisions of command, and how to be confident in his orders. Eustace found himself two human teachers, as well—an old hillbilly farmer named Hoy Moretz, who knew everything about breaking livestock in the traditional manner, and a young Mennonite named Johnny Ruhl, who had an intuition for horses that Eustace believed to be unmatched. Eustace would bring his horse over to these men for lessons and then hang around as they worked with their animals, watching and learning. Hoy and Johnny found Eustace to be an ideal student—attentive and talented, and easy to teach, because he seemed to understand intuitively the old country adage about why God gave man two ears and only one mouth: he could shut up and he could listen.

Eustace did a lot of farming and hauling with Bonnie, and she was built for that. She was an ox in horse’s clothing, and he was grateful for her. But he was also fascinated with the idea of taking a horse on the road for some serious distance travel. So every so often he would saddle up his big farm mare and head off into the mountains for a few days at a time, just to get a feel for what it might be like to travel with an animal as a partner. Eustace loved the idea, but Bonnie was definitely not built for such adventures. She was too slow, too thick. Then Eustace began to crave a real riding horse. He wanted a smooth motorcycle instead of the hulking bulldozer that was Bonnie. And so, with the advice and consent of his teachers, in 1994 he bought himself a pure Morgan, a championship endurance racer named Hasty.

Hasty was every bit his name. Moreover, Hasty came to Eustace nicely trained. Where Eustace had had to teach Bonnie how to behave, Hasty now taught Eustace how to behave. Eustace paid close attention and learned quickly, until he and Hasty were equals, able to spend their days teaching each other how to be a pair. Eustace started taking long-distance journeys with Hasty, riding down from the mountains to the North Carolina coast. As he’d expected, he did indeed love the physical challenge of sustaining a fast pace over uncertain terrain with an animal partner and no guarantee of safety. What he hadn’t expected, though, was the intensely heightened level of interaction he was experiencing with regular Americans as he rode through their lives on horseback. There was something about the presence and romance of a horse that drew people in.

The reaction was extraordinary and universal. One New Year’s Day, when Eustace was riding Hasty toward the coast, he passed through a poverty-stricken neighborhood in rural North Carolina. It was all grim run-down shacks and trailers and yards full of rusted cars. As he rode past one ramshackle home, he noticed a huge commotion in the backyard. Maybe a hundred people, all black and all poor, had gathered for a massive family reunion and feast. The smells of barbecuing meat hovered in the cold January air. The entire humble property was rocking and humming with the buzz of celebration. When the people spotted Eustace—this shady and bearded mountain man, this white dude on a horse with a shotgun across his saddle—they laughed and applauded and called out, “Ride on in!” So Eustace swung his horse right into the yard, right into the center of this big family reunion. Just like that, he was family. He was embraced and welcomed and celebrated like any distant cousin. The family crowded around and took turns asking for horseback rides. They had a million questions. They wanted to know everything about Eustace and his utopian message and his destination. They fed him until he could hardly move, stuffed him to the brim with good ham and pies and collard greens and corn bread and beer, and then let him go on his way, with a cheering delegation running behind, blessing him, then thinning out, then vanishing.

To Eustace, who had spent the better part of his life devising ways to break down walls and enter the consciousness of every kind of American, this was a revelation. It was a spontaneous and satisfying encounter, and he well knew that he would never have been welcomed to such a gathering without the horse as an icebreaker. Eustace had traveled all over America—on foot, by hitchhiking, in boxcars, and on long drives—but nothing had prepared him for the intimacy with the nation that a horse could give him. It was the answer.

Clearly, it was time to plan a horse trip across the continent.

Eustace wanted to ride across America and he wanted to bring his younger brother Judson along. Judson Conway was excellent company, the dream traveling companion for a trip like this. But beyond that, Eustace felt that he and Judson, as brothers, needed some epic sharing experience. He recognized that he still thought of Judson as a little boy, as some soft kid hiding in the bedroom with Star Wars action figures, and he wanted to erase that image. Judson was a man now. Judson was a hunter and a horseman and a seasoned traveler and a working cowboy. Eustace wanted to witness him in all these shapes, while also experiencing a marathon of adventures that would surely draw the two brothers together as equals.

Judson, needless to say, was all over this. Did he want to drop out of modern society and cross America on horseback like an authentic heroic Hollywood high plains drifter? Heck, yeah! Judson was wild for the plan, hungry for the “life on the edge, chance to live large” opportunity. He threw himself into the idea with a swan dive, announcing that he was game to take off at a moment’s notice, hot for the chase. Just point him West and say the word—and watch his dust fly.

And so it was decided. They even agreed on a name for themselves. They’d be the Long Riders. Eustace, naturally, got right on the ball with the organizing. He figured out how many horses they’d need, how much money they should bring, what kind of guns they should take, and how much time it all would require. He collected maps and anecdotes from other long-distance horse travelers, trying to anticipate every possible contingency. Of course it was almost impossible to imagine exactly what they might face out there; the important thing was to have a smart route, good horses, and a strong beginning.

Eustace chose a southern path across the nation. The Long Riders would start out on Jekyll Island, off the coast of Georgia, and head west as fast as they could, tearing through Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and right into California. Eustace’s general scheme was to skirt the major cities and not get arrested or hit by any trucks (his mother made him promise not to let baby Judson be killed)—and that was about as far ahead as he could reasonably plan. It was imperative to concentrate on speed. This was not to be a lazy, contemplative walkabout. He wanted to push himself and his brother and the horses to their absolute limits, to see exactly how smoothly they could consume so many miles while experiencing the harsh tutorial of physical challenge.

And then, quite suddenly, they had another partner.

Judson, in his Judsonian way, had been talking up the journey and he had caught the ear of his friend Susan Klimkowski, a native North Carolinian who had worked with Judson on that ranch in Wyoming. Unassumingly pretty, terrifically shy, and surprisingly tough, twenty-five-year-old Susan had more years of experience on horseback than Judson and Eustace combined. She was one of those people who ride before they walk. She was no thrill seeker and no show-off, and she didn’t pretend to be a child of destiny, but when she heard about the trip across America, it stirred in her an intense resolve. She had to go along.

Judson had worked with Susan in the Rockies long enough to know that she could handle the physical demands of the trip, but he told her she’d have to talk it over with Eustace in person. In a gesture of perfect respect and instinct, Susan asked Eustace Conway whether she could join the Long Riders, not by calling him on the telephone and making a verbal plea, but by riding her horse up the mountain to his home and discussing the matter from the saddle. She presented herself to Eustace, in other words, as she would present herself to the entire challenge—already packed, obviously capable, and asking for nothing but the word “Yes.”

Which Eustace gave her. He was impressed by her presentation and could tell that she knew her way around a horse. If she could keep up, she could come along. And the extra bonus attraction was that Susan came with a nice pickup truck and a handsome new horse trailer, which Eustace thought might be an excellent accompaniment to the journey. He knew that such a trip could be completed without a support vehicle, but he also knew that they were way over their heads already with a serious learning curve, and that a safe portable space in which to store injured horses or extra blankets might take away some of the pressure and danger. It would be a bit of a drag—Eustace and Judson and Susan would have to take turns driving the trailer up ahead on the road every day, then hitch back to the horses to begin the day’s ride. They’d pound leather together to cover the miles up to where the trailer was parked and then leapfrog ahead the next morning. It would be a burden, but worth the trouble.

Fair enough. So now they were three. Three people and four horses and one truck and one trailer and a whole continent unfolding before them. On Christmas Day of 1995, they set off. They were all wearing Santa hats, laughing their heads off, energized and keen. Right off the bat, they found an unopened bottle of Bacardi on the side of the road. “Blessings from God, a gift from nature,” Eustace declared, and they slammed back the rum and commenced their journey.

Eustace was riding Hasty. Susan was riding Mac, a reliable black twelve-year-old Tennessee Walker. Judson was alternating between Spur, a lovely silver Arabian he’d picked up at an auction, and Chief, a horse bought fresh for this adventure, which the Conway boys had named after their legendary grandfather, Chief Johnson.

“Poor Chief,” Judson said, on the day they bought him. “He’s been hanging out in a pasture his whole life and has no idea what he’s about to get into. He’s on his way to learning what being a horse is all about.”

It wasn’t as if any of them, horses or humans, had a clear idea of what they were about to get into. (“We did not know what we were doing,” Eustace would say later. “And that is a fact.”) Eustace was considerably more keyed up and nervous than Susan and Judson, who were still at the point of thinking that the trip would be nothing but nonstop fun. Eustace had enough sense to worry whether they’d even survive. Whatever was to happen, though, Eustace was ready to document it. He brought a small tape recorder with him and eighteen cassette tapes, and he kept an oral journal as they rode. Part of his reason for doing this was to avoid the slow process of writing down his recollections. And his steady, stream-of-consciousness ramblings on the tapes are, indeed, all the more evocative for the sounds of the birds and traffic and horses’ hooves in the background.

“I’m holding the tape recorder in one hand and the pack horse in the other,” he says on Day Two of the journey. “Saw some beautiful Spanish moss scenery, a little girl in a bright jacket on a huge old pine tree, molasses presses, furnaces, palmettos. Road is fairly littered with trash here, cups, beer cartons, cigarette cartons, bottles, wrappers, cans, bottles, aluminum foil. Amazing, the trash. Twenty to thirty feet away, however, it’s beautiful. Backlit trees, plantation pines. Sort of a mono-culture. Very sandy soil. Right now I’m as free as anyone in America. It’s so satisfying to be here, away from responsibilities, I wish more people had the simple life.”

So he was documenting his experience, but there was also an ethnographer at work within him. Eustace was eager to interview the regular Americans they met along the way. He’d been thinking more and more in recent years about the disappearance of regional dialects due to the pervasive influence of mass media. He could hear it happening in his holler back home, where the old Appalachian folks seemed to speak a language entirely different from their grandchildren’s. The grandparents still had an Elizabethan drawl (they pronounced the word “sword” with a definitive w, for instance) and called tools and animals by ancient words that would soon be extinct, seeing that their younger relatives were all starting to sound like New York City disc jockeys. Eustace relishes authentic and distinctive dialects and is a brilliant mimic, too. He knew this would be his last chance to capture a wide representation of American Southern voices, since the Long Riders often literally rode through people’s backyards. They had an all-access pass and were riding a plumb line right through the center of American life—no barriers, no boundaries, no margins of limitation. It was almost as if they were ghosts, and every wall before them became nonexistent. They could smell and touch and reach the people as they passed through.

Eustace caught on tape an old Georgia cracker asking, “What kind of farm y’all have?”

“Well, sir,” Eustace began, “I have about a thousand acres in North Carolina. I guess you could say that I run a primitive and traditional farm up there, as well as a nature education center . . .”

But the cracker interrupted. No, no. He didn’t want to know what kind of farm Eustace had; he wanted to know what kind of fire arm Eustace had. Then on the tape you can hear Eustace laughing and laughing and politely clarifying.

And he loved the black voices in Georgia, too, like the elderly man on the porch swing who used Eustace’s tape to reminisce about growing up in a sharecropper’s family:

“My daddy would pass through the rooms and say, ‘Git up, boys.’ We didn’t have no lights. He say, ‘Git up, boys!’ and next time he say, ‘I thought you boys were s’posed to git up’ . . . Ain’t no such thing as child abuse back then and you better get out the bed, cuz I wanna tell you something—my daddy was 275 pounds of pure man, and when he say, ‘Git up, boy,’ you better hit that floor.”

It was easy to get people to talk. It helped, of course, that the riders were so romantically evocative. Eustace was all tall and lean in his antique U.S. Cavalry saddle, wild and bearded and often shirtless, wearing feathers in his hair and riding expertly without even a bit in Hasty’s mouth. He looked like a deserter from the Texas Rangers, some unfettered Jeb who’d lost his unit and turned Injun. Judson and Susan were dressed like dusty, old-time wranglers—all chaps and spurs and beat-up cowboys hats and long duster coats and bandanas. Their look was only partly self-conscious; these are exactly the clothes to wear when you’re on horseback all day, exposed to sun, rain, snow, underbrush, and dust.

To Judson’s eternal credit, he was willing at times to sacrifice his authentic cowboy image for practicality. He took to wearing pastel-colored spandex leggings under his chaps, which used to freak the hell out of the macho truck drivers and ranch hands they’d meet along the way. But the slick material kept Judson from getting saddle burns, and when he got too restless from endless riding, he could pull off his boots, toss on a pair of Nikes, and jog a few miles alongside his horse, just to stay in shape and work the kinks out of his legs.

The riders themselves were plenty compelling. But it was the horses that drew people in. “Everywhere we went,” Judson said, “we were a parade.” Suburban children outside Atlanta came running toward them without a flinch of hesitation, just to hug their horses. It would be the same story with the poor white farming families they later met in Texas.

It would even be the same story on the Apache reservation out in Arizona. The reservation was a desolate and impoverished land they’d considered skirting, because white people for hundreds of miles had warned them against risking their lives at the hands of “those scary bad-ass motherfucker Apaches.” But Eustace, who knew enough of both ancient history and current politics to respect this warning, wouldn’t budge from his chosen route. As he proclaimed to his nervous partners, “We do not change our course because of goddamn racial prejudice. What have we learned so far on this journey, people? Who has not been kind to us yet? Black, white, Hispanic—everyone’s been good to us. And if we start dodging people out of fear, then we’ve destroyed everything we supposedly stand for. You guys can take the detour, but I’m riding right across this goddamn reservation, with or without you. And I don’t give a shit if I get shot in the head for it, either.”

So the Long Riders did ride straight across the Apache reservation, all together. And the Apaches did turn out to be some scary bad-ass motherfuckers who took the Long Riders into their homes for the night, offering food for both the riders and their horses.

It would be the same story months down the road, when they passed through the urban squalor of the San Diego ghettos (“Don’t do it!” white people warned), and the Mexican kids came streaming out of their homes to ask for rides on the horses while the parents took pictures and handed out food and blessings. All across the nation, the same welcome. Everywhere TV cameras and sheriffs’ escorts would follow them from one county line to the next. They met mayors and ministers from coast to coast, who came out to speak for the people in town after town, welcoming them. It was a frenzy of hospitality and excitement.

Cars would pull over on the road, the drivers would jump out, run over to the Long Riders, ask the same questions over and over: “Who are you? Where are you going? What can we do to help you?”

And always this one: “I want to do what you’re doing.”

“You can,” Eustace would reply each time. “You can!”

Their days began at four A.M., when they took care of their horses and tried to imagine where, in the next thirty to fifty miles, they were going to find food and water for themselves and their animals. Every day, someone would have to drive the trailer miles ahead and then hitch back to the camp so that they could start riding together. This took a huge amount of time; sometimes two Long Riders would be delayed whole hours while the third tried gamely to get a lift. And their days didn’t end until after midnight. The pace of their riding was fierce. They were all limping and busted from riding so hard, but they never let up, never walked, only trotted.

They rode for such long stretches between vets and farriers that Eustace became adept at doctoring his own animals and caring for their hooves. He’d watched farriers put shoes on his horses so many times that he was sure he could figure out how to do it. He called Hoy Moretz, his hillbilly horse mentor back in North Carolina, and asked whether it would be advisable to do his own shoeing out here on the journey, and the man gave him a strong warning. “Don’t do it. You’re a smart boy, but you’re not a professional. You can learn how to shoe your own horses back on your farm at home, but there’s too much at stake on the road to risk injuring one of your animals through ignorance.” Sane advice, and Eustace couldn’t agree more, but he disregarded it in the end because we all know what necessity is the mother of. He had to learn, so he did learn. He also gave his horses shots and medicine and adjusted their feed and talked endlessly on the tapes about their physical condition.

“Hasty pissed really dark blood near the end of his stream; that has me worried . . . fell twice today, seems impossible, but it happened, hit his face right on the ground . . . I put a blindfold across his eyes and led him around to get him prepped for the bridge that’s coming up. Because there’s a chance if we can get one horse to cross this new kind of bridge with the metal grate that the horses can see under and are really afraid of, well, maybe they’ll all pass and we’ll be safe. . . . Found a little rock up in Spur’s hoof that’s making him hurt . . . trying to watch out for their ligaments; can’t let a single sore go untreated out here.”

Several times along the way Eustace realized that they needed newer or fresher horsepower, so he’d stop to buy or trade livestock. That’s how they came to acquire Cajun, Fat Albert, Blackie, and Chavez. It’s also how they got the immortal mule, Peter Rabbit.

Peter Rabbit came from down in Mississippi. Eustace was determined to buy the Long Riders a mule, because he wanted a strong pack animal. So he started putting out the word to everyone he met along the road that he was looking to buy. Someone had mentioned a horseman nearby with a big farm who surely had some animals he’d sell off. The farmer, Pierson Gay, was handsome, conservative, and elegant—a classic Southern Gentleman with a well-tended white mustache. The Long Riders telephoned him from the road and said what they were looking for. He agreed to put them up for the night in his stables and to discuss horse-trading. As Judson recalled it, though, “When we rode up to his farm, looking all long-haired and greasy and like a bunch of dirtbag hippies, Pierson literally had to turn his head from the sight of us. He’s such a clean-cut man, I swear to God, he almost retched in disgust.”

But there’s a way that horse people can communicate their expertise with horses—a private code, maybe. Just as Eustace had been immediately convinced that Susan Klimkowski knew how to ride by watching her show up at his mountain home on horseback, it didn’t take Pierson Gay long to notice that these kids knew what they were doing. And as far as livestock was concerned, Pierson had one animal he was willing to sell—a big, good-looking, white devil of a mule. Strong as can be. Name was Peter Rabbit. Eustace and Judson and Susan checked out Peter Rabbit and found him to be healthy and sturdy, just what they needed for their extra loads. Pierson told them he’d sell the mule for $1000. Now these Long Riders, especially Eustace, knew how to negotiate for an animal; you never accept the first price. They came back to Pierson and offered $900. At this, Mr. Pierson Gay walked away, muttering as he exited the barn, “A thousand dollars; that’s the price. That’s what the mule’s worth to me and that’s what I said he costs, so you can give me a thousand dollars or I’ll leave Peter Rabbit right there in the pasture; won’t hurt my feelings a bit.”

They coughed up the thousand bucks.

There were some problems with Peter Rabbit, though. Pierson Gay made no attempt to hide them. There are always problems with mules. Unlike most horses, mules are brainy and often malicious. Mules can think, reason, plot, and exact vengeance. You have to keep your guard up around mules, and this one in particular was satanic. Here were the rules. You couldn’t touch Peter Rabbit’s ears, or he would try to kill you. That made putting a bridle on the mule a life-risking operation. You couldn’t touch Peter Rabbit’s belly, or he would try to kill you. That made putting a saddle on the mule a dicey bit of work, too. Other times, warned Pierson Gay (who was a competent expert with quadrupeds and had long ago given up on breaking this mule), Peter Rabbit was apt to try to kill you for no apparent reason whatsoever. And you also couldn’t touch his feet. Or he’d try to kill you.

Still, he was a mighty powerful animal. So they bought him.

The Long Riders rode off the next day with Peter Rabbit all fresh and strong in their pack string. It wasn’t long before the mule made his presence known. It was pouring down rain, and Judson was trying to put a plastic tarp over his horse to protect the goods. The tarp was flapping and whipping about in the wind, and Peter Rabbit didn’t like that one bit. He hauled off and slammed Judson with a full-force kick that hit the cowboy right in the meatiest section of his thigh. If it had landed elsewhere, it could have been a knee-snapping, arm-breaking, hip-smashing, skull-caving, or gut-crushing blow. As it was, Peter Rabbit’s hearty kick threw Judson five feet up in the air and then landed him right on the ground, where, Judson admits, he lay quietly on the damp grass, letting the rain fall on his face and thinking how pleasant it was to rest on his back and take a breather for a moment on this brutal journey.

But Eustace sprang into action. He’d been keeping his eye on Peter Rabbit, expecting a clash of wills between them, and waiting for his moment to explain to the mule who was in charge here. This was the moment. Mule and man squared off for the first of what would be dozens of physical altercations. Eustace took a swing at the mule, as if he were in a bar brawl, and shouted right up in his face, “Don’t you ever kick my brother again!” The mule swung around to kick Eustace, who grabbed the animal’s lead rope in one hand and grabbed a whip in the other and started beating the mule. Peter Rabbit kicked and dragged Eustace for a few hundred feet, but Eustace held on to that lead rope tight and fierce. Peter Rabbit slung Eustace up against trees and rocks, kicking and biting, both of them braying their lungs out. Judson and Susan ran and hid in the woods, terrified, and Judson kept shouting, “Jesus Christ, Eustace! Just quit! He’s trying to kill you!” But Eustace held on and took his kicks and then worked the mule over to a set of picturesque and antique gas pumps at a run-down old gas station and tied the mule up.

Then they had a little conversation.

Eustace, reduced now (or elevated) to a purely brutish state, clamped on to Peter Rabbit’s nose with his teeth and bit down, hard. Then he pried open Peter Rabbit’s mouth and bellowed into it like a grizzly on attack. Then he grabbed Peter Rabbit’s ears and chewed on them, too, all the while growling and howling like a wounded ogre. Then he circled the mule, beating him with his fists. Then he picked up each of the mule’s feet—one at a time, to show his dominance—and yelled into each hoof as if it were some kind of bestial telephone. Cars driving by on the highway slowed down—way down—as they passed this scene, and pale faces peered out from the passing automobiles, riveted. Judson and Susan, in shock, huddled in the woods, watching this all unfold.

“What can I tell you?” Judson whispered to Susan, both afraid and deeply proud.“My brother’s an animal.”

Eustace worked Peter Rabbit over for a little while longer and then let the mule go. Peter Rabbit slunk off, surely thinking to himself, Holy shit . . .

A few more conversations like this occurred between Eustace Conway and Peter Rabbit along the course of the journey before the mule, who was no idiot, got the picture. He acknowledged, for the first time in his mulish life, that someone else would be making the decisions. And by the time they got to California, that mule was so polite and disciplined and well trained that the Long Riders had to let Pierson Gay know about it. They took a photograph of Peter Rabbit. In the picture, Eustace is standing in front of the mule, biting one of its ears. Susan is squatting below the mule, tickling its belly. And Judson is standing on the mule’s back, arms flung wide open, grinning.

They mailed the photo to Mississippi, to Peter Rabbit’s original owners. A few weeks later, Eustace called the Pierson Gay residence to see whether they’d received the photo. Mrs. Pierson Gay, a most gentle and refined Southern lady, answered the phone. Why, yes, she drawled charmingly, they had received the photograph.

“So what do you think of that old mule now?” Eustace asked.

“My word, honey,” replied Mrs. Pierson Gay in her most feathery antebellum Southern accent, “it looks like Peter Rabbit done went and got himself a Hahvahd education.”

It wasn’t a parade every day. They had great times on their journey, but they also rode for long and desolate episodes along desert highways where nobody drove by and the garbage blew like tumbleweeds. In rural Texas, they rode through a blinding sandstorm, surviving it only by pulling their bandanas up over their faces, a good system until a Texas state trooper stopped them and demanded that they remove their “masks” because “folks is getting nervous y’all are some kinda outlaws.” At other points in the journey, they hit assassin waves of heat so oppressive that Eustace feared the horses might die and that their own lungs would combust from the scorch. Sometimes they’d stop around lunchtime and try to duck the heat under a patch of shade.

Judson would say,“How long do we have for a break?”

“Ten minutes,” Eustace would answer, and Judson and Susan would lie down, cover their faces with their hats, and catch exactly ten minutes of sleep. But Eustace never slept. His energies were consumed by caring for the horses. In those ten minutes, he’d make the rounds, check the feet, test knots on the lead ropes, look into the animals’ eyes, feel for saddle sores. He wasn’t concerned about the heat or his own physical exhaustion; only worried about the horses.

The worst weather they hit was in Louisiana, where they rode into a crippling four-day ice storm. It came on them out of nowhere in the form of a fierce freezing rain, and soon the three riders looked as if they were encased in a quarter inch of glass. Everything was frozen—hats, stirrups, saddlebags, boots, beards. This was the only weather that ever stopped the Long Riders, and it was not because of personal discomfort; it was because Eustace refused to endanger the horses’ safety on those slick roads of solid ice. Trying to find a place to hole up for the storm, they ended up taking shelter beneath the awnings of a small old-time grocery store. Eustace released Judson onto the local citizenry, telling him to use his famous charm to secure some warm beds for the riders that night and a warm barn for the horses.

“Go work the situation, little brother,” said Eustace. “Do what you do best.”

Judson, who does work fast, dutifully struck up a friendship with some fellers who were chewing tobacco in the general store. And within minutes the Long Riders had been invited to wait out the ice storm at a nearby compound, run by an organization of white militia rednecks representing the Patriot Movement. These militiamen were, according to Eustace Conway’s description, “some people who think that the United States government has way too much control over our lives, which is basically not a bad idea and I agree with many of their points, although I wasn’t impressed with their level of disorganization, and they all drank so much alcohol that they couldn’t forward their message efficiently.”

“Yeah, we got a place you can stay,” one of the militiamen drawled. “Y’all got any guns? Well, you won’t need ’em at our place! We got loads of guns.”

For the next two days, the Long Riders were guests of the Patriot Movement. Trapped in the small Louisiana farmhouse by the weather, Susan and Judson spent two cozy days getting stone drunk with these staunch defenders of America’s sacred Second Amendment rights and shooting guns for kicks. Meanwhile, Eustace tried to remain sober and productive, spending those forty-eight hours calling everyone he had ever met across America, trying to see if anyone knew somebody who might want to join the Long Riders and drive the truck and trailer. Eustace was fed up with all the bullshit of driving ahead and hitchhiking back. Sure enough, after about a hundred phone calls, he found his driver, a nineteen-year-old boy nicknamed Swamper, who had nothing else to do with his life at the moment but hop on a Greyhound bus back in North Carolina and join the team in Louisiana.

When the ice storm ended, the Long Riders bade farewell to their militia friends and headed west again with their new partner, young Swamper, driving the support vehicle, pushing on toward Texas.

Texas was a highlight for Eustace, because that’s where he bought himself the greatest horse of his life—his beloved Hobo. Hobo was a made-for-travelin’ Registered Standard Breed. Hobo would become a legend, the fastest and smartest and most loyal horse Eustace ever met. Eustace bought Hobo on the road in the middle of Texas from a farmer named Mr. Garland, and what a find that was. The farmer was leaning on his fence when the Long Riders trotted by, and they all set to talking. As Mr. Garland described this horse he was thinking of selling (“he’s kind of thin and fast”) Eustace’s mouth almost started watering. From the brief conversation, he could fill out the whole story. This Texan had bought himself a beautiful and speedy horse because he loved the idea of it, but now he found the animal too fast to handle. Bring it on!

“You want to try him out?” the Texan asked.

Eustace got on Hobo for a test drive and said, “Come up, boy.” In one dizzying nanosecond that horse went from contentedly grazing in the field to a formidable G-force gallop. Eustace’s hat flew off, and he was barely hanging on by his heels.

“I don’t think your brother can manage that horse,” Mr. Garland said to Judson, who was watching from the fence, and Judson said, “Oh, he’ll manage.”

What a day! Eustace was afraid it would be rude and obscene to tell that Texan how good this horse felt between his legs on the test drive, how fine and thrilling it was when Hobo opened up and took off across the pastures “like a born challenger, like a rocket,” how he couldn’t help thinking that nothing in the world had felt so good between his legs except maybe Carla’s body . . .

He bought Hobo right then and there and rode off with him. Eustace and this spectacular horse had the most amazing interaction, right from day one. As Eustace would say, “All I’d have to do is think, and as fast as I could articulate the thought, Hobo would respond.” This was an animal that finally matched Eustace’s will—a true partner, an animal that wanted to go. Hobo was a brilliant addition. The Long Riders needed an eager pace horse like Hobo to keep up their momentum. It was hard sometimes to stay motivated. All of them—horses and horsemen— were suffering from injuries and strain and weariness. Judson always shot off his pistol in celebration as they crossed a state border, for instance, but there was a nasty accident one day when he did this on the Arizona–New Mexico border and Eustace’s horse took off in a panic and threw him. Eustace wasn’t riding Hobo or Hasty that day, but was trying out a horse they’d purchased recently—Blackie, a strong and skittish mustang blend, which apparently had no liking for guns. When Judson shot off his pistol, the horse went ballistic, and Eustace landed on the top of his head on a rock and split his scalp. He was so badly hurt, he could barely see straight, and every step gave him a spasm, but he let the blood clot as a bandage and kept riding, because “What was I gonna do? Not continue on?”

This was no joy ride. They were not sashaying across America. They were burning up the miles, which meant they were tired all the time. They were hungry and hurting. They argued with one another. Sadly, the very opposite of what Eustace had wanted from this trip was happening. He had hoped to strengthen his relationship with Judson, but, instead, Judson was slipping farther and farther away from his hero-worshipping attitude toward his older brother. Judson wanted to have fun on this trip, and resented Eustace’s unyielding fixation on speed, which never allowed them time to stop and take in the surroundings.

“What can I say about Eustace?” Judson asked later. “He’s gotta be goddamn Ernest Shackleton all the time, set every world record, be the fastest this and the best that. He could never relax and have a good time. That’s not why Susan and I took the trip.”

The cross-country journey was turning into a vast canvas on which the differences between the Conway brothers were boldly highlighted. There was Eustace on one side—driven by his ancient mythological themes of heroes and destinies. And there beside him was Judson— driven by his desire to have a good time and armed with a thoroughly modern sensibility about the roles that people play in this world. It was this super self-conscious sensibility of Judson Conway’s (a sensibility, by the way, that he shares with pretty much every modern American except his brother) that enabled him to joke, “Hey, I’m a real cowboy now!” as he fired off his six-shooter. Judson was riding his horse across America because he knew that people used to do that kind of thing and because it was cool and fun to masquerade as an icon. Eustace was riding his horse across America because he wanted the icon to live. For Judson it was a delicious game; for Eustace, it was an acutely serious endeavor.

“Susan and I would’ve been happy to go at half the pace and have more time to hang out and smell the flowers,” Judson said.

“Just because I’m traveling fifty miles a day,” Eustace countered, “doesn’t mean I can’t smell the flowers. I’m smelling the goddamn flowers as I’m speeding by! And I’m smelling fifty miles more of ’em than other people. First of all, we needed the speed on this trip because of scheduling—Judson and Susan had to get back to their jobs, so we didn’t have forever to get to California. Also, I wanted to learn how much we were capable of. Both the horses and the riders. I wanted to push, to scrutinize, to challenge, to bend the realm of the possible. I wanted to put our limitations under a microscope and stare at them, understand them, and reject them. Look, it wasn’t important to me to be comfortable on this trip or to even have fun. When I have a goal, when I’m in the middle of a challenge like this, I don’t need the things other people need. I don’t need to sleep or eat or be warm or dry. I can live on nothing when I stop eating and sleeping.”

“That’s called dying, Eustace,” I said.

“No.” He grinned. “That’s called living.”

It’s hard to see where this urgency fits into Eustace’s more Zen-like philosophies of living in perfect harmony with the gentle rhythms of nature, about “being like water.” This journey was definitely not about being like water; it was about being a cross-country, cross-cutting buzzsaw. And the effect was not calming. Eustace’s partners could hardly stand his unremitting determination. Judson took to drinking whiskey every night on the trip as a way to soften the impact of his brother’s intensity.

“I know Eustace hated seeing me getting drunk and oblivious,” he said, “but it kept me sane.”

Eustace was relentless and his leadership was often oppressive, but he stands by all his decisions, even to this day. “People don’t understand— Judson and Susan didn’t understand—that it was no accident we covered all that distance without getting ourselves or our animals killed or seriously hurt. I know other people who’ve tried to ride a horse across America and got all messed up—horses injured, equipment stolen, mugged, beaten up, hit by cars. That didn’t happen to us, because I was fucking vigilant. I made about a thousand private decisions every day, each one narrowing the odds of hitting trouble. If I decided to cross the road, it was for a reason. If I could shift my horse slightly so that he walked on grass instead of gravel for just four steps, I’d do that, saving his legs four steps of impact.

“At the end of every day, when we were looking for campsites, my computer brain would kick in and evaluate each possibility, taking in about three dozen contingencies nobody else would have considered. What kind of neighborhood is this meadow near? Is there an exit route behind the meadow in case we need to make a quick move? Are there loose wires on the ground that the horses could get tangled up in? Is there fresh grass across the road that’s going to lure the horses to head over the highway in the middle of the night and get hit? Will people see us from the road and stop to ask what we’re up to and waste our energy when we need to be caring for the horses? Judson and Susan never saw this process. They kept saying, ‘How about this spot, Eustace? This looks like a nice place to camp.’ And I’d say, ‘Nope, nope, nope’ and not bother to explain why.”

Judson and Susan, already chafing under Eustace’s command, mutinied in Arizona. They literally came to a fork in the road. Judson and Susan wanted to veer off the highway and take a wilder route for the day, heading down into a rugged canyon for a shortcut that promised some serious all-terrain adventure. Eustace balked. He wanted to stay on the highway, a duller and less scenic ride that would put more miles on the horses, but considerably less impact. The Long Riders held a group meeting.

“It’s not safe,” Eustace said. “You don’t know what you’ll encounter down there. You could run into a canyon wall or an impassable river and have to backtrack ten miles, lose the whole day. You could get killed. You don’t have a map or any reliable information. You’re going to encounter loose rockslides and poor trails and dangerous creeks that will beat the hell out of your horses. Your animals are already pushed to the edge; it’s cruel to make this demand on them. It’s too dangerous a risk.”

“We’re tired of riding on the highway,” Judson complained. “We came on this trip because we wanted to see the country, and this is our chance to get back down into nature. We want to be more spontaneous, live closer to the edge.”

They took a vote and, of course, Judson and Susan won. Eustace wouldn’t budge. “I’m dead against it,” he said. “You can take the canyon trail if you want to, but I’m not coming.”

It was a devastating moment for Judson. They’d made a pact before setting out on the journey that democratic action would rule the day; if there was ever a dispute over the next move, majority opinion would rule. They would never split up over a disagreement, and now they were doing exactly that. On this heroic twenty-five-hundred-mile journey, there was to be one sad thirty-mile gap in the middle of the country where the inseparable partners separated because they could not reach a consensus.

“I thought we were supposed to be a team,” Judson said to his brother.

And Eustace replied, “I’m happy to be on a team as long as we always do what I know is right.”

Judson and Susan headed off down the canyon.

“It was the coolest day of the whole journey,” Judson recalled. “Wild scenery and nature. We rode through rivers up to our horses’ bellies and we rode through ancient rock spires. We loved every minute of it, laughing and singing the whole time. It was everything I’d imagined the trip could be. We felt like old-time outlaws. And Eustace missed it.”

“Their horses came back limping,” Eustace remembered. “They never should have been down there. They could have been killed, or they could have destroyed their animals. I was right.”

From then on, Judson decided to shut his mouth and go along with Eustace’s commands, because it was more peaceful to submit than to fight. But as he rode alongside his older brother, he endured the dreadful sense of knowing that they would never be the same after this.

They made it to the Pacific by Easter, as they’d planned. No desertions and no deaths. They rode through San Diego to where they could smell the ocean. When they broke over the last highway and got to the beach, Eustace rode his horse right into the surf, as though he’d like to ride Hobo all the way to China. He was in tears, still pushing.

Not so Judson and Susan. They were finished with this brutal trip. It was over, and they were thrilled. Judson went directly to where people were. He rode his horse right into a bar and sat—on his horse!—for several hours, spinning his six-shooter and telling stories while the customers crowded up to him and the bartender bought him round after round. As for Susan, she tied her horse outside the bar and walked into the crowd quietly, garnering no particular attention.

They spent the next week in San Diego, where their mothers came to meet them. Mrs. Conway and Mrs. Klimkowski wanted to take the kids all around the town, to show them Sea World and tour the zoo and eat at fancy restaurants. Judson and Susan were more than happy to be pampered, but Eustace stayed clear of everyone, silent and morose.

“I don’t know how they could turn it off like that,” Eustace said later. “I wanted to tell them, ‘Hey, you guys just had this incredible experience with your horses and you can forget it? One day you’re living life so intensely and the next day you can hop in the car and go get a fucking Tastee-Freez? Like it never happened?’ They didn’t seem to care at all.”

He spent the week alone, brooding, riding his horse every day, all day long, up and down the beach. His companions would ask, “Aren’t you sick of riding yet?” No. Never. Eustace rode the beach for hours, contemplating his journey, facing down the undeniable limitation of the Pacific Ocean, and dealing with the geographical reality of his personal Manifest Destiny: that there was nowhere else to go. The country dead-ended right here. It was over. If only another continent would appear out of the sea so that he could conquer it, too . . .

They drove the horses back to North Carolina in the trailer. Gave them a nice break. Eustace may not have needed to relax after the journey, but he was bent on letting his beloved Hobo relax for a while.

So Hobo got a nice rest in a trailer, riding all the way home to North Carolina like a celebrity. Back at Turtle Island, Eustace gave the horse several months in the pasture to unwind before they started riding together again. Of course, riding was going to be different at Turtle Island from what it had been on the road. Eustace needed Hobo now for farm work more than for speed. He needed to ride Hobo when he was out surveying property and he needed to hitch Hobo up to help drag logs and sleds filled with tools. They worked hard and well together. Hobo had a sweetness that even surpassed his speed.

And then, one day, long months after the Long Riders trip was over, Eustace decided that he and Hobo had earned an old-fashioned joy ride. So they took off from the stress and hubbub of Turtle Island and rode up into the mountains. They climbed and climbed to a high meadow, where, Eustace remembers, he let go of the reins and spread his arms wide and allowed Hobo to open up and run for the sheer delight of it in the high, bright air.

They rode back home, quiet and happy. But when they were almost in sight of the barn, Hobo tripped. He tripped on a tiny rock. You could hardly call it an accident, it was so insignificant. This beautiful horse, which had crossed the continent without injury or complaint, which could scale loose rock and sheer Appalachian slopes without a moment’s hesitation and always responded with intelligence and eagerness to Eustace’s faintest hints of communication, just stumbled over a common stone. Hobo took a funny little step and broke his leg, and the femur snapped nearly in half.

“No,” Eustace said, leaping off his horse.“No, please, no . . .”

Hobo couldn’t put any weight on the leg. He was confused and kept turning around to look at the injured limb. And at Eustace, hoping for an answer to what had gone wrong. Eustace left Hobo there alone and ran to his office, where he made desperate phone calls to his mentors, the hillbilly Hoy Moretz and the Mennonite Johnny Ruhl. He called every veterinarian he knew, and every farrier, but when he described what had happened, all they could do was confirm what he already knew: that nothing could be done. Eustace would have to shoot his friend. After all they’d been through together, to have this happen on a fine afternoon at home, when they were almost in sight of the barn . . .

Eustace got his shotgun and went back to the horse. Hobo was standing there, as before, looking at his leg and then at Eustace, trying to make sense of it. “I’m so sorry, Hobo,” Eustace said, “and I love you so much.” And then he shot Hobo in the head.

The horse buckled to the ground, and Eustace collapsed with him, sobbing. He clung to Hobo’s neck as the horse died, telling him about all the good times they’d had together and about how brave he always was and thanking him. How could this have happened? They were only steps away from the barn . . .

Later in the day—and this was the hardest part—Eustace returned to cut off Hobo’s mane and tail. These would mean much to him in the years to come. Maybe if Eustace ever got a horse someday who was worthy, he could take strands from the mane and tail of Hobo and weave them into a bridle for the new animal, and this would be a fine tribute. To make that first cut, though, to disturb his friend’s body with a knife, was almost impossible, and Eustace cried as if the weight of his grief would fell every tree in the woods.

He left Hobo where he’d fallen. He wanted the vultures to eat him. He knew that the Native Americans believed vultures to be the sacred transport, the means by which a spirit is delivered from the earth up into the sky. So Eustace left Hobo there, where the birds could find him. Which means that, even today, whenever Eustace is working outside and sees vultures drifting in the air, he looks up and says hello, because he knows that’s where Hobo lives now.

When springtime came, Eustace returned to where Hobo had fallen to look over his friend’s bones. He wanted to collect the vulture feathers he found around Hobo’s body and keep them in a sacred place. But his intention was not merely spiritual; Eustace also wanted to examine Hobo’s broken femur, now that the meat was gone from it. He had a suspicion that the break may have been inevitable. He’d often wondered whether Hobo had once been a racehorse and sustained a career-ending injury, and that’s why the farmer in Texas had ended up with him and was willing to sell him for a reasonable price. Maybe Hobo had carried this stress fracture around for years, and there had always been this weakness in the bone, and it had been only a matter of time before it broke again.

And indeed, when Eustace studied Hobo’s bleached bones, he found his suspicion to be correct—the bone had always been cracked; the injury had always been there. This moment, when Eustace knelt on the ground and examined the bone with a scientific eye, is crucial, because it shows how, even in his grief, Eustace Conway always searches for logic and for answers. Life goes on, after all, and one must always seek the lesson even through the sorrow. Never remain static; never stop collecting information.

And it’s this same reluctance to remain static that made Eustace Conway, only two years after the Long Riders trip had ended, attempt another insanely ambitious horse journey. Because one must always keep pushing. One must always scrutinize and challenge and put one’s limitations under a microscope to examine and reject.

Of course, Eustace didn’t embark on the same journey. No reason to repeat experience, after all. But a slightly different adventure this time. Having mastered transcontinental horsemanship on a saddle, Eustace decided to hitch his horses up to a lightweight buggy and take them on a lightning-fast tour of the Great Plains of North America, riding a twenty-five-hundred-mile circle across Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, up into Canada, through Manitoba, Alberta, and Saskatchewan, then back down into Montana and Wyoming. He figured he could do it in under sixty days. He had a different partner now. He was riding with his new girlfriend. He had recently allowed himself to fall in love for the first time after having survived the whirling tornado of Carla. It had been a few years, but he was ready. He was excited about this new love of his, and he called me up shortly after he met the girl to tell me all about her.

“What’s she like?” I asked.

“Beautiful, intelligent, kind, young. Half Mexican. The most beautiful skin you ever saw.”

“What’s her name?” I asked.

“Patience.”

“It better be!”

Patience Harrison was a twenty-three-year-old schoolteacher. She was young, but certainly tough enough for a voyage like the one Eustace was about to take. She was a superb athlete, the former captain of the Duke field hockey team, and she was bold; she’d already traveled across Africa under much harder circumstances than she would encounter in Canada. Eustace was mad about her.

He loved Patience for her brains and for her winning personality and for her physical courage. The first time she came to visit Turtle Island, Eustace took her for a buggy ride. He asked whether she wanted to try driving the horses for a while, and she reached for the reins without a moment’s hesitation, totally game. He thought,Wow, that’s the girl for me. He was also won over by a video he saw of Patience playing collegiate field hockey. In the video, you can see her take a nasty hit by an opponent with a flying stick and then drop to the ground in pain. She had broken her wrist. Then she gets up and tries to run after her opponent, even as her arm is dangling all wrong at her side. Then she’s down again on the ground in pain. Then she’s up for another attempt, hauling ass down the field, teeth gritted, refusing to quit. Forget about pornography; this was the sexiest video image of a woman Eustace had ever seen.

And he loved Patience, it must be said, for her looks. She was gorgeous. Now, Eustace Conway isn’t ever going to have a girlfriend who isn’t gorgeous, but Patience was, as Eustace later put it, “my ideal. Can you imagine ever being with your ideal? With her Mexican background, she has that dark skin and dark eyes and white teeth that I find to be the most beautiful look in the world. I desire her so much. I’m never with her that I don’t desire her. Everything about her—her hands, her body, her lips, her ears, the gloss of her hair—I worship every cell of that girl.”

He declared his love to her with his typical fervor.

“With rainbows in my eyes I see your beauty,” he wrote to her in an early letter. “With sunshine in my heart, I feel love for you. Guided by butterflies I flow toward freedom with you. With the fertile rains of hope I dream of our future. With more passion than you would be comfortable with, I want you.”

There was certainly no contesting that last statement. Patience Harrison was plenty compelled by Eustace and fascinated by his romantic life, but from the beginning she was cool to his ardor. It took him forever to coax her into physical intimacy in private, and she wasn’t physically attentive to him in public, either, not somebody who would even hold hands when people were watching. She was decidedly uncomfortable with his passion and found it difficult not to look away in embarrassment whenever he tried to gaze deep into her eyes. She disliked it immensely when he called her Baby, and grew annoyed at how fixated he was on her beauty, complaining, “Could you sometimes tell me that I’m intelligent or talented or interesting, instead of just gorgeous?”

At which Eustace would joke, “You have the most intelligent glossy black hair I’ve ever seen. Your smile and eyes are hauntingly talented. You have the most interesting body in the world.”

It did not, to most observers, seem a perfect match. Patience was a thoroughly modern young woman who had always kept boyfriends at a distance in order to maintain her independence. (She was so standoffish, she joked, that one of her ex-boyfriends had nicknamed her “Prudence.”) Eustace, who, as always, wanted a seamless union of fiery proportions, was stung by her coldness. Moreover, Patience wasn’t too sure about giving up her life to go live at Turtle Island forever as the new First Lady. But her biggest reservation, she would later admit, was that she was terrified by a comment Eustace had made early on about wanting to have thirteen children with her.

That’s right: thirteen.

I just had to ask Eustace about that.

Actually, my exact question was: “Please tell me you didn’t really say that.”

His response was, “One hundred years ago a woman wouldn’t have been scared by that idea!”

Which was such a disappointing answer. Setting aside the perfectly obvious fact that it isn’t a hundred years ago, there is so much else wrong with this statement that I’m not sure where to start dissecting it. Eustace Conway, as a true student of history and anthropology, should know better. Even a hundred years ago, the average birth rate of the American woman had dropped to a mere 3.5 children per lifetime. Women were already using birth control and had publicly begun debating how raising huge families would affect their economic and social standing. You have to look a lot further back than a century, in other words, to find the kind of enthusiastic breeders Eustace was dreaming about.

And even then there are other considerations. Take Daniel Boone’s wife, for example, the steadfast Ms. Rebecca Boone. Married at seventeen, Rebecca immediately inherited the two orphaned children of Boone’s dead brother. She then had ten children (who lived) of her own out there on the frontier, adopted the six motherless children of her widowed brother, and helped care for many of the thirty-three babies spawned by her four daughters.

Rebecca Boone lived most of her adult life in a fort. She and her children starved through the winters. Her sons were wounded and killed by Indians; her daughters were merely kidnapped by them. In the middle of her marriage, Rebecca was able to move her family back to her safe and comfortable home settlement in North Carolina for two wonderful years while Daniel was out founding a new colony in Kentucky. When he came back to fetch her, she nearly revolted, almost refusing to return to the deep woods with him. He insisted; she resisted. The marriage, history suggests, came perilously close to ending. Rebecca was a loyal wife, though, and so, in the end, she followed her husband into the wilderness. But she was exhausted. A missionary who came through a Boone settlement in the 1780s remembered meeting Rebecca Boone and sitting with this “quiet soul” in front of her tiny cabin while she wept and told him of her troubles and hardships and of “the distress and fear in her heart.”

So, yes, Eustace was correct in a sense. Many pioneer women had lots of children. But were they totally into it? Did they absolutely dig having all those babies? Was this some kind of inspired decision? Somehow I can’t picture Rebecca Boone turning handsprings of joy on the day she discovered, deep in the forest and well into her forties, that she was pregnant for the tenth time. Similarly, I can’t picture young Patience Harrison—recent Duke graduate and honor student and ambitious world traveler—getting all giddy with anticipation when Eustace Conway said he wanted to have thirteen kids with her.

And she didn’t take comfort when Eustace assured her that thirteen kids was only his dream, that he had lots of dreams he never expected to be fulfilled, that he would even consider having no children at all if that’s what she wanted, or they could adopt children, or there were any number of other options they could discuss. Furthermore, he wanted to know whether Patience had experienced a people, such as the Amish or the Maya of Guatemala, who truly cherished and valued children? Maybe her opinions would change if she could see firsthand, as Eustace had, the inspiring way those cultures fold large families into the greater society with such ease and pleasure. Still, the number echoed in Patience’s head like the vibrations from a great tolling cathedral bell.

Thir-teen! Thir-teen! Thir-teen!

That wasn’t the only problem between them, anyway. Patience was cautious and hesitant and remote with Eustace. But he still loved her. He attributed her hesitancy to her youth, and he hoped they would slowly come together over time to burn with a brighter passion. Maybe they could work things out on this adventure. Maybe the buggy ride would make everything better.

Eustace, even more than on the Long Riders trip, wanted to push himself and his horses to the very edge of endurance. He knew his horses could move a lot faster pulling a buggy than carrying a man, and he wanted to see how fast they could travel. The buggy was light and quick, not a heavy-duty farm rig, and the horses were fitted with slick nylon harnesses that would be more efficient than leather.

He was demonic about not making the horses carry extra weight. He had to approve of every item of clothing Patience wanted to bring to make sure that a pair of frivolous socks wouldn’t add an ounce of strain to his animals. Patience once stopped at a store in North Dakota and bought a jar of pickles for snacking, and Eustace gave her hell about it. “All that glass and fluid and pickles makes a lot of extra weight for my horses to pull all day,” he ranted, and didn’t let up until the offending item was consumed and discarded. With his horses, particularly on a difficult journey, he was concerned, attentive, vigilant. Miles from a vet and pushing his animals to the limits of their endurance, he was zealously aware of “every step my horses took, everything they ate, everything they drank, every scab, every limp, every booger, the color of their urine every time they pissed, the frequency of their stools, every tiny flick of the ear, everything.”

Eustace was even more fanatical about speed on this journey than on the Long Riders trip. He was so obsessed with not wasting a moment’s time that when he saw a gate approaching, he’d hand the reins to Patience, leap off the buggy, and sprint ahead to open the gate. Then he’d slam it shut and sprint ahead to catch up with her. He wouldn’t even stop the buggy to relieve himself, choosing, instead, to leap off and piss in the woods while the horses trotted on, then catch up on foot at full speed.

Eustace and Patience got so that they could change and replace their horses’ shoes—over fifty such stops on the trip—quicker than an Indy 500 pit team, Patience handing Eustace the tools, Eustace fixing the shoe swiftly and flawlessly. They moved across the plains, as Eustace later reported, “faster than a cloud’s shadow across the bent grass.” They stopped for virtually nothing. Eustace had fliers made up with information about the trip—press releases, really—that they handed to people when the inevitable million questions came up and they had to hustle on their way. They had not a moment’s leisure. When some ranchers in Canada invited them to stick around for a few days to enjoy the yearly round-up and branding, Patience wanted to stay, but Eustace said, “There will be lots of brandings and round-ups, but only one chance for us to ever set a world speed record by going twenty-five hundred miles in fifty-six days.”

The trip was most certainly a success in horsemanship, organization, and safety. But the relationship, already vulnerable, was murdered by it. Eustace and Patience were getting four hours of sleep a night, careening across the prairie, freezing, miserable, intense. The weather was brutal. When it wasn’t a 70 mph wind, it was freezing rain. Their hands stopped working from the cold, so they couldn’t unfasten harnesses and buckles at the end of each day. They ate horrible food or didn’t eat at all.

There were some unforgettable moments, of course. The scenery was extraordinary. They had a wonderful time for a few days riding through a no-man’s-land—a swath of ownerless land within the Canadian-American border, in which they felt as if they were riding nowhere on the mapped earth. When the rain and sleet abated, they read Cormac McCarthy novels to each other. That was nice. They met many generous people, and Eustace liked sitting back and letting Patience be her gracious, disarming self. He liked watching her win over strangers, who would fall in love with her and then offer them housing, food, help for the horses. And their teamwork with the animals was striking. What was most impressive, though, was that Patience—competitive athlete that she was—never once complained about the physical toll and long hours of the journey.

“That,” she told me, “was the easy part.”

The hard part was that they were passing whole days without speaking to each other, except about the horses. And they weren’t sleeping together. No conversation, no physical contact.

“I never cried because I was tired or in pain,” Patience said. “But I cried a lot toward the end about the relationship with Eustace. It sucked.”

The journey itself was heroic, in other words, but the situation was unfortunately reminiscent of Ursula K. LeGuin’s sharp observation that “the backside of heroism is often rather sad; women and servants know that.”

Patience couldn’t stand Eustace’s constant dominance over her. “I used to be a tomboy,” she said. “I used to intimidate men with my strength. I was a modern woman with a lot of confidence in myself before I met him. But slowly he overtook me until I had no power anymore. That’s how it happens with Eustace; you get sucked into the vortex of his goals and his life, and then you’re lost. I disappeared to him. Lots of times, local reporters would ask to join us for the trip, so he’d ride in the buggy with the reporter and I’d follow in the reporter’s car. He’d charm each guy and talk to him all day, but the next day, when I rode beside him for twenty hours, he’d never say a word to me. All he did on that trip was boss me around and tell me what to do.”

“Of course I told her what to do,” Eustace agreed. “Of course I was in charge, because I knew what had to be done. I had the background and the experience to understand the animals and the realities of long-distance survival and to save her life and my life and the horses’ lives on two thousand different occasions, and she didn’t even notice fifteen hundred of those times. I never had her respect about that. She got more sulky and more immature when we were working together. She had no idea what it took to get us alive across that prairie. We had the goal to set a world speed record. And if I’m going to take on something like that, I’m taking it on a hundred percent, and she needs to respect my knowledge and stop having childish reactions to my leadership.”

When I asked Eustace whether it would have helped to pull the buggy over for a day to sit in a meadow and talk over the problems they were having, he said, “That wasn’t part of the program. That would have ruined our goal.”

Patience later complained (just as Judson had complained on the Long Riders voyage) that Eustace acted like his father during this trip. Patience had spent enough time around Eustace’s parents to be upset by the dominance and disdain Big Eustace showed his wife, and now she felt she was getting the same treatment from Little Eustace. The same kind of tyranny, the same level of perfectionism, the same refusal to respond to the needs of anyone else. To both Patience and Judson, Eustace came across on these horse journeys not only as impossible, but as tragic. What could be sadder than a man who literally travels to the ends of the earth but still cannot avoid becoming his father?

But I’m not convinced that Eustace was becoming his father on these journeys so much as honoring him, trying to prove again that he was worthy, brave, accomplished, and logical. Just as he had tried to prove with all his most daring adventures and mind-numbing accomplishments. As much as Eustace may have wanted to love Patience and his brother, he could not put their needs first when the stake of each of these journeys was so massive—nothing less than the prize of getting his father’s attention at last. He was still concentrating on the older and sadder love story, one that was so bitterly unresolved. Big Eustace had never given his son a word or a nod of recognition despite all his achievements. What more did Eustace have to do to get the man to acknowledge that his son was not a miserable, pathetic, idiotic failure? Would an equestrian world speed record do it?

Would two?

One cannot level against Eustace a more hurtful charge than that he is behaving like his father. “I would be glad to put a gun in my mouth and blow my own head off,” he said, “if I ever believed I treated anyone the way that man treated me.” Certainly Eustace opens himself up to more self-doubt and self-criticism than his father has ever done, and he has suffered deeply (no more so than on these long horse journeys) over his troubles in relating to people. He knows of these problems; he sees the patterns; he works to correct the situations. But he does not always know what to do. He is self-aware enough to know that he is, in his word, “damaged,” but he doesn’t know how to repair himself. He knows that he was way over his head with Patience Harrison, that, for whatever reasons, he couldn’t communicate with her on the journey in a way that gave them any chance at a relationship. Maybe it was her immaturity; maybe it was his relentless perfectionism; maybe it was a corrosive combination of their combined weaknesses. But the whole thing was a disaster.

“Maybe,” he said, “we should have concentrated more on our relationship and less on our goals, but our goals sometimes felt like the only thing we had in common. I don’t know what I should have done. I’m not good at this kind of thing. I just hoped we could work it out later.”

There was no later. Not really. They limped along in their relationship for a year after the buggy journey, but Patience ended up taking a job down in Boone, coaching field hockey, and slowly peeled herself away from Eustace and from Turtle Island. And no number of his passionate fifteen-page letters (“I am sorry if I have not been able to articulate my self, feelings, perspective, in a way that you could understand . . . I pray someday when you are strong enough or ready you can experience this profound love I am feeling”) could win her back.

Patience had run out of it.

What killed Eustace about Patience was that she didn’t understand him. She didn’t understand how much he loved her. She didn’t understand his emotional limitations and scars. His goals. How much love he needed from her. How much love he was willing to give her. And how much he wanted to see that she trusted him. She didn’t understand anything about him.

And it is exactly this perceived lack of appreciation, lack of understanding, lack of faith, that burned Eustace to an emotional crisp. After suffering under a father who told him he was crazy and worthless and a total failure, how could he now be subjected to a person (especially someone who was supposedly in love with him) who didn’t trust him or believe in his expertise? Well, that was altogether too familiar. And if the woman he loved couldn’t understand him, how could he expect to gain understanding from anyone else? Where could he find recognition and sympathy? In whose arms? In whose eyes? Eustace Conway was becoming more certain that nobody would ever really know him, that this intense isolation would be a permanent condition. That he was a refugee in this world by birth and by destiny.

“I feel like Ishi,” he said.

The story of Ishi was one that had haunted Eustace from childhood. Ishi was an Indian of the California people, a primitive, Stone Age culture that lived for centuries in the canyons outside Los Angeles. In the late nineteenth century, Ishi’s people were killed in genocidal attacks as the white man pushed farther up into the canyons looking for gold and ranch land. By the turn of the century, the understanding among anthropologists was that the California Indians were extinct.

Until August 29, 1911, that is. On that day, right in the middle of an age of railroads and telephones, Ishi, a healthy native in his fifties, wandered down to a ranch valley in Oroville, California. He was naked, and his hair was burned off, to symbolize mourning. He had been hiding in the canyons since childhood with a sister and a grandmother, and now that they had both passed away, he, overcome with grief and loneliness, had taken a long journey on foot, ready to travel “into the next world.” Which is where he ended up. He was a Stone Age man who had walked right into modern industrial America. It took researchers and ethnographers weeks to figure out who Ishi was and to piece together a language by which to communicate with him. They found him, of course, to be a priceless vault of anthropological information. He taught them language, myths, and hunting techniques (including a form of archery that had previously been observed only in Mongolia). The anthropologists who studied Ishi ended up bringing him to their museum, where he worked as a janitor.

“This man,” Eustace said in disbelief, “with his unbelievably articulate ability to live in the wilderness, was pushing a broom all day.”

Ishi also made arrowheads for visitors, who would come to see him on display at the museum once a week. He learned to speak some English, took to wearing trousers, saw vaudeville acts, rode trains, and died of tuberculosis within the decade.

“I swear to God I feel like Ishi sometimes,” Eustace said. “Completely different from everyone else in this world, the last of my kind, stranded. Just trying to communicate. Trying to teach people something. But constantly misunderstood.”

Eustace had run into this understanding-deficit throughout his horse journeys. He met young people who were vegetarian environmentalists and were upset to see him dressed in animal skins or to learn that he hunted for food. He reached the point where he no longer had the energy to explain how much more destructive to the environment their synthetic-fleece clothing was, seeing that it was made of nonret newable material produced in polluting and resource-gobbling factories. Or that they didn’t know where their food came from, or how the earth suffered from its manufacture and packaging. And then there were the animal rights people, who objected to the cruelty they perceived in watching Eustace push his horses so hard.

“There were people out there who owned fat horses, horses that were nothing but pasture potatoes,” Eustace observed, “and they had never seen a horse that was truly in shape before they saw mine. My horses are lean, long-muscled, skinny, capable animals that have worked and traveled their whole lives. These are athletes built for the long haul. That’s what horses were made to be. Nobody takes better care of animals than I do. But I heard people say, ‘You aren’t feeding those ponies enough!’ and it made me angry. I wanted to say, ‘Listen, people. I’m feeding my horses so goddamn much food it would flat-out kill your lazy old horse stuck in your stupid little pasture.’ But my horses were lean because they were burning it off.”

The most upsetting incident occurred in Gillette, Wyoming. Eustace and Patience and their horses had just finished a 51-mile day. They hitched the buggy to the rail of a dusty saloon that looked like a movie set and went inside for a burger. On their way out of town, an old cowboy swung by and took a look at Eustace’s best horse, Hasty, his trusted Morgan, who, fed and watered, was resting with his head down. The cowboy said, “That horse ain’t got no heart. I’ve been around horses my whole life, and I can tell you that animal has one foot in the grave. You better pull him out and give him up.”

Eustace didn’t say a word. He didn’t tell the cowboy that Hasty had traveled thousands of miles in his life. He didn’t say that Hasty had once kept a 45-beat-per-minute heart rate after trotting fourteen miles—lower than the pulse rate of most horses at rest. Wasn’t even breathing hard. He didn’t mention that Hasty would cover nearly 450 miles in the next eight days. Or that Eustace Conway wouldn’t trade that horse for a million dollars.

“Hasty was just a bay,” Eustace told me. “Brown horse with a black mane and tail. He was the most common-looking horse you ever saw, but he was a hero. People had no idea what I was sitting on with that horse. That cowboy said Hasty didn’t have any heart; I’m telling you this horse was nothing but heart. Hasty was my champion, and he loved to go. We experienced adventures together that this cowboy couldn’t even have imagined, and we understood each other. We pushed each other to go as far and as fast as we could, and Hasty loved it. I’m telling you, that horse hasn’t even found his limits yet. And I never met anyone who understands what that means.”

There’s a guy down in Kentucky who is (because somebody has to be) the world’s foremost authority on the history of long-distance equestrian travel. His name is CuChullaine O’Reilly, and he owns the world’s largest collection of books on equestrian adventure. He himself has ridden horses on five epic journeys across Central Asia, including one trip to the Himalayan Mountains, where one of his horses died and was eaten by the locals.

“You gotta put Eustace Conway in context,” says CuChullaine O’Reilly, who actually can. “I know my stuff, and let me tell you that this guy is the real deal. Because how many people in this country keep horses? Hundreds of thousands, right? And how many of them have ridden their horses more than fifty miles away from a barn? Nobody. Because it’s terrifying to put yourself and your animal out there in the world with no security. I know all about this.

“Look, the distances Eustace has traveled aren’t in themselves remarkable. I know a couple who’ve gone over eighteen thousand miles on horseback. I know a guy from Maine who went for a fourteen-thousand-mile ride a few years ago. So crossing the country is not in itself a big deal. What’s extraordinary is that Eustace did it in 103 days. Unbelievable. That’s the fastest anyone has traveled long distance on horseback in at least twenty-five years, probably longer. The fact that Eustace did it without having been a real horseman before is astonishing. He used his wilderness skills and audacity and intelligence, and he made this journey virtually free of mistakes. And the buggy journey? To turn around and master buggies so fast? It’s mind-boggling. There are only a few people who are Eustace’s peers in horsemanship, and they are all lifelong horsemen who do nothing else. They do their research for two years before a long journey, and then they get sponsors and bring along private veterinarians and lots and lots of money. And they make lots of mistakes he didn’t make.”

There are three factors, according to CuChullaine O’Reilly, that a man needs in order to be a brilliant endurance rider: courage, resolve, and romance. Eustace has all these, in spades. And something else, too. He has a kind of preternatural gift. To CuChullaine O’Reilly, Eustace Conway’s crossing the country in 103 days was an accomplishment as exciting as an untrained Iowa farm boy stepping up to a footrace and casually breaking a four-minute mile. You can’t just do that. But Eustace did.

In this regard, and in terms of pure and authentic character value, CuChullaine O’Reilly finds Eustace comparable only to one other person, the Alaskan wildman Eugene Glasscock. Eugene Glasscock is a bearded and hard-boiled recluse (“Mr. Mountain,” he’s called at home) who got a wild hair one day back in the 1980s and decided to ride his horse from the Arctic Circle down to the Equator. Wearing, of course, handmade buckskins. The crazy freak. He barely made it alive through the Yukon and Rockies, and he was attacked by machete-wielding bandits in Mexico, and he had to swim beside his horse across some raging rivers down in Guatemala. He liked the jungle, though. That’s why Mr. Mountain still lives down there in Central America, someplace totally off the map. Too bad he’s difficult to get in touch with, says CuChullaine O’Reilly, because it’d sure be fun to get Eugene Glasscock and Eustace Conway together for a weekend “so that they could go off and tell stories and get drunk and eat some possums.”

“Nobody can understand Eustace,” he says. “Because what you get when a modern-day American encounters Eustace Conway and his horse is the twenty-first century running head-on into a six-thousand-year-old nomadic tradition that regular people cannot understand. They are so removed from that episode of their humanity that it is foreign to them. They have no idea what trans-species communication is. They don’t understand that Eustace uses his horsemanship not as a prestige gimmick or as a means of winning blue ribbons or collecting rodeo belt buckles, but as a way to become bonded to another animal so that together they pass through curtain after curtain of incomprehensible and invisible experience until they reach the indescribable other side.”

But there’s one other thing that the world’s foremost expert on equestrian endurance travel believes about Eustace Conway. He says there’s still more to come from Eustace. He thinks Eustace hasn’t even begun to show us what he can do. He thinks Eustace has the capacity for “some real Jason and the Argonauts type of superhuman adventure. Maybe.”

Why only maybe?

“Because,” he explains, “I think he’s reached a plateau in his life. He’s pushed himself as far as he can go using his charisma and courage, and now he needs to go on a spiritual journey. He needs to do something that is private. He’s postured himself in public for so many years that he doesn’t know himself. There are parts of his soul he can’t begin to understand, and until he learns these things about himself, he’ll never be the nomad he’s meant to be. He’s a brave man, but he’s not a spiritual pilgrim yet. Until he goes out in the world, all alone, and cuts away the ropes and publicity and ego and bullshit and does something truly heroic, he’s just blowing smoke up his own ass. And I’ll tell you another thing. He’s no goddamn farmer, and he should quit trying to be one. That’s not his nature. He needs to get away from all that. He should stop trying to save the world. Because until he stops living in his grandfather’s shadow and pretending that he likes digging holes in the ground and planting vegetables on that goddamn farm, he will never be Jason of the Argonauts.”

Adds CuChullaine O’Reilly, “But that’s just my opinion.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

I alone comprehend the true plan and the means of fulfilling it.

—Charles Fourier, Utopian

Eustace Conway’s grandfather founded Camp Sequoyah in 1924 and ran his domain with an exacting command until the moment of his death, by heart attack, when he was eighty. He died in the harness, as they say, never slowing his stride. And he hadn’t named a successor to his legacy. After his funeral, it was revealed that there was no plan for the camp to continue without him. While Chief always had a large staff working for him, he didn’t trust anyone enough to turn over the management of the operation, never having found anyone he believed capable of running his beloved Sequoyah—his “Camp With a Purpose” where “the Weak Become Strong and the Strong Become Great”—up to his rigorous standards.

When campers and staff arrived at Camp Sequoyah for the summer, Chief took over every aspect of their lives. He dictated how they would dress, when they’d exercise, when they would pray, and what they would eat. One counselor remembers the day Chief Johnson took him into his office and spent a full hour delivering a lecture on how best to sweep a room. Another counselor once got a lecture on how best to use a paperclip. (“The big loop goes to the back of the document; the small loop to the front.”) Naturally, Chief prohibited tobacco, cursing, and alcohol from his property. But he also strictly forbade Coca-Cola, vinegar, pepper, and denim. There was a rumor that Chief even put saltpeter in the applesauce to “curb desire” and keep his boys away from the temptations of self-abuse. (“We did eat an awful lot of applesauce,” said one old Sequoyan when I brought it up.) Hair was not to touch ears. Campers were to wear pressed white shirts on Sundays. Camp nurses, the only females on the workforce, were to be matronly and plain so as not to cause sexual disturbance by their presence. Staff members were to be graded throughout the summer on their physical and social progress, with extra credit given for such traits as Loyalty, Readiness to Shoulder Responsibility, and Personal Magnetism.

He was uncompromising. He did not hand out praise. Nobody was ever good enough for Chief. Nobody worked harder or more efficiently than Chief. He carved that camp from virgin wilderness, creating it with his own strength and genius. He had suffered through the first winters up at Sequoyah in a log cabin, had defined every philosophical notion that made the camp unique, had built its every structure, and had kept the operation alive (and thriving) throughout the hard times of the Great Depression and World War II. So who was going to tell Chief Johnson how anything was done? Nobody. As his grandson Eustace would complain fifty years later in his journal about the lackluster employees of his own empire, Turtle Island, “I have worked hard to make this place what it is. What have they done? How can they respect it? What investment have they made in anything that is a serious challenge? How can I put up with them?”

Well, you can put up with them by assuming absolute power over them, body and soul. That’s what Chief did. Chief had a series of “talks” he delivered to the campers at different points of their stay, based on their ages. Included were discussions of God and Nature and Honesty and Courage and How to Become a Man of Destiny, and also warnings about Masturbation and Dating. He spoke to the boys about “The Effect of a Rational Sex Life Upon Marriage and Offspring” (Talk #5) and about “Venereal Disease” (Talk #6). When his boys left Camp Sequoyah, Chief stayed in touch with them—with the many thousands of them—sending them motivational messages every Christmas, as well as sending out his own earnest pamphlets, which he mailed off at key moments of their lives:

A Letter to Boys About to Leave Home for Preparatory School

A Letter to Young Men About to Enter College

A Letter to Young Men on the Occasion of Their Twenty-first Birthday

A Letter to Young Men About to Get Married

A Letter to Young Men Who Have Just Become Fathers

Every boy was Chief’s son. And his boys went on to become doctors, judges, teachers, soldiers—the stalwart backbone of the American South for decades. Every one of their achievements was his achievement. One woman wrote Chief a letter back in the 1950s assuring him that her son, a former Sequoyan, had passed through two years of the Navy without appearing to have acquired any “of the bad habits for which sailors are sometimes known. I feel that the vision he caught at Sequoyah has been and will continue to be a shining guiding light along his way.”

Every boy was Chief’s son, yes. But he also had two flesh-and-blood sons of his own, Harold and Bill Johnson, the brothers of Eustace Conway’s mother, Karen.

“The youth of each generation should be aware of the role some of them will be privileged to play in the progress of man toward a Higher Destiny,” Chief wrote, and no youths had this responsibility thrust upon them harder than Chief’s sons. And yet Harold and Bill, perhaps we should not be surprised to learn, both went completely ballistic on their dad. They were smoking and drinking by the age of fifteen. Alternatively sullen and willful. Shooting off guns and racing cars. Disobedient and indignant.

“They were just the opposite,” recalled one old Sequoyan, “of what Chief desperately wanted in a son. He had always envisioned them to be the ideal boys.”

Chief could make no sense of why his sons had gone wrong. Maybe it was the mother’s fault. Mrs. Chief, as she was forever known, was always confounding her husband by not being as rigorous a disciplinarian as he would have liked. But what could you expect? Mrs. Chief was not her husband’s doctrinarian equal. She was a gifted pianist and a college graduate and a frustrated urban sophisticate who was emotional and unpredictable and often resentful about spending her life in the woods with thousands of boys. She had, it was always said with great delicacy, “an artistic temperament.” Unlike her husband, who kept a logical hold on the more animalistic aspects of human nature, Mrs. Chief was known to sometimes scream her head off in fits of frustration and anger. She was also known to sneak away sometimes to play sexy and rollicking ragtime tunes on the piano when her husband was out of earshot. She probably liked pepper, too.

So maybe what happened to the sons was Mrs. Chief’s fault. That’s what Chief probably figured. Both boys busted out of that house the first chance they got. It was Harold, Chief’s firstborn, who caused his father the most trouble. Canst thou not beg? No, Harold Johnson could not beg and could not submit to his father, not from day one. And he couldn’t stand it at home. As Harold’s nephew Eustace wrote in his adolescent diary decades later: “While it would be a dumb thing to run away, I think I would be happier anywhere in the woods if I could only get away. If I do leave, I will try my best not to come back, even if I am starving. Anything is better than this.”

Harold ran away to Alaska when he was seventeen. Like generations of American boys before him, he headed to the frontier to get out from under the authority of the old man. He could not be in the same house with his father. They had no means of dialogue. His father would never praise Harold, never let up on him, never give him an inch of space within which to move or grow. But Harold wanted to be a big man, and it came to pass that there was not room in this town for the two of them. Harold had to go.

He’d read some Jack London and got an itch. By the time he made it to Seward, he had only fifty cents in his pocket. He was hungry, scared, and alone, but he damn sure wasn’t going back to Camp Sequoyah. He found work on a road crew. Then he got himself a motorcycle and went to school to learn how to repair engines. And then, on the brink of World War II, he enlisted in the Marines (much to the horror of his father, who had been a committed pacifist ever since witnessing the carnage in the trenches in France). Harold was stationed in Hawaii, where he taught jungle survival to Air Force pilots. After the war, he refused to move back South and founded one business after another up in Alaska—an ice cream shop, a boat dealership, a mail-order color slide developing operation. Then he built and sold generator sets, a lucrative scheme in a state that still had no power grid. Then he set up a diesel engine business and became a millionaire. He was six feet five, strong, and dashing. And was always known as a charming, magnetic, big, controlling, and powerful man who worked endless hours, had a genius for self-promotion, and did not easily give praise or welcome the opinions of others.

When Chief Johnson died at the age of eighty, there was nobody to take over Camp Sequoyah. Neither of Chief’s sons wanted to run the camp. Harold hated the South and had his own empire to manage up in Alaska. Bill, the younger and more troubled child, had become a real estate developer, of all heretical things. It was his wish to sell off some of the beautiful forested dynasty of Camp Sequoyah, which his father had preserved over so many decades, for housing and lumber.

Something crucial must be noted here about the Johnson family. What seems never to have been discussed was the possibility that Chief’s daughter might take over the camp. Despite Karen’s deep commitment to her father’s vision and her competence in the wilderness, she was never considered a candidate for leadership. Not seen as strong enough, perhaps. But Karen’s husband very much wanted to run that camp, was dying for the chance. And we know, of course, that her husband was Eustace Robinson Conway III.

That was Big Eustace, who had come to Camp Sequoyah after MIT to work with children and to live in nature. One of Chief’s star counselors, brilliant, energetic, dedicated, and physically adept, Big Eustace loved the wilderness, held the camp’s endurance hiking record, and was a gifted teacher and a patient leader of boys. He was adored at Camp Sequoyah. (I went to a Camp Sequoyah reunion once and met there a number of grown men who said, when I mentioned Eustace Conway, “Is he here? My God, I would give anything to see him again! He was the best nature educator I ever had! I worshipped him!” It took me some time to do the math and estimate the ages and realize that these old guys were talking about my Eustace’s father.) With his calculating intellect and passion for nature, Big Eustace believed he had the brains and the spirit to take over Sequoyah one day. And, as he freely admitted to me, he married Karen Johnson “halfway because of the person that she was and halfway to get my hands on that camp of her father’s.”

The fact is, he would have been great at running the place. As one old Sequoyan remembered, Big Eustace was “as straight-laced, as dedicated, and as competent as Chief himself. We all assumed he’d take over the camp one day. He was the closest thing we ever saw to someone with the capacity to keep it running up to Chief’s standards.” But when Chief died, he left no such word in his will. And Harold and Bill declared that they would fight to the death to keep the camp out of their brother-in-law’s control. They hated their sister’s husband. They hated him for his intellectual arrogance and his dismissiveness of them. They thought him an opportunist and wouldn’t let him near the place.

So the camp floundered through years of substandard management, run by lesser men from outside the family. As for Big Eustace, he gave up his dreams of becoming a nature educator and worked as an engineer at a chemical plant. Living in a box, working in a box, driving from box to box in a box with wheels. He never again set foot near Sequoyah. And when Little Eustace turned out to be a willful and wild boy who preferred the woods to school, Big Eustace would regularly attack him with the accusation that he was “irregular, abnormal, stubborn, and impossible, just like your Johnson uncles.”

The camp finally withered to nothingness. The solid handmade log cabins lay empty. When the camp was finally abandoned in the 1970s, Little Eustace Conway was a teenager. He was already a skilled woodsman and a fierce leader, the one who had every kid in his neighborhood working on regulated shifts around the clock to tend to his extensive personal turtle collection.

“I want Camp Sequoyah,” Little Eustace said. “Give it to me! Let me run it! I know I could do it!”

Of course nobody listened to him. He was just a kid.

Summer, 1999.

When Eustace Conway returned to his thousand acres of Turtle Island after his adventures crossing America on horseback and in buggies, he found his paradise to be, well, a mess.

There was a lot more to Turtle Island after years of Eustace’s improvements and developments; the place was no longer a rugged nature preserve but a highly organized and highly functional primitive farm. It was dotted with buildings, all of which Eustace had built in various traditional styles. There was his private passive solar office, yes. But he’d also built several public structures, including a comfortable bunkhouse for visitors called “Everybody’s,” the design of which he borrowed from a neighbor’s traditional barn.

He’d built a handsome toolshed, crafted perfectly in line with the buildings of Daniel Boone’s era, what with its hand-split oak door and handmade hinges and chinks filled with manure and clay. He based this design on buildings he’d seen at historic sites. And a hog pen of half-dovetailed logs, notched in the traditional Appalachian style. And a chicken house with a foundation of stone sunk nine inches into the ground to keep predators from digging in and stealing eggs. And a corn crib with nice pungeon floors and, although “a hundred years from now, someone might wish I hadn’t used pine, so be it. I needed to get the job done.” He’d built a blacksmith shop of locust and oak, right on the site of a blacksmith shop that stood there two hundred years ago, when what is now Turtle Island was the only thoroughfare for this whole section of the Appalachian Mountains. He used the stones of the original building to make forges, where he now does all his own smithing. He’d created an outdoor kitchen. And, over the course of a summer, with a team of dozens of young people who’d never worked construction before, he’d crafted a forty-foot-tall locust and pine and poplar barn, put together without a single sawn board, containing sixty-foot-long beams and boasting a cantilevered roof, six horse stalls, and thousands of hand-split shingles.

And more, too.

In the middle of this building spree, a North Carolina anthropology professor heard about this gifted young man who lived up there in the mountains, made buildings without the use of nails, farmed with livestock, and survived off the land. Intrigued, she sent a student to Turtle Island one day to ask Eustace whether he’d consider coming down from the mountain to speak to her class and explain how he had done all this. Dutifully, Eustace considered the offer. Then he sent the student back down the mountain with a simple message for the good professor. “Tell her I did it by working my fucking ass off.”

Turtle Island was by now a vast and complicated place. Aside from organizing the educational programs, the mere running of the farm was an enormous job. There were horses and cows and turkeys to tend to, barns to keep up, fences to mend, pastures to plow, gardens to cultivate, and hay to bale. It took a tremendous amount of work to keep the place running, and Eustace had left it all in the hands of his apprentices. He did so with the greatest trepidation. Before he went on his horse journeys, he gave his apprentices lists and lectures to make sure they understood exactly how to care for the property, but, in the end, he narrowed his commands down to two basic components: “Please,” Eustace begged. “Just don’t kill any of my animals and don’t burn down any of my buildings.”

Well, they hadn’t killed any of his animals. They hadn’t burned down any of his buildings, either. But when Eustace returned, he found Turtle Island to be in extreme disorder. Gardens were overrun by weeds; bridges needed repair; goats were in the wrong pasture; the paths were overgrown. Nobody had been handling publicity and scheduling, which meant that not one single school group was on the schedule to visit Turtle Island that fall, which, in turn, meant that money would be short throughout the winter.

Eustace’s workers were willing and hard-working people, but the fact is that Eustace had never found anyone he trusted to manage Turtle Island so that the institution would thrive in his absence. Of course, it’s hard to imagine that there’s anyone able or willing to put in the hours that Eustace did. He’d had some apprentices who were good with people and some who were good with livestock and some who were good at manual labor and some who had a slight talent for business. But no one could do everything Eustace could, which was everything. And no one was willing to work all day on building a barn and then sit up all night making phone calls and writing land deeds.

What he needed was a clone.

In lieu of that, he had hired a program manager, a gifted young naturalist who could take over the duties of running the camping and educational side of Turtle Island, so that Eustace could focus on his own baby, the apprenticeship program. Eustace believed that it was through this intense tutorial program that he would have the most healthy effect. He had long ago begun to wonder whether dealing with group after group of random campers was really going to change anything about American society.

“I’m sitting under the walnut tree in the parking lot on the freshly cut grass,” he had written in his journal during one such crisis of conscience, not long after Turtle Island had opened. “I need to be cooking supper for the delinquents here from the ‘youth at risk’ group. I don’t want to face them. Let them suffer and die is the attitude I have quickly developed in the face of their disruptive disrespect. I am feeling weak . . . I don’t know if I really want to make this place what I dreamed. I know I could. I could make it succeed, but do I want that?”

He had decided that the answer was to keep the camping and day programs, but put someone else in charge of them so that he could focus on the apprentices. He wanted to throw his energy and ability behind the intimate, long-term, one-on-one teaching relationships he would develop with his direct trainees. Then they would take their skills out into the world and teach others, who would teach others, and so the change would come, more slowly, perhaps, than Eustace had dreamed when he was twenty years old, but still the change would come.

He was almost certain of it.

* * *

There was a girl. She was a hippie. Her name was Alice. Alice loved nature more than anything, and she wanted to live in the woods and be self-sufficient, and her sister, who knew Eustace Conway, said, “Alice, this is the man for you.” Alice got in touch with Eustace and told him that she wanted to live close to nature, just as he did. One afternoon, she visited Turtle Island, and Eustace gave her a tour and some of his brochures and told her to think about whether she’d like to work as an apprentice. She took one look at the babbling brooks, the swaying trees, the farm animals grazing in the fields, and the peaceful, welcoming sign at the front gate (No Shirt, No Shoes, No Problem!), and thought she had surely reached paradise.

Swiftly, Alice wrote to Eustace, assuring him that, “my instincts say YES! From the little I’ve seen and read, Turtle Island holds certain qualities that feel truest to my heart. It’s like a dream come true. I’m also grateful for your open welcome and would be honored to come to live, learn, work, and play with you and the land. I remember as a young girl watching ‘Little House on the Prairie,’ dreaming of someday living it instead of watching it. Dedication to family, living in harmony with nature. Ah . . . sweet life.”

After seven months at Turtle Island, Alice wrote Eustace a different kind of letter.

“When I first got here, I asked for a day off a week. You told me I didn’t deserve it. Yet Jennie’s second weekend out she got a day off. You showed her how to skin a deer, when I had to work my butt off for you to even recognize me as a student . . . you make me work so hard . . . make me feel unworthy . . . I feel unappreciated and unwanted . . . you say the more you get to know me the more disappointed you are in me . . . you’ve been working me ten to twelve hours a day . . . maybe I shouldn’t be here.”

And then Alice was gone. Fired. Dismissed.

What was the problem? What happened in the seven months between “sweet life” and “maybe I shouldn’t be here”?

Well, according to Eustace, the problem was that Alice was a hippie, a dreamer, and a lounge-about. She’d done a whole lot of drugs in her life, and maybe that was why her brain worked slowly and she was absent-minded and she had trouble learning how to do things right. She didn’t work quickly or efficiently. She couldn’t absorb skills, no matter how many times she was shown the correct procedure. And she took up too much of Eustace’s emotional energy, always wanting to sit in his office and talk about nature and her feelings and the dream she had last night and the poem she’d just written.

And Eustace was afraid that Alice might accidentally kill somebody or herself. Alice routinely pulled cockamamie stunts like leaving candles burning unattended on the windowsills of wooden buildings. Several times she wandered, daydreaming, into the path of falling timber as Eustace was clearing away pastureland. Worst of all, one day when Alice was working with Eustace as he was getting into his buggy to train a young horse, she released the animal from its tether before handing Eustace his reins. The horse, young and skittish, took off on a wild ride, and Eustace was stuck in the buggy, empty-handed, powerless to control the animal. The horse tore through the woods while Eustace held on for his life, trying to think of the softest place to bail out and save himself. He ended up taking a header right into a bush at twenty-five miles an hour, landing right on his face and hurting himself seriously. The horse wrecked the buggy into the side of the blacksmith shop and sustained injuries of its own.

“I had been rebuilding that buggy, which was a Mennonite antique, for months,” Eustace recalled, “and it was completely destroyed. That cost me $2000. And I wouldn’t take $10,000 for the psychological damage it did to the horse to be in a bad wreck like that at such a young age. It took me nearly a year to get that horse to a place where he could relax pulling a buggy again. And it was all because of Alice’s carelessness.”

Two weeks later, she made the same mistake again. That’s when Eustace told her she had to go. She was too senseless and dangerous to keep around, lost as she always seemed to be in her “Little House on the Prairie” fantasyland.

Dismissing apprentices is never easy, particularly since it’s a point of pride for Eustace Conway to claim that anyone can learn to live this primitive life and that he is that man who can teach anybody. It’s a failure of the dream to have to tell somebody, “You must leave here because you are incapable of learning.” Or, “You must leave here because you are impossible to have around.” It’s a terrible moment when Eustace Conway’s refrain turns from “You can!” to “You can’t!”

I once asked Eustace what percentage of the apprentices had left Turtle Island under angry or bitter circumstances. Without hesitating, he said, “Eighty-five percent. Although my program manager would probably say it was closer to ninety-five.”

OK, let’s round that off to 90 percent. It’s hard to look at such an attrition rate without pinning the label of bad leadership on Eustace. Turtle Island is his world, after all, and he is accountable for what happens in his world. If he can’t keep his world populated, then something is clearly wrong with the scheme. If I were a stockholder in a company where 90 percent of the employees were quitting or being fired each year, I might consider asking the CEO some hard questions about his management policies.

On the other hand, maybe the number makes perfect sense. Maybe it shouldn’t be easy to stay on Turtle Island. Maybe only 10 percent of the population are able to cut it. What if the comparison model was the Navy SEAL training program? How many of those guys do they lose each year? And who’s left after everybody else quits? The strongest, right? The people who are going up to Turtle Island, though, are not necessarily the people most suited for the place.

“Again and again,” Eustace said, “I attract people who have dreams of nature but no experience with nature at all. They come up here, and the only comparison they make is ‘Wow, it looks just like the Nature Channel.’”

One of my favorite Turtle Island apprentices was an intelligent and soft-spoken young guy named Jason. He hailed from a well-to-do suburban family, had been raised in comfort, and been carefully educated in expensive private schools. When I asked Jason why he wanted to commit the next two years of his life to studying under Eustace Conway, he said, “Because I’ve been unhappy, and I didn’t know where else to go to get happy.”

Saddened by the unexpected death of his beloved father, angry at his mother for her “narrow-minded Christianity,” annoyed by his “useless professors,” disgusted with his peers, “who ignorantly refuse to listen to my songs and their warnings about environmental destruction,” Jason had recently dropped out of college. When he heard about Eustace, he thought that a stay at Turtle Island would provide the enlightenment he sought. He saw Eustace as a larger-than-life hero who “goes out in the world and meets his destiny without fear of obstacles, and who can make things work where most people are satisfied to see something stay broken and die.”

In a dramatic gesture, Jason decided to walk to Turtle Island all the way from Charlotte during Christmas vacation, but he got only about five miles down the road. It was freezing rain and he was overpacked and couldn’t figure out where he was going to camp that night or how to stay dry. Demoralized and hungry, he called his girlfriend from a gas station, and she drove him the rest of the way to Turtle Island.

Jason’s dream was to achieve perfect self-sufficiency. He didn’t want to deal with phony Americans and their materialistic stupidity. He planned on moving to Alaska and homesteading up there in the last frontier. He wanted to live off the land, and he hoped that Eustace would teach him how to do it. He dreamed that life would be better in Alaska, where “a man can still hunt for food to feed his family without going through the bureaucracy of getting a hunting license.”

“Have you ever been hunting?” I asked Jason.

“Well, not yet,” Jason said, grinning sheepishly.

Jason was the very model of the young guy who typically comes to Eustace Conway for guidance. He was trying to discover how to be a man in a society that no longer had a clear path for him. Just as Eustace Conway had struggled as a teenager to find rituals to lead him into manhood, Jason was struggling to find some ceremony or meaning that would help define his own ascension. But he had no role models, his culture had no satisfying coming-of-age ritual for him, and his background had provided him with none of the manly skills that were so attractive to him. He was, by his own admission, lost.

This is the same disturbing cultural question that Joseph Campbell spent years asking. What happens to young people in a society that has lost all trace of ritual? Because adolescence is a transitional period, it is an inherently perilous journey. But culture and ritual are supposed to protect us through the transitions of life, holding us in safety during danger and answering confusing questions about identity and change, in order to keep us from getting separated from the community during our hardest personal journeys.

In more primitive societies, a boy might go through an entire year of initiation rites to usher him into manhood. He might endure ritual scarification or rigorous tests of endurance, or he might be sent away from the community for a period of meditation and solitude, after which he would return to the fold and be seen by all as a changed being. He will have moved safely from boyhood into manhood, and he will know exactly when that happened and what is now expected of him, because his role is so clearly codified. But how is a modern American boy supposed to know when he has reached manhood? When he gets his driver’s license? When he smokes pot for the first time? When he experiences unprotected sex with a young girl who herself has no idea whether she’s a woman now or not?

Jason didn’t know. All he knew was that he ached for some sort of confirmation of his adulthood, and college life wasn’t giving it to him. He had no idea where to find what he sought, but he was compelled by the idea that Eustace might help. Jason did have a beautiful girlfriend, and he maintained the romantic idea that the two of them would homestead in Alaska together someday, but she apparently had her own ideas. She was young, affluent, a brilliant student, as reflexively feminist as most of her generation, and she had an itch to see the world. She had limitless possibilities before her. Jason hoped she would “settle down” eventually with him, but that struck me as doubtful, and, indeed, after the next few months she left him. And that hardly made Jason feel better about himself as a man in the making.

Jason’s discomfort in his own skin seemed to me typical of many young American men, who see their female peers soar into a new world and often have trouble catching up. When Jason looks out into American society, after all, what does he see? Aside from the environmental and consumer crisis that so offends his sensibilities, he is facing a world undergoing a total cultural and gender upheaval. Men are still largely in charge, mind you, but they are slipping fast. Modern America is a society where college-educated men have seen their incomes drop 20 percent over the last twenty-five years. A society where women complete high school and college at significantly higher rates than men, and have new doors of opportunity opened to them every day. A society where a third of all wives make more money than their husbands. A society where women are increasingly in control of their biological and economic destinies, often choosing to raise their children alone or not to have children at all or to leave an identifiable man out of the reproductive picture entirely, through the miracles of the sperm bank. A society, in other words, where a man is not necessary in the way he was customarily needed—to protect, to provide, to procreate.

I was at a women’s professional basketball game in New York recently. As a girl I had been a serious basketball player, but there was no such thing as the WNBA back then, so I’ve watched this league grow in recent years with the greatest interest. I love going to the games and seeing talented female athletes compete for decent salaries. Mostly, though, I love watching the spectators, who tend to be enthusiastic and athletic preteen girls. On this night at a New York Liberty game, I saw something amazing. A handful of twelve-year-old girls ran to the railing in front of their seats and unfurled a sheet on which they’d written:

W.N.B.A. = WHO NEEDS BOYS, ANYHOW?

As cheers rose throughout the entire arena, all I could think was that Eustace Conway’s grandfather must be whirling in his grave.

So, given the current culture, it’s no wonder that a guy like Jason would want to move to Alaska and reclaim some noble and antique ideal of manhood. But he had an immense distance to travel—not geographic—before he could consider being a pioneer, before he could correctly learn what he was “for.” Jason was keen and, heaven knows, sincere. He had a terrific smile, and Eustace enjoyed his company and his songs warning of environmental destruction. But Jason had an ego as soft and vulnerable as a fresh bruise, and he comported himself with a certain compensatory arrogance that made him difficult to teach. And, given his protected suburban upbringing, he had a big, fat, gaping lack of common sense. Shortly after arriving at Turtle Island, he borrowed one of Eustace’s work trucks for a trip down to South Carolina and accidentally drove the entire trip at seventy-five miles an hour with the vehicle locked in four-wheel drive.

As Eustace said later in wonder, “I can’t believe my truck even existed that distance in such a condition.”

Indeed, by the time Jason arrived at his destination, the engine was ruined.

“Didn’t you notice anything strange about the way the truck was running?” Eustace asked Jason, when he called to report that the truck’s engine block had “suddenly” cracked.

“It was making a lot of noise,” Jason admitted. “It did seem kind of weird. The engine was roaring and grinding so loud, I had to turn the music all the way up to drown out the noise.”

It cost Eustace thousands of dollars to get his best truck running again.

Over the next nine months of Jason’s apprenticeship (he would quit long before his two-year commitment was up, having grown unhappy with Eustace’s leadership), he acquired impressive proficiency in primitive farming and other rugged skills, but he also wrecked two more of Eustace’s vehicles. And when Eustace asked Jason to consider paying him back for some of the damage, Jason became deeply offended. How dare this so-called natural man show an attachment to material possessions! What a hypocrite Eustace was!

“Don’t put your shit on me, Eustace,” Jason wrote soon after leaving Turtle Island. “I don’t need to feel this way. I need relationships that enrich my life, not ones that bring me down. I feel your truck is more important to you than I am . . . To borrow words from Lester, the father in American Beauty, ‘It’s just a fucking couch!’”

Again and again this shift takes place in Eustace’s life. He is worshipped, and then his worshippers are horrified to find that he is not their godlike ideal. By and large, the people who come to Eustace are seekers, and when they meet this charismatic icon, they are certain that their search is over, that all their questions will be answered, which is why they so quickly and unconditionally hand their lives over to him. And it’s not only young men who fall into this pattern.

“For five days I was in infinity,” wrote one typically amazed young woman, after a short visit to Turtle Island. “Tiny pieces of my breath were everywhere in the white pines and the sassafras. Thank you, Creator! Thank you, Eustace! It has influenced me forever. It is the one place I know I want to be. If you ever need another hand, I’ll give you both of mine!”

After such a glorified introduction, it can be mortifying to learn that life at Turtle Island is grueling and that Eustace is another flawed human being, with his own teeming brew of unanswered questions. Not many seekers survive this shock, a shock I’ve come to refer to as the Eustace Conway Whiplash Effect. (Eustace, by the way, has since co-opted the phrase, going so far as to wonder whether he should perhaps distribute neck braces to all apprentices as a preventive measure to help them survive the inevitable trauma of disenchantment. He jokes, “People will ask, ‘Why do I need to wear this neck brace, Eustace?’ and I’ll nod wisely and say, ‘Oh, you’ll see.’”)

This is the same reason that it’s challenging for Eustace to maintain lasting friendships. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of people intimately connected to his life, but many of them seem to fall into one of two categories: enchanted disciples or disillusioned heretics. Most people find it impossible to drop their notions of Eustace as an icon long enough to befriend him as a person. He could probably count on one hand the number of people he considers close friends, and even those relationships are often strained, both by Eustace’s lifelong fear of betrayal (which has kept him from pursuing full intimacy in friendships) and by his insistence that he cannot be truly understood by anyone (which doesn’t help, either). Eustace doesn’t believe that even the man he would call his best friend—a sensitive, kind, skilled woodsman named Preston Roberts, whom he met in college—completely understands him.

Preston and Eustace used to dream, back in college, that they would form a nature preserve together and raise their families side by side, along with their buddy Frank Chambless, who had hiked the Appalachian Trail with Eustace. But when the time came to buy Turtle Island, Preston and Frank were only marginally involved in the operation. Frank bought a small piece of land near the preserve but sold it years later, to Eustace’s chagrin, to raise money. After that sale, Frank virtually disappeared from Eustace’s life, and Eustace never understood why.

Preston Roberts bought land near Turtle Island and kept it. He has labored on many of the Turtle Island buildings and has taught at summer camp over the years. He and Eustace take off every now and again for a horse journey or a hiking adventure, where they can bask in each other’s company and in the splendor of nature. Preston admires Eustace immensely and would gladly take a bullet for him. But despite Eustace’s repeated invitations, he has not yet elected to move his family to Turtle Island permanently. As Preston’s wife explained, “My husband has always been a little afraid that he’d lose his friendship with Eustace if he had to work with him every day.”

Indeed, that sort of proximity does seem to try most souls. Particularly during apprenticeships. It doesn’t help, of course, that the wouldbe apprentices who come to Turtle Island are often a little emotionally vulnerable to begin with.

“Some of people who want to come and live here,” Eustace told me once, “are the most antisocial and maladjusted and miserable people in society. They think that Turtle Island is the place that will finally make them happy. They write me letters saying how much they hate humanity . . . Jesus Christ, can you imagine trying to organize a work detail out of people like that? Teenage runaways want to come here. There’s someone in the state prison system writing me letters right now about wanting to come here. These are the kind of dissatisfied outcasts that I attract.”

When I visited Eustace in August of 1999, he had a young apprentice whom he’d nicknamed Twig. Twig was from some disaster of a dysfunctional family in Ohio and kept getting thrown out of homes and in trouble with the law. Eustace accepted Twig because it is the very cornerstone of his philosophy that anyone can handle this primitive life if he is fully willing and properly taught. Twig was a major pain in the ass, though. He was a belligerent and untrustworthy little punk, and several of the other apprentices (there were three other young men and women there at the time, about the normal number each year) asked Eustace to dismiss the kid, because he was so disruptive to the spirit of their work. And, needless to say, Twig didn’t have a single hard skill. But Eustace wanted to give Twig a chance, and he invested hours in working with him and calming him down and teaching him how to use tools and trying to show him how to get along with people.

There had been some major improvements. Twig came to Turtle Island weak and pale and lazy. In time, you could see every muscle in his chest and his back while he was working hard. (This transformation from feebleness to fitness plays out all the time at Turtle Island, and it is perhaps Eustace’s favorite thing to witness.) And this screwed-up kid could now hitch a plow to a horse and tend to pigs and cook over an open fire. One evening he even made me soup out of yellow jacket larvae— an ancient Cherokee recipe. But the magnitude of what Twig had yet to learn was positively numbing to think about.

One evening, I went to a distant field with Eustace to watch him teach Twig how to use a disc plow. They had to drag the plow out to this field about half a mile through the woods with a mule and draft horse, using a sturdy old Appalachian sled to carry the machinery. Every aspect of the job spoke of potential physical danger—the ungainly and willful animals, the unsteadiness of the sled, the flying chains and leather straps and ropes, the razor-sharp edges of the heavy old plow. And yet knowing all this, and having lived at Turtle Island for six months, Twig elected to show up for this job wearing flip-flops.

“Personally, I wouldn’t run a disc plow in a rocky pasture using a mule as temperamental as Peter Rabbit while wearing flip-flops,” Eustace told me, as we watched Twig work, “but if he wants to lose a foot, I’ll give it to him.”

“You’re not going to say anything to him?” I asked.

Eustace looked exhausted. “Ten years ago, I would have. I would have given him an earful about the proper footwear for farming and about protecting yourself around animals and heavy machinery, but I’m tired now, I’m tired of dealing with people who don’t have one molecule of common sense. I could correct Twig on this, and I could correct him seven hundred times a day on stuff like this, but I’ve reached the point where all I have the energy for is to keep people from killing themselves or me or each other. You know, when Twig first came here, he begged me to throw him right into the wilderness, because he wanted to live close to nature. The reality is that he’s ignorant. He wouldn’t last five goddamn minutes in the real wilderness. He doesn’t even know how much he doesn’t know. And I have to deal with this stuff all the time—not just from Twig, but from hundreds like him.”

Then, to Twig, who had begun to plow the vast field in weird and tiny little circles, Eustace said: “Here’s an idea, Twig. Every time you turn the animals, you’re putting pressure on their mouths and pressure on yourself and on the machinery. Try to think of a more streamlined way to plow instead of making so many tight turns. How about making long runs with the plow, all the way from one end of the field to the other, keeping in one direction for as long as you have the momentum going? You understand what I’m saying? You might even want to plow this slope here, but I’d recommend coming at it from below, since you’re still inexperienced and you don’t want to have to worry about running over your animals with your plow.”

As Twig headed off, sort of doing what he’d been told, Eustace said to me, “This is going to take him forever. I’d rather be in my office right now taking care of the seven hundred letters I need to write and the seven hundred tax bills I need to pay. But I have to stay here and watch him, because I can’t trust him yet with my animals or machinery. So why do I bother? Because my hope is that someday he’ll learn how to handle this chore and then I can send him out by saying, ‘Go plow that field,’ and he’ll know exactly what to do and I’ll be able to trust that the job will be done right. But we’re a long way from that. I mean, the boy is wearing flip-flops! Look at him.”

Actually, he was wearing flip-flops and shorts and no shirt, and he had a cigarette tucked behind his ear.

“I like to think I’m teaching these people skills that they’ll someday use in their own lives, but when I think of the hundreds of people who have come through here over the years, I can’t imagine one who could manage a primitive life right now all alone. Maybe Christian Kaltrider will someday. He was brilliant. He’s building a log cabin on his own land right now, and that’s good to see. He learned all that here. There’s a kid named Avi Aski, who was a terrific apprentice. He’s looking for land to buy in Tennessee, and maybe he’ll make it work. Maybe.”

Twig came toward us with the plow, churning up a wobbly path of soil.

“You’re doing a good job,” Eustace told him. “Much better than I expected.”

Eustace delivered the compliment with an expressionless face and an even tone. But underneath the praise I could hear the scary traces of controlled anger and impatience and disappointment that I usually hear in Eustace’s voice at this time of evening, when the sun’s going down and the chores haven’t been done and somebody’s screwing up again. Around this time of evening, it’s pretty obvious that what Eustace really wants to do is line up the lot of us in a neat row and bitch-slap some sense into our stupid heads.

Of course, he would never . . .

“Nice work, Twig,” he said instead. “Thank you for your focus.”

Eustace regularly gets apprentices who have never before held a bucket. He’ll give them the simplest task in the world—go fill this bucket with water—and then he’ll watch in horror as they try to carry the filled bucket. They don’t know how. They hold the heavy bucket as far away from their bodies as they can, keeping their arm stretched out in front of them, parallel to the ground, wasting energy and strength just holding their burden. It makes him wince in pain to watch it. Or hammers. Eustace gets young people up at Turtle Island who have never before met a hammer. They have no sense of how a hammer works. They come to him because they claim they want to live “self-sufficiently,” but when he asks them to hammer in a nail, they grab the hammer in a tightened fist, way up by its head, and then they punch at their target.

“When I see that,” Eustace says solemnly, “it makes me want to lie down and die.”

When he’s teaching young children in public schools, he sometimes tries to play this old Indian game with them, where you roll a hoop and try to throw sticks through it as it tumbles along. But he finds again and again that whole classes of American children are incapable of figuring out how to roll a hoop.

“It’s a crazy thing for a child not to know how to roll a hoop!” he rants. “I show them how to do it and I hand them the hoop and they drop it. They kind of randomly throw the hoop and, of course, it lands flat on the ground, two feet away from them. So they stare at it. Why isn’t it moving? They don’t get it. Even after I’ve showed them once, they can’t figure it out. After a long time, some child might figure out that a wheel needs momentum to roll, and if I’m lucky, some genius might think, Ah! Let’s try to spin it!

“I see this played out over and over. I watch these kids and I think, ‘Can this unbelievable crisis be real?’What kind of children are we raising in North America? Listen, I can guaran-damn-tee you that every child in Africa knows how to roll a fucking wheel. It’s a question of understanding natural law. The world is ruled by a few basic physical laws—leverage, inertia, momentum, thermodynamics—and if you’re out of touch with these fundamental principles, then you can’t hammer a nail, carry a bucket, or roll a wheel. That means you’re out of touch with the natural world. Being out of touch with the natural world means you’ve lost your humanity and that you live in an environment that you completely do not understand. Can you even begin to imagine my horror at this? Can you begin to comprehend what’s been forgotten in just a few generations? It took mankind one million years to learn how to roll a wheel, but it only took us fifty years to forget.”

We’ve forgotten, of course, because of the oldest natural law on the books: Use it or lose it. Kids can’t manage the simplest tools because they have no need to learn. It serves no purpose in their comfortable, well-appointed lives. Their parents can’t teach them this kind of physical dexterity, because they, by and large, don’t have it, either. Don’t need it, never learned it, no call for it anymore. But we know things weren’t always this way. Even a century ago, for instance, there wasn’t a man in America who didn’t carry some kind of knife with him at all times. Whether it was for skinning bears or trimming cigars, a man needed a knife as a basic tool for living, and he knew how to take care of it and sharpen it and handle it. Who needs a knife now?

For that matter, who needs a horse? Who even needs to know what a horse is? Eustace found on his horse journeys that it was the people in their seventies and eighties who were likely to be comfortable around the animals, having grown up with working livestock as children, or hearing stories about it from their parents. But to each successive generation the idea of a horse was increasingly foreign, exotic, unthinkable. The younger people had no idea how to behave around the animals, how to protect themselves, how to grasp the concept of another living being.

“And what will their children think?” Eustace wondered. “Twenty years from now, a horse will look like a camel to people, like some crazy zoo animal.”

So it is that the incompetence widens with each generation. Still, Eustace feels he could handle this incompetence if it weren’t for the one big flaw he sees in modern Americans of all ages: people don’t listen. They don’t know how to pay attention. They don’t know how to focus. Even if they claim that they want to learn, they have no discipline.

“The hardest thing is to get young people to trust me and do as I say,” Eustace said. “If I have four people up here working with me and I say, ‘OK, everyone. Let’s roll this log on the count of three,’ one will start rolling the log immediately, two will pull the log on the count of three, and the fourth will wander off somewhere and pick his nose. And they’re constantly questioning my authority. They always want to know Why are we doing it this way, why are we doing it that way? Listen, I know why, and that’s all that matters, and I don’t have time to explain every decision. They never believe me when I say I’m right. If I say I’m right, then you can be sure I am right, because I don’t make mistakes. If I’m not sure of something, then I’ll say I’m not sure of it, but most of the time I am sure. People get mad and say, ‘Eustace thinks his way is the only way.’Well, that’s true. My way is the only way. And I believe the best work is done when people surrender to one authority, like in the military. That’s the most efficient and streamlined way to produce labor. If I was the general of an army, for instance, the discipline would be more organized and I could insist that everyone do exactly what I said, and then things would run properly.”

To make Turtle Island function, Eustace ends up taking control—as his grandfather did with his campers and staff—of every aspect of his apprentices’ lives.

“It gets to the point,” said one apprentice, “where you feel you have to ask Eustace’s permission to take a shit. Because God forbid you should be off in the woods taking a shit when he needs to teach you how to use a foot-pedal grinder or forge a horseshoe.”

Yeah, Eustace wouldn’t deny that. I’ve heard him lecture his apprentices on the proper way to tie their shoes, because why should people waste time having their shoes come untied when there’s so much work to be done? But that’s how American utopian communities—the ones that lasted more than a week—have always been run. Discipline, order, and obedience make them endure. In the bedrooms of female Shakers, back in the nineteenth century, you would have found this instructive sign:

“Each person must rise from her bed at the sound of ‘first trumpet.’ Kneel in silence on the place where you first placed your foot when getting out of bed. No speaking in the room unless you wish to ask a question of the sister having the care of the room. In that case, whisper. Dress your right arm first. Step your right foot first. At the sound of ‘second trumpet’ march in order, giving your right side to your superior. Walk on your toes. Fold your left hand across your stomach. Let your right hand fall at your side. March to the workshop in order. Ask no unnecessary questions.”

Lord, how Eustace Conway would love that kind of order around Turtle Island. But there’s only so much control he can assert each day. For now, it’s all he can do to get his apprentices to roll a log on the count of three.

Most of the apprentices live in fear of Eustace, to be perfectly honest. They talk about him whenever he’s out of earshot—hushed and somewhat desperate conversations—huddled like courtiers trying to read the king’s motives and moods, passing on advice for survival, wondering who will be cast away next. Too intimidated to deal with Eustace directly, the apprentices, unsure of how to please this demanding master, seek advice from Eustace’s girlfriends or brothers or close friends, asking these privileged associates: What does he want from me? Why am I always in trouble? How can I keep him happy? Eustace knows this chattering goes on behind his back, and he loathes it. He considers it the ultimate of insubordination.

That’s why he nailed this letter on the Turtle Island community bulletin board in the summer of 1998:

“Turtle Island staff, residents, and associates. I, Eustace Conway, am pissed off. My girlfriend Patience has been here for five days, and she has been approached by many of you in discussion about your problems with me. This is a challenge and an unnecessary burden for her and our young relationship. I resent this approach to ‘reaching me.’ If you have a problem with me, approach me with it, NOT her. If we can’t solve it or you can’t find satisfaction, DON’T work through her. If you can’t stop talking about negative aspects of your relationship with me, please resign or leave now. I am intolerant of this behavior. I am hurt, saddened, and full of grief that such would ever happen. I personally would rather beat the living shit out of you than have you work your problems with me through Patience. If this seems overreacting, well, that is a social-emotional burden that I will carry. I hope I have made myself clear of my need. Grateful and respectful of your consideration, humbly yours in trust, Eustace Conway.”

No Shirt. No Shoes. No Fucking Backtalk.

It might seem from all this that the only people who could survive on Turtle Island are those who have no self-will, who are wimpy and easy to push around, who will meekly do as they’re told for months without a peep of complaint. But this isn’t true. Wimpy people crumble here and they crumble fast. They try hard to please Eustace, and when they realize they’ll never get the validation they crave, they break down in mourning, devastated by how violated they feel. (These apprenticeships generally end in tears: I gave and gave and gave, but it was never enough for you!) The only people who crumble faster than the wimps are the cocky individuals with chips on their shoulders who stubbornly refuse to bend. They’re the ones who believe they will be personally exterminated if they have to live under someone else’s authority for even a minute. (These apprenticeships generally end in a big fight: I am not your slave!)

But the people who thrive here—and there aren’t many of them— are an interesting species. They are among the most quietly self-aware people I’ve ever met. They have in common a profound psychic stillness. They don’t talk a lot, and they don’t seek praise, but they seem confident of themselves. They are able to make themselves vessels of learning without drowning in it. It’s as if they decide, when they come here, to take their fragile and sensitive self-identity, fold it up tight, tuck it away someplace safe, and promise to retrieve it two years later, when the apprenticeship will be over. That’s what Eustace Conway’s all-time star apprentice Christian Kaltrider did.

“I came here in a very humble state,” Christian explained, “but also extremely fired up and interested, and I was a big-time sponge. It was my intention to learn, and that was all. Eustace would teach me something, and I’d go off and do it. I didn’t spend any time talking—just listening and watching and doing what I was told. Of course, he had control over me all the time, but I didn’t let that frustrate me. I told myself, ‘I am letting him have this control for the purpose of my education. And he is in control only of my education, not of my identity.’ That’s a subtle distinction. Are you giving yourself to Eustace, or are you letting him take you? I made the decision to give myself over as a student, and that’s why my experience was so different from the experience of many others who come here. Other people come here worshipping Eustace. They want to please him, so they let him take over their entire selves, and that’s when the resentment starts to build. It builds slowly, over time. What wears people down here isn’t the physical labor but the psychological stress of losing their identity. I was never in danger of that.”

“If you don’t protect yourself from Eustace,” explained Candice, another Turtle Island apprentice determined to make her experience successful, “then he’ll suck you dry. You have to keep some part of yourself—your ego, I guess—where he can’t reach it. And you have to be quietly stubborn about it. I’ve made my decision. I’m staying here for the full two years of my apprenticeship, no matter how hard it gets. I refuse to become just another DETI.”

“ DETI?” I asked.

“Disgruntled Ex-Turtle Islander,” she clarified. “Look, I came here to learn, and I am learning. And I find Eustace to be fair and patient, even when I’m an idiot. I try to be quiet and private, and that’s the only way to do the work around here and get something from it. He’s the boss, and you do have to accept his decisions. You have to take his leadership seriously, but you can’t take it personally.”

It’s the same thing that makes a good soldier—not mindless obedience, but mindful obedience. Which is probably why one of the most successful Turtle Island apprentices was a young woman named Siegal, who, before coming to North Carolina, had served in the Israeli military. Perfect training! Siegal survived Eustace Conway the same way she survived her military service. “You must make yourself very small,” she explained, as if that’s such a simple thing to do.

It’s not at all simple, though. Not many people can subdue their egos. The talent for submission is especially hard for modern American kids, who are raised in a culture that has taught them from infancy that their every desire is vital and sacred. Their parents, their teachers, their leaders, their media, have always asked them, “What do you want?” I used to see this when I was a diner waitress, of all things. Parents would interrupt ordering food for the entire table to hover around their toddler and ask, “What do you want, honey?” And they’d stare moon-eyed at the child, waiting desperately for the answer. Oh my God, what will he say? What does he want? The world holds its breath! Eustace Conway is right on target when he says parents did not give their children this kind of power a hundred years ago. Or even fifty years ago. I myself can declare with all honesty that on the rare occasions when my mother and her six Midwestern-farm siblings ate in restaurants as children, if any of them had dared to make a personal demand of their father . . . well, they just wouldn’t have.

But Americans are raised differently now. And the “What do you want, honey?” culture has created the kids who are flocking to Eustace today. They undergo enormous shock when they quickly discover that he doesn’t give a shit what they want. And between 85 and 90 percent of them can’t handle that.

And then there’s the food.

One of the things that makes a Turtle Island apprenticeship challenging is that the food up on the mountain can be . . . well, inconsistent. I have enjoyed some of the finest meals of my life there, after a day of steady labor and an invigorating wash in the creek, sitting around the solid oak table with my workmates, eating fresh produce from the garden and a flank off one of Will Hicks’s famous pigs, all sopped up with hot cornbread out of a cast-iron pot lifted right off the coals. It’s nice. I have eaten gorgeous handfuls of wild morel mushrooms at Turtle Island, irritating Eustace to the point of madness by saying, after every bite, “Do you know how much these things cost in New York?” (“No,” he says. “Do you know how delicious these things taste in North Carolina?”) But I also spent a week at Turtle Island in January when we had the same venison stew for three meals a day. And it was skanky, old, tough venison. Heat it up every night, try not to taste the burn and rust from the bottom of the pot. And the only other ingredients of the stew were apparently an onion and five beans.

While the paying guests—the special groups and the young campers who visit Turtle Island—get excellent food served by wonderful cooks hired for the occasion, no such arrangements are made for the apprentices, so the food situation can get pretty grim sometimes, especially in the winter. The squash, for instance. Squash is the staple of the winter diet of the apprentices. They turn squash into everything they can imagine—squash bread, squash pie, squash lasagna, squash soup. And then they give up and eat squash mush until the garden starts up again in the spring. It’s as if they’re sixteenth-century sailors and the squash is their hardtack, their last provision. There have been mutinies over the squash alone. There have been tearful meetings where apprentices who have endured every other physical challenge will wail to Eustace, in a unified protest, “The squash must stop!”

They don’t get a lot of sympathy from him, though. Because it’s not as if he’s holing up there in his cabin sucking the marrow out of duck a l’orange while his long-suffering apprentices shovel more squash down their gullets. If squash is all there is to eat, it’s what he eats, too, and let there be no whining about it. There is—as with everything at Turtle Island— nothing he asks of his apprentices that he himself will not endure. (He’s no Peter Sluyter, the utopian shyster who ran a strict Labidist homestead in seventeenth-century upstate New York. Fire was forbidden to his followers, though Sluyter always had one roaring comfortably in his own home.) No, Eustace Conway is cold when his people are cold; he’s hungry when his people are hungry; he’s working when they’re working. Although he’s usually also working when his people are asleep, for that matter. Eustace has been in hungry places in his life, places where squash mush would have been an epic feast, so he’s not too sympathetic. Anyhow, if they get really desperate, they can always head down into Boone for some Dumpster Diving.

Dumpster Diving is a Conway family tradition. It’s something (maybe the most fun thing) the Conway boys learned from their father. Big Eustace Conway is a lifetime salvage artist. It appeals to his sense of frugality and of adventure to pick apart the garbage of others. There is no garbage too foul for him to look through in search of a great find. Eustace and Walton and Judson inherited the skill from their father, but they refined it to the point that they learned to look in other people’s garbage not only for old record players and air conditioners, but for food. Delicious, decadent food. The Dumpsters behind the huge super- markets of the American dream, it turns out, are the free-as-the-wind buffets of the truly resourceful.

Eustace Conway, naturally, has made Dumpster Diving into an art. He supported his appetites through college by subsidizing his blowgun game catches with the juicy remains of the supermarket alleys. And he perfected his system because, you can be sure, if he’s going to do it, he’ll do it flawlessly, like everything else.

“Timing is crucial,” he explained. “You want to pick exactly the right moment of the day to start foraging in the Dumpster. It’s best to hang around the store a bit and scope things out, see what time each day the food goes out so that you can get it at its freshest. It’s also important to walk back to the Dumpster as though you belong there, moving with speed and confidence. Stay low to the ground and don’t dawdle. I always look immediately for a sturdy, wax-covered cardboard box with nice handles, and I grab it and jump into the Dumpster. Leaning over the side and poking around is not an economical use of your time. I waste no time with any produce that is poor quality. Just because you’re eating out of the garbage, doesn’t mean you need to eat garbage. I fly through the produce, throwing aside anything that’s rotten or of low quality. If there’s a crate of spoiled apples, I may find the three perfect apples in there and toss them into my cardboard box. You can often find one perfect melon in a box of smashed melons, and sometimes you can find a whole crate of grapes that were thrown out because they’re off the stem. And meat! I’ve brought home dozens of sirloin steaks, all nicely wrapped in plastic, that were tossed out because they’re one day over expiration. I can almost always find whole trays full of yogurt—I love yogurt—that are perfectly good and were thrown out for the same reason. Isn’t that a sin, what gets wasted in this country? It reminds me of what my old Appalachian neighbor Lonnie Carlton said: ‘We used to live on less than what folks throw away these days.’”

One famous incident occurred when Eustace went into a Dumpster in Boone all alone, on a quiet and routine sortie. Looking confident, keeping low, finding his special cardboard box, he was making quick progress through the Dumpster and compiling “the nicest arrangement of fruits and vegetables you ever saw” when he heard a truck pull up behind the store. Then footsteps. Shit! Eustace ducked down into the corner of the Dumpster and made himself as tiny as he could. And then a man, a nice-looking older gentleman in clean clothes, leaned over the Dumpster and started poking around. A fellow diver! Eustace didn’t breathe. The stranger didn’t notice him, but it wasn’t long before he did notice Eustace’s sturdy, wax-covered cardboard box filled with the finest produce money can’t buy.

“Hmm,” said the stranger, pleased with the discovery.

He leaned far over, picked up the box, and walked away with it. Eustace heard the truck start up again and sat there, huddled like a rat in the corner, thinking this over. Should he hide until the truck was gone? Play it safe? Start his search over? But, wait. That man was stealing his produce! It had taken him a good fifteen minutes to find those goods, and they constituted the best food available that day. Eustace couldn’t stand for that. You can’t let a man take food from your mouth! He leaped out of the Dumpster as though he were on springs and took off after the truck. He waved the guy down, yelling as he gave chase. The stranger pulled over, ashen, trembling at this wild apparition that had emerged, running and yelling, from the bowels of a supermarket Dumpster.

“Good afternoon, sir,” Eustace began, and released one of his most charming smiles. “I have to tell you, sir, that those are my fruits and vegetables you’ve taken.”

The stranger stared. He seemed to be considering having a heart attack.

“Yes, my friend, I collected all that food for myself, and it took me some time to do it. I’m happy to share it with you, but I can’t let you take it all. Why don’t you wait here while I find you a box of your own, and I’ll split it up for the two of us?”

Then Eustace ran to the Dumpster and found another sturdy, wax-covered cardboard box. He ran back, jumped into the bed of the stranger’s pickup, and quickly and evenly divided the produce into two even caches. He grabbed one box for himself, hopped out of the truck, and returned to the driver’s side window. The man gaped at him, dazed. Eustace let fly another big smile.

“OK, then, sir. You’ve got yourself a nice box of groceries now, and so do I.”

The stranger didn’t move.

“You’re good to go now, sir,” Eustace said. “And have a nice day.”

Slowly, the stranger drove away. He’d never once said a word.

So. There comes a time in the residency of any Turtle Island apprentice when the skill of Dumpster Diving is introduced. Most of the apprentices take to it like rats to a junkyard, enjoying the opportunity to get into town for a field trip and to stick it to society once more in a subversive way. They call these little shopping expeditions “visits to the Dump Store,” and when the squash mush has been served up for the fourth consecutive week, that forbidden fruit from the A&P starts to look pretty good. This helps account for the odd variety of food I have experienced at Turtle Island. Yes, there is the fine homemade gingerbread with homemade peach butter. Yes, there is the superb spinach, fresh from the garden. But I’ve also dined up there on such decidedly non-Appalachian fare as pineapples, coconuts, chocolate pudding cups, and, on one memorable occasion, something I found in a Styrofoam package labeled “white and dainty cream-filled pastry horns.”

“In all the months I’ve lived here,” Candice the apprentice told me, “I’ve never once figured out how we survive. I honestly don’t know how we live. Dumpster Diving can take you only so far, you know, and in the winter we starve. Sometimes people bring us food, which is great, because we’re not allowed to buy anything. I’ve been in charge of the cooking most of the time that I’ve been here, and I’ve only ever spent Eustace’s money twice, on real staples, like cornmeal or oil or pepper. Other than that, we scrounge.”

I once asked Candice what she used for her excellent bread, and she replied, “Whole wheat. Plus”—and ran her fingers through a sandy grain she kept stored in an old coffee can—“I always throw in some of this weird stuff. I got it from one of the horses’ feed bins in the barn. I don’t know what it is, but you can’t taste it in the bread, and it makes the wheat last longer.”

Another afternoon, I was hanging out with Candice in the outdoor kitchen, helping her cook, when Jason wandered in.

“Hey, Jason,” she said. “Can you move Barn Kitty for me?”

Barn Kitty was Turtle Island’s most excellent mouser, a hardworking cat that could usually be found in the granary or on the topmost shelves of the outdoor kitchen. I realized that I hadn’t seen Barn Kitty in a while.

“Where is she?” Jason asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Where is she?”

“Under the water trough,” Candice replied. “The dogs keep rolling in her and moving her around, and she smells awful.”

I looked under the water trough. Oh, that’s why I hadn’t seen Barn Kitty in a while. Because Barn Kitty was now a matted, reeking, legless corpse. Candice explained that a bobcat got to Barn Kitty one night a few weeks earlier. Since then, Barn Kitty’s battered remains kept showing up all over Turtle Island, dragged around by various other living creatures. Jason picked up the remains with a stick and threw them up on the tin roof of the kitchen, where the sun could bake them dry and the dogs couldn’t reach them.

“Thanks, Jason,” Candice said, and added under her breath, “Jeez, I don’t know why we didn’t just eat that old cat. Eustace makes us eat every other damn thing that dies around here.”

I overheard Eustace one day talking on the telephone to a young man who had called all the way from Texas because he wanted to sign on as a Turtle Island apprentice. The kid sounded promising. His name was Shannon Nunn. He’d been raised on a ranch and claimed to have done farm labor his whole life. He also knew how to fix automobile engines. And he was a star athlete of enormous personal discipline. Eustace tries not to get his hopes up about people, but these few factors alone made Shannon Nunn sound about 1000 percent more promising than the scores of idealistic, romantic, and incompetent college kids who often arrive at Turtle Island “unable to open a car door.” Shannon said that he’d read about Eustace in Life magazine and was calling because he wanted a new challenge for himself. If he could learn how to live off the land, maybe he’d escape a life in shallow modern American culture, where “everyone is drowning in complacency.”

Sounded good so far.

Still, Eustace spent an hour explaining to Shannon what he could expect at Turtle Island. It was a lucid and patently honest speech.

“I’m not a normal person, Shannon,” I heard him say. “Many people find that I’m not easy to get along with or work for. My expectations are high, and I don’t give my workers much praise. People sometimes come here thinking they already have a lot of valuable skills to offer, but I’m rarely impressed. If you come, you’ll be expected to work. Turtle Island is not a school. There are no classes here. This is not a survivor’s course. I’m not going to take you in the woods for a certain number of hours a day and teach you an organized program of wilderness skills. If that’s the kind of experience you want, please don’t come here. There are plenty of places where you can find that, places that will put your needs and desires first. Outward Bound is good for that, and so is the National Outdoor Leadership School. You pay them; they’ll teach you. I am not about that. I’ll never put your needs or desires first, Shannon. The needs of this farm always come first. A lot of the chores I’ll give you are repetitive and boring, and you’ll probably feel you’re not learning anything. But I can promise that if you stay with the apprenticeship program for at least two years, and if you do what I say, you’ll acquire the hard skills that will give you a degree of self-sufficiency almost unknown in our culture. If I see that you’re willing to learn and able to work, I’ll devote more time to you individually as the months go by. But it will all come very slowly, and I’ll always maintain my authority over you.

“I’m telling you this because I’m tired. Tired of having people come here with preconceptions that are different from what I’ve just explained to you and then leave in disappointment. I don’t have time for that, so I’m trying to make myself extremely clear. I’ll demand more of you than you’ve ever had demanded of yourself. And if you aren’t ready to work hard and to do exactly what I say, then please stay home.”

Shannon Nunn said, “I understand. I want to be there.”

Shannon showed up a month after this conversation, ready to work. He was more excited, he said, than he’d ever been about anything. He was a young man seeking spiritual wholeness in the woods, and he believed he had found his teacher. He was looking, he said, “to drink of that water that—once you find it—you will never thirst again.”

Seven days later, he packed up his bags and left Turtle Island, deeply angry, hurt, and disappointed.

“I went there,” Shannon told me over a year later, “because I thought I understood the deal. Eustace promised me that if I worked for him, he’d teach me how to live off the land. I thought he would be teaching me survival skills, you know? Like hunting and gathering. Like how to build a shelter in the wilderness and how to make fire—all the stuff he knows. I’d invested a lot of time and energy to go to Turtle Island. It was scary, because I’d left everything—my home, my family, my school—to go there and be taught by him. But all he had me doing was mindless menial labor! He didn’t teach me anything about living off the land. He had me building fences and digging ditches. And I told him, ‘Man, I could be digging ditches back home and getting paid for it. I don’t need this.’”

Shannon was so disappointed that within a week of his arrival, he went to Eustace to discuss his problems with the apprenticeship program. Eustace heard the boy out. His response was: “If you don’t like it here, go.” And he walked away from the conversation. This made Shannon furious to the point of tears. Wait a minute! Why was Eustace walking away from him? Couldn’t he see how upset Shannon was? Couldn’t they talk about it? Work something out?

But Eustace had already talked and didn’t feel like talking anymore. He’d had this same conversation again and again with many different Shannon Nunns over many years, and he had nothing more to say. Eustace walked away from the conversation because he was tired and because he had to get back to work.

He sleeps only a few hours a night.

Sometimes he dreams about Guatemala, where he saw children who were adept with a machete by the age of three. Sometimes he dreams about the orderly farms and quiet families of the Mennonites. Sometimes he dreams of dropping his agenda for saving the human race and, as he wrote in his journal, “changing Turtle Island into a private ‘for me’ sanctuary to try to survive the ridiculous nature of the world today.”

But then he dreams about his grandfather, who once wrote, “More enduring than skyscrapers, bridges, cathedrals, and other material symbols of man’s achievement are the invisible monuments of wisdom, inspiration, and example erected in the hearts and minds of men. As you throw the weight of your influence on the side of the good, the true and the beautiful, your life will achieve an endless splendor.”

And he dreams about his father. He wonders how much more backbreaking success he’ll have to achieve before he earns one word of praise from the old man.

And then he wakes up.

Every morning, he wakes up to the same thing, to a national crisis. An impotent nation reflexively ruining everything in its path. He wonders whether there’s any hope of repairing this. He wonders why he’s thrown his life into the breach to save everybody else’s life. Why he allows his sacred land to be overrun by clumsy fools who treat the place so roughly. He wonders how it came to pass that, when all he ever wanted was to be nature’s lover, he feels he has become her pimp instead. He tries to comprehend the difference between what he’s obligated to do with his life and what he’s allowed to do. If he could do only what he truly wanted, he might sell off this whole heavy burden of Turtle Island and use the money to buy a broad parcel of land somewhere in the middle of New Zealand. There, he could live in peace, all alone. Eustace loves New Zealand. What a spectacular country! Free of every kind of poisonous creature, sparsely populated with honest and trustworthy people, clean and isolated. To hell with America, Eustace thinks. Maybe he should drop out of the mountain man rat race and leave his countrymen to their fate.

It’s a gorgeous fantasy, but Eustace wonders whether he’d have the resolve to act on it. Maybe when he dreams about moving to New Zealand he’s like one of those urban stockbrokers who dream about cashing out and moving up to Vermont to open a hardware store. Maybe, like the stockbrokers, he’ll never make the shift. Maybe, like them, he’s too invested in his lifestyle to ever change.

“Maybe I’m too late with my message,” he says. “Maybe I’m too early. All I can say is that I think this country is suffering through a mortal emergency. I think it’s a nightmare and that we’re doomed if we don’t change. And I don’t even know what to suggest anymore. I’m tired of hearing myself talk.”

CHAPTER NINE

We are great, and rapidly—I was about to say fearfully—growing!

—John Caldwell Calhoun, 1817

I get drunk with Eustace Conway sometimes. It’s one of my favorite things to do with him. OK, it’s one of my favorite things to do with almost anybody, but I particularly enjoy doing it with Eustace. Because there’s some measure of peace that the alcohol brings to him—those famous sedative properties at work, I suppose—that tamps down the fires within. The booze helps turn down his internal furnaces for a short while, which lets you stand close to him without getting singed by the flames of his ambitions and blistered by the buckling heat of his worries and convictions and personal drive. With a little whiskey in him, Eustace Conway cools out and becomes more fun, more light, more like . . . Judson Conway.

With a little whiskey, you can get Eustace to tell his best stories, and he’ll whoop in delight as he remembers them. He’ll imitate any accent and spin the most outrageous yarns. He will laugh at my dumbest jokes. When Eustace Conway is drinking, he’s likely to crack himself up by peppering his dialogue with distinctly un-Eustacian modern phrases he’s picked up over the years, such as “Yadda-yadda-yadda,” or “You da bomb!” or “That’s a win-win situation,” or—my favorite—upon receiving a compliment, “That’s why they pay me the big Benjamins!”

“So, I’m hiking around Glacier National Park one summer,” he’ll say, soon after the bottle has been opened, and I’ll smile and lean forward, ready to listen. “I’m high up above the timberline, walking across a snowbelt. Nobody knows where I am, and I’m not even on a trail; just a ridge of snow and ice as far as you can see, with steep drop-offs on either side. Of course, I don’t have any decent equipment; I’m up there messing around. So I’m walking along, and suddenly I lose my footing. And it’s so goddamn steep that I start sliding right down the slope, skating down the sheer ice on my back. Most people hiking up there would’ve brought an ice ax, but I don’t have one, so I can’t stop my fall. All I can do is try to dig all my weight down into my backpack, to slow myself, but it’s not working. I’m digging my heels into the ice, but that’s not working, either! Then the snow and ice turn to gravel and loose rock, and I’m speeding thumpa-thumpa-thumpa across the boulders at top speed. I keep falling and falling, and I think, I’m gonna die for real this time! and then—THUD. I slam to a halt. What the hell? I lift my head and realize I have just slammed into a dead mule. I swear to God! This is a dead motherfucking mule! This is a freeze-dried, mummified carcass of a mule, and it’s what stopped my fall. Slowly, I stand up and look out over the mule, and right there, on the other side of his body, is a sheer cliff, dropping down about two thousand feet into the middle of Glacier National Park. I start laughing and laughing, almost hugging the mule. Man, that dead mule is my hero. If I’d dropped off there, nobody would’ve even found my body! Not for a thousand years, until some hikers came across it and then wrote a damn National Geographic article about me!”

A few more sips of whiskey, and Eustace will talk about Dorothy Hamilton, the black woman who came running out of the fast-food restaurant in rural Georgia when the Long Riders rode by, flapping her apron and kissing the Conway boys and demanding to talk into their tape recorder journal. She knew the Long Riders were riding all the way to California—she’d seen them on TV—and she had a loud message for the West Coast: “Helllloooo all you surfers out theah in California!” Eustace keens away in his cabin, summoning up this woman’s joyful voice. “This is a big hello from yo’ friend, Dorothy Hamilton, the girl in the CHICKEN shop!!!”

One night, Eustace and I walked down the holler in the snow to visit his dear old Appalachian neighbors Will and Betty Jo Hicks. Will and Eustace set to talking about some old “double-burl” shotgun Will used to own. I tried to eavesdrop, but realized, as I do on every visit to the Hickses that I can’t understand one word in ten that Will Hicks drawls. He says “hit” for “it” and “far” for “fire” and “veehickle” for “car,” but I can’t decipher much more than that. Between his missing teeth and his backcountry euphemisms and his molasses inflection, his speech remains a mystery to me.

Back in Eustace’s cabin that night, over a bottle of whiskey, I complained, “I can’t make any sense of that damn Appalachian accent. How can you communicate with Will? I guess I just need to study me that Appa-language a little closer.”

Eustace howled and said, “Woman! You just need to Appa-listen harder!”

“I don’t know, Eustace. I think it’s gonna take me an Appa-long time before I can understand the likes of Will Hicks.”

“Heck, no! That old country boy was just tryin’ to teach you an Appa-lesson!”

“I reckon we can discuss this Appa-later,” I said, giggling.

“You’re not Appa-laughin’ at old Will Hicks, are you?” Eustace said.

By this time we were both Appa-laughin’ our fool heads off. Eustace was busting up, and his big grin was gleaming in the firelight, and I loved him like this. I wished to heaven I had ten more bottles of whiskey and as many hours to sit in this warm cabin and enjoy watching Eustace Conway let go of his fierce agenda and Appa-loosen the hell up for once.

I said, “You can be so much fun to hang out with, Eustace. You should show people this part of yourself more often.”

“I know, I know. That’s what Patience used to tell me. She said the apprentices wouldn’t be afraid of me all the time if I’d let them see my spontaneous and fun side. I’ve even considered trying to figure out how to do that. Maybe every morning before we start work, I should institute a practice of having five free minutes of spontaneous fun.”

“Five minutes of spontaneous fun, Eustace? Exactly five minutes? Not four? Not six?”

“Argghhh . . .” He gripped his head and rocked back and forth. “I know, I know, I know . . . it’s crazy. See what it’s like for me? See what it’s like inside my brain?”

“Hey, Eustace Conway,” I said, “life isn’t very easy, is it?”

He smiled gallantly and took another long swig of hooch. “I’ve never found it to be.”

There is still ambition in Eustace. He’s not finished yet. Back when he was really young, back when he first walked around Turtle Island with his girlfriend Valarie, he pointed out, as though reading from a blueprint, what he would make of his domain. Houses here, bridges there, a kitchen, a meadow, a pasture. And he has made it so. All over his land now, standing physical and real, is the evidence of what Eustace had originally seen in his mind. The houses, the bridges, the kitchen— everything is in place.

I remember standing with Eustace over a nearly cleared pasture on my first visit to Turtle Island. It was nothing but a field of mud and stumps, but Eustace said, “Next time you come here, there’ll be a huge barn in the center of that pasture. Can’t you see it? Can’t you picture all the grass growing up green and healthy and the horses standing so pretty, all around?” The next time I went to Turtle Island, there was, as though by some enchantment, a big beautiful barn in the center of the pasture, and the grass was growing up green and healthy, and the horses were standing so pretty, all around. Eustace walked me up a hill to give me a better view of the place, and he looked around and said, “Someday there’ll be an orchard right here.”

And I know the man well enough to be certain there will be.

So, no, he’s not done with Turtle Island yet. He wants to build a library, and he’s looking to buy a sawmill so that he can produce his own lumber. And then there’s his dream house, the place where he’ll live. Because after all this time—after more than twenty years in the woods, after working himself numb to acquire a thousand acres of land, after building more than a dozen structures on his property—Eustace still doesn’t have a home of his own. For seventeen years he lived in a teepee. For two years he lived in the attic of a toolshed. And recently he’s taken to living in a small rustic cabin he calls the Guest House—a fairly public place, where all the apprentices and guests gather twice a day for meals in the wintertime when the outdoor kitchen is closed. For a man who claims to want, more than anything, isolation, he has never given himself a truly private space on Turtle Island. Everybody else, from the hogs to the apprentices to the tools to the books, must be housed first.

But there is a home he has been designing in his mind for decades. And therefore you can be sure that it will exist someday. He made the first drawings of it when he was in Alaska, stranded on an island for two days, waiting for the rough seas to subside enough so that he could kayak safely back to the mainland. And when I asked him one afternoon if he could describe it for me in detail, he said, “Why, yes.”

“The fundamental philosophy of my dream house,” he began, “is similar to my feeling about my horses—you go beyond the necessary because you have a love for the aesthetic. This house is a bit showy, but I’m not going to sacrifice quality for anything. If I want slate shingles, I’m going to have slate shingles. Also beveled glass, copper trim, hand-forged ironwork—anything I want. The house will be built with large wooden timbers, and I’ve already picked out some from the woods around here. Big logs and lots of stone, with everything overbuilt for strength and longevity.

“When I open the front door, the first thing I’ll see is a stone waterfall that goes up over thirty feet, with a stone pool at the bottom of it. The waterfall is powered by solar electricity, but also heated, so it contributes to the heating of the house. There will be a stone or tile floor, something that feels good to the eye and feet. The main room looks straight up to a cathedral ceiling over forty feet tall. At the back of the room will be a big sunken fire pit, made of stone, with stone benches built into it. I’ll make fires in there, and my friends can come over on cold winter nights and warm their bodies and backs and butts on those warm stones. To the left of the great room is a door leading to my workshop, twenty feet by twenty. The exterior wall is really just two massive doors on five-foot-long iron hinges that swing out wide and open into the outdoors, so when I’m working in my shop during the summer, I’ll have the air and sun and birds singing.

“Next to the great room are two glass rooms. One is a greenhouse, so I’ll can have a plethora of fresh greens and vegetables all year. The other is a dining room, simple and perfect. There’s a place for everything, just like on a ship. A big wooden table and benches and a wraparound couch. And windows everywhere so that I can look down into the valley, where I’ll see the barn, the pastures, and the garden. Behind the entrance to the dining room is a door leading to the kitchen. Marble countertops, handmade cabinets with antler handles, open shelving, wood-burning stove—but also a gas range. Sinks with running cold and hot water, all powered by solar, and all kinds of handmade this and hand-forged that and cast-iron cooking ware. And there’s another door leading to an outside kitchen, where I can cook and eat in the summertime, with a sheltered deck and a table and outdoor sinks with running water and shelves and stoves, so that I don’t have to keep going inside all the time for supplies. The deck looks out over a beautiful drop-off in the ravine, and there’ll probably be propane lighting out there.

“Upstairs are two small loft bedrooms and—this can be seen from the great room—a balcony opening out from the master bedroom. The master bedroom is the size of the workshop below, but it won’t be all cluttered. Just open space, clean and beautiful. Down the hall from the master bedroom is a composting toilet and a sauna and the loft bedrooms. There’s also an outdoor sleeping porch with a bed on it, but if I have to sleep indoors, there’s a king-size bed with a skylight over it so that I can look at the stars all night. And, of course, there will be huge walk-in closets.

“There will be art everywhere in my home. Over the balconies will be hanging Navajo rugs. It’ll be a little like that Santa Fe style everyone likes so much these days, but full of real and valuable art—not the art-i-fakes people collect because they don’t know better. This home will have lots of art, lots of light, lots of space, peaceful, safe, underground on three sides, useful and beautiful. I’m telling you, Architectural Digest would love to get its hands on this place. And I know I could build it myself, but I won’t even break ground for it until I have a wife, because I will be damned if I’m gonna build this house without the right woman beside me.”

He stopped talking. Sat back and smiled.

I myself was unable to speak.

It wasn’t that I was wondering where the hell Eustace had ever picked up a copy of Architectural Digest. It wasn’t that I was shocked that Eustace, who has preached for decades about how little we need in the way of material surroundings to live happily, had just described his desire to build a rustic mansion suitable to the aesthetic standards of a retired millionaire oilman. It wasn’t that I was contemplating how much Eustace suddenly sounded to me like Thomas Jefferson—a civic-minded but solitary idealist, momentarily letting go of his obligations to the Republic in order to lose himself in the decadent reverie of designing the perfect home away from society. It wasn’t even that I was wondering where those thirteen kids Eustace keeps planning to sire are going to sleep in a house that has only two spare bedrooms. I could handle all that. Didn’t faze me one bit.

My shock was much more basic.

It was merely that, despite all the surprising twists of character I’d come to expect over the years from this most complex and modern of mountain men, I still could not believe I had just heard Eustace Conway utter the phrase “huge walk-in closets.”

Here is Eustace Conway, looking down the burl of the shotgun that is age forty. If the actuary charts of the insurance industry are to be believed, he is halfway finished with his life. He has achieved much. He has seen more of this world than most of us will ever read about. He has, about seventy-five times a year, done things that people told him were impossible to do. He has acquired and protected the land he always wanted. He has paid attention to the laws of the universe, and that attention has rewarded him with proficiency in a dazzling range of subjects. He has instituted an organization of teaching and preaching founded in his exact image. He has become a public figure of considerable renown. He is venerated and he is feared. He’s at the top of his game. He even calls himself a Type-A Mountain Man, and, indeed, he has become a Man of Destiny in action, the World’s Most Public Recluse, the CEO of the Woods.

But there are cracks. And he can feel the wind blowing through them. Just as when he was thirty, he can’t seem to make his relationships with other people work as well as he would like. The folks he labors with at Turtle Island are always angry with him or misunderstanding him. Virtually every apprentice I met at Turtle Island ended up leaving Eustace long before his or her time was officially up, and usually in tears. Even Candice, who was fiercely determined not to become just another Disgruntled Ex-Turtle Islander, left the mountain abruptly as a DETI, frustrated by Eustace’s refusal to give her more control over the garden.

And Eustace fares no better with his family. Foremost in his consciousness, of course, is that disparaging father—looming over his every breathing moment, critical and disgusted and angry. Forever it has been the case in Eustace Conway’s life that when he looks for love and acceptance from his father, he goes nearly snowblind from the blankness he sees there.

Although something strange did happen this year.

Eustace called me on his thirty-ninth birthday. We had a normal conversation, talking for an hour about Turtle Island business and gossip. He told me about his new apprentices and about work on the barn and the birth of a beautiful new colt named Luna.

And then he said, in a strange tone, “Oh, there’s something else. I got a birthday card this week.”

“Oh, yeah?” I asked. “From who?”

“From my father.”

There was a long silence. I put down the tea I was drinking and found myself a chair.

“Tell me,” I said. “Tell me everything.”

“I’m holding the card right here in my hand.”

“Read it to me, Eustace.”

“It’s kind of interesting, you know? My dad . . . um . . . he drew the card himself. It’s a drawing of three little balloons floating up to the sky. He drew the balloons with a red pen and drew a bow around the strings of the balloons with a green pen. He used a blue pen for the message.”

“What message?”

Eustace Conway cleared his throat and read: “It’s hard to believe that thirty-nine years have passed since you were born and started our family. Thank you for the many blessings you have brought us over the decades. We look forward to many more. Love, Daddy.”

There was another long silence.

“Run that by me again,” I said, and Eustace did.

Neither one of us spoke for a while. Then Eustace told me that he’d received the card two days earlier. “I read it once and folded it up and put it back in its envelope. I was so upset by it, my hands were shaking. It’s the first kind thing my father has ever said to me. I don’t think anyone can know how that makes me feel. I didn’t look at it again until right now. It took me two days to get the courage to open it up again and read it over. I was afraid to even touch it, you know. I wasn’t sure it was true. I thought maybe I dreamed it.”

“Are you OK?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Oh, my God, I don’t know how to open my fearful heart and even think about it. I mean, what the hell is this about? What does this mean, Dad? What the fuck are you up to, Dad?”

“He may not be up to anything, Eustace.”

“I think I’m going to hide this card away for a while.”

“Go ahead,” I said.“Maybe you can read it again tomorrow.”

“Maybe I’ll do that,” said Eustace, and he hung up.

This tiny but startling thaw between the two Eustaces reminded me of an obscure word I’d learned recently. I’d discovered it one day when I was paging through a dictionary on a whim, trying to find Eustace’s name, to see if I could learn its derivation. There was no Eustace in my dictionary, but I did discover Eustasy, which is a noun. And here’s what Eustasy means: “a worldwide change in sea-level, occurring over many millennia, triggered by the advance or retreat of glaciers.”

A slow and epic melting, in other words. Which is what it would take, I suppose, to effect even a marginal alteration on the level of an ocean.

And then there are the other members of the Conway family to consider. Eustace’s relationships with them are unsettled, too. He adores his mother, but he mourns her sad and arduous married life with an intensity that corrodes his own ability to seek happiness. He cares for his little brother Judson more than he cares for anyone, but it’s cruelly obvious to the most casual observer that the brothers are not as close as they had once been. Not since the Long Riders journey. Judson lives near Eustace now, residing just over the holler from Turtle Island in a small log cabin that he built himself and now shares with his totally kick-ass fiancée (a tough and independent soul who hunts for deer with a bow and arrow, and who works as a lumberjack, and whose name is— get this!—Eunice). Judson could easily ride his horse over to visit Eustace every day if he felt like it, but he doesn’t feel like it. The brothers rarely see each other. Eustace wants much more access to Judson than he is offered, but Judson carefully and affably keeps an arm’s length between them.

“I saw it when we rode across America,” Judson told me. “Eustace is like my dad. He’s too fucking intense and hard to be around. He and my dad both pride themselves on being great communicators. They think they operate at this higher level of intelligence and communication than anyone else. At least Eustace does try to listen to people, and he comes across all gentle and equal, but the bottom line’s the same—he has to get his way all the time, and there’s no talking through it. Hey, I love my brother, but I don’t know how to deal with that. That’s why I keep my distance. I don’t have any choice. And it makes me really sad.”

Walton Conway, the middle brother, also lives nearby, less than an hour from Turtle Island. Brilliant and multilingual and reserved, he lives in a comfortable modern home, his bookshelves filled with Nabokov and Dickens. Walton teaches English and writes quiet fiction. He runs a business out of his home, importing and selling handmade crafts from Russia. His wife is a generous and lively woman with two daughters from a previous marriage, and they’ve since had another daughter. Walton’s life is tranquil now, but he did a good bit of rough traveling in his youth. Back then, he was always writing letters home to his big brother Eustace, whom he admired deeply and whose respect he so clearly wanted.

“I hate to say it,” Walton wrote to Eustace back in 1987, after a long stay on a farm in Germany where he’d found work, “but you might be proud of me. When I was working, my hands would get good and grimy, and I’ve got calluses now in places I’d never discovered before.”

Or this letter from Russia in 1992: “Had a great change of pace digging a cucumber bed way out of the city last weekend. Good shovel work all day long. Thought of you and Tolstoy and of that summer you did construction work—sweeping?—down in hotter-than-hell Alabama. (You see, I’ve lived all your adventures vicariously, through little peepholes.) In general, though, you would hate it here in Moscow. I am surrounded by filth. It is pitiful to see the city, what man has done to himself, what lives are doled out at the front of the lines. I can’t imagine you here. I dream of Turtle Island.”

But now that Walton lives so close to Turtle Island, he hardly ever visits his brother. This kills Eustace, who dearly wants to spend time with Walton, and who feels wounded because his brother won’t take a larger role in his life.

“It’s the ego that keeps me away,” Walton said, by way of explanation. “I can’t stand it. Some mornings I wake up and I think, God, wouldn’t it be great to have a brother with all the skills and interests of Eustace, but who was humble, too? I’d love to spend time with somebody like that, to learn from him. I’d like to go hiking with Eustace someday and have a quiet interaction, but this ego thing is really difficult to get around. I always want to say to him, ‘Imagine if one day you went for a horse ride and didn’t have to tell everyone about it? Does every moment of your life always have to be such a public show?”

As for Eustace’s only sister, Martha? Well, I consider her the most inscrutable of all Conways. She lives so far outside the bold and adventuresome world of her brothers that it is sometimes easy to forget her existence. The big joke in the Conway family is that Martha was a changeling and that nobody can understand how she “got that way.” Martha lives with her husband and two daughters in a tidy suburban development, in a house so clean and sterilized you could use her kitchen as an operating theater.

“You know how most parents have to hide all the breakable stuff in their house when they have little kids around so that nothing gets wrecked?” Judson asked me, when trying to describe his sister. “Well, in Martha’s house, it’s not like that. She leaves the breakable stuff sitting right out there on the coffee table and tells her daughters not to touch. And you’d better believe they don’t touch.”

Martha is a devout Christian, considerably more religious than either of her parents. She is also a keenly intelligent woman with an MBA from Duke. I’m certain she could be running General Motors right now if she wanted to, but she focuses all her acumen and organizational ability on being a faultless housewife, an exacting mother, and a vital member of her church. I don’t know Martha well; I spent only one afternoon with her. But I liked her. I found her to be more gentle than I had expected, after hearing reports from her brothers about her famous rigidity. I was moved that she welcomed me into her home, considering how sacred that place is to her. I could see in her eyes how hard it was for her to let me in. I could see the painful edge in her, where her profound sense of Christian hospitality sparred against her cherished sense of privacy.

When I asked Martha to define herself, she said, “The most important thing in my life is my walk with Jesus Christ. It reflects on everything I do—how I raise my children, how I honor the commitment to my marriage, how I struggle not to put myself first, how I struggle to deal with my emotions and control my voice. Every choice I make is based on my faith. I teach my children at home because of my faith. I don’t want my children in public schools. I feel there are a lot of evils there, ever since they took prayer out of school. I want my children to grow up with serious faith, and they can get that only here with me. Out there in the world, everything is based on relativism, and I don’t want my children to learn that. Out there, nothing is an absolute anymore. But I still believe in absolutes. I believe there is an absolute right and wrong way to live, and I can teach my children that, right here in this house.”

The other big joke in the Conway family is to point out how different Eustace and Martha are. “Wait until you see how she lives,” I was warned. “You won’t believe that she and Eustace are related!” But I respectfully disagree. As soon as I walked into Martha’s living room, I thought, Sorry, folks. These two are the exactly the same. Eustace and Martha both found the world “out there” to be corrupted and repulsive, so both designed their own worlds, worlds so stubbornly isolated from the greater society that they may as well be living under glass domes. They preside over their personal worlds with an unconditional power, never having to suffer the sting of compromise. Eustace’s world just happens to be a thousand acres, and Martha’s world is closer to a thousand square feet, but they rule with the same impulse. It’s all about absolutism.

And absolutism is great for getting a lot of work done, but when absolutisms collide, it can be a loud and fatal train wreck. Which is why Eustace and his sister have never managed to be close. This is made sadder because both want to work out some kind of relationship. But they only vex each other. Eustace believes he makes every effort to respect Martha’s values and tightly scheduled life by giving her plenty of warning before he visits and by reading Bible stories to her children and by trying not to mess up her cherished house. Still, she accuses him of being rude and self-centered, which hurts him all the more, considering his perception that Martha—who has brought her family up to Turtle Island only twice, despite repeated invitations—seems to take no interest in his life. Martha, on the other hand, is routinely hurt by what she perceives: a domineering brother who demands that the entire world stop and drop at his feet to worship him whenever he breezes through town. Out of pride, out of habit, Martha refuses to bow.

So, no, Eustace’s interactions with his family aren’t satisfying. Not on any front. He can’t get past that. What bothers him even more, though, is that he hasn’t begun a family of his own. Now, as when he was thirty, he scans his empire and is shocked to notice that, while he has accomplished much through sheer force of will, he still doesn’t have a wife and children. At this point in his life, he should be well into a family, deep into the process of childrearing and heartily comforted by the solidity of marriage. Where does Eustace go wrong on this? He can’t figure it out.

Eustace and I drove down his mountain one day to visit his horse mentor, the old hillbilly farmer and genius animal trainer, Hoy Moretz. We had a good afternoon in Hoy’s kitchen, eating cornbread with his wife, Bertha, and listening to wild old lies and paging through Hoy’s photo albums, which contain nothing but pictures of mules, bulls, and horses. Hoy is funny and sly. (When I met him for the first time, I said, “How do you do, sir?” and he said, “Fat and lazy. How ’bout you?”) He’s not book-read—his daddy had him driving teams of bulls at the age of six for the saw mill—but he’s an inspired farmer. His land is three hundred acres of the neatest and sweetest pastures and fields you ever saw. Hoy has no children of his own, and so, over the kitchen table, Eustace got to asking him what would become of that gorgeous land after he and Bertha both passed on. Hoy said he didn’t rightly know, but he imagined “Uncle Sam’ll take it over and sell it to them developers who just put nine hundred houses up on the other side of my mountain.”

In the car later, I asked Eustace whether he would want Hoy’s land. The Moretz farm is only forty-five minutes from Turtle Island, and it’s gorgeous, and, yes, Eustace said, of course he would want it and of course he would hate to see it developed into a graveyard of suburban homes.

“But that’s the pattern of the world,” he went on. “First come the roads and then come the farms and then the farmers sell out to developers who chop it up and rape it and put in more roads until it’s all chewed to pieces. I can’t save every acre in North Carolina. I don’t have the power for that.”

“But what would you do with Hoy’s property if you could get it?” I asked, thinking he might use it for hayfields or as a place to graze his ever-increasing kingdom of horses.

“I’d save it and then give it to one of my sons when he was grown so that he could make it a traditional heritage farm,” Eustace said.

That sentence hung awkwardly in the air for a long moment. There were several assumptions at play here: that Eustace will someday have a bunch of children; that there will be boys among them; that any one of these boys will grow up to give a shit about heritage farming; that Eustace will not find his sons to be as mammoth a disappointment (“the antithesis of what I had expected!”) as his grandfather and his father found their sons to be; that any of his land will still be around in twenty-five years. Even Eustace seemed to hear these doubts.

“My sons,” he said finally, in self-disgust. “Listen to me talk. Where am I going to get sons?”

Where, indeed? And with whom as a mother? This is the trillion-dollar question in Eustace’s life, the question that haunts not only him but everyone who knows him, to the point that it’s like a national pastime for people to sit around speculating about who (or if) Eustace Conway would someday marry. Every member of the Conway family has taken me aside at some point in the last few years to utter his or her secret desire that Eustace will never marry and certainly never have children, because he would be, as Martha fears, “way too scary as a father.”

But Eustace has other friends who are constantly trying to set him up with one mountain-climbing, peace-loving, dark-skinned, modern nature girl after another. Some friends think he should go back to Guatemala and marry the prettiest and quietest fourteen-year-old Mayan girl he can find. Others think he needs the world’s toughest and most modern ballbuster to come in and kick his ass around Turtle Island for a while. And he has one friend, a blunt woman artist, who never stops challenging him with this accusation: “Hey, Eustace. Why don’t you just admit that you don’t really like children? You can’t get away from them fast enough when they’re in the room with you.”

Like everyone else, I have my own opinions about Eustace’s romantic life. It seems to me that what he really needs is a woman who is both strong and submissive. This may sound like a contradiction, but it wasn’t always the case. Strength combined with submission in women was the norm for centuries, especially on the American frontier. Take a look again at Davy Crockett’s wife, whose thorough competence in the wilderness was matched only by her subservience to her husband. That’s what Eustace needs. But that was 1780. Times, as we’ve all surely noticed, have changed. And so it is my personal opinion that Eustace Conway is not going to have much luck finding himself a wife (or, as he sometimes puts it, “a mate”). As an urban friend of his bemoaned once, in a fake folksy drawl, “A century of goddamn feminism done spoilt all the brides!”

Like many impressive Men of Destiny before him, it is only in this one most delicate operation of intimate partnership where Eustace doesn’t succeed. All his energies and all his talents become useless in the face of it. As the unhappy Meriwether Lewis wrote to his dear friend William Clark, a few years after they’d crossed and mapped the continent, “I am now a perfect widower with respect to love . . . I feel all that restlessness, that inquietude, that certain indescribable something common to old bachelors, which I cannot avoid thinking my dear fellow proceeds from that void in our hearts which might, or ought to be better filled. Whence it comes I know not, but certain it is, that I never felt less like a hero than at the present moment. What may be my next adventure God knows, but on this I am determined, to get a wife.”

It’s not as though Eustace doesn’t have plenty of options. The man has a powerful effect on women and has access to loads of them, isolated though his world may seem. There is no end of beautiful and starry-eyed female dreamers who dance through Turtle Island every year as campers, apprentices, and day-trippers, many of whom would be more than happy to have a thrilling roll in the duff with a real mountain man, given the invitation. If all Eustace was after in life was hot sexual gratification, he could easily pick himself an endless supply of lovers, as if picking berries off a bush. He must be given credit, though, for never having used Turtle Island as a personal Free Love Utopia. He has never exploited that crop of lovelies for short-term sexual pleasure. On the contrary, he consciously detaches himself from the many young girls who idolize him for his rugged image, because he doesn’t think it’s appropriate to take advantage of their adoration. Instead, what he endlessly searches for is a robust and sacrosanct monogamous union of Olympian dimensions between two heroic figures. It’s a search informed and inspired by a conception of romantic love that remains doggedly—indeed, heartbreakingly and unbelievably and almost belligerently—naïve.

“It was so intriguing to meet you and have a chance to share with you,” he wrote in an early letter to one woman who never hung around long enough to even be legitimately listed as one of Eustace Conway’s girlfriends. “I don’t know exactly what you must think about me, but I hope we will have a chance to get to know each other. I am looking for a mate—an energetic, intelligent, adventuresome person like yourself is really attractive to me. I would like to live out my fantasies of a sacred relationship that was filled with a lifetime of love and compassionate care and understanding. I want that ‘perfect’ love-filled American dream ‘fantasy’ relationship, if you will. I am holding out for nothing less than that . . . I have been interested in marriage for 10 years. I have been looking but haven’t found the ‘right one’ yet . . . If you have the vision to see and the care to investigate, you will find me a deep and caring person who is capable and willing to offer you more than you have ever dreamed about in the way of meaningful partnership through this journey of life, ‘the human experiment.’ I offer you that. Please take me seriously on this and not let another protective mechanism keep you from finding in me what your heart truly desires. Insofar as I can offer you my love, truest sentiments, Eustace.”

But this “stand-in-the-wind-tunnel-of-my-love” approach hasn’t worked, there, either. And it baffles Eustace, this absence, this loss, this failure to create an ideal family to erase his brutal childhood. He’s all too aware that he’s running out of time. Just recently, he got involved with Ashley, a twenty-four-year-old beautiful hippie he’s known for years. She is as warm and loving as any human being I’ve met. Eustace first ran into her six years before, at a party, and stared at her all night, watching her talk to others, thinking that “she was so alive, so full of love, like a waterfall spilling all over the room with the mist boiling up around her, so captivating. I took one look at her and thought, This is the one. I need to marry that girl.”

But Ashley, all of eighteen at the time, already had a lover. She was on her way out of town, about to step into the world for some wild traveling and adventures, and was in no way ready to be Eustace Conway’s woman. But she has since returned to Boone and she’s single now. Eustace has fallen in love with her once again, and she with him.

Eustace thinks Ashley is an angel, and it’s not hard to see why. She emanates kindness and humanity. Ashley was driving me through Boone one afternoon when a homeless man approached her car at a red light and asked for money. Ashley, who has been barely surviving for years on food stamps and hope, dug around in the car for spare change, but could find only a few dimes.

“I can’t give you much money,” she apologized to the homeless man, “but I promise I will give you all my prayers.”

“Thank you,” he said, smiling as if he’d been handed a hundred-dollar bill. “I believe you.”

Ashley has a heart big enough to absorb all the love and need and hunger that Eustace thrusts at her without even flinching. But there’s a glitch with Ashley. Somewhere along her journeys she managed to acquire three young children—a five-year-old son and toddler twin daughters.

When I heard about them, I said, “Eustace, I always thought you wanted thirteen kids. Looks to me as if you’ve got a good start here, buddy. Three down, ten to go.”

Eustace laughed. “Sure, but the concept of thirteen kids is a lot different from the reality of three.”

Ashley is calm, affectionate, funny, attentive, and steady. She brings a much-needed sense of peace and hospitality to Turtle Island. And she can gracefully handle that way of life. She spent several years living on a scrappy Rainbow Gathering commune that made Turtle Island look like a Hilton Resort. This is a woman who went through two pregnancies without seeing a doctor. (“You know when you’re healthy,” she explains, “and I didn’t need anyone to tell me I was doing fine.”) This is a woman who delivered her twins outside in the middle of the night on the cold Colorado ground, barely sheltered under a tarp. This is a woman who could definitely manage a life of hog-butchering and Dumpster Diving.

Eustace swears he would marry Ashley in a minute if she didn’t already have a family. He has strong reservations about bringing up another man’s freewheeling children, particularly when that other man is a hippie who still has a considerable presence in his kids’ lives. Eustace doesn’t want an undisciplined influence like that anywhere near children he himself might someday be raising. Although he is not as frightened, it should be said, by Ashley’s twin daughters as he is by her energetic and willful young son.

“How could I adopt that boy when he’s already begun to be formed? He’s already seen too many corrupting things that I can’t control or erase. I had the worst relationship with my father, and if I’m going to have a son, I have to be sure that the relationship is perfect right from the beginning. I don’t want there to be a moment of anger or trouble between us. For all I know, I could spend ten years showing Ashley’s boy the proper path, and then he could turn on me when he’s fourteen and say, ‘Fuck that, Dad. I’m gonna go get high.’”

“Eustace,” I said, “nobody can promise you that your own biological children wouldn’t say the same thing someday. In fact, I can almost promise you that they will. You do know that, right?”

“But the odds would be better with my own children, because I’d be there from the beginning to teach them what’s acceptable and unacceptable behavior. The odds just don’t look good with Ashley’s kids. They’re already undisciplined. Ashley’s a great mother but her children manipulate her and cause all kinds of havoc and destruction. It’s really hard to have her kids around all the time, because they’re not trained. They’re always getting into everything and demanding her attention. She brings them up here and I do things with them, like take them horseback riding, but it’s no fun. It’s fun for them but not for me.”

Eustace can’t quite let go of Ashley, because she’s beautiful and kind and gives him the deliciously unconditional love he’s been starving for. But he can’t keep her around, either, because she brings too many terrifying variables into his exacting and well-ordered cosmos. He’s been trying to help her bring more order and discipline to her family; he’s lent her books from his library written by the Amish about how to properly “train up” a child, very much as one would train up a horse. Ashley, who is indeed run ragged by her children, studied the books carefully and gratefully, and has taken much of the advice to heart. She’s even passed these old-fashioned lessons about childrearing along to her hippie friends who are mothers, to help them create some stability within their own disorganized families. And it’s been a largely successful education. Using the strict old Amish system, Ashley has gotten her children on a more solid schedule, and there are fewer tantrums and meltdowns. But the children are still a handful, of course. Because there are three of them and because they are children.

So Eustace doesn’t know what to do about Ashley. In the end, his decision will almost certainly be a showdown between the two things he craves most: absolute love and absolute control. It’s a tough call. Historically, love has always been a pretty fierce contender, but some people in this world need more than love. Eustace has lived without love before; that’s a familiar sensation for him. Whereas he has never lived a moment of his adult life without control.

So he remains alone and single. And full of questions about what kind of woman he should seek. After all these years, he’s come to think that he should be more careful about whom he selects to love. Maybe he’s been too random in his choices; maybe that’s why it never works out. Taking on the challenge as he would take on any organizational task, Eustace recently sat down and efficiently listed the requirements for his perfect woman. If he could evaluate prospective candidates in each category, he should be able to choose wisely, and surely he would never be hurt or lonely again.

Very healthy, his list (set forth in no particular order) begins. Then:

Capacity for intimacy.

Beautiful.

Confidence with and passion for sexuality.

Spiritual belief/direction.

Excited and motivated to live each day completely and with sacred appreciation for it.

Nurturing, giving, caretaking, traditional woman sides to personality.

Leans toward nonmaterialistic lifestyle, values.

Emotional, confident, centered, energy, positive support, and social skills.

Independently able self, with capacity to bond deeply in sacred marriage union.

Multilingual.

Involved with or appreciation for arts—dance, theater, literature, visual, etc.

Passion for family a priority.

Appreciates judicial money management.

Likes to work at tasks, i.e., farm/land/garden management.

The list goes on and on. So you can see the problem. You can see how God himself might shake his head when handed such an invoice and say, Sorry, pal, we don’t carry that in stock. But Eustace is way more optimistic than God. And way more lonely than God, too.

When Eustace first showed me this love list, I handed it back and said, “I’m really sorry, Eustace, but this isn’t how love works.”

“I don’t know how else to do it,” he said, sounding, for once, helpless.

It’s true that this list testifies to how enormously unequipped Eustace Conway is when it comes to handling intimacy. Look, we all seek certain traits in a lover, but this list looked to me like a cheat-sheet for an exam that most of us don’t need to study for. Most of us don’t need to match up people’s qualities with an inventory printout; we can tell when we’re in love. But Eustace isn’t sure that he can tell. He has too few of the basic skills to face the mountains and valleys and unpredictable weather patterns of real love between flawed and wonderful human adults. He is, by his own admission, too damaged and sensitive, and I find it astonishingly brave of him to continue trying to open his heart to others at all.

Whether these troubles can be blamed on the hard-driving masculine iconography he’s absorbed from American culture or whether it’s the fallout of his traumatized childhood, I do not know. But when I see Eustace Conway heading off into the wilderness of intimacy, clutching that exhaustive checklist of his, he looks to me an awful lot like the chubby suburban guy who just bought out the Orvis catalogue for a weekend hunting trip: overpacked, underskilled, and scared to death.

One of Eustace’s regular gigs over the years has been at Merlefest, a well-established festival of folk music and arts held every summer in western North Carolina. Eustace doesn’t travel and speak as much as he used to; he prefers to stay home at Turtle Island away from the masses. But he still works at Merlefest every year, setting up his teepee on the fairgrounds and speaking to people about natural living. It’s a good job. It pays well and draws an earnest crowd, and Eustace gets to spend the weekend listening to live folk music from Appalachian heroes of his like Doc Watson and Gillian Welch.

I went to Merlefest with Eustace in the summer of 2000, and saw, in his manner with the public, more world-weariness than I’d ever seen in him before. It wasn’t as if he were telephoning in his performances with people, but he wasn’t the firebrand I remembered from speaking engagements in years past. And it wasn’t hard to understand, during the course of this weekend, why a man could lose his spark in the face of the world’s reality.

Eustace had been told well in advance that he was to share the stage at Merlefest with another headline speaker, “a real Indian Chief from the Florida Everglades” named Chief Jim Billy. For weeks, Eustace was somewhat nervous and apprehensive about this encounter.

“I know a lot of Native Americans and I’m usually welcome,” he explained.“ But sometimes Indians have a bad reaction to me, like,Who’s this white guy in the teepee pretending to be? Especially with politicized native people, I can be seen at first as offensive. Of course I understand their hesitation, so I’m always a little cautious; careful to be extra respectful.”

In this case, he needn’t have worried. Chief Jim Billy turned out to be a big friendly guy in blue jeans with the wide smile and hearty handshake of a born salesman. His tribe had just gotten a massive windfall in the form of gaming profits, and the chief carried himself with the satisfied ease of well-fed wealth. His act, which he did just for fun these days, now that he didn’t need the cash, was to get on stage and sing “rock ’n’ roll–inspired songs for kids” about all the cool and scary animals that live down in the Everglades.

“Hey, parents!” he warned between songs. “Don’t let your kids go into the woods alone, ’cuz there’s animals back there that will bite you! Bite you? Heck, down in the Everglades, they’ll eat you!”

When his act was over, Chief Jim Billy sat in the audience and listened attentively to Eustace’s compelling and sober presentation about how to live in harmony with nature. Eustace showed the audience how to weave rope with grass and with their own hair, and displayed baskets and clothing that he had made from natural materials. Chief Jim Billy approached Eustace after the show, extremely impressed.

“I’ll tell you something, man,” he said, hugging Eustace. “You’re great. The stuff you know how to do? It’s great. You gotta come down to Florida and teach my people all this stuff, because nobody down there knows how to do these things anymore. You’re more Indian than any of us! Hell, the only thing people in my tribe know how to do is fly up to Miami and get a tan! I’m just pullin’ your leg here, buddy. But seriously, you should come down and see us on the reservation. We’re doing real good these days. We run a little safari that goes right through the swamp for the tourists, and the tourists would love to see you. You could be a real good attraction, because those people are looking for something authentic, something genuine, and that’s what you got. We try to give them a taste of genuineness on our swamp trip, but we like to have some fun, too. We have one guy who dresses up in a black hairy costume and runs alongside the boat, jumping out at people. I tell you, man, you’d love the hell out of it. Any time you want to come down and visit, just call me. I’ll take care of you, treat you like a king. You got a telephone back there in the woods, Tarzan? Good. Call me. I’m serious. I’ll pick you up in my plane, fly you down for the weekend. I got my own jet, a real nice G-4. It’s even got an indoor outhouse! You’ll love it!”

Then Chief Billy hugged Eustace again and smoothly handed over his business card.

“Everything you need to know about me is on this card,” said this gregarious Chief of the Seminoles to Eustace Conway. “Phone, cell phone, beeper, everything. Call me anytime, man. You’re awesome.”

Together, Eustace and I walked in silence away from the stage and back toward his demonstration teepee, which was set up on the midway, across from the concession stands. There were two nine-year-old boys playing inside when we arrived, dirt bikes parked by the smoke flap, and they nearly tackled Eustace when he showed up.

“We heard you can teach us how to start fires!” one of them said. One boy was dark-haired and small for his age; the other was overweight and blond, wearing a T-shirt that said EARTHDAY.

Accommodating them, Eustace took two sticks and explained to the boys that “trees hold fire. They get their fire from the sun. Inside every tree is a little bit of the sun that you can release with your own energy.” Eustace ground the sticks together until he got a small bright ember, which he dropped into the center of a tiny nest of dry tinder, cupped in his hand. “What we have here is a baby ember, a newborn piece of fire. If we don’t treat it right and feed it the nice food of oxygen, it will die.” He encouraged the dark-haired boy to blow gently on the tinder, and, like magic, suddenly there was flame. The boy cheered. Then there was a loud electronic squawk in the teepee. The chubby boy in the earthday shirt pulled a walkie-talkie out of his back pocket.

“What?” he shouted into the receiver, deeply annoyed.

“Where are you, Justin? Over,” came a woman’s voice.

“I’m in a teepee, Mom!” Justin yelled back. “Over!”

“I can’t hear you, Justin. Where are you, Justin?” the walkie-talkie repeated. “Over.”

Justin rolled his eyes and screamed, “I said I’m in a teepee, Mom! Over! A teepee?A teepee, Mom? Get it, Mom? Over!”

I stepped outside, away from the clamor, thinking how much work Eustace has ahead of him if he’s really intent on saving this culture. Outside the teepee, I found a middle-aged man in a flannel shirt looking over Eustace’s structure with interest. We set to talking.

“My name is Dan,” he told me. “I come here to Merlefest every year from Michigan and always try to find Eustace. I like listening to him talk about his life. It appeals to me, although it makes me envious, too. God knows, I’d move into the woods in a minute if I could. But I can’t. I’ve got five kids in school to support right now. I’ve got a good job at Sarah Lee, I’ve got alimony to pay, and I don’t see how I could leave the financial security and health insurance and live like Eustace, but I wish to God I could. I think about it every year when I come here, whenever I meet him. He’s pretty compelling, you know? And look how healthy he is, living in that natural way. Not like the rest of us.”

Here, Dan smiled with sweet embarrassment and patted his heavy stomach. He continued.“Eustace is always, like, you can do it, you can do it. But I don’t see how I can do it. We just built a big house, you know? It’s full of so much damn stuff, I don’t even know where it came from. I swear to God, I don’t understand how it happened that we own all this stuff. Sometimes I look at my house and wish I could burn it to the ground, walk away from everything, start over somewhere else with nothing. Lead a simple life out in the woods, away from the world. You understand that feeling at all? You ever get that desire? You ever wanna disappear off the face of the earth?”

“Of course,” I said. “Everyone gets that desire.”

“Not Eustace Conway, I bet.”

“Don’t lay your money on it, Dan.”

All of which is to say that, looking toward the age of forty, Eustace must admit that he has not exactly provoked the kind of change in our world that he hoped to when he was younger. (Indeed, that he was certain he would provoke.) The waves of eager citizens following him into the woods never quite materialized as he’d expected when he was twenty. The world remains what it was, maybe worse.

Looking back two decades, he told me, “I honestly believed I could change things. My feeling was Just give America to me; let me take it; I’ll fix it myself! I thought all it would require was conviction and hard work, and I knew I was capable of working harder than anyone. I didn’t think the whole country would come streaming back to a more natural way of living, but I figured maybe sixty or a hundred people a year would come to Turtle Island and then take their lessons back to their communities and the message would spread like ripples in a pond and the effect would keep expanding. But I see now how hard it is to make a major difference in this country if you don’t happen to be the president or an important senator and if you have no resources except your energy. How can one person make a difference? It’s impossible and it’s improbable and, most of all, it’s damn tiring.”

And America’s obsession with devouring land continues, faster and more efficiently than ever. Eustace is glad to see that environmental awareness, once a radical and fringe concept, is now “totally pop and hip.” Still, he can’t see that a little recycling fever is any match for the famished momentum of industry and overpopulation and rampant consumerism that define our culture. It may be that Turtle Island will, a century from now, be as Eustace once imagined it: “A tiny bowl in the earth, intact and natural, surrounded by pavement and highways. People will climb up to the ridges around Turtle Island and peer inside, and they’ll be able to see a pristine and green example of what the whole world once looked like.”

Maybe that’s true. Maybe what Eustace is doing by saving this little patch of Appalachian forest is what medieval monks once did by copying all those ancient texts. In a dark time, one that does not value knowledge, he is steadfastly preserving something small and precious in the hope that a more enlightened future generation will be grateful to have it. Maybe that’s all he’s doing.

People used to say to Eustace, “If you touch only one life, you’ve had an effect on the world!” But Eustace was never satisfied with that. It was his intent to alter the very destiny of humanity and never to settle for the meager accomplishment of touching a random life every now and again. He runs into people sometimes these days who’ll say, “You’re Eustace Conway! I remember you! You spoke at my high school fifteen years ago! You were amazing! You changed my life!”

Then Eustace gets all excited, until the person clarifies that. “Yeah, ever since I heard you speak, I don’t run the water anymore while I’m brushing my teeth. I’m conserving resources.”

Eustace can only laugh, covering his face with his hands and shaking his head. “I mean, don’t get me wrong,” he’ll tell me. “I want to say to these people, hey, I’m glad you’re not running the water while you’re brushing your teeth. Honestly, I am. That’s a very nice way to conserve a precious resource and that makes me really happy. But you know what? I kinda had bigger plans for you.”

Eustace has lost, too, his youthful notion that he could teach absolutely anybody to live in the woods. When he was younger, he never considered turning away a would-be apprentice from Turtle Island. He never believed there was a single person in this country who couldn’t master a more natural life with a little training. But now he’s more cautious, more selective. He doesn’t automatically welcome the ex-convicts and barely recovering drug addicts and angry teenage runaways anymore, because it saps the system to have such people around.

He’s also found it useful to formalize the apprenticeship program more. It used to be a looseygoosey, sealed-on-a-handshake relationship, the details of which altered from person to person, from year to year. Basically, all a young man or woman had to do was show up at Turtle Island and express some eagerness, and Eustace would sign the kid up, asking only that the apprentice promise to work hard and keep a positive attitude throughout the stay. These days, though, Eustace screens all potential apprentices through a fairly rigorous application process that demands resumés, references, background information, and a written essay. Moreover, tired of the Eustace Conway Whiplash Effect that decimated the morale of his workforce, Eustace now hands out this memo (simply entitled “Re: Relationship With Eustace”) to every applicant:

“Please don’t expect to develop a close friendship with Eustace or be disappointed by anything other than a working boss, leader, and director-type of friendship. People are attracted to aspects of Eustace’s warm and generous personality and often want a more personal contact than can be expected, or than Eustace is comfortable in allowing. Apprentices have been disappointed when they did not get enough social contact with Eustace. Eustace is comfortable with extending his time to you on a mutually agreed upon expectation level. This clearly defined relationship is between a leader and those who are learning about the chores, methods, and needs of a farm and educational center.”

Lately, Eustace has suffered such crushing disappointments with his workers that he’s considering altogether giving up the apprenticeship program. Two of his apprentices quit this spring after serving out only six months of their year-long contracts, abandoning Turtle Island with the usual complaints that the work was too hard, they were having trouble with Eustace’s leadership, the experience was not what they’d expected, and they “needed to follow their bliss,” even if it meant not honoring their commitments.

“Does it mean nothing to anybody anymore to sign an agreement?” Eustace asked in wonder. “Is it naïve of me in my antiquated way to think that people should do what they say they’re going to do? How could these kids walk away after six months without caring that they’d promised to stay a year? They had no sense of the bind that put me in, or the fact that I might have made plans around their commitment. They bailed out early and left me high and dry. And why does this keep happening, time and again?”

What devastated Eustace about the loss of these two young people was not only that their stay at Turtle Island followed such a familiar trajectory (enthusiastic hope followed by bitter disillusionment) but that one of the apprentices, a thoroughly competent and reliable woman named Jennifer, had been, to Eustace’s mind, possibly the best worker he’d ever had. She even rivaled the legendary Christian Kaltrider with her potential. She was smart, dedicated, and uncomplaining, with a serious commitment to learning about primitive farming. She’d been raised in the mountains and had brought skills to Turtle Island that even Eustace didn’t have. He’d trusted her enough to turn over to her the management of the Turtle Island garden (an act of faith he’d made with no small amount of suffering, and largely as a self-experiment, to see whether he could handle the loss of control). And Jennifer had made the garden thrive, even as she was learning about the care of horses and the construction of buildings. She was perfect, and Eustace had come to respect her and rely on her. And now she had up and quit.

“Look up the word heartbroken in the dictionary and you’ll see a picture of me next to it,” he told me on the phone a week after Jennifer had left. “I was so depressed when she left, I didn’t get out of bed for two days. If somebody like Jennifer can’t make it here for a whole year, who can? Who am I kidding? Why am I bothering? What is Turtle Island for, if that’s how it’s always going to end? It’s something I pour my lifeblood into for the benefit of others, but it’s not working, and the people I’m doing it for keep quitting and failing. I’m closer to giving up than I’ve ever been. I’ve been having fantasies of hanging a little sign on the gate that says: Turtle Island closed. Go away. Of course, I won’t. Or maybe I will. I don’t know anymore . . .”

And so it goes that Eustace, by hard necessity, is narrowing his vision as he ages, winnowing out some of his youthful ideals, giving up some of his boldest dreams. His latest aspirations are strikingly modest. For now, he’s not taking on any new apprentices but is concentrating his energy on getting a horseback-riding program instituted at Turtle Island. He’s been running ads in the Boone newspapers, inviting people to come up to his property for day trips around his woods. He’s hoping that the money he makes by taking people on horseback rides will help defer the expenses of keeping all those lovely horses of his. And it’s a refreshingly simple human interaction—the customer pays, Eustace provides a simple service, he doesn’t try to convince anyone to move into the forest with him, and everyone goes home at the end of the day satisfied.

OK, he thinks now, maybe I can’t change the world. Maybe Eustace’s influence will be more modest, affecting small groups and scattered individuals— people like the motorists he waved to from his horse on the Long Riders trip, the kindergarteners he buried up to their necks in the forest, the drug dealers in Tompkins Square Park whom he left to ponder the curious fact that a man can make his clothing from the materials of this earth . . .

Or consider the young campers who were exploring Turtle Island one day and discovered a beaver dam and were encouraged by their counselors to swim inside the dam through the beaver’s tunnels until they reached the inside of the beaver’s lodge—warm, dry, sacred, and hidden. How many boys in this century have been inside a beaver lodge? That event must have sent an immeasurable and lasting tremor through the consciousness of those boys. To Eustace Conway, with his grand architect’s vision of a transformed America, that may not seem like much. But in this age of increasingly mindless conformity, even the faintest suggestion that the world can be looked at from another vantage point for one fleeting moment, it is much. And maybe that doesn’t satisfy Eustace, but that may be all he gets. He is, in the end, a teacher. And like all teachers, he may have to accept the reality that only a few of his students over a few decades will truly be affected by a few lessons.

There was once a kid, for instance, named Dave Reckford.

He was raised outside Chicago, a suburban child with a physician father and a mother who expressed her vaguely hippie leanings by sending her son to Quaker schools and feeding him health foods. When Caterpillar Tractor closed its Illinois factory, Dave’s hometown turned from boom to bust, and his parents moved to North Carolina, where Dave was sent to an expensive private school packed with children from the oldest families in the South. And then his life turned upside down. Dave’s father fell in love with another woman and split. The family was shattered into chaos. Eventually, those shattered bits were re-ordered. After a few hard years, his mother pulled her life together and married a wealthy and kind man, but somehow Dave was left behind in all this. He was thirteen years old and shaken to his guts. Profoundly sad. And searching.

A few years later, a modern-day mountain man named Eustace Conway came to teach a nature class at the private school where Dave Reckford was a student. “He was all dressed up in buckskin,” Dave remembers, “and he didn’t smell very good. And he started talking, in his quiet way, about his teepee and his blowgun and his life in the wilderness. I was enthralled. He talked about going to the bathroom in the woods. He got on this diversion about how squatting is the natural way to go to the bathroom and how sitting on a toilet seat puts an unnatural strain on the organs of digestion, and we were shocked—this whole room of elite Southern teenagers. We’d never heard anything like it. And then he said, ‘In fact, when I have to go to the bathroom someplace where all they have is toilets, I just jump up on the toilet seat and squat on it like this—’ and he hopped up onto a desk in a squat to show us. He was laughing and we were laughing, and somehow he made it all seem OK and interesting without freaking us out.”

Later, Eustace set to talking with Dave, and, sensing the level of desperation in the kid, invited him to visit Turtle Island. Dave immediately agreed, and drove his “little rich-boy Mercedes coupe” up there for a weeklong visit. This was in the early, early years. There wasn’t much to Turtle Island yet, except Eustace’s teepee. He hadn’t cleared any land and he didn’t have any livestock. It was still primitive. When Dave showed up, Eustace was sitting by his teepee, talking “with a really pretty woman. He asked me if I could please excuse myself for a half hour so that he could be alone with this girl in his teepee, and then he slipped off with her to have—it was pretty obvious—sex. I was pretty amazed by the openness of his sexuality. He finally came out of the teepee, and the girl left, and then he began to teach me. The first thing he showed me was a bed of coals in his fire pit. He explained that if you keep your deep-set coals warm all the time, you’ll always have fire ready at hand and not have to strike up a new flame.”

Then he set Dave to work rebuilding the forge in the blacksmith shop. Next, they began digging the foundation for the toolshed Eustace was building. He taught Dave how to make shingles, which was “really hard work, with a sledgehammer.” And so it went, day after day, hard manual labor from a boy who had never experienced such a thing.

“It wasn’t what I’d expected,” Dave said, “from the quiet-warrior, soft-spoken, Zen-master teacher I thought I had followed up the mountain. He was a slave driver. He was relentless and obsessive about detail, and the work made me cry and almost broke my back. It was so hard, I was afraid each day that I wouldn’t survive. But every night, I got to sleep near Eustace in his teepee, on the animal skin rugs by the warm fire, and that was the best and safest sleep I’d had since I was a child. He made me great food and listened to me talk about my family. I don’t think anyone gets this kind of access to Eustace Conway anymore, but this was in the years before he had apprentices and campers everywhere and all his public duties. He was twenty-seven years old and I was a fatherless kid, but it was a profound experience to spend time with a grown man who wanted to talk to me and teach me things.”

Eustace used his time with Dave to try to have him understand the fundamental essence of his philosophy, which centered on mindfulness. There is no way, Eustace said to Dave, that you can have a decent life as a man if you aren’t awake and aware every moment. Show up for your own life, he said. Don’t pass your days in a stupor, content to swallow whatever watery ideas modern society may bottle-feed you through the media, satisfied to slumber through life in an instant-gratification sugar coma. The most extraordinary gift you’ve been given is your own humanity, which is about consciousness, so honor that consciousness.

Revere your senses; don’t degrade them with drugs, with depression, with willful oblivion. Try to notice something new every day, Eustace said. Pay attention to even the most modest of daily details. Even if you’re not in the woods, be aware at all times. Notice what food tastes like; notice what the detergent aisle in the supermarket smells like and recognize what those hard chemical smells do to your senses; notice what bare feet feel like; pay attention every day to the vital insights that mindfulness can bring. And take care of all things, of every single thing there is—your body, your intellect, your spirit, your neighbors, and this planet. Don’t pollute your soul with apathy or spoil your health with junk food any more than you would deliberately contaminate a clean river with industrial sludge. You can never become a real man if you have a careless and destructive attitude, Eustace said, but maturity will follow mindfulness even as day follows night.

Eustace told Dave tragicomic stories about some of the teenage American boys who’d visited Turtle Island and were so oblivious of their environment that they literally didn’t have the sense to come in from the rain. A storm would come up, and the boys would stand there in the downpour, as stupefied as a flock of overbred sheep, unable to reason that they should transport their bodies to a shelter. Or there was the boy Eustace had seen step in a yellow jacket’s nest and then stand stock still and confused as the swarm gathered around him. The boy was patently unable to think that he should get himself out of this situation until Eustace shouted, “Run!”

Be awake, Eustace said (laughing at the very simplicity of it), and you will succeed in this world. When it rains, find shelter! When you’re being stung by yellow jackets, run! Only through constant focus can you become independent. Only through independence can you know yourself. And only through knowing yourself will you be able to ask the key questions of your life: What is it that I am destined to accomplish, and how can I make it happen?

What Dave remembered more than anything about that week, though, was the transformative, almost religious, experience of watching Eustace build a fence.

“Building a fence up here in this rocky soil is hard work. First you have to pound into the ground this metal post, slamming it with a sledgehammer and making a hole for your black locust stake. I almost cut my leg off once, trying to do it. Then you stick that black locust stake into the hole and whale on it with that heavy sledgehammer, drilling it in. I did six of these in a row, and I swear to God I almost died. I can’t describe what hard work that was. I collapsed on the ground and felt that my heart would explode. Eustace then took over for me, and while I tried to catch my breath, he put in the next twenty stakes without pausing once, without even breathing hard.

“I studied him as he worked. How could he do this? He’s not as big or muscular as I am. I’m a triathlete and I’m big, and I couldn’t do it. His arms are lean. How can it work? But as I watched him, I realized he had an intimate physical relationship with his tools. When he swung that sledgehammer, he didn’t use just his arms; he swung it in one perfectly economical motion, using his whole body. His hips helped him hoist the sledgehammer up, and then he arched back and put all his momentum behind the blow. It was beautiful. It was complete physical attention to one task. It was like watching a dance. The dance of manual labor. And I knew that this was why Eustace could do everything faster and better than everyone else, because of that intensity and grace and perfection of focus.”

Dave remembers watching Eustace on another day hammering nails into wood—fast, rhythmic, and perfect—and asking, “How come you never miss the nail?”

“Because I made up my mind a long time ago that I’d never miss the nail,” Eustace replied. “So I don’t.”

In the end, the grueling pace of the work at Turtle Island was such a shock to Dave’s body that he collapsed. He became physically ill from the eleven-hour days of labor. Eustace, seeing this, stopped the work for a day and drove Dave down to town. “Let’s take a fun trip,” he said casually. He took the kid into a bar and got him a beer—his first. Eustace laughed and joked with the bartender and never mentioned the work that was left behind. On the way back up the mountain that night, Dave broke down and told Eustace he didn’t think he could stay any longer.

“I told him I wanted to go home. I was probably crying. I’m sure I was homesick, because I was just a kid. Eustace was calm and thoughtful. We sat in his truck and he talked about life and about what it takes to become a man. He imparted wisdom and kindness to me, taking me seriously at an age when nobody ever took me seriously. He told me that one of the reasons people are so unhappy is they don’t talk to themselves. He said you have to keep a conversation going with yourself throughout your life to see how you’re doing, to keep your focus, to remain your own friend. He told me that he talked to himself all the time, and that it helped him to grow stronger and better every day. He suggested some books I should read. Then he hugged me.”

Fifteen years later, Dave Reckford still couldn’t tell this part of the story without tears brimming up.

“Listen,” he said, “it was a real hug, long and strong. It was a bear hug. It was the first time I had ever been hugged by a man, and it seemed to cure something inside me that was lonely and hurt. He told me I was free to go home and he wished me luck. But he also told me I was free to come back and stay with him on Turtle Island any time I wanted to, because I had done a good job and because I was a good person. And I did go home, but when I got there, I found that something had changed in me. And the rest of my life was changed.”

Every man in Dave Reckford’s family is a lawyer, a doctor, a businessman, or a diplomat. That’s what is expected, the way of the family. It’s not Dave’s way, as it turns out. Dave is thirty years old now and has been roaming around, looking for his place. He’s studied history and music. He’s tried his hand at writing. He’s traveled to Cuba and Europe and across America and even joined the army, trying to find where he should place himself for his short time on earth.

Recently, he finally landed. He solved it. He asked the woman who tends to his parents’ gardens to take him on as her apprentice. She agreed. So now Dave Reckford has become what he believes he was intended to be: a gardener. He takes care of plants. He spends his days thinking about soil and light and growth. It’s a simple relationship, but he is rewarded by it. He tries to understand what plants need and how to help them. He tries to make his every movement careful and precise, to honor his work. He talks to himself all the time, keeping in contact with his personal essence. And every single day of his life he thinks about perfection of focus and about the singular grace of human labor.

Which means that, every single day of his life, he thinks about Eustace Conway.

EPILOGUE

You can’t fix it. You can’t make it go away.

I don’t know what you’re going to do about it,

but I know what I’m going to do about it. I’m just

going to walk away from it. Maybe

a small part of it will die if I’m not around

feeding it anymore.

—Lew Welch

The history of Eustace Conway is the history of man’s progress on the North American continent.

First, he slept on the ground and wore furs. He made fire with sticks and ate what he could hunt and gather. When he was hungry, he threw stones at birds and blew darts at rabbits and dug up roots from the ground, and so he survived. He wove baskets from the trees in his domain. He was a nomad; he moved on foot. Then he moved into a teepee and became a more sophisticated trapper of animals. He made fire with flint and steel. When he mastered that, he used matches. He began to wear wool. He moved out of the teepee and into a simple wooden structure. He became a farmer, clearing the land and cultivating a garden. He acquired livestock. He cut paths into the woods, which became trails and then roads. He improved the roads with bridges. He wore denim.

He was first an Indian, then an explorer, then a pioneer. He built himself a cabin and became a true settler. As a man of utopian vision, he now sustains himself with the hope that like-minded people will buy property around Turtle Island and raise their families as he will someday raise his. The neighbors will till their land with animal-drawn machinery and come to each other’s aid in the time of harvest and join each other for bursts of recreational dancing, and they will ride to each other’s homes on horseback and trade goods.

When all that happens, Eustace will have become a villager. That’s what he wants—to create a town. And when that is all firmly in place, he will build his dream home. He’ll move out of the cabin and into a large and expensive show house full of walk-in closets and appliances and family and stuff. And he will have finally caught up with his time. At that point, Eustace Conway will be the paradigm of a modern American man.

He evolves before our eyes. He improves and expands and improves and expands because he is so clever and so resourceful that he cannot help himself. He is not compelled to rest in the enjoyment of what he already knows how to do; he must keep moving on. He is unstoppable. And we are also unstoppable. We on this continent have always been unstoppable. We all progress, as de Tocqueville observed, “like a deluge of men, rising unabatedly, and driven daily onward by the hand of God.” We exhaust ourselves and everyone else. And we exhaust our resources— both natural and interior—and Eustace is only the clearest representation of our urgency.

I remember driving back to Turtle Island early one evening with him, after a visit to his grandfather’s old empire of Camp Sequoyah. We were almost home, passing through Boone, and stopped at an intersection. Eustace suddenly spun his head and asked, “Was that building there two days ago when we left for Asheville?”

He pointed at the skeleton of a small new office building. No, I hadn’t noticed it there two days earlier. But it looked almost finished. Only the windows needed to be popped in. A battalion of construction workers were leaving the site for the day.

“Couldn’t be,” Eustace said. “Can they really put up a building that fast?”

“I don’t know,” I said, thinking that, of all people, he ought to know. “I guess they can.”

He sighed. “This country . . .” he said.

But Eustace Conway is this country. And, that being the case, what remains? What remains after all this activity? That’s the question Walt Whitman once asked. He looked around at the galloping pace of American life and at the growth of industry and at the jaw-clenching rush of his countrymen’s ambitions and wondered, “After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on—have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear—what remains?”

And, as ever, dear old Walt gave us the answer: “Nature remains.”

That’s what Eustace is left with, too. Although, like the rest of us (and this is his biggest irony), Eustace doesn’t have as much time as he wishes to celebrate the natural world.

As he told me one winter evening over the phone, “We had a snowstorm up at Turtle Island this week. A friend of mine came to visit and said, ‘Hey, Eustace, you’ve been working too hard. You should take a break and build a snowman. Ever think of that?’Well, hell, of course I’d already thought of that. All I had to do was take one step outside my door that morning to see that it was perfect snow for a snowman. I’d already visualized the snowman I would build, if I were to build one. I quickly analyzed the consistency of the snow and decided exactly where to put the snowman for best presentation, exactly how big it would be, and where in my blacksmith shop I could find charcoal for the eyes. I pictured every detail of the snowman right down to the carrot nose, which I had to think about for an instant: Do we have enough carrots to spare that I could use one for this snowman? And after the snowman is over, could I get the carrot back and put it in a stew so that it wouldn’t be wasted? Or would an animal get at the carrot first? I ran through all this in about five seconds, estimated how much time it would take out of my busy day to build the snowman, I weighed that against how much pleasure building a snowman would bring me—and decided against it.”

More’s the pity, because he does enjoy being outside and he might have gotten more pleasure from the snowman than he was able to logically calculate. Because he does love nature, for all his commitments and obligations. He loves it all—the cosmic scope of the woods; the stipple of sunlight slanting down through a verdant natural awning; the loveliness of the words locust, birch, and tulip poplar . . . More than loving it, he needs it. As Eustace’s grandfather wrote, “When the mind is tired, or the soul is disquieted, let us go to the woods and fill our lungs with the rain-washed and the sun-cleansed air, and our hearts with the beauty of tree, flower, crystal, and gem.”

The best man that Eustace can be is the man he becomes when he is alone in the woods. That’s why I drag him out of his office whenever I come to Turtle Island and make him lead me on a walk. Even though he generally doesn’t have time for it, I make him do it, because we don’t get ten steps into the forest before he says, “That’s bee balm. You can make a straw out of its hollow stem and suck moisture up from pebbles in streams where it might be too shallow to drink.”

Or, “That’s Turk’s Cap, a flower that looks a lot like a tiger lily, only more exotic. It’s extremely rare. I doubt there are five of these plants on all thousand acres of Turtle Island.”

Or, when I complain about my poison ivy, he takes me down to the river and says, “Come join me in my pharmacy.” He pulls up some jewelweed, and opens it to the ointment inside, spreads it on my bumpy wrist, and suddenly everything feels better.

I love Eustace in the woods because he loves himself in the woods. It’s that easy. Which is why, one day when we were walking, I said to him out of the blue,“Permission to introduce a revolutionary new concept, sir?”

Eustace laughed. “Permission granted.”

“Have you ever wondered,” I asked, “if you might benefit the world more by actually living the life you always talk about? I mean, isn’t that what we’re all here for? Aren’t we each supposed to try to live the most enlightened and honest life we can? And when our actions contradict our values, don’t we just fuck everything up even more?”

I paused here and waited to get punched. But Eustace said nothing, so I continued.

“You’re always telling us how happy we could be if we lived in the woods. But when people come up here to live with you, what they end up seeing is your stress and frustration at having so many people around and being overwhelmed with responsibilities. So of course they don’t absorb the lesson, Eustace. They hear your message but they can’t feel your message, and that’s why it doesn’t work. Do you ever wonder about that?”

“I wonder about it constantly!” Eustace exploded. “I’m totally fucking aware of that! Whenever I go into schools to teach, I tell people, ‘Look, I am not the only person left in this country who tries to live a natural life in the woods, but you’re never going to meet all those other guys because they aren’t available.’Well, I am available. That’s the difference with me. I’ve always made myself available, even when it compromises the way I want to live. When I go out in public, I deliberately try to present myself as this wild guy who just came down off the mountain, and I’m aware that it’s largely an act. I know I’m a showman. I know I present people with an image of how I wish I were living. But what else can I do? I have to put on that act for the benefit of the people.”

“I’m not so sure it’s benefiting us, Eustace.”

“But if I lived the quiet and simple life I want, then who would witness it? Who would be inspired to change? Only my neighbors would see me. I’d influence about forty people, when I want to influence about four hundred thousand people. You see the dilemma? You see my struggle? What am I supposed to do?”

“How about trying to live in peace for once?”

“But what does that mean?” Eustace was roaring now, laughing and totally losing it. “What does that fucking mean?”

Of course, that’s not my question to answer. All I can tell with any certainty is when the man appears to be most at peace. And that usually isn’t when he’s firing apprentices or spending six straight hours on the telephone haggling with tax lawyers, school boards, newspaper reporters, and insurance companies. When he appears to be most at peace is when he is experiencing the closest and most personal liaison with the wilderness. When he is right inside nature’s stupefying theater, he is closest to happy. When he is—as much as is humanly achievable in our modern age—living in communion with whatever is left of our frontier, he gets there.

Sometimes I’m lucky enough to have a glimpse into that best part of Eustace Conway in the most unlikely instances. Sometimes the moment just finds him. There was this one evening when we were driving back from Asheville, trucking along in silence. Eustace was in a quiet mood, and we were listening to old-time Appalachian music, taking in the sad twang of hard men who had lost their farms and hard women whose husbands had gone down into the coal mines and never returned. It was drizzling rain, and as we moved from superhighway to freeway to two-lane macadam to the dirt road of his mountain, the rain lightened up, even as the sun was going down. We bounced and trundled up toward Turtle Island under the gloom of steep, overgrown hollers.

Quite suddenly, a family of deer leaped out of the woods and onto the road before us. Eustace hit the brakes. The doe and her fawns skitted sideways into the darkness, but the buck stayed, staring into our headlights. Eustace honked. The buck stood. Eustace jumped out of the truck and let out a loud whoop into the damp night, to chase the buck back into the woods, but the buck stood where it was.

“You’re beautiful, brother!” Eustace shouted at the deer.

The buck regarded him. Eustace laughed. He made fists and shook them wildly in the air. He whooped and howled like an animal. Again, Eustace shouted to the buck, “You’re beautiful! You rule! You da bomb!”

Eustace laughed. Still the buck held his ground, unmoving.

And then Eustace, too, stopped moving—enchanted into a temporary paralysis. For a long while he stood as stock still and silent as I’d ever seen him, barely illuminated by the spilled bath of his shadowy headlights, staring at that buck. Nobody budged or breathed. In the end, it was Eustace who broke first, throwing his fists up into the air again and shouting out into the night with all the voice he could summon:

“I love you! You’re beautiful! I love you! I love you! I love you!”

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the extraordinary Conway family for their openness and hospitality during this project, and particularly Eustace Conway for his courage in letting me proceed with this work unfettered.

It has been an honor to know you all, and I have tried to honor you here.

There have been many people in Eustace’s life—past and present—who gave generously of their time to help me formulate the ideas behind this book. For their tolerance in being incessantly interviewed, I thank Donna Henry, Christian Kaltrider, Shannon Nunn, Valarie Spratlin, CuChullaine O’Reilly, Lorraine Johnson, Randy Cable, Steve French, Carolyn Hauck, Carla Gover, Barbara Locklear, Hoy Moretz, Nathan and Holly Roarke, the Hicks family, Jack Bibbo, Don Bruton, Matt Niemas, Siegal Kiewe, Warren Kimsey, Alan Stout, Ed Bumann, Pop Hollingsworth, Patience Harrison, Dave Reckford, Scott Taylor, Ashley Clutter, and Candice Covington. And a special note of thanks to Kathleen and Preston Roberts, who are not only lovely and gracious people, but who let Eustace and me sit on their porch and drink beer and shoot off guns all night long. (“I never fired a gun when I was drunk before,” Eustace said, and Preston shouted, “And you call yourself Southern?”)

I am grateful to the authors of the many books and histories that have guided this endeavor. Among others, I found inspiration in John Mack Faragher’s biography of Daniel Boone, David Roberts’s biography of Kit Carson, James Atkins Shatford’s biography of Davy Crockett, David McCullough’s biography of the young Teddy Roosevelt, Rod Phillips’s analysis of forest Beatniks, and Stephen Ambrose’s compelling account of Lewis and Clark’s journey to the Pacific.

Anybody interested in reading more about American utopias should get Timothy Miller’s encyclopedic The 60’s Communes: Hippies and Beyond, and anybody interested in a surprisingly funny book that happens to be about American utopias should hunt down a copy of Mark Halloway’s brilliant Heavens on Earth: Utopian Communities in America, 1680–1880. The statistics quoted in Chapter Seven on the decline of males come from The Decline of Males, by Lionel Tiger. I also owe thanks to R. W. B. Lewis for his wise study The American Adam, and to Richard Slotkin for his equally wise The Fatal Environment. And my bottomless thanks (and eternal admiration) go to the living library that is Doug Brinkley, for telling me to read all these books.

Thanks also go to Powell’s Bookstore of Portland, Oregon, for having—when I was seeking books about the impressions of nineteenth-century European visitors to America—an entire shelf labeled “Impressions of 19th Century European Visitors to America.” There is no better bookstore in America, and this proves it.

I am fortunate to have great friends who are also great readers and editors. For their help and valuable assistance in editing various versions of this book, I thank David Cashion, Reggie Ollen, Andrew Corsello, John Morse, John Gilbert, Susan Bowen (the speed-reading Georgia Peach), and John Hodgman (who invented just for me the essential new editing abbreviation CWRBS, meaning “Cut the Will Rogers Bullshit”). I thank John Platter, who found the strength to read an early draft of this book in his final days of life, and whom I miss terribly every time I walk to my mailbox and remember that I will never receive another letter from him.

I thank Kassie Evashevski, Sarah Chalfant, Paul Slovak, and the hugely incredible Frances Apt for their sure-footed guidance. I thank Art Cooper at GQ for believing me four years ago when I said, “Trust me— you just gotta let me write a profile about this guy.” I thank Michael Cooper for saying long ago, when I was in doubt about writing the book, “Wouldn’t you rather make a mistake by doing something than make a mistake by not doing something?” Again, I thank my big sister Catherine for her preternatural genius about American history and for her steadfast support. Again, I thank my dear friend Deborah for being open twenty-four hours a day to dispense her wisdom on the human psyche. This book would be virtually barren of ideas without the inspiration of these two amazing women.

There are not enough thanks in the world to offer the Ucross Foundation for giving me 22,000 acres of privacy in the middle of Wyoming during what I will probably always remember as the most important thirty days of my life.

And lastly, there are not enough ways in the world for me to say this:

Big Love

STERN MEN

ELIZABETH GILBERT

Praise for Stern Men

‘A howlingly funny first novel’

San Francisco Chronicle

‘Gilbert’s tangy language has as much music as muscle; the novel is Emersonian in its clarity and Austenian in its sly social observation’

Mirabella

‘While Elizabeth Gilbert is not the first writer to suggest that smart women have much to teach stern men, she puts the idea forward with rugged power’

New York Times Book Review

‘Rich as drawn butter and as comical as the crawly crustacean itself, Stern Men is high entertainment. Elizabeth Gilbert has penned a Dickensian tale; one wishes it ran in two volumes’

USA Today

‘A wonderful novel that will have you laughing out loud, Stern Men is an admirable debut from a writer obviously destined for literary longevity. Like Tyler and Irving (and Joseph Heller, Stanley Elkin, and Alice Hoffman), Gilbert has a gift for comic fiction that conveys serious issues (in this case, the environment, caste systems, etc.). And like those writers, Gilbert will most certainly be around for a long time to come’

Denver Post

‘Wise, funny, and wonderful’

Baltimore Sun

‘In this breezily appealing first novel, Gilbert presents us with a heroine as smart, sly, plucky and altogether winning as her own prose; it’s difficult, in fact, not to develop a knee-weakening crush on both’

Salon.com

‘Gilbert’s storytelling brio and keen intelligence prove irresistible’

Newsday

‘This funny, clever, and wise novel, filled with well-developed characters who are more than eccentric stereotypes, moves [Gilbert] squarely to the forefront of writers to watch’

Seattle Times

‘Sophisticated yet ribald, comic yet serious: an exceptional debut from a writer to watch’

Kirkus Reviews

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

TO SARAH CHALFANT.

For everything.

In an aquarium at Woods Hole in the summer of 1892, a conch was placed in the same tank with a female lobster, which was nearly ten inches long, and which had been in captivity about eight weeks. The conch, which was of average size, was not molested for several days, but at last, when hard pressed by hunger, the lobster attacked it, broke off its shell, piece by piece, and made quick work of the soft parts.

— The American Lobster: A Study of Its Habits and Development

Francis Hobart Herrick, Ph.D., 1895

Prologue

TWENTY MILES out from the coast of Maine, Fort Niles Island and Courne Haven Island face off—two old bastards in a staring contest, each convinced he is the other’s only guard. Nothing else is near them. They are among nobody. Rocky and potato-shaped, they form an archipelago of two. Finding these twin islands on a map is a most unexpected discovery; like finding twin towns on a prairie, twin encampments on a desert, twin huts on a tundra. So isolated from the rest of the world, Fort Niles Island and Courne Haven Island are separated from each other by only a fast gut of seawater, known as Worthy Channel. Worthy Channel, nearly a mile wide, is so shallow in parts at low tide that unless you knew what you were doing—unless you really knew what you were doing—you might hesitate to cross it even in a canoe.

In their specific geography, Fort Niles Island and Courne Haven Island are so astonishingly similar that their creator must have been either a great simpleton or a great comic. They are almost exact duplicates. The islands—the last peaks of the same ancient, sunken mountain chain—are made from the same belt of quality black granite, obscured by the same cape of lush spruce. Each island is approximately four miles long and two miles wide. Each has a handful of small coves, a number of freshwater ponds, a scattering of rocky beaches, a single sandy beach, a single great hill, and a single deep harbor, held possessively behind its back, like a hidden sack of cash.

On each island, there is a church and a schoolhouse. Down by the harbor is a main street (called, on each island, Main Street), with a tiny cluster of public buildings—post office, grocer, tavern. There are no paved roads to be found on either island. The houses on the islands are much alike, and the boats in the harbors are identical. The islands share the same pocket of interesting weather, significantly warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer than any coastal town, and they often find themselves trapped within the same spooky bank of fog. The same species of fern, orchid, mushroom, and wild rose can be found on both islands. And, finally, these islands are populated by the same breeds of birds, frogs, deer, rats, foxes, snakes, and men.

The Penobscot Indians left the first human records on Fort Niles and Courne Haven. They found the islands an excellent source of sea fowl eggs, and the ancient stone weapons of these early visitors still show up in certain coves. The Penobscot didn’t long remain so far out in the middle of the sea, but they did use the islands as temporary fishing stations, a practice picked up handily in the early seventeenth century by the French.

The first permanent settlers of Fort Niles and Courne Haven were two Dutch brothers, Andreas and Walter Van Heuvel, who, after taking their wives and children and livestock out to the islands in June of 1702, laid claim to one island for each family. They called their settlements Bethel and Canaan. The foundation of Walter Van Heuvel’s home remains, a moss-covered pile of rock in a meadow on what he called Canaan Island—the exact site, in fact, of Walter’s murder at the hands of his brother just one year into their stay. Andreas also killed Walter’s children on that day and took his brother’s wife over to Bethel Island to live with his family. Andreas was frustrated, it is said, that his own wife was not bearing him children fast enough. Eager for more heirs, he’d set out to claim the only other woman around. Andreas Van Heuvel broke his leg some months later, while building a barn, and he died from an ensuing infection. The women and children were soon rescued by a passing English patrol ship and taken to the stockade at Fort Pemaquid. Both women were pregnant at the time. One delivered a healthy son, whom she named Niles. The other woman’s child died in delivery, but the mother’s life was saved by Thaddeus Courne, an English doctor. Somehow this event gave rise to the names of the two islands: Fort Niles and Courne Haven—two very pretty places that would not be settled again for another fifty years.

The Scots-Irish came next, and they stayed. One Archibald Boyd, along with his wife, his sisters, and their husbands, took over Courne Haven in 1758. They were joined during the next decade by the Cobbs, Pommeroys, and Strachans. Duncan Wishnell and his family started a sheep farm on Fort Niles in 1761, and Wishnell soon found himself surrounded by neighbors called Dalgleish, Thomas, Addams, Lyford, Cardoway, and O’Donnell, as well as some Cobbs who’d moved over from Fort Niles. The young ladies of one island married the young men of the other, and the family names began floating back and forth between the two places like loose buoys. By the mid-1800s, new names appeared, from new arrivals: Friend, Cashion, Yale, and Cordin.

These people shared much the same ancestral background. And because there were not many of them out there, it’s not surprising that, in time, the inhabitants came to resemble one another more and more. Rampant intermarriage was the culprit. Fort Niles and Courne Haven somehow managed to avoid the fate of Malaga Island, whose population became so inbred that the state had to finally step in and evacuate everyone, but the blood lines were still extremely thin. In time, there developed a distinctive form (short, tightly muscled, sturdy) and face (pale skin, dark brows, small chin), which came to be associated with both Courne Haven and Fort Niles. After several generations, it could be fairly said that every man looked like his neighbor and every woman would have been recognized by her ancestors on sight.

They were all farmers and fishermen. They were all Presbyterians and Congregationalists. They were all political conservatives. During the Revolutionary War, they were colonial patriots; during the Civil War, they sent young men in blue wool jackets to fight for the Union in distant Virginia. They did not like to be governed. They did not like to pay taxes. They did not trust experts, and they were not interested in the opinions or the appearance of strangers. Over the years, the islands were, on different occasions and for various reasons, incorporated into several inland counties, one after another. These political mergers never ended well. Each arrangement ultimately became unsatisfactory to the islanders, and by 1900 Courne Haven and Fort Niles were left to form an independent township. Together, they created the tiny domain of Skillet County. But that, too, was a temporary arrangement. In the end, the islands themselves split; the men on each island, it seemed, felt best and safest and most autonomous when left completely alone.

The population of the islands continued to grow. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, there came a muscular expansion, with the advent of the granite trade. A young New Hampshire industrialist named Dr. Jules Ellis brought his Ellis Granite Company to both islands, where he soon made a fortune by excavating and selling the glossy black rock.

Courne Haven, in 1889, hit its peak, achieving a record population of 618. This number included Swedish immigrants, who had been hired by the Ellis Granite Company as raw-muscled quarry labor. (Some of the granite on Courne Haven was so rifted and coarse that it was good only for making cobblestones, easy work for unskilled laborers like the Swedes.) That same year, Fort Niles boasted a society of 627 souls, including Italian immigrants, who’d been hired as skilled carvers. (Fort Niles had some fine, mausoleum-grade granite— beautiful granite to which only Italian craftsmen could do justice.) There was never much work for the native islanders in the granite quarries. The Ellis Granite Company much preferred hiring immigrants, who were less expensive and easier to control. And there was little interaction between the immigrant workers and the locals. On Courne Haven, some local fishermen married Swedish women, and there appeared a streak of blonds in that island’s population. On Fort Niles, however, the pale, darkhaired Scottish look remained unsullied. Nobody on Fort Niles married the Italians. It would have been unacceptable.

The years passed. Trends in fishing changed, from lines to nets and from cod to hake. The boats evolved. The farms grew obsolete. A town hall was built on Courne Haven. A bridge was built over Murder Creek on Fort Niles. Telephone service arrived in 1895, through a cable run under the sea, and by 1918 several homes had electricity. The granite industry dwindled and was finally driven into extinction by the advent of concrete. The population shrank, almost as quickly as it had ballooned. Young men moved off the islands to find work in big factories and big cities. Old names started vanishing from the rolls, slowly leaking away. The last of the Boyds died on Courne Haven in 1904. There were no O’Donnells to be found on Fort Niles after 1910, and—with each decade of the twentieth century—the number of families on Fort Niles and Courne Haven diminished further. Once sparsely inhabited, the islands became sparse once again.

What the two islands needed—what they always needed—was good blood between them. So far away from the rest of the nation, so similar in temperament, lineage, and history, the residents of Courne Haven and Fort Niles should have been good neighbors. They needed one another. They should have tried to serve each other well. They should have shared resources and burdens and benefited from all manner of cooperation. And perhaps they could have been good neighbors.

Perhaps their destiny did not have to be one of conflict. Certainly there was peace between the two islands for the first two centuries or so of settlement. Perhaps if the men of Fort Niles and Courne Haven had remained simple farmers or deep-sea fishermen, they would have been excellent neighbors. We have no way of knowing what might have been, though, because they ultimately became lobstermen. And that was the end of good neighbors.

Lobsters do not recognize boundaries, and neither, therefore, can lobstermen. Lobstermen seek lobsters wherever those creatures may roam, and this means lobstermen chase their prey all over the shallow sea and the cold-water coastline. This means lobstermen are constantly competing with one another for good fishing territory. They get in each other’s way, tangle each other’s trap lines, spy on each other’s boats, and steal each other’s information. Lobstermen fight over every cubic yard of the sea. Every lobster one man catches is a lobster another man has lost. It is a mean business, and it makes for mean men. As humans, after all, we become that which we seek. Dairy farming makes men steady and reliable and temperate; deer hunting makes men quiet and fast and sensitive; lobster fishing makes men suspicious and wily and ruthless.

The first lobster war between Fort Niles Island and Courne Haven Island began in 1902. Other islands in other bays of Maine have had their lobster wars, but none was waged so early as this one. There was scarcely even a lobster industry in 1902; the lobster had not yet become a rare delicacy. In 1902, lobsters were common, worthless, even an annoyance. After bad storms, hundreds and thousands of the creatures washed up on the shores and had to be cleared away with pitchforks and wheelbarrows. Laws were passed forbidding affluent households from feeding their servants lobster more than three days a week. At that moment in history, lobstering was merely something island men did to supplement their income from farming or vessel fishing. Men had been lobstering on Fort Niles and Courne Haven for only thirty years or so, and they still fished in coats and ties. It was a new industry. So it is remarkable that anyone could have felt sufficiently invested in the lobster industry to start a war over it. But that is exactly what happened in 1902.

The first Fort Niles–Courne Haven lobster war began with a famous and reckless letter written by Mr. Valentine Addams. By 1902, Addamses were to be found on both islands; Valentine Addams was a Fort Niles Addams. He was known to be intelligent enough, but famously high-strung and maybe the slightest bit mad. It was in the spring of 1902 that Valentine Addams wrote his letter. It was addressed to the Presiding Chairman of the Second International Fisheries Conference in Boston, a prestigious event to which Addams had not been invited. He sent neatly written copies of his letter to several of the Eastern Seaboard’s major fishing newspapers. And he sent a copy to Courne Haven Island on the mail boat.

Valentine wrote:

Sirs!

I must sadly and dutifully report a hateful new crime perpetrated by deceitful members of our local lobster fishing ranks. I have termed this crime Short Lobster Stocking. I refer to the practice by which some unscrupulous lobstermen will covertly pull up an honest lobsterman’s pots during the night and exchange the honest man’s Large Lobsters for a batch of the unscrupulous man’s worthless young Short Lobsters. Consider the consternation of the honest fisherman, who pulls up his pots in daylight, only to discover worthless Short Lobsters within! I have been confounded by this practice again and again at the hands of my own neighbors from the Nearby Island of Courne Haven! Please consider addressing your commission to the detainment and punishment of these Courne Haven Island Short Lobster Bandits. (Whose names I list for your agents herein.)

I remain your grateful reporter,

Valentine Addams

In the spring of 1903, Valentine Addams wrote a letter to the Third International Fisheries Conference, again held in Boston. This conference, even larger than that of the year before, included dignitaries from the Canadian Provinces and from Scotland, Norway, and Wales. Addams again had not been invited. And why should he have been? What business would a common fisherman like him have at such a gathering? This was a meeting of experts and legislators, not an occasion for the airing of local grievances. Why should he have been invited, with all the Welsh and Canadian dignitaries, and all the successful Massachusetts wholesalers, and all the renowned game wardens? But what of that? He wrote, in any case:

Gentlemen!

With all my respect, sirs, please convey the following to your fellows: A pregnant she-lobster carries some 25,000 to 80,000 eggs on her belly, known to us fishermen as “berries.” As an article of food, these salty egg berries were once a popular addition to soups. You will recall that the eating of this article of food was officially discouraged some years ago, and that the practice of collecting for sale any berried she-lobster was outlawed. Sensible, sirs! This was for the sound purpose of solving the Eastern Shores’ Lobster Problem and conserving the Eastern Shores’ Lobster. Gentlemen! By this date you must surely have heard that some scoundrel lobster fishermen have evaded the law by scraping the valuable berries off the creature’s belly. The unscrupulous fishermen’s motive is to keep this good breeding lobster for their personal sale and profit!

Gentlemen! Scraped as such into the sea, these lobster eggs do not become healthy lobster fry, but, rather, become 25,000 to 80,000 bits of bait for hungry schools of cod and sole. Gentlemen! Look to those greedy fish bellies for the scores of lobsters vanished from our shores! Look to those unscrupulous Berry-Scraping Lobstermen for our diminishing lobster population! Gentlemen! The Scriptures ask, “Shall the flocks and the herds be slain for them, to suffice them? Or shall all the fish of the sea be gathered together for them, to suffice them?”

I have it on excellent authority, Sirs, that On My Neighboring Island of Courne Haven, every fishing man practices berry-scraping! The State’s gaming agents stand unwilling to arrest or detain these Courne Haven thieves—for they are thieves!—despite my reports. I intend to commence immediately confronting these scoundrels myself, delivering such punitive measures as I shall deem suitable, representing the certainty of my sound suspicions and the good name of your Commission. Gentlemen!

I remain your willing agent, Valentine R. Addams.

(And I include herewith the names of Courne Haven Scoundrels.)

The very next month, Courne Haven Harbor’s only pier burned down. Valentine Addams was suspected by several Courne Haven lobstermen of having participated in the act, a suspicion Addams did not much allay by being present at the Courne Haven fire, standing in his peapod boat just off the shore at dawn, shaking his fist and yelling, “Portuguese whores! Look at the Catholic beggars now!” as the Courne Haven lobstermen (who were no more Portuguese or Catholic than Valentine Addams himself ) fought to save their boats. Not many days following this, Addams was found in Fineman’s Cove, having been weighted down to the bottom of the sea by two fifty-pound sacks of rock salt. A clam digger discovered the body.

The fish and game agent ruled the drowning a suicide. Fair enough. In its way, the death was a suicide. Burning the single pier of a neighboring island is as suicidal an action as a man can take. Everyone knew that. No sane man on Fort Niles Island could reasonably begrudge the Courne Haven fishermen their retaliatory gesture, violent though it may have been. Still, it created a problem. Addams left behind an awkwardly pregnant widow. If she stayed on Fort Niles Island, she would be a great inconvenience to her neighbors, who would have to support her. As it turned out, that was what she intended to do. She would be dead weight on Fort Niles, a drain on a community whose working families could scarcely support themselves. Fear of this burden caused resentment over Valentine Addams’s death. What was more, the drowning of a man with the very rock salt he had used to preserve his stinking bait was more than a little insulting. Recourse would be sought.

As retaliation, the men of Fort Niles Island rowed over to Courne Haven Island one night and painted a thin coat of tar on the seats of every dinghy anchored in its harbor. That was merely a rude joke, done for laughs. But they then sliced all the buoys they could find that marked lobster traps in the Courne Haven fishing territory, causing the pot wrap lines to snake down through the heavy water, and the tethered traps to vanish forever. It was the full destruction of the community’s industry—what little lobster industry there was, of course, in 1903—for the entire season.

Fair enough.

After this, it was quiet for a week. Then a popular man from Fort Niles Island, Joseph Cardoway, was caught outside a mainland tavern by a dozen Courne Haven lobstermen, who beat him with long oak fishing gaffs. When Cardoway healed from the beating, his left ear was missing, his left eye was blinded, and his left thumb dangled, loose and useless as an ornament, from his muscle-torn hand. The attack outraged all of Fort Niles. Cardoway was not even a fisherman. He ran a small mill on Fort Niles and was an ice-cutter. He had nothing to do with lobster fishing, yet he’d been crippled because of it. Now the lobster war reached its full heat.

The fishermen of Courne Haven Island and Fort Niles Island fought for a decade. They fought from 1903 to 1913. Not steadily, of course. Lobster wars, even back then, are not steady fights. They are slow territory disputes, with spasmodic acts of retaliation and withdrawal. But during a lobster war, there is constant tension, constant danger of losing gear to another man’s knife. Men become so consumed in defending their livelihood that they essentially eradicate that livelihood. They spend so much time fighting, spying, and challenging that they have little time left to actually fish.

As in any conflict, some contestants in this lobster war became more involved than others. On Fort Niles, the men of the Pommeroy family were most entangled in territory disputes, and, as a consequence, were effectively destroyed by the strife. They were impoverished. On Courne Haven, the fishermen in the Burden family were effectively destroyed, as well; they neglected their labor in order to undermine the efforts of, for instance, the Pommeroy family on Fort Niles. On both islands, the Cobbs were very nearly destroyed. Henry Dalgliesh found himself so demoralized by the war that he simply packed up his family and moved from Courne Haven Island to Long Island, New York, where he became a constable. Anyone who grew up on Fort Niles or Courne Haven during this decade was raised in poverty. Any Pommeroy, Burden, or Cobb who grew up during this decade was raised in extreme poverty. And hatred. For them, it was a true famine.

As for the widow of the murdered Valentine Addams, she gave birth in 1904 to twin boys: a foul-mannered baby whom she named Angus and a fat, listless baby whom she named Simon. The Widow Addams was not much more rational than her dead husband had been. She would not tolerate the words “Courne Haven” spoken in her presence. On hearing them, she would keen as if she herself were being murdered. She was a force of vindictiveness, a bitter woman whose anger aged her, and she prodded her neighbors to perform bold acts of hostility against the fishermen on the other side of Worthy Channel. She propped up her neighbors’ rage and resentment if ever they let it sag. Partly because of her exhortations, partly because of the inevitable pace of any conflict, the widow’s twin sons were a full ten years old before the lobster war their father had begun was fully over.

There was only one fisherman among those on both islands who did not take part in these events, a Fort Niles fisherman by the name of Ebbett Thomas. After the burning of the Courne Haven pier, Thomas quietly took all his lobster pots from the water. He cleaned them and stored them, with their gear, safe in his cellar. He pulled his boat from the water, cleaned it, and stored it on shore, covered with a tarp. There had never been a lobster war before this, so one wonders how he was able to anticipate the destructive events to come, but he was a man of considerable intuition. Ebbett Thomas apparently suspected, with a smart fisherman’s awareness of bad weather rising, that it might be wiser to sit this one out.

After safely hiding his lobster gear, Ebbett Thomas walked up the single great hill of Fort Niles Island to the offices of the Ellis Granite Company and applied for a job. This was practically unheard of—a local seeking work in the quarries—but Ebbett Thomas nonetheless managed to get work at the Ellis Granite Company. He managed to talk Dr. Jules Ellis himself—the founder and owner of the company— into hiring him. Ebbett Thomas became the foreman of the Ellis Granite Company’s Box Shop, supervising the construction of the wooden crates and boxes in which pieces of finished granite were shipped from the island. He was a fisherman, and his ancestors had all been fishermen, and his descendants would all be fishermen, but Ebbett Thomas did not put his fishing boat back in the water until ten years had passed. It was his considerable intuition that enabled him to weather this difficult episode without suffering the economic ruin visited on his neighbors. He kept to himself and he kept his family at a distance from the whole mess.

Ebbett Thomas was an unusual man for his time and place. He had no education, but he was bright and, in his way, worldly. His intelligence was recognized by Dr. Jules Ellis, who thought it a shame that this intelligent man was confined to a small, ignorant island and to a miserable life of fishing. Dr. Ellis often thought that, under different circumstances, Ebbett Thomas might have been a sound businessman, perhaps even a professor. But Ebbett Thomas was never granted different circumstances, so he lived out his days on Fort Niles, accomplishing little except to fish well and for a decent profit, always staying free of the petty disputes of his neighbors. He married his third cousin, an inestimably practical woman named Patience Burden, and they had two sons, Stanley and Len.

Ebbett Thomas lived well, but he did not live long. He died of a stroke at the age of fifty. He didn’t live long enough to see Stanley, his firstborn, get married. But the real pity is that Ebbett Thomas didn’t live long enough to meet his granddaughter, a girl by the name of Ruth, born to Stanley’s wife in 1958. And that is a shame, because Ebbett Thomas would have been fascinated by Ruth. He might not have particularly understood his granddaughter, but he surely would have regarded her life with some measure of curiosity.

1

Unlike some crustaceans, who are coldly indifferent to the welfare of their offspring, the mamma lobster keeps her little brood about her until the youthful lobsterkins are big enough to start in life for themselves.

—Crab, Shrimp, and Lobster Lore

William B. Lord

1867

THE BIRTH OF RUTH THOMAS was not the easiest on record. She was born during a week of legendary, terrible storms. The last week of May 1958 did not quite bring a hurricane, but it was not calm out there, either, and Fort Niles Island got whipped. Stan Thomas’s wife, Mary, in the middle of this storm, endured an unusually hard labor. This was her first child. She was not a big woman, and the baby was stubborn in coming. Mary Thomas should have been moved to a hospital on the mainland and put under the care of a doctor, but this was no weather for boating around a woman in hard labor. There was no doctor on Fort Niles, nor were there nurses. The laboring woman, in distress, was without any medical attention. She just had to do it on her own.

Mary whimpered and screamed during labor, while her female neighbors, acting as a collective of amateur midwives, administered comfort and suggestions, and left her side only to spread word of her condition across the island. The fact was, things didn’t look good. The oldest and smartest women were convinced from early on that Stan’s wife was not going to make it. Mary Thomas wasn’t from the island, anyway, and the women didn’t have great faith in her strength. Under the best of circumstances, these women considered her somewhat pampered, a little too fine and a little too susceptible to tears and shyness. They were pretty sure she was going to quit on them in the middle of her labor and just die of pain right there, in front of everyone. Still, they fussed and interfered. They argued with one another over the best treatment, the best positions, the best advice. And when they briskly returned to their homes to collect clean towels or ice for the woman in labor, they passed the word among their husbands that things at the Thomas house were looking very grave indeed.

Senator Simon Addams heard the rumors and decided to make his famous peppery chicken stock, which he believed to be a great healer, one that would help the woman in her time of need. Senator Simon was an aging bachelor who lived with his twin brother, Angus, another aging bachelor. The men were the sons of Valentine Addams, all grown up now. Angus was the toughest, most aggressive lobsterman on the island. Senator Simon was no kind of lobsterman at all. He was terrified of the sea; he could not set foot in a boat. The closest Simon had ever come to the sea was one stride wide of the surf on Gavin Beach. When he was a teenager, a local bully tried to drag him out on a dock, and Simon had nearly scratched that kid’s face off and nearly broken that kid’s arm. He choked the bully until the boy fell unconscious. Senator Simon certainly did not like the water.

He was handy, though, so he earned money by repairing furniture and lobster traps and fixing boats (safely on shore) for other men. He was recognized as an eccentric, and he spent his time reading books and studying maps, which he purchased through the mail. He knew a great deal about the world, although not once in his life had he stepped off Fort Niles. His knowledge about so many subjects had earned him the nickname Senator, a nickname that was only half mocking. Simon Addams was a strange man, but he was acknowledged as an authority.

It was the Senator’s opinion that a good, peppery chicken soup could cure anything, even childbirth, so he cooked up a nice batch for Stanley Thomas’s wife. She was a woman he dearly admired, and he was worried about her. He brought a warm pot of soup over to the Thomas home on the afternoon of May 28. The female neighbors let him in and announced that the little baby had already arrived. Everyone was fine, they assured him. The baby was hearty, and the mother was going to recover. The mother could probably use a touch of that chicken soup, after all.

Senator Simon Addams looked into the bassinet, and there she was: little Ruth Thomas. A girl baby. An unusually pretty baby, with a wet, black mat of hair and a studious expression. Senator Simon Addams noticed right away that she didn’t have the red squally look of most newborns. She didn’t look like a peeled, boiled rabbit. She had lovely olive skin and a most serious expression for an infant.

“Oh, she’s a dear little baby,” said Senator Simon Addams, and the women let him hold Ruth Thomas. He looked so huge holding the new baby that the women laughed—laughed at the giant bachelor cradling the tiny child. But Ruth blew a sort of a sigh in his arms and pursed her tiny mouth and blinked without concern. Senator Simon felt a swell of almost grandfatherly pride. He clucked at her. He jiggled her.

“Oh, isn’t she just the dearest baby,” he said, and the women laughed and laughed.

He said, “Isn’t she just a peach?”

Ruth Thomas was a pretty baby who grew into a very pretty girl, with dark eyebrows and wide shoulders and remarkable posture. From her earliest childhood, her back was straight as a plank. She had a striking, adult presence, even as a toddler. Her first word was a very firm “No.” Her first sentence: “No, thank you.” She was not excessively delighted by toys. She liked to sit on her father’s lap and read the papers with him. She liked to be around adults. She was quiet enough to go unnoticed for hours at a time. She was a world-class eavesdropper. When her parents visited their neighbors, Ruth sat under the kitchen table, small and silent as dust, listening keenly to every adult word. One of the most common sentences directed at her as a child was “Why, Ruth, I didn’t even see you there!”

Ruth Thomas escaped notice because of her watchful disposition and also because of the distracting commotion around her in the form of the Pommeroys. The Pommeroys lived next door to Ruth and her parents. There were seven Pommeroy boys, and Ruth was born right at the end of the run of them. She pretty much vanished into the chaos kicked up by Webster and Conway and John and Fagan and Timothy and Chester and Robin Pommeroy. The Pommeroy boys were an event on Fort Niles. Certainly other women had produced as many children in the island’s history, but only over decades and only with evident reluctance. Seven babies born to a single exuberant family in just under six years seemed almost epidemic.

Senator Simon’s twin brother, Angus, said of the Pommeroys, “That’s no family. That’s a goddamn litter.”

Angus Addams could be suspected of jealousy, though, as he had no family except his eccentric twin brother, so the whole business of other people’s happy families was like a canker on Angus Addams. The Senator, on the other hand, found Mrs. Pommeroy delightful. He was charmed by her pregnancies. He said that Mrs. Pommeroy always looked as if she was pregnant because she couldn’t help it. He said she always looked pregnant in a cute, apologetic way.

Mrs. Pommeroy was unusually young when she married—not yet sixteen—and she enjoyed herself and her husband completely. She was a real romp. The young Mrs. Pommeroy drank like a flapper. She loved her drinking. She drank so much during her pregnancies, in fact, that her neighbors suspected she had caused brain damage in her children. Whatever the cause, none of the seven Pommeroy sons ever learned to read very well. Not even Webster Pommeroy could read a book, and he was the ace of smarts in that family’s deck.

As a child, Ruth Thomas often sat quietly in a tree and, when the opportunity arose, threw rocks at Webster Pommeroy. He’d throw rocks back at her, and he’d tell her she was a stinkbutt. She’d say, “Oh, yeah? Where’d you read that?” Then Webster Pommeroy would drag Ruth out of the tree and kick her in the face. Ruth was a smart girl who sometimes found it difficult to stop making smart comments. Getting kicked in the face was the kind of thing that happened, Ruth supposed, to smart little girls who lived next door to so many Pommeroys.

When Ruth Thomas was nine years old, she experienced a significant event. Her mother left Fort Niles. Her father, Stan Thomas, went with her. They went to Rockland. They were supposed to stay there for only a week or two. The plan was for Ruth to live with the Pommeroys for a short time. Just until her parents came back. But some complicated incident occurred in Rockland, and Ruth’s mother didn’t come back at all. The details weren’t explained to Ruth at the time.

Eventually Ruth’s father returned, but not for a long while, so Ruth ended up staying with the Pommeroys for months. She ended up staying with them for the entire summer. This significant event was not unduly traumatic, because Ruth really loved Mrs. Pommeroy. She loved the idea of living with her. She wanted to be with her all the time. And Mrs. Pommeroy loved Ruth.

“You’re like my own daughter!” Mrs. Pommeroy liked to tell Ruth.

“You’re like my own goddamn daughter that I never, ever had!”

Mrs. Pommeroy pronounced the word daughtah, which had a beautiful, feathery sound in Ruth’s ears. Like everyone born on Fort Niles or Courne Haven, Mrs. Pommeroy spoke with the accent recognized across New England as Down East—just a whisper off the brogue of the original Scots-Irish settlers, defined by an almost criminal disregard for the letter r. Ruth loved the sound. Ruth’s mother did not have this beautiful accent, nor did she use words like goddamn and fuck and shit and asshole, words that delightfully peppered the speech of the native lobstermen and many of their wives. Ruth’s mother also did not drink vast quantities of rum and then turn all soft and loving, as Mrs. Pommeroy did every single day.

Mrs. Pommeroy, in short, had it all over Ruth’s mother.

Mrs. Pommeroy was not a woman who would hug constantly, but she certainly was one to nudge a person. She was always nudging and bumping into Ruth Thomas, always knocking her around with affection, sometimes even knocking her over. Always in a loving way, though. She knocked Ruth over only because Ruth was still so small. Ruth Thomas hadn’t got her real size yet. Mrs. Pommeroy knocked Ruth on her ass with pure, sweet love.

“You’re like my own goddamn daughter that I never had!” Mrs. Pommeroy would say and then nudge and then—boom—down Ruth would go.

Daughtah!

Mrs. Pommeroy probably could have used a daughter, too, after her seven handfuls of sons. She surely had a genuine appreciation of daughters, after years of Webster and Conway and John and Fagan and so on and so on, who ate like orphans and shouted like convicts. A daughter looked pretty good to Mrs. Pommeroy by the time Ruth Thomas moved in, so Mrs. Pommeroy had an informed love for Ruth.

But more than anyone else, Mrs. Pommeroy loved her man. She loved Mr. Pommeroy madly. Mr. Pommeroy was small and tight-muscled, with hands as big and heavy as door knockers. His eyes were narrow. He walked with his fists on his hips. He had an odd, scrunched-up face. His lips were always smooched in a halfkiss. He frowned and squinted, like someone performing difficult mathematics in his head. Mrs. Pommeroy adored him. When she passed her husband in the house hallways, she’d grab at his nipples through his undershirt. She’d tweak his nipples and yell, “Tweaky!”

Mr. Pommeroy would yell, “Whoop!”

Then he’d grab her wrists and say, “Wanda! Quit that, will you? I really hate it.”

He’d say, “Wanda, if your hands weren’t always so warm, I’d throw you out of the damn house.”

But he loved her. In the evenings, if they were sitting on the couch listening to the radio, Mr. Pommeroy might suck on a single strand of Mrs. Pommeroy’s hair as if it were sweet licorice. Sometimes they’d sit together quietly for hours, she knitting woolen garments, he knitting heads for his lobster traps, a bottle of rum on the floor between them from which they both drank. After Mrs. Pommeroy had been drinking for a while, she liked to swing her legs up off the floor, press her feet against her husband’s side, and say, “Feet on you.”

“No feet on me, Wanda,” he’d say flatly, not looking at her, but smiling.

She’d keep pressing on him with her feet.

“Feet on you,” she’d say. “Feet on you.”

“Please, Wanda. No feet on me.” (He called her Wanda although her true name was Rhonda. The joke was on their son Robin, who—in addition to having the local habit of not pronouncing r at the end of a word—could not say any word that started with r. Robin couldn’t say his own name for years, no less the name of his mother. What’s more, for a long time everyone on Fort Niles Island imitated him. Over the whole spread of the island, you could hear the great strong fishermen complaining that they had to mend their wopes or fix their wigging or buy a new short-wave wadio. And you could hear the great strong women asking whether they could borrow a garden wake.)

Ira Pommeroy loved his wife a great deal, which was easy for everyone to understand, since Rhonda Pommeroy was a true beauty. She wore long skirts, and she lifted them when she walked, as if she imagined herself fancy in Atlanta. She wore a persistent expression of amazement and delight. If someone left the room for even a moment, she’d arch her brows and say charmingly, “Where have you been?” when the person returned. She was young, after all, despite her seven sons, and she kept her hair as long as a young girl’s. She wore her hair swung up and around her whole skull, in an ambitious, glossy pile. Like everyone else on Fort Niles, Ruth Thomas thought Mrs. Pommeroy a great beauty. She adored her. Ruth often pretended to be her.

As a girl, Ruth’s hair was kept as short as a boy’s, so when she pretended to be Mrs. Pommeroy, she wore a towel knotted around her head, the way some women do after a bath, but hers stood for Mrs. Pommeroy’s famous glossy pile of hair. Ruth would enlist Robin Pommeroy, the youngest of the boys, to play Mr. Pommeroy. Robin was easy to boss around. Besides, he liked the game. When Robin played Mr. Pommeroy, he arranged his mouth into the same smooch his dad often wore, and he stomped around Ruth with his hands heavy on his hips. He got to curse and scowl. He liked the authority it gave him.

Ruth Thomas and Robin Pommeroy were always pretending to be Mr. and Mrs. Pommeroy. It was their constant game. They played it for hours and weeks of their childhood. They played it outside in the woods, nearly every day throughout the summer that Ruth lived with the Pommeroys. The game would start with pregnancy. Ruth would put a stone in her pants pocket to stand for one of the Pommeroy brothers, unborn. Robin would purse his mouth all tight and lecture Ruth about parenthood.

“Now listen me,” Robin would say, his fists on his hips. “When that baby’s bawn, he won’t have any teeth. Heah that? He won’t be weddy to eat that hard food, like what we eat. Wanda! You have to feed that baby some juice!”

Ruth would stroke the baby stone in her pocket. She’d say, “I think I’m about to have this baby right now.”

She’d toss it on the ground. The baby was born. It was that easy.

“Would you just look at that baby?” Ruth would say. “That’s a big one.”

Each day, the first stone to be born was named Webster, because he was the oldest. After Webster was named, Robin would find another stone to represent Conway. He’d give it to Ruth to slip into her pocket.

“Wanda! What’s that?” Robin would then demand.

“Would you just look at that,” Ruth would answer. “Here I go, having another one of those goddamn babies.”

Robin would scowl. “Listen me. When that baby’s bawn, his foot bones’ll be too soft for boots. Wanda! Don’t you go stick any boots on that baby!”

“I’m naming this one Kathleen,” Ruth would say. (She was always eager for another girl on the island.)

“No way,” Robin would say. “That baby’s gonna be a boy, too.”

Sure enough, it would be. They’d name that stone Conway and toss him down by his big brother, Webster. Soon, very soon, a pile of sons would grow in the woods. Ruth Thomas delivered all those boys, all summer long. Sometimes she’d step on the stones and say, “Feet on you, Fagan! Feet on you, John!” She birthed every one of those boys every single day, with Robin stomping around her, hands heavy on his hips, bragging and lecturing. And when the Robin stone itself was born at the end of the game, Ruth sometimes said, “I’m throwing out this lousy baby. It’s too fat. It can’t even talk right.”

Then Robin might take a swing, knocking the towel-hair off Ruth’s head. And she might then whip the towel at his legs, giving him red slashes on his shins. She might knock a fist in his back if he tried running. Ruth had a good swing, when the target was slow, fat Robin. The towel would get wet from the ground. The towel would get muddied and ruined, so they’d leave it and take a fresh one the next day. Soon, a pile of towels would grow in the woods. Mrs. Pommeroy could never figure that one out.

Say, where’d those towels go? Hey! What about my towels, then?

The Pommeroys lived in the big house of a dead great-uncle who had been a relative of both of them. Mr. and Mrs. Pommeroy were related even before they were married. They were cousins, each conveniently named Pommeroy before they fell in love. (“Like the goddamn Roosevelts,” Angus Addams said.) To be fair, of course, that’s not an unusual situation on Fort Niles. Not many families to choose from anymore, so everyone’s family.

The dead Pommeroy great-uncle was therefore a shared dead great-uncle, a common dead great-uncle. He’d built a big house near the church, with money made in a general store, back before the first lobster war. Mr. and Mrs. Pommeroy had doubly inherited the home. When Ruth was nine years old and stayed with the Pommeroys for the summer, Mrs. Pommeroy tried to get her to sleep in that dead uncle’s bedroom. It was under a quiet roof and had one window, which spied on a massive spruce tree, and it had a soft wooden floor of wide planks.

A lovely room for a little girl. The only problem was that the great-uncle had shot himself right there in that room, right through his mouth, and the wallpaper was still speckled with rusty, tarnished blood freckles. Ruth Thomas flatly refused to sleep in that room.

“Jesus, Ruthie, the man’s dead and buried,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “There’s nothing in this room to scare anybody.”

“No,” Ruth said.

“Even if you see a ghost, Ruthie, it would just be my uncle’s ghost, and he’d never hurt you. He loved all children.”

“No, thank you.”

“It’s not even blood on the wallpaper!” Mrs. Pommeroy lied. “It’s fungus. It’s from the damp.”

Mrs. Pommeroy told Ruth that she had the same fungus on her bedroom wallpaper every now and again, and that she slept just fine. She said she slept like a cozy baby every night of the year. In that case, Ruth announced, she’d sleep in Mrs. Pommeroy’s bedroom. And, in the end, that’s exactly what she did.

Ruth slept on the floor next to Mr. and Mrs. Pommeroy’s bed. She had a large pillow and a mattress of sorts, made from rich-smelling wool blankets. When the Pommeroys made any noise, Ruth heard it, and when they had giggly sex, she heard that. When they snored through their boozy sleeping, she heard that, too. When Mr. Pommeroy got up at four o’clock every morning to check the wind and leave the house for lobster fishing, Ruth Thomas heard him moving around. She kept her eyes shut and listened to his mornings.

Mr. Pommeroy had a terrier that followed him around everywhere, even in the kitchen at four o’clock every morning, and the dog’s nails ticked steady on the kitchen floor. Mr. Pommeroy would talk quietly to the dog while making his breakfast.

“Go back to sleep, dog,” he’d say. “Don’t you want to go back to sleep? Don’t you want to rest up, dog?”

Some mornings Mr. Pommeroy would say, “You following me around so you can learn how to make coffee for me, dog? You trying to learn how to make my breakfast?”

For a while, there was a cat in the Pommeroy house, too. It was a dock cat, a huge coon-cat that had moved up to the Pommeroys’ because it hated the terrier and hated the Pommeroy boys so much that it wanted to stay near them at all times. The cat took the terrier’s eye out in a fight, and the eye socket turned into a stink and mess of infection. So Conway put the cat in a lobster crate, floated the crate on the surf, and shot at it with a gun of his father’s. After that, the terrier slept on the floor beside Ruth Thomas every night, with its mean, stinking eye.

Ruth liked sleeping on the floor, but she had strange dreams. She dreamed that the ghost of the Pommeroys’ dead great-uncle chased her into the Pommeroys’ kitchen, where she searched for knives to stab him with but could find nothing except wire whisks and flat spatulas to defend herself. She had other dreams, where it was storming rain in the Pommeroys’ back yard, and the boys were wrestling with each other. She had to step around them with a small umbrella, covering first one boy, then another, then another, then another. All seven Pommeroy sons fought in a tangle, all around her.

In the mornings, after Mr. Pommeroy had left the house, Ruth would fall asleep again and wake up a few hours later, when the sun was higher. She’d crawl up into bed with Mrs. Pommeroy. Mrs. Pommeroy would wake up and tickle Ruth’s neck and tell Ruth stories about all the dogs her father had owned, back when Mrs. Pommeroy was a little girl exactly like Ruth.

“There was Beadie, Brownie, Cassie, Prince, Tally, Whippet . . .” Mrs. Pommeroy would say, and eventually Ruth learned the names of all the bygone dogs and could be quizzed on them.

Ruth Thomas lived with the Pommeroys for three months, and then her father returned to the island without her mother. The complicated incident had been resolved. Mr. Thomas had left Ruth’s mother in a town called Concord, New Hampshire, where she would remain indefinitely. It was made pretty clear to Ruth that her mother would not be returning home at all. Ruth’s father took Ruth out of the Pommeroy house and back next door, where she was able to sleep in her own bedroom again. Ruth resumed her quiet life with her father and found that she did not much miss her mother. But she very much missed sleeping on the floor beside the bed of Mr. and Mrs. Pommeroy.

Then Mr. Pommeroy drowned.

All the men said Ira Pommeroy drowned because he fished alone and he drank on his boat. He kept jugs of rum tied to some of his trap lines, bobbing twenty fathoms down in the chilled middle waters, halfway between the floating buoys and the grounded lobster traps. Everyone did that occasionally. It wasn’t as if Mr. Pommeroy had invented the idea, but he had refined it greatly, and the understanding was that he’d wrecked himself from refining it too greatly. He simply got too drunk on a day when the swells were too big and the deck was too slippery. He probably went over the side of his boat before he even knew it, losing his footing with a quick swell while pulling up a trap. And he couldn’t swim. Scarcely any of the lobstermen on Fort Niles or Courne Haven could swim. Not that being able to swim would have helped Mr. Pommeroy much. In the tall boots, in the long slicker and heavy gloves, in the wicked and cold water, he would have gone down fast. At least he got it over with quickly. Knowing how to swim sometimes just makes the dying last longer.

Angus Addams found the body three days later, when he was fishing. Mr. Pommeroy’s corpse was bound tightly in Angus’s lines, like a swollen, salted ham. That’s where he’d ended up. A body can drift, and there were acres of ropes sunk in the water around Fort Niles Island that could act like filters to catch any drifting corpses. Mr. Pommeroy’s drift stopped in Angus’s territory. The seagulls had already eaten out Mr. Pommeroy’s eyes.

Angus Addams had pulled up a line to collect one of his traps, and he’d pulled up the body, too. Angus had a small boat, with not much room for another man on board, alive or dead, so he’d tossed dead Mr. Pommeroy into the holding tank on top of the living, shifting lobsters he’d caught that morning, whose claws he’d pegged shut so they wouldn’t rip each other into a slop of pieces. Like Mr. Pommeroy, Angus fished alone. At that time in his career, Angus didn’t have a sternman to help him. At that point in his career, he didn’t feel like sharing his catch with a teenage helper. He didn’t even have a radio, which was unusual for a lobsterman, but Angus did not like being chattered at. Angus had dozens of traps to haul that day. He always fished through his chores, no matter what he found. And so, despite the corpse he’d fished up, Angus went ahead and pulled his remaining lines, which took several hours. He measured each lobster, as he was supposed to do, threw the small ones back, and kept the legal ones, pegging their claws safely shut. He tossed all the lobsters on top of the drowned body in the cool tank, out of the sun.

Around three-thirty in the afternoon, he headed back to Fort Niles. He anchored. He tossed Mr. Pommeroy’s body into his rowboat, where it was out of his way, and counted the catch into the holding crates, filled his bait buckets for the next day, hosed off the deck, hung up his slicker. When he was finished with these chores, he joined Mr. Pommeroy in the rowboat and headed over to the dock. He tied his rowboat to the ladder and climbed up. Then he told everyone exactly whom he’d found in his fishing grounds that morning, dead as any idiot.

“He was all stuck in my wopes,” Angus Addams said grimly.

As it happened, Webster and Conway and John and Fagan and Timothy and Chester Pommeroy were at the docks when Angus Addams unloaded the corpse. They’d been playing there that afternoon.

They saw the body of their father, laid out on the pier, puffed and eyeless. Webster, the oldest, was the first to see it. He stammered and gasped, and then the other boys saw it. They fell like terrified soldiers into a crazy formation, and broke right into a run home, together, in a bunch. They ran up from the harbor, and they burst, fast and weeping, past the roads and the collapsing old church to their house, where their neighbor Ruth Thomas was fighting with their littlest brother, Robin, on the steps. The Pommeroy sons drew Ruth and Robin up into their run, and the eight of them shoved into the kitchen at the same time and rushed into Mrs. Pommeroy.

Mrs. Pommeroy had expected this news ever since her husband’s boat was found, three nights before, without her husband anywhere near it, floating far off course. She already knew her husband was dead, and she’d guessed that she would never recover his body. But now, as her sons and Ruth Thomas hurled themselves into the kitchen, their faces stricken, Mrs. Pommeroy knew that the body had been found. And that her sons had seen it.

The boys knocked into Mrs. Pommeroy and took her down to the floor as though they were mad brave soldiers and she was a live grenade. They covered and smothered her. They were grieving, and they were a real weight upon her. Ruth Thomas had been knocked over, too, and was sprawled out, confused, on the kitchen floor. Robin Pommeroy, who did not yet get it, was circling the pile of his sobbing brothers and his mother, saying, “What? What?”

What was a word Robin could say very easily, unlike his own name, so he said it again.

“What? What? Webster, what?” he said, and he must have wondered at this poor snarl of boys and at his mother, so silent under them. He was far too little for such a report. Mrs. Pommeroy, on the floor, was quiet as a nun. She was cloaked in her sons. When she struggled to stand up, her boys came up with her, stuck on her. She picked her boys off her long skirts as if they were brambles or beetles. But as each boy dropped off to the floor, he crawled back on her again. They were all hysterical. Still, she stood quietly, plucking them from her.

“Webster, what?” Robin said. “What, what?”

“Ruthie,” Mrs. Pommeroy said, “go on home. Tell your father.”

Her voice had a thrilling, beautiful sadness. Tell yah fathah . . . Ruth thought it the prettiest sentence she had ever heard.

Senator Simon Addams built the coffin for Mr. Pommeroy, but the Senator did not attend the funeral, because he was deadly afraid of the sea and never attended the funeral of anyone who had drowned. It was an unsustainable terror for him, no matter who the dead person was.

He had to stay away. Instead, he built Mr. Pommeroy a coffin of clean white spruce, sanded and polished with light oil. It was a lovely coffin.

This was the first funeral that Ruth Thomas had attended, and it was a fine one, for a first funeral. Mrs. Pommeroy was already showing herself to be an exceptional widow. In the morning, she scrubbed the necks and fingernails of Webster, Conway, John, Fagan, Timothy, Chester, and Robin. She worked their hair down with a fancy tortoise-shell comb dipped in a tall glass of cold water. Ruth was there with them. She could not stay away from Mrs. Pommeroy in general, and certainly not on an important day like this. She took her place at the end of the line and got her hair combed with water. She got her nails cleaned and her neck scrubbed with brushes. Mrs. Pommeroy cleaned Ruth Thomas last, as though the girl were a final son. She left Ruth’s scalp hot and tight from the combing. She made Ruth’s nails shine like coins. The Pommeroy boys stood still, except for Webster, the oldest, who was tapping his fingers nervously against his thighs. The boys were very well behaved that day, for the sake of their mother.

Mrs. Pommeroy then performed some brilliant work on her own hair, sitting at the kitchen table before her bedroom dresser mirror. She wove a technically complicated plait and arranged it around her head with pins. She oiled her hair with something interesting until it had the splendid sheen of granite. She draped a black scarf over her head. Ruth Thomas and the Pommeroy boys all watched her. She had a real gravity about her, just as a dignified widow should. She had a true knack for it. She looked spectacularly sad and should have been photographed that day. She just was that beautiful.

Fort Niles Island was required to wait more than a week to stage the funeral, because it took that long to get the minister to come over on the New Hope, the mission boat. There was no permanent ministry on Fort Niles anymore, nor on Courne Haven. On both islands, the churches were falling down from lack of use. By 1967, there wasn’t a large enough population on either Fort Niles or Courne Haven ( just over a hundred souls on the two islands) to sustain a regular church. So the citizens shared a minister of God with a dozen other remote islands in a similar predicament, all the way up the coast of Maine. The New Hope was a floating church, constantly moving from one distant sea community to another, showing up for brief, efficient stays. The New Hope remained in harbor only long enough to baptize, marry, or bury whoever needed it, and then sailed off again. The boat also delivered charity and brought books and sometimes even the mail. The New Hope, built in 1915, had carried several ministers during its tenure of good work. The current minister was a native of Courne Haven Island, but he was scarcely ever to be found there. His work sometimes took him all the way up to Nova Scotia. He had a farflung parish, indeed, and it was often difficult to get his attention promptly.

The minister in question was Toby Wishnell, of the Wishnell family of Courne Haven Island. Everyone on Fort Niles Island knew the Wishnells. The Wishnells were what was known as “highline” lobstermen, which is to say that they were terrifically skilled and inevitably wealthy. They were famous lobstermen, superior to every fishing man.

They were rich, supernatural fishermen, who had even managed to excel (comparatively) during the lobster wars. The Wishnells always tore great masses of lobster from any depth of water, in any season, and they were widely hated for it. It made no sense to other fishermen how many lobsters the Wishnells claimed as their own. It was as if the Wishnells had a special arrangement with God. More than that, it was as if the Wishnells had a special arrangement with lobsters as a species.

Lobsters certainly seemed to consider it an honor and a privilege to enter a Wishnell trap. They would crawl over other men’s traps for miles of sea bottom just to be caught by a Wishnell. It was said that a Wishnell could find a lobster under a rock in your grandmother’s flower garden. It was said that families of lobsters collected in the very walls of Wishnell homes, like rodents. It was said that Wishnell boys were born with tentacles, claws, and shells, which they shed during the final days of nursing.

The Wishnells’ luck in fishing was obscene, offensive, and inherited. Wishnell men were especially gifted at destroying the confidence of Fort Niles men. If a Fort Niles fisherman was inland, doing business for a day in, say, Rockland, and he met a Wishnell at the bank or at the gas station, he would inevitably find himself behaving like an idiot. Losing all self-control, he would demean himself before the Wishnell man. He would grin and stammer and congratulate Mr. Wishnell on his fine new haircut and fine new car. He would apologize for his filthy overalls. He would foolishly try to explain to Mr. Wishnell that he’d been doing chores around his boat, that these filthy rags were only his work clothes, that he’d be throwing them out soon, rest assured. The Wishnell man would go on his way, and the Fort Niles fisherman would rage in shame for the rest of the week.

The Wishnells were great innovators. They were the first fishermen to use light nylon ropes instead of the old hemp ropes, which had to be painstakingly coated in hot tar to keep them from rotting in the seawater. The Wishnells were the first fishermen to haul traps with mechanized winches. They were the first fishermen, in fact, to use motorized boats. That was the way with the Wishnells. They were always first and always best. It was said that they bought their bait from Christ Himself. They sold huge catches of lobsters every week, laughing at their own sickening luck.

Pastor Toby Wishnell was the first and only man born into the Wishnell family who did not fish. And what an evil and wellconceived insult that was! To be born a Wishnell—a lobster magnet, a lobster magnate—and piss away the gift! To turn away the spoils of that dynasty! Who would be idiot enough to do such a thing? Toby Wishnell, that’s who. Toby Wishnell had given it all up for the Lord, and that was seen over on Fort Niles as intolerable and pathetic. Of all the Wishnells, the men of Fort Niles hated Toby Wishnell the most. He absolutely galled them. And they fiercely resented that he was their minister. They didn’t want that guy anywhere near their souls.

“There’s something about that Toby Wishnell he ain’t telling us,” said Ruth Thomas’s father, Stan.

“It’s faggotry, is what it is,” said Angus Addams. “He’s pure faggot.”

“He’s a dirty liar. And a born bastard,” Stan Thomas said. “And it may be faggotry, too. He may just be a faggot, too, for all we know.”

The day that young Pastor Toby Wishnell arrived on the New Hope to attend to the funeral of drowned, drunk, swollen, eyeless Mr. Pommeroy was a handsome early autumn day. There were high blue skies and keen winds. Toby Wishnell looked handsome, too. He had an elegant frame. He wore a lean black wool suit. His trousers were tucked into heavy, rubber fishermen’s boots to guard against the muddied ground.

There was something unreasonably fine about Pastor Toby Wishnell’s features, something too pretty about his cleancut chin. He was polished. He was cultivated. What’s more, he was blond. Somewhere along the way, the Wishnells must have married some of the Swedish girls born to the Ellis Granite Company workers. This happened back at the turn of the century, and the soft blond hair had stuck around. There was none of it on Fort Niles Island, where nearly everyone was pale and dark. Some of the blond hair on Courne Haven was quite beautiful, and the islanders were rather proud of it. It had become a quiet issue between the two islands. On Fort Niles, blonds were resented wherever they were seen. Another reason to hate Pastor Toby Wishnell.

Pastor Toby Wishnell gave Ira Pommeroy a most elegant funeral. His manners were perfect. He walked Mrs. Pommeroy to the cemetery, holding her arm. He guided her to the edge of the newly dug grave. Ruth Thomas’s Uncle Len had dug that grave himself over the last few days. Ruth’s Uncle Len, always hard up for money, would take any job. Len was reckless and didn’t generally give a damn throughout life. He had also offered to keep the body of drowned Mr. Pommeroy in his root cellar for a week, despite the protests of his wife. The corpse was sprinkled heavily with rock salt to cut the smell.

Len didn’t care.

Ruth Thomas watched Mrs. Pommeroy and Pastor Wishnell head to the grave. They were in perfect step with each other, as matched in their movements as ice skaters. They made a good-looking couple. Mrs. Pommeroy was trying bravely not to cry. She held her head tilted back, daintily, like a nosebleeder.

Pastor Toby Wishnell delivered his address at the graveside. He spoke carefully, with traces of his education.

“Consider the brave fisherman,” he began, “and the jeopardy of his sea . . .”

The fishermen listened without a flinch, regarding their own

fishermen’s boots. The seven Pommeroy boys stood in a descending line beside their mother, as still as though they’d been pegged to the ground, except for Webster, who shifted and shifted on his feet as if he were about to race. Webster hadn’t stood still since first seeing his father’s body laid out on the pier. He’d been moving and tapping and shifting nervously ever since. Something had happened to Webster that afternoon. He had become goosey, fidgety, and unnerved, and his reaction wasn’t going away. As for Mrs. Pommeroy, her beauty troubled the silent air around her.

Pastor Wishnell recalled Mr. Pommeroy’s skills on the sea and his love of boats and children. Pastor Wishnell regretted that such an accident could befall so skilled a sailor. Pastor Wishnell recommended that the gathered neighbors and loved ones avoid speculating on God’s motives.

There were not many tears. Webster Pommeroy was crying, and Ruth Thomas was crying, and Mrs. Pommeroy was touching the corners of her eyes every so often, but that was it. The island men were silent and respectful, but their faces did not suggest personal devastation at this event. The island wives and mothers shuffled and stared actively, reckoning the grave and reckoning Mrs. Pommeroy and reckoning Toby Wishnell and, finally, reckoning their own husbands and sons quite frankly. It was a tragedy, they were surely thinking. Hard to lose any man. Painful. Unfair. Yet beneath such sympathetic thoughts each of these women was probably thinking, But it was not my man. They were almost fully occupied with relief. How many men could drown in a year, after all? Drownings were rare. There were almost never two drownings in a year in such a small community. Superstition suggested that Mr. Pommeroy’s drowning had made all the other men immune. Their husbands would be safe for some time. And they would not lose any sons this year.

Pastor Toby Wishnell asked those gathered to remember that Christ Himself was a fisherman, and that Christ Himself promised a reception for Mr. Pommeroy in the full company of trumpeting angelic hosts. He asked that those gathered, as a community of God, not neglect the spiritual education and guidance of Mr. Pommeroy’s seven young sons. Having lost their earthly father, he reminded those present, it was now ever more imperative that the Pommeroy boys not lose their heavenly Father as well. Their souls were in the care of this community, and any loss of faith by the Pommeroy boys would surely be seen by the Lord as the fault of the community, for which He would punish its people accordingly.

Pastor Wishnell asked those gathered to consider the witness and testimony of Saint Matthew as a warning. He read from his Bible, “But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.”

Behind Pastor Wishnell was the sea itself, and there was Fort Niles harbor, glittering in the hard afternoon light. There was the New Hope mission boat, anchored among the squatty fishing boats, gleaming prominently and looking lean and long by comparison. Ruth Thomas could see all this from where she stood, on the slope of a hill, next to Mr. Pommeroy’s grave. With the exception of Senator Simon Addams, everyone on the island had come to the funeral. Everyone was there, near Ruth. Everyone was accounted for. But down on the Fort Niles dock stood an unfamiliar big blond boy. He was young, but he was bigger than any of the Pommeroy boys. Ruth could tell his size even at that significant distance. He had a big head shaped something like a paint can, and he had long, thick arms. The boy was standing perfectly still, with his back to the island. He was looking out to sea.

Ruth Thomas became so interested in the strange boy that she stopped crying over Mr. Pommeroy’s death. She watched the strange boy during the entire funeral service, and he did not move. He faced the water for the full duration, his arms by his side. He stood there, still and quiet. It was only long after the funeral, when Pastor Wishnell walked down to the dock, that the boy moved. Without speaking to the pastor, the big blond boy climbed down the ladder of the pier and rowed Pastor Wishnell back to the New Hope. Ruth watched with the greatest interest.

But that all happened after the funeral. In the meantime, the service continued smoothly. Eventually, Mr. Pommeroy, idling in his long and leggy spruce box, was packed down in the dirt. The men dropped clods of earth upon him; the women dropped flowers upon him. Webster Pommeroy fidgeted and paced in place and looked as if he might start running any minute now. Mrs. Pommeroy let go of her composure and cried prettily. Ruth Thomas watched in some anger as the drowned husband of her favorite person in the entire world was buried.

Ruth thought, Christ! Why didn’t he just swim for it instead?

. . .

Senator Simon Addams brought Mrs. Pommeroy’s sons a book that night, in a protective canvas bag. Mrs. Pommeroy was making supper for her boys. She was still wearing her black funeral dress, which was made of a material heavy for the season. She was scraping the root hairs and rough skin from a bucket of her garden’s carrots. The Senator brought her a small bottle of rum, as well, which she said she thought she wouldn’t be having any of, but she thanked him all the same.

“I’ve never known you to turn down a drink of rum,” Senator Simon Addams said.

“All the fun’s out of drinking for me, Senator. You won’t be seeing me drink anymore.”

“There was fun in drinking once?” the Senator asked. “There ever was?”

“Ah . . .” Mrs. Pommeroy sighed and smiled sadly. “What’s in the sack?”

“A gift for your boys.”

“Will you have supper with us?”

“I will. Thank you very much.”

“Ruthie!” Mrs. Pommeroy said, “bring the Senator a glass for his rum.”

But young Ruth Thomas had already done so, and she’d brought him a chunk of ice, too. Senator Simon rubbed Ruth’s head with his big, soft hand.

“Shut your eyes, Ruthie,” he told her. “I’ve got a gift for you.”

Ruth obediently shut her eyes for him, as she always had, ever since she was a very small girl, and he kissed her on the forehead. He gave her a big smack. That was always his gift. She opened her eyes and smiled at him. He loved her.

Now the Senator put the tips of his two index fingers together. “OK, Ruthie. Cut the pickle,” he said.

Ruth made scissors of the fingers on her right hand and snipped through his fingers.

“Get the tickle!” he exclaimed, and he tickled her ribs. Ruth was too old for this game, but the Senator loved it. He laughed and laughed. She smiled indulgently. They sometimes performed this little routine four times a day.

Ruth Thomas was eating supper with the Pommeroys that night, even though it was a funeral night. Ruth nearly always ate with them. It was nicer than eating at home. Ruth’s father wasn’t much for cooking a hot meal. He was clean and decent enough, but he didn’t keep much of a home. He wasn’t against having cold sandwiches for dinner. He wasn’t against mending Ruth’s skirt hems with a staple gun, either. He ran that kind of house and had done so ever since Ruth’s mother left. Nobody was going to starve or freeze to death or go without a sweater, but it wasn’t a particularly cozy home. So Ruth spent most of her time at the Pommeroys’, which was much warmer and easier. Mrs. Pommeroy had invited Stan Thomas over for dinner that night, too, but he’d stayed at home. He was thinking that a man shouldn’t take a supper off a woman freshly grieving the funeral of her husband.

The seven Pommeroy boys were murderously glum at the dinner table. Cookie, the Senator’s dog, napped behind the Senator’s chair. The Pommeroys’ nameless, one-eyed dog, locked in the bathroom for the duration of the Senator’s visit, howled and barked in outrage at the thought of another dog in his home. But Cookie didn’t notice. Cookie was beat tired. Cookie followed the lobster boats out sometimes, even when the water was rough, and she was always very nearly drowning. It was awful. She was only a year-old mutt, and she was crazy to think she could swim against the ocean. Cookie had been pulled by the current once nearly to Courne Haven Island, but the mail boat happened to pick her up and bring her back, almost dead. It was awful when she swam out after the boats, barking. Senator Simon Addams would edge near the dock, as close to it as he dared, and would beg Cookie to come back. Begging and begging! The young dog swam in small circles farther and farther out, sneezing off the spray from the outboard motors. The sternmen in the chased boats would throw hunks of herring bait at Cookie, yelling, “Git on outta heh!”

Of course the Senator could never go out after his dog. Not Senator Simon, who was as afraid of water as his dog was inspired by it. “Cookie!” he’d yell. “Please come on back, Cookie! Come on back, Cookie! Come on back now, Cookie!”

It was hard to watch, and it had been happening since Cookie was a puppy. Cookie chased boats almost every day, and Cookie was tired every night. This night was no exception. So Cookie slept, exhausted, behind the Senator’s chair during supper. At the end of Mrs. Pommeroy’s supper, Senator Simon caught the last morsel of pork on his plate with his fork tines and waved his fork behind him. The pork dropped to the floor. Cookie woke up, chewed the meat thoughtfully, and went back to sleep.

Then the Senator pulled from the canvas sack the book he’d brought as a gift for the boys. It was a huge book, heavy as a slab of slate.

“For your boys,” he told Mrs. Pommeroy.

She looked it over and handed it to Chester. Chester looked it over. Ruth Thomas thought, A book for those boys? She had to feel sorry for someone like Chester, with such a massive book in his hand, staring at it with no comprehension.

“You know,” Ruth Thomas told Senator Simon, “they can’t read.”

Then she said to Chester, “Sorry!” thinking that it wasn’t right to bring up such a fact on the day of a boy’s father’s funeral, but she didn’t know for certain whether the Senator knew that the Pommeroy boys couldn’t read. She didn’t know if he’d heard of their affliction.

Senator Simon took the book back from Chester. It had been his great-grandfather’s book, he said. His great-grandfather had purchased the book in Philadelphia the only time that good man had ever left Fort Niles Island in his entire life. The cover of the book was thick, hard, brown leather. The Senator opened the book and began to read from the first page.

He read: “Dedicated to the King, the Lords Commissioner of the Admiralty, to the Captains and Officers of the Royal Navy, and to the Public at Large. Being the most accurate, elegant, and perfect edition of the whole works and discoveries of the celebrated circumnavigator Captain James Cook.”

Senator Simon paused and looked at each of the Pommeroy boys. “Circumnavigator!” he exclaimed.

Each boy returned his look with a great lack of expression.

“A circumnavigator, boys! Captain Cook sailed the world all the way around, boys! Would you like to do that someday?”

Timothy Pommeroy stood up from the table, walked into the living room, and lay down on the floor. John helped himself to some more carrots. Webster sat, drumming his feet nervously against the kitchen tile.

Mrs. Pommeroy said politely, “Sailed around the whole world, did he, Senator?”

The Senator read more: “Containing an authentic, entertaining, full, and complete history of Captain Cook’s First, Second, and Third Voyages.”

He smiled at Mrs. Pommeroy. “This is a marvelous book for boys. Inspiring. The good captain was killed by savages, you know. Boys love these stories. Boys! If you wish to be sailors, you will study James Cook!”

At that time, only one of the Pommeroy boys was any kind of a sailor. Conway was working as a substitute sternman for a Fort Niles fisherman named Mr. Duke Cobb. A few days every week, Conway left the house at five in the morning and returned late in the afternoon, reeking of herring. He pulled traps and pegged lobsters and filled bait bags, and received ten percent of the profits for his work. Mr. Cobb’s wife packed Conway his lunch, which was part of his pay. Mr. Cobb’s boat, like all the boats, never went much farther than a mile or two from Fort Niles. Mr. Cobb was certainly no circumnavigator. And Conway, a sullen and lazy kid, was not shaping up to be a great circumnavigator, either.

Webster, the oldest boy, at fourteen, was the only other Pommeroy old enough to work, but he was a wreck on a boat. He was useless on a boat. He went nearly blind with seasickness, dying from headaches and vomiting down his own helpless sleeves. Webster had an idea of being a farmer. He kept a few chickens.

“I have a little joke to show you,” Senator Simon said to Chester, the nearest boy. He spread the book on the table and opened it to the middle. The huge page was covered with tiny text. The print was dense and thick and faint as a small pattern on old fabric.

“What do you see here? Look at that spelling.”

Terrible silence as Chester stared.

“There’s no letter s anywhere, is there, son? The printers used f instead, didn’t they, son? The whole book is like that. It was perfectly common. It looks funny to us, though, doesn’t it? To us, it looks as if the word sail is the word fail. To us, it looks as if every time Captain Cook sailed the boat, he actually failed the boat! Of course, he didn’t fail at all. He was the great circumnavigator. Imagine if someone told you, Chester, that someday you would fail a boat? Ha!”

“Ha!” said Chester, accordingly.

“Have they spoken to you yet, Rhonda?” Senator Simon asked Mrs. Pommeroy suddenly, and shut the book, which slammed like a weighty door.

“Have who, Senator?”

“All the other men.”

“No.”

“Boys,” Senator Simon said, “get out of here. Your mother and I need to talk alone. Beat it. Take your book. Go outside and play.”

The boys sulked out of the room. Some of them went upstairs, and the others filed outside. Chester carried the enormous, inappropriate gift of Captain James Cook’s circumnavigations outdoors. Ruth slipped under the kitchen table, unnoticed.

“They’ll be coming by soon, Rhonda,” the Senator said to Mrs. Pommeroy when the room had cleared. “The men will come by soon for a talk with you.”

“Fine.”

“I wanted to give you some warning. Do you know what they’ll be asking you?”

“No.”

“They’ll ask if you’re planning on staying here, on the island. They’ll want to know if you’re staying or if you’re planning to move inland.”

“Fine.”

“They probably wish you’d leave.”

Mrs. Pommeroy said nothing.

From her vantage point under the table, Ruth heard a splash, which she guessed was Senator Simon’s pouring a fresh dollop of rum on the ice in his glass.

“So, do you think you’ll stay on Fort Niles, then?” he asked.

“I think we’ll probably stay, Senator. I don’t know anybody inland. I wouldn’t have anywhere to go.”

“And whether you do or do not stay, they’ll want to buy your man’s boat. And they’ll want to fish his fishing ground.”

“Fine.”

“You should keep both the boat and the ground for the boys, Rhonda.”

“I don’t see how I can do that, Senator.”

“Neither do I, to tell you the truth, Rhonda.”

“The boys are so young, you see. They aren’t ready to be fishermen so young, Senator.”

“I know, I know. I can’t see either how you can afford to keep the boat. You’ll need the money, and if the men want to buy it, you’ll have to sell. You can’t very well leave it on shore while you wait for your boys to grow up. And you can’t very well go out there every day and chase men off the Pommeroy fishing ground.”

“That’s right, Senator.”

“And I can’t see how the men will let you keep the boat or the fishing ground. Do you know what they’ll tell you, Rhonda? They’ll tell you they just intend to fish it for a few years, not to let it go to waste, you see. Just until the boys are big enough to take over. But good luck taking it back, boys! You’ll never see it again, boys!”

Mrs. Pommeroy listened to all this with equanimity.

“Timothy,” Senator Simon called, turning his head toward the living room, “do you want to fish? Do you want to fish, Chester? Do you boys want to be lobstermen when you grow up?”

“You sent the boys outside, Senator,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “They can’t hear you.”

“That’s right, that’s right. But do they want to be fishermen?”

“Of course they want to be fishermen, Senator,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “What else could they do?”

“Army.”

“But forever, Senator? Who stays in the Army forever, Senator?

They’ll want to come back to the island to fish, like all the men.”

“Seven boys.” Senator Simon looked at his hands. “The men will wonder how there’ll ever be enough lobsters around this island for seven more men to make a living from them. How old is Conway?”

Mrs. Pommeroy informed the Senator that Conway was twelve.

“Ah, they’ll take it all from you, for sure they will. It’s a shame, a shame. They’ll take the Pommeroy fishing ground, split it among them. They’ll buy your husband’s boat and gear for a song, and all that money will be gone in a year, from feeding your boys. They’ll take over your husband’s fishing territory, and your boys will have a hell of a fight to win it back. It’s a shame. And Ruthie’s father probably gets the most of it, I’ll bet. Him and my greedy brother. Greedy Number One and Greedy Number Two.”

Under the table, Ruth Thomas frowned, humiliated. Her face got hot. She did not entirely understand the conversation, but she felt deeply ashamed, suddenly, of her father and of herself.

“Pity,” the Senator said. “I’d tell you to fight for it, Rhonda, but I honestly don’t know how you can. Not all by yourself. Your boys are too young to stage a fight for any territory.”

“I don’t want my boys fighting for anything, Senator.”

“Then you’d better teach them a new trade, Rhonda. You’d better teach them a new trade.”

The two adults sat silently for some time. Ruth hushed her breathing. Then Mrs. Pommeroy said, “He wasn’t a very good fisherman, Senator.”

“He should have died six years from now, instead, when the boys were ready for it. That’s really what he should have done.”

“Senator!”

“Or maybe that wouldn’t have been any better. I honestly don’t see how this could have worked out at all. I’ve been thinking about it, Rhonda, ever since you had all those sons in the first place. I’ve been trying to figure out how it would settle in the end, and I never did see any good coming of it. Even if your husband had lived, I suppose the boys would have ended up fighting among themselves. Not enough lobsters out there for everyone; that’s the fact. Pity. Fine, strong boys. It’s easier with girls, of course. They can leave the island and marry. You should have had girls, Rhonda! We should have locked you in a brood stall until you started breeding daughters.”

Daughtahs!

“Senator!”

There was another splash in a glass, and the Senator said, “And another thing. I came to apologize for missing the funeral.”

“That’s all right, Senator.”

“I should have been there. I should have been there. I have always been a friend to your family. But I can’t take it, Rhonda. I can’t take the drowning.”

“You can’t take the drowning, Senator. Everyone knows that.”

“I thank you for your understanding. You are a good woman, Rhonda. A good woman. And another thing. I’ve come for a haircut, too.”

“A haircut? Today?”

“Sure, sure,” he said.

Senator Simon, pushing back his chair to get up, bumped into Cookie. Cookie woke with a start and immediately noticed Ruth sitting under the kitchen table. The dog barked and barked until the Senator, with some effort, bent over, lifted the corner of the tablecloth, and spotted Ruth. He laughed. “Come on out, girl,” he said, and Ruth did.

“You can watch me get a haircut.”

The Senator took a dollar bill from his shirt pocket and laid it on the table. Mrs. Pommeroy got the old bed sheet and her shears and comb from the kitchen closet. Ruth pushed a chair into the middle of the kitchen for Simon Addams to sit on. Mrs. Pommeroy wrapped the sheet around Simon and his chair and tucked it around his neck. Only his head and boot tips showed.

She dipped the comb in a glass of water, wetted down the Senator’s hair against his thick, buoy-shaped head, and parted it into narrow rows. She cut his hair one share at a time, each segment flattened between her two longest fingers, then cropped off on a neat bias. Ruth, watching these familiar gestures, knew just what would happen next. When Mrs. Pommeroy was finished with the haircut, the sleeves of her black funeral dress would be topped with the Senator’s hair. She would dust his neck with talcum powder, bundle the sheet, and ask Ruth to take it outdoors and shake it. Cookie would follow Ruth outside and bark at the whipping sheet and bite at the tumbling clumps of damp hair.

“Cookie!” Senator Simon would yell. “Come on back in here now, baby!”

Later, of course, the men did visit Mrs. Pommeroy.

It was the following evening. Ruth’s father walked over to the Pommeroy house because it was right next door, but the other men drove over in the unregistered, unlicensed trucks they kept for carting their trash and children around on the island. They brought blueberry cakes and casseroles as offerings from their wives and stayed in the kitchen, many of them leaning on the counters and walls. Mrs. Pommeroy made the men polite pots of coffee.

On the grass outside, below the kitchen window, Ruth Thomas was trying to teach Robin Pommeroy how to say his name or any word beginning with r. He was repeating after Ruth, fiercely pronouncing every consonant but the impossible one.

“ROBin,” Ruth said.

“WOBin,” he insisted. “WOBin!”

“RAZZ-berries,” Ruth said. “RHU-barb. RADish.”

“WADish,” he said.

Inside, the men offered suggestions to Mrs. Pommeroy. They’d been discussing a few things. They had some ideas about dividing the traditional Pommeroy fishing ground among them for use and care, just until one of the boys showed interest and skill in the trade. Until any one of the Pommeroy boys could maintain a boat and a fleet of traps.

“RUBBish,” Ruth Thomas instructed Robin, outside the kitchen window.

“WUBBish,” he declared.

“RUTH,” she said to Robin. “RUTH!”

But he wouldn’t even try that one; Ruth was much too hard. Besides, Robin was tired of the game, which only served to make him look stupid. Ruth wasn’t having much fun, anyhow. The grass was full of black slugs, shiny and viscous, and Robin was busy slapping at his head. The mosquitoes were a mess that night. There hadn’t been weather cold enough to eliminate them. They were biting Ruth Thomas and everyone else on the island. But they were really shocking Robin Pommeroy. In the end, the mosquitoes chased Robin and Ruth indoors, where they hid in a front closet until the men of Fort Niles began to file out of the Pommeroy house.

Ruth’s father called for her, and she took his hand. Together, they walked to their home next door. Stan Thomas’s good friend Angus Addams came with them. It was past dusk and getting cold, and once they were inside, Stan made a fire in the parlor wood stove. Angus sent Ruth upstairs to the closet in her father’s bedroom to fetch the cribbage board, and then he sent her to the sideboard in the living room to fetch the good decks of cards. Angus set up the small, antique card table next to the stove.

Ruth sat at the table while the two men played. As always, they played quietly, each determined to win. Ruth had watched these men play cribbage hundreds of times in her young life. She knew how to be silent and useful so that she wouldn’t be sent away. She fetched them beers from the icebox when fresh beers were needed. She moved their pegs along the board for them so that they wouldn’t have to lean forward. And she counted aloud to them as she moved the pegs. The men said little.

Sometimes Angus would say, “Have you ever seen such luck?”

Sometimes he’d say, “I’ve seen better hands on an amputee.”

Sometimes he’d say, “Who dealt this sorry rag?”

Ruth’s father beat Angus soundly, and Angus put down his cards and told them a terrible joke.

“Some men are out fishing one day for sport, and they’re drinking too much,” he began. Ruth’s father put down his cards, too, and sat back in his chair to listen. Angus narrated his joke with the greatest of care. He said, “So, these fellas are out fishing and they’re really having a time and drinking it up. They’re getting awful stewed. In fact, these fellas get to drinking so bad that one of them, the one named Mr. Smith, he falls overboard and drowns. That ruins everything. Hell! It’s no fun having a fishing party when a man drowns. So the men drink some more booze, and they set to feeling pretty miserable, because nobody wants to go home and tell Mrs. Smith her husband is drowned.”

“You’re terrible, Angus,” Ruth’s father interrupted. “What kind of joke is that for tonight?”

Angus continued. “Then one of the guys has a great idea. He suggests maybe they ought to hire Mr. Smooth-Talking-Jones to go break the bad news to Mrs. Smith. That’s right. It seems there’s a fella in town, name of Jones, who’s famous for being a real smooth talker. He’s perfect for the job. He’ll tell Mrs. Smith about her husband, but he’ll tell her so nice, she won’t even care. The other guys think, Hey, what a great idea! So they go find Smooth-Talking-Jones, and he says he’ll do the job, no problem. So Smooth-Talking-Jones puts on his nicest suit. He puts on a tie and a hat. He goes over to the Smith house. He knocks on the door. A woman answers. Smooth-Talking-Jones says, ‘Pardon me, ma’am, but ain’t you the Widow Smith?’”

At this, Ruth’s father laughed into his beer glass, and a thin spray of foam flew from his mug to the table. Angus Addams held up his hand, palm out. Joke wasn’t finished. So he finished it.

“The lady says, ‘Why, I am Mrs. Smith, but I ain’t no widow!’ And Smooth-Talking-Jones says, ‘The fuck you ain’t, sweetheart.’”

Ruth toyed with that word in her mind: Sweethaht, sweethot . . .

“Oh, that’s terrible.” Ruth’s father rubbed his mouth. He was laughing, though. “That’s terrible, Angus. Jesus Christ, what a rotten joke to tell. I can’t believe you’d tell a joke like that on a night like this. Jesus Christ.”

“Why, Stan? You think it sounds like someone we know?” Angus said. Then he asked, in a strange falsetto, “Ain’t you the Widow Pommeroy?”

“Angus, that is terrible,” Ruth’s father said, laughing even harder.

“I’m not terrible. I’m telling jokes.”

“You’re terrible, Angus. You’re terrible.”

The two men laughed and laughed, and then settled down a bit.

Eventually, Ruth’s father and Angus Addams commenced playing cribbage once more and grew quiet.

Sometimes Ruth’s father said, “Christ!”

Sometimes Ruth’s father said, “I should be shot for that play.”

At the end of the night, Angus Addams had won one game and Stan Thomas had won two. Some money was exchanged. The men put away the cards and dismantled the cribbage board. Ruth returned the board to the closet in her father’s bedroom. Angus Addams folded up the card table and set it behind the sofa. The men moved into the kitchen and sat at the table. Ruth came back down, and her father patted her bottom and said to Angus, “I don’t imagine Pommeroy left his wife enough money to pay you for that nice coffin your brother built.”

Angus Addams said, “You kidding me? Pommeroy didn’t leave any money. There’s no money in that goddamn family. Not enough money for a pissant funeral, I can tell you that. Not enough money for a coffin. Not even enough money to buy a ham bone to shove up his ass so the dogs could drag his body away.”

“How interesting,” Ruth’s father said, completely deadpan. “I’m not familiar with that tradition.”

Then it was Angus Addams who was laughing. He called Ruth’s father terrible.

“I’m terrible?” Stan Thomas said. “I’m terrible? You’re the terrible one.”

Something in this kept them both laughing. Ruth’s father and Mr. Angus Addams, who were excellent friends, called each other terrible people all that night long. Terrible! Terrible! As if it was a kind of reassurance. They called each other terrible, rotten, deadly people.

They stayed up late, and Ruth stayed up with them, until she started crying from trying to keep herself awake. It had been a long week, and she was only nine. She was a sturdy kid, but she’d seen a funeral and heard conversations she didn’t understand, and now it was past midnight, and she was exhausted.

“Hey,” Angus said. “Ruthie? Ruthie? Don’t cry, then. What? I thought we were friends, Ruthie.”

Ruth’s father said, “Poor little pie.”

He took her up into his lap. She wanted to stop crying, but she couldn’t. She was embarrassed. She hated crying in front of anyone. Still, she cried until her father sent her into the living room for the deck of cards and let her sit on his lap and shuffle them, which was a game they used to play when she was small. She was too old to be sitting in his lap and shuffling cards, but it was a comfort.

“Come on, Ruthie,” Angus said, “let’s have a smile out of you.”

Ruth tried to oblige, but it wasn’t a particularly good smile. Angus asked Ruth and her father to do their funniest joke for him, the one he loved so much. And they did.

“Daddy, Daddy,” Ruth said in a fake little-girlie voice. “How come all the other children get to go to school and I have to stay home?”

“Shut up and deal, kid,” her father growled.

Angus Addams laughed and laughed.

“That’s terrible!” he said. “You’re both terrible.”

2

After discovering that he is imprisoned, which he does very speedily, the lobster seems to lose all his desire for the bait, and spends his time roaming around the pit, hunting for a means of escape.

—The Lobster Fishery of Maine

John N. Cobb, Agent of the United States Fish Commission

1899

NINE YEARS passed.

Ruth Thomas grew into a teenager, and she was sent away to a private school for girls, located in the far-off state of Delaware. She was a good student but not the firecracker she should have been, with her brains. She worked exactly as hard as it took for her to get adequate grades, and not one bit harder. She resented having been sent away to school, although clearly something had to be done with her. At that moment in the century, in the 1970s, Fort Niles Island educated its children only through the age of thirteen. For most of the boys (future lobstermen, that is), this was plenty. For the others—bright girls and boys with bigger ambitions—special arrangements had to be made. Generally, this meant they were sent to the mainland to live with families in Rockland and attend public high school there. They came back to the island only on long vacations or over the summer. Their dads checked up on them during trips to Rockland, when it was time to sell the lobster catch.

This was the system that Ruth Thomas would have preferred. Attending high school in Rockland was the normal path, and it was what she’d expected. But an exception was made for Ruth. An expensive exception. A private education was arranged for her, far away from home. The idea, according to Ruth’s mother, who was now living in Concord, New Hampshire, was to expose the girl to something other than lobster fishermen, alcoholism, ignorance, and cold weather. Ruth’s father sullenly and silently gave his permission, so Ruth had no choice. She went to the school, but she made her protest known. She read the books, learned the math, ignored the other girls, and got it over with. Every summer, she returned to the island. Her mother suggested other summer activities, such as going to camp or traveling or finding an interesting job, but Ruth refused with a finality that left no room for negotiation.

It was Ruth Thomas’s firm position that she belonged nowhere but on Fort Niles Island. This was the position she took with her mother: she was truly happy only on Fort Niles; Fort Niles was in her blood and soul; and the only people who understood her were the residents of Fort Niles Island. None of this, it must be said, was entirely true.

It was important to Ruth in principle that she feel happy on Fort Niles, although, for the most part, she was pretty bored there. She missed the island when she was away from it, but when she returned, she immediately found herself at a loss for diversion. She made a point of taking a long walk around the shoreline the minute she came home (“I’ve been thinking about this all year!” she would say), but the walk took only a few hours, and what did she think about on that walk? Not much. There was a seagull; there was a seal; there was another seagull. The scenery was as familiar to her as her bedroom ceiling. She took books down to the shore, claiming that she loved to read near the pounding surf, but the sad fact is that many places on this Earth offer better reading environments than wet, barnacle-covered rocks. When Ruth was away from Fort Niles, the island became endowed with the characteristics of a distant paradise, but when she returned to it, she found her home cold and damp and windy and uncomfortable.

Still, whenever she was on Fort Niles, Ruth wrote letters to her mother, saying, “Finally I can breathe again!”

More than anything, Ruth’s passion for Fort Niles was an expression of protest. It was her resistance against those who would send her away, supposedly for her own good. Ruth would have much preferred to determine what was good for her. She had great confidence that she knew herself best and that, given free rein, would have made more correct choices. She certainly wouldn’t have elected to send herself to an elite private school hundreds of miles away, where girls were concerned primarily with the care of their skin and horses. No horses for Ruth, thank you. She was not that kind of girl. She was more rugged. It was boats that Ruth loved, or so she constantly said. It was Fort Niles Island that Ruth loved. It was fishing that Ruth loved.

In truth, Ruth had spent time working with her father on his lobster boat, and it had never been a terrific experience. She was strong enough to do the work, but the monotony killed her. Working as a sternman meant standing in the back of the boat, hauling up traps, picking out lobsters, baiting traps and shoving them back in the water, and hauling up more traps. And more traps and more traps. It meant getting up before dawn and eating sandwiches for breakfast and lunch. It meant seeing the same scenery again and again, day after day, and rarely venturing more than two miles from shore. It meant spending hour upon hour alone with her father on a small boat, where the two of them never seemed to get along.

There were too many things for them to argue about. Stupid things.

Ruth’s father used to eat his sandwich and throw the lunch bag right in the ocean, and that would drive Ruth crazy. He would throw his soda can in after it. She’d yell at him for this, and he’d sulk, and the rest of the trip would be tense and silent. Or he might get fed up and spend the whole trip scolding and berating her. She didn’t work fast enough; she didn’t handle the lobsters carefully enough; she was going to step in that pile of rope one of these days and get pulled overboard and drown if she didn’t pay closer attention. That kind of thing.

On one of their early trips, Ruth warned her father about a barrel drifting up on his “port side,” and he laughed in her face.

“Port side?” he said. “This isn’t the Navy, Ruth. You don’t need to worry about port and starboard. The only direction you need to worry about is staying out of my way.”

Ruth seemed to get on his nerves even when she wasn’t trying to, although sometimes she did so on purpose, just to pass the time. One wet summer day, for instance, they pulled up string after string of traps and found no lobsters. Ruth’s father got more and more agitated. He was catching nothing but seaweed, crabs, and urchins. Eight or nine strings later, however, Ruth pulled a good-sized male lobster out of a trap.

“Dad, what’s this?” she asked innocently, holding up the lobster. “I’ve never seen one of these before. Maybe we can take it into town and sell it to somebody.”

“That’s not funny,” her father said, although Ruth herself thought it was pretty good.

The boat stank. It was cold even in the summer. In bad weather, the boat deck jumped and popped, and Ruth’s legs ached from the strain of keeping her balance. It was a small boat and had barely any shelter. She had to pee in a bucket and empty it overboard. Her hands were always freezing, and her father would yell if she took a break to warm her hands around the hot exhaust pipe. He never worked with gloves, he said, even in December. Why couldn’t she handle the cold in the middle of July?

Yet when Ruth’s mother asked Ruth what she wanted to do with her summer, Ruth invariably replied that she wanted to work on a lobster boat.

“I want to work with my dad,” Ruth said. “I’m really only happy out on the water.”

As for her relations with the other islanders, she may not have been as perfectly understood by them as she told her mother. She loved Mrs. Pommeroy. She loved the Addams brothers, and they loved her. But because of her long spells in Delaware getting educated, she was pretty much forgotten by everyone else, or, worse, disowned. She was no longer like them. Truth to tell, she’d never been all that much like them in the first place. She’d always been an inward-looking child, not, say, like the Pommeroy boys, who screamed and fought and made perfect sense to everyone. And now that Ruth passed most of her time someplace very far off, she talked differently. She read an awful lot of books. And, to many of her neighbors, she seemed stuck up.

Ruth graduated from boarding school in late May of 1976. She had no plans for the future except to return to Fort Niles, where she so obviously belonged. She made no move to attend college. She never even looked at the college brochures scattered around her school, never responded to the advice of her teachers, never gave any notice to the shy hints of her mother.

In that May of 1976, Ruth Thomas turned eighteen. She was five feet six inches tall. She had shiny hair that was almost black, and it came to her shoulders; she wore it in a ponytail every day. Her hair was so thick, she could sew a button on a coat with it. Her face was roundish, her eyes were wide apart, and she had an inoffensive nose and long, pretty eyelashes. Her skin was darker than anyone else’s on Fort Niles, and she tanned to a smooth, even brown. She was muscular and a little heavy for her height. She had a bigger rear end than she wanted, but she didn’t fuss about it too much, because the last thing she wanted to sound like was those girls at school in Delaware who fussed over their figures annoyingly, uninterruptedly, odiously. She was a heavy sleeper. She was independent. She was sarcastic.

When Ruth returned to Fort Niles at the independent, sarcastic age of eighteen, she did so in her father’s lobster boat. He picked her up at the bus station in the rotten truck he kept parked down by the ferry landing, the truck he used for his business and shopping whenever he came to town, which was approximately every two weeks. He picked Ruth up, accepted a slightly ironic kiss from her, and immediately announced that he was dropping her off at the grocery store to pick up supplies while he had a goddamn talk with his goddamn wholesaler, the miserable bastard. (“You know what we need out there,” he said. “Just spend fifty bucks.”) Then he told Ruth the reasons that his goddamn wholesaler was a miserable bastard, all of which she had heard before in careful detail. She drifted out of the conversation, such as it was, and considered how odd it was that her father, who had not seen her in several months, did not think to ask about her graduation ceremony. Not that she cared. But it was odd.

The boat ride back to Fort Niles took more than four hours, during which Ruth and her father did not converse much, because the boat was loud and because she had to slip around in the stern to make sure that the boxes of groceries didn’t tip over or get wet. She thought about her plans for the summer. She had no plans for the summer. While loading the boat, her father had informed her that he’d hired a sternman for the season—Robin Pommeroy, of all people. Ruth’s father had no work for his daughter. Although she griped at him for leaving her out, she was secretly pleased not to be working for him again. She would have acted as his sternman strictly on principle, had he asked, but she would have been miserable out there. So it was a relief. Still, it meant she had nothing to do with her time. She was not sufficiently confident of her abilities as a sternman to approach any other fisherman and ask for a job, even if she had really, really wanted one, which she really, really did not. Besides, as her father had also informed her, everyone on Fort Niles already had help. All the partnerships had been negotiated. Weeks before Ruth showed up, every old man on Fort Niles had found a young man to do the muscle work in the back of the boat.

“Maybe you can pick up if other kids get sick or fired,” her father shouted to her suddenly, midway through the journey back to Fort Niles.

“Yeah, maybe I’ll do that,” Ruth shouted back.

She was already thinking ahead to the next three months and—who was she kidding?—to the rest of her life, which had absolutely no shape to it. Good God! she thought. She was facing backward, sitting on a box of canned goods. Rockland was long since out of sight on this misty day, and the other islands, inhabited or not, that they passed so slowly and so loudly looked as small and brown and wet as lumps of shit. Or so Ruth thought. She wondered whether she could get another job on Fort Niles, although the idea of a job on Fort Niles that didn’t involve lobstering was something of a joke. Ha-ha.

What the hell am I going to do with my time? Ruth thought. She felt an awful and familiar sense of boredom rise within her as the boat chugged and bumped over the cold Atlantic bay. As far as she could see, there was nothing for her to do, and she knew exactly what that meant. Nothing to do meant hanging around with the few other islanders who had nothing to do. Ruth could see it coming. She was going to spend her summer hanging around with Mrs. Pommeroy and Senator Simon Addams. She could see it coming clearly. It wasn’t so bad, she told herself. Mrs. Pommeroy and Senator Simon were her friends; she was fond of them. They’d have lots to talk about. They’d ask her all about her graduation ceremony. It wouldn’t be so boring, really.

But the uneasy, unpleasant sense of approaching boredom remained in Ruth’s belly, like seasickness. Finally she drove the boredom— already!—down by composing in her mind a letter to her mother. She would write it that night, in her bedroom. The letter would begin, “Dear Mom: As soon as I stepped back onto Fort Niles, all the tension drained out of my body and I took the first deep breaths I have taken in months and months. The air smelled like hope!”

That’s exactly what she would say. Ruth decided this on her father’s lobster boat precisely two hours before Fort Niles was even in sight, and she spent the rest of the trip mentally composing the letter, which was most poetic. The exercise cheered her up a good deal.

Senator Simon Addams was seventy-three years old that summer, and he had a special project going. It was an ambitious and eccentric project. He was going to search for an elephant’s tusk that, he believed, was buried in the mudflats at Potter Beach. The Senator thought there might even be two tusks buried out there, though he’d announced that he would be happy to find just one.

Senator Simon’s conviction that 138 years of seawater would not have impaired such strong material as pure ivory provided him with the necessary confidence for his search. He knew the tusks must be somewhere. They may have been separated from their skeleton and from each other, but they would not have decomposed. They could not have dissolved. They were either buried in the sand far out at sea or they had washed up on a beach. And the Senator believed they may well have found their way to Fort Niles Island. Those rare elephant tusks may have been swept by currents—as wreckage had been swept for centuries—right up on Potter Beach. Why not?

The tusks the Senator sought were from an elephant that had been a passenger aboard the 400-ton steamboat Clarice Monroe, a vessel that went down right outside Worthy Channel in late October of 1838. It was a famous event at the time. The steamer, a wooden side-wheeler, caught fire just after midnight, during a sudden snowstorm. The fire itself may have been caused by so simple a mishap as a tipped lamp, but the storm winds caught and spread it before it could be contained, and the deck of the steamer was quickly blanketed in flame.

The captain of the Clarice Monroe was a drinker. The fire was almost certainly not his fault, but it was his undoing. He panicked shamefully. Without waking the passengers or crew, he ordered the one sailor on watch to lower a single lifeboat, in which he, his wife, and the young sailor rowed away. The captain left the doomed Clarice Monroe, his passengers, and his cargo to burn. The three survivors in the rowboat became lost in the storm, rowed for a full day, lost the power to row any further, and drifted for one day more. When they were picked up by a merchant marine vessel, the captain was dead of exposure, his wife had lost her fingers, feet, and ears to frostbite, and the young sailor had completely lost his mind.

Without her captain, the Clarice Monroe, still burning, had drifted against the rocks off Fort Niles Island, where she broke up among the waves. There were no survivors among the ninety-seven passengers. Many of the corpses drifted over to Potter Beach, piling up in the brine and mud alongside the charred and battered wooden wreckage of the steamboat. The men of Fort Niles gathered the corpses, wrapped them in burlap, and stored them in the icehouse. Some were identified by family members who came to Fort Niles throughout the month of October on ferry boats to collect their brothers and wives and mothers and children. Those unfortunates who were not claimed were buried in the Fort Niles cemetery, under small granite markers inscribed, simply, DROWNED.

But the steamboat had lost other cargo.

The Clarice Monroe had been transporting, from New Brunswick down to Boston, a small circus made up of several remarkable items: six white show horses, several trick monkeys, a camel, a trained bear, a pack of performing dogs, a cage of tropical birds, and an African elephant. After the ship broke up, the circus horses tried to swim through the snowstorm. Three drowned, and the other three reached the shores of Fort Niles Island. When the weather cleared the next morning, everyone on the island turned out to see the three magnificent white mares gingerly picking their way across the snowy boulders.

None of the other animals made it. The young sailor from the Clarice Monroe, found in the rowboat with his dead captain and the captain’s devastated wife, driven to delirium by exposure to the storm, said upon his rescue—insisted!—that he had seen the elephant jump over the railing of the burning wreck and swim strongly through the waves, its tusks and trunk lifted high above the churning, icy water. He swore he had seen the elephant swimming through the salty snow as he himself rowed away from the wreck. He saw the elephant swim and swim and then, sounding one last mighty trumpet, sink beneath the waves.

The sailor, as noted, was out of his mind at the time of his rescue, but there were those who believed his story. Senator Simon Addams had always believed it. He’d heard the story from his earliest childhood and had been fascinated by it. And it was the tusks of that circus elephant which the Senator now sought to recover, 138 years later, in the spring of 1976.

He wanted to put at least one tusk on display at the Fort Niles Museum of Natural History. In 1976, the Fort Niles Museum of Natural History did not exist, but the Senator was working on it. He’d been collecting artifacts and specimens for the museum for years, storing them in his basement. The whole idea was his. He had no backers, and he was the sole curator. He believed a tusk would make a most impressive centerpiece to his collection.

The Senator, obviously, couldn’t search for the tusks himself. He was a sturdy old man, but he was in no condition to dig around in the mud all day. Even if he were younger, he would not have had the courage to wade out into the loose soup of seawater and shifting mudflats that extended from Potter Beach. He was much too afraid of the water. So he had taken on an assistant, Webster Pommeroy.

Webster Pommeroy, who was twenty-three that summer, had nothing else to do anyway. Every day, the Senator and Webster would head down to Potter Beach, where Webster would look for the elephant’s tusks. It was a perfect task for Webster Pommeroy, because Webster Pommeroy was not capable of doing anything else. His meekness and seasickness prevented his becoming a lobsterman or a sternman, but his problems went deeper than that. Something was wrong with Webster Pommeroy. Everyone saw it. Something had happened to Webster the day he saw his father’s corpse—eyeless and puffy—sprawled out on the Fort Niles dock. Webster Pommeroy, at that moment, broke; fell to bits. He stopped growing, stopped developing, nearly stopped speaking. He turned into a twitchy and nervous and deeply troubled local tragedy. At twenty-three, he was as slim and small as he’d been at fourteen. He seemed to be forever cast in a boy’s frame. He seemed to be forever trapped in that moment of recognizing his dead father.

Senator Simon Addams had a sincere concern for Webster Pommeroy. He wanted to help the boy. The boy broke the Senator’s heart. He felt the boy needed a vocation. It took the Senator several years to discover Webster’s worth, though, because it was not immediately clear what, if anything, Webster Pommeroy could do. The Senator’s only idea was to enlist the young man in his project for the Museum of Natural History.

The Senator initially sent Webster to the homes of neighbors on Fort Niles, requesting that they donate to the museum any interesting artifacts or antiques, but Webster was a shy and miserable failure at the task. He would knock on a door, but when the neighbor opened it, he was likely to stand there, mute, nervously tapping his feet. Every local housewife was disturbed by his behavior. Webster Pommeroy, standing on the doorstep, looking as if he was about to cry, was not a born solicitor.

The Senator next tried to enlist Webster in building a holding shed in the Addamses’ back yard to house the Senator’s growing collection of items suitable for the museum. But Webster, while conscientious, was not a natural carpenter. He was neither strong nor handy. His tremors made him useless in the construction work. Worse than useless, indeed. He was a danger to himself and others, because he was always dropping saws and drills, always hammering his fingers. So the Senator took Webster off the building detail.

Other tasks the Senator created were similarly unsuitable for Webster. It was beginning to look as though Webster could do nothing. It took nearly nine years for the Senator to discover what Webster was good at.

It was mud.

Down at Potter Beach was a veritable pasture of mud, revealed fully only at low tide. During the lowest tides, it was more than ten acres of mud, wide and flat and smelling of rancid blood. Men had periodically dug clams in this mud, and they frequently turned up hidden treasures—ancient boat parts, wooden buoys, lost boots, odd bones, bronze spoons, and extinct iron tools. The muddy cove apparently was a natural magnet for lost objects, and so it was that the Senator coeived the idea of searching the flats for the elephant’s tusks. Why would they not be there? Where else would they be?

He asked Webster whether he was interested in wading through the mud, like a clam digger, seeking artifacts in a systematic manner. Could Webster examine the shallower areas of the Potter Beach mudflats, perhaps, wearing high boots? Would that distress Webster too greatly? Webster Pommeroy shrugged. He didn’t seem distressed. And so it was that Webster Pommeroy began his career of searching the mudflats. And he was brilliant at it.

As it turned out, Webster Pommeroy could move through any mud. He could negotiate mud that was nearly up to his chest. Webster Pommeroy could move through mud like a vessel made for the task, and he found marvelous treasures—a wristwatch, a shark’s tooth, a whale’s skull, a complete wheelbarrow. Day after day, the Senator would sit on the dirty rocks by the shore and watch Webster’s progress. He watched Webster search through the mud every day of the summer of 1975.

And when Ruth Thomas came home from boarding school in late May of 1976, the Senator and Webster were at it again. With nothing else to do, with no work and no friends of her age, Ruth Thomas developed the hobby of walking down to the Potter Beach mudflats every morning to watch Webster Pommeroy scour the mud. She would sit with Senator Simon Addams on the beach for hours at a time, watching. At the end of each day, the three would walk back to town together.

They made a strange threesome—the Senator and Ruth and Webster. Webster was a strange one in any company. Senator Simon Addams, an unusually large man, had a misshapen head; it looked as if it had been kicked in at one time and had healed poorly. He teased himself about his odd fat nose. (“I have nothing to do with the shape of my nose,” he liked to say. “It was a birthday present.”) And he frequently wrung his great doughy hands. He had a strong body but was subject to severe bouts of fear; he called himself a champion coward. He often looked as if he was afraid someone was about to come around the corner and smack him. This was quite the opposite of Ruth Thomas, who often looked as if she was about to smack the next person who came around the corner.

Sometimes, as Ruth sat on the beach, looking at huge Senator Simon and tiny Webster Pommeroy, she wondered how she had become involved with these two weak, weird men. How had they become her good friends? What would the girls back in Delaware think if they knew of this little gang? She was not embarrassed by the Senator and Webster, she assured herself. Whom would she be embarrassed around, all the way out there on Fort Niles Island? But those two were odd ones, and anyone from off the island who might have caught a glimpse of the threesome would have thought Ruth odd, too.

Still, she had to admit, it was fascinating to watch Webster crawl around in the mud, looking for a tusk. Ruth had not a shred of faith that Webster would find an elephant’s tusk, but it was entertaining to watch him work. It was really something to see.

“That’s dangerous, what Webster’s doing out there,” the Senator would say to Ruth as they watched Webster head deeper and deeper into the mud.

It was indeed dangerous, but the Senator had no intention of interfering, even as Webster sank into the loosest, most collapsing, most embracing mud, his arms submerged, feeling about for artifacts in the blind muck. The Senator was nervous and Ruth was nervous, but Webster moved stoically, without terror. Such moments, in fact, were the only times his twitchy body was ever still. He was calm in the mud. He was never afraid in the mud. Sometimes he too seemed to be sinking.

He would pause in his search, and the Senator and Ruth Thomas would see him slowly descending. It was frightful. It did look at times as if they were about to lose him.

“Should we go after him?” the Senator would suggest, meekly.

“Not in that fucking deathtrap,” Ruth would say. “Not me.”

(Ruth had developed something of a mouth by the time she was eighteen years old. Her father often commented on it. “I don’t know where you got that goddamn mouth of yours,” he’d say, and she would reply, “Now there’s a goddamn mystery.”)

“Are you sure he’s all right?” the Senator would ask.

“No,” Ruth would say. “I think he may be going under. But I’m not going after him, and neither are you. Not in that fucking deathtrap.”

No, not her. Not out there, where forgotten lobsters and clams and mussels and sea worms grew to godless size, and where Christ only knew what else hovered about. When the Scottish settlers first came to Fort Niles, they had leaned over those very mudflats from huge rocks and had dug out, with gaffs, living lobsters as big as any man. They had written of this in their journals; descriptions of pulling out hideous five-foot monster lobsters, ancient as alligators and caked with mud, grown to repulsive extremes from centuries of unmolested hiding. Webster himself, sifting with his bare, blind hands, had found in this mud some petrified lobster claws the size of baseball mitts. He had dug out clams the size of melons, urchins, dogfish, dead fish. No way was Ruth Thomas going in there. No way.

So the Senator and Ruth would have to sit and watch Webster sink.

What could they do? Nothing. They sat in tense silence. Sometimes a gull would fly overhead. Other times, there was no movement at all. They watched and waited, and occasionally felt panic simmering in their hearts. But Webster himself never panicked in the mud. He would stand, sunk past his hips, and wait. He seemed to be waiting for something unknown that, after a long period, he would find. Or perhaps it would find him. Webster would begin to move through the sinking mud.

It was not clear to Ruth how he did this. From the beach, it looked as though a rail had risen from below to reach Webster’s bare feet, and he was now standing safely on this rail, which was taking him, slowly and smoothly, away from a dangerous spot. It looked, from the beach, like a clean, gliding rescue.

Why was he never stuck? Why was he never cut by clams, glass, lobsters, mollusks, iron, stone? All the hidden dangers in the mud seemed to shift politely aside to let Webster Pommeroy pass. Of course, he wasn’t always in danger. Sometimes he would dawdle around in the shallow, ankle-deep mud near the shore, staring down, expressionless. That could get boring. And when it got too boring, Senator Simon and Ruth, sitting on the rocks, would talk to each other. For the most part, they talked about maps and explorations and shipwrecks and hidden treasure, the Senator’s favorite topics of conversation. Especially shipwrecks.

One afternoon, Ruth told the Senator that she might try to find work on a lobster boat. This wasn’t entirely true, although it was exactly what Ruth had written to her mother in a long letter the day before. Ruth wanted to want to work on a lobster boat, but the actual desire was not there. She mentioned the idea to the Senator only because she liked the sound of it.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said, “of finding work on a lobster boat.”

The Senator instantly grew annoyed. He hated to hear Ruth talk of setting foot on any boat. It made him nervous enough when she went to Rockland with her father for the day. All during the times of Ruth’s life when she’d worked with her dad, the Senator had been upset. He imagined, every day, that she would fall over and drown or the boat would sink or there’d be a terrible storm that would wash her away. So when Ruth brought up the idea, the Senator said he would not tolerate the risk of losing her to the sea. He said he would expressly forbid Ruth to work on a lobster boat.

“Do you want to die?” he asked. “Do you want to drown?”

“No, I want to make some money.”

“Absolutely not. Absolutely not. You do not belong on a boat. If you need money, I’ll give you money.”

“That’s hardly a dignified way to make a living.”

“Why do you want to work on a boat? With all your brains? Boats are for idiots like the Pommeroy boys. You should leave boating to them. You know what you really should do? Go inland and stay there. Go live in Nebraska. That’s what I’d do. Get away from the ocean.”

“If lobstering is good enough for the Pommeroy boys, it’s good enough for me,” Ruth said. She didn’t believe this, but it sounded principled.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Ruth.”

“You’ve been encouraging the Pommeroy boys to be sailors forever, Senator. You’re always trying to get them fishing jobs. You’re always telling them they should be circumnavigators. I don’t see why you shouldn’t give me a little encouragement, every now and again.”

“I do give you encouragement.”

“Not to be a fisherman.”

“I will kill myself if you become a fisherman, Ruth. I will kill myself every single day.”

“What if I wanted to be a fisherman, though? What if I wanted to be a sailor? What if I wanted to join the Coast Guard? What if I wanted to be a circumnavigator?”

“You don’t want to be any circumnavigator.”

“I might want to be a circumnavigator.”

Ruth did not want to be a circumnavigator. She was making small talk. She and the Senator spent hours talking nonsense like this. Day after day. Neither one paid too much mind to the nonsense-speak of the other. Senator Simon patted his dog’s head and said, “Cookie says, ‘What’s Ruth talking about, a circumnavigator? Ruth doesn’t want to be a circumnavigator.’ Didn’t you say that, Cookie? Isn’t that right, Cookie?”

“Stay out of this, Cookie,” Ruth said.

A week or so later, the Senator brought up the topic again while the two of them watched Webster in the mudflats. This is how the Senator and Ruth had always talked, in long, eternal circles. They had, in fact, only one conversation, the one they’d been having from the time Ruth was about ten years old. They went round and round. They covered the same ground again and again, like a pair of schoolgirls.

“Why do you need experience on a fishing boat, for heaven’s sake?” Senator Simon said. “You’re not stuck on this island for life like the Pommeroys. They’re poor slobs. Fishing is all they can do.”

Ruth had forgotten that she’d even mentioned getting work on a fishing boat. But now she defended the idea. “A woman could do that job as well as anyone.”

“I’m not saying a woman couldn’t do it. I’m saying nobody should do it. It’s a terrible job. It’s a job for jerks. And if everyone tried to become a lobsterman, pretty soon all the lobsters would be gone.”

“There’re enough lobsters out there for everyone.”

“Absolutely not, Ruthie. For heaven’s sake, who ever told you that?”

“My dad.”

“Well, enough lobsters for him.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“He’s Greedy Number Two. He’ll always get his.”

“Don’t call my father that. He hates that nickname.”

The Senator patted his dog. “Your dad is Greedy Number Two. My brother is Greedy Number One. Everyone knows that. Even Cookie here knows that.”

Ruth looked out at Webster in the mudflats and did not reply. After a few minutes, Senator Simon said, “You know, there are no lifeboats on lobster boats. It’s not safe for you.”

“Why should they have lifeboats on lobster boats? Lobster boats aren’t much bigger than lifeboats in the first place.”

“Not that a lifeboat can really save a person . . .”

“Of course a lifeboat can save a person. Lifeboats save people all the time,” Ruth asserted.

“Even in a lifeboat, you’d better hope to get rescued soon. If they find you floating around in your lifeboat in the first hour after a shipwreck, of course, you’ll be fine . . .”

“Who’s talking about shipwrecks?” Ruth asked, but she knew very well that the Senator was always about three minutes away from talking about shipwrecks. He’d been talking to her about shipwrecks for years.

The Senator said, “If you are not rescued in your lifeboat in the first hour, your chances of being rescued at all become very slim. Very slim, indeed, Ruthie. Slimmer with every hour. After a whole day lost at sea in a lifeboat, you can assume that you won’t be rescued at all. What would you do then?”

“I’d row.”

“You’d row. You would row, if you were stuck on a lifeboat and the sun was going down, with no rescue in sight? You would row. That’s your plan?”

“I guess I’d have to figure something out.”

“Figure what out? What is there to figure out? How to row to another continent?”

“Jesus, Senator. I’m never going to be lost at sea in a lifeboat. I promise you.”

“Once you’re in a shipwreck,” the Senator said, “you will be rescued only by chance—if you are rescued at all. And remember, Ruthie, most shipwreck survivors are injured. It’s not as if they jumped off the edge of a boat in calm water for a little swim. Most shipwreck survivors have broken legs or ghastly cuts or burns. And what do you think it is that kills you in the end?”

Ruth knew the answer. “Exposure?” she guessed wrongly, just to keep the conversation going.

“No.”

“Sharks?”

“No. Lack of water. Thirst.”

“Is that right?” Ruth asked politely.

But now the subject of sharks had arrived, the Senator paused. Finally he said, “In the tropics, the sharks come right up into the boat. They bring their snouts into the boat, like dogs sniffing around. But barracudas are worse. Let’s say you’ve been wrecked. You’re clinging to a piece of wreckage. A barracuda comes over and sinks his teeth into you. You can rip him off, Ruthie, but his head will stay attached to you.

Like a snapping turtle, Ruthie. A barracuda will hold on to you long after he’s dead. That’s right.”

“I don’t worry about barracudas too much around here, Senator. And I don’t think you should worry about barracudas, either.”

“Well, how about your bluefish, then? You don’t have to be in the tropics for bluefish, Ruthie. We’ve got packs of bluefish right out there.” Senator Simon Addams waved past the mudflats and Webster, pointing to the open Atlantic. “And bluefish hunt in packs, like wolves. And stingrays! Shipwreck survivors have said that giant rays came right up under their boat and spent the whole day there, hovering. They used to call them blanket fish. You could find rays out there bigger than your little lifeboat. They ripple along under your boat like the shadow of death.”

“That’s very vivid, Senator. Well done.”

The Senator asked, “What kind of sandwich is that, Ruthie?”

“Ham salad. Want half?”

“No, no. You need it.”

“You can have a bite.”

“What’s on there? Mustard?”

“Why don’t you have a bite, Senator?”

“No, no. You need it. I’ll tell you another thing. People lose their minds in a lifeboat. They lose their ideas about time. They might be out there in an open boat for twenty days. Then they get rescued, and they’re surprised to find that they can’t walk. Their feet are rotting from waterbite, and they have open sores from sitting in pools of saltwater; they have injuries from the wreck and burns from the sun; and they’re surprised to find, Ruthie, that they can’t walk. They never have any understanding of their situation.”

“Delirium.”

“That’s right. Delirium. Exactly. Some men in a lifeboat get a condition called ‘shared delirium.’ Let’s say there are two men in a boat. They both lose their minds the same way. One man says, ‘I’m going over to the tavern for a beer,’ and steps over the side and drowns. The second man says, ‘I’ll join you, Ed,’ and then he steps over the side and drowns, too.”

“With the sharks lurking.”

“And the bluefish. And here’s another common shared delusion, Ruthie. Say there are only two men in a lifeboat. When they do get rescued, they’ll both swear that there was a third man with them the whole time. They’ll say, ‘Where’s my friend?’ And the rescuers will tell them, ‘Your friend is in the bed right next to you. He’s safe.’ And the men will say, ‘No! Where’s my other friend? Where’s the other man?’ But there never was any other man. They won’t believe this. For the rest of their lives they’ll wonder: Where’s the other man?”

Ruth Thomas handed the Senator half of her sandwich, and he ate it quickly.

“In the Arctic, of course, they die from the cold,” he continued.

“Of course.”

“They fall asleep. People who fall asleep in lifeboats never wake up.”

“Of course they don’t.”

Other days, they talked about mapmaking. The Senator was a big fan of Ptolemy. He bragged about Ptolemy as if Ptolemy were his gifted son.

“Nobody altered Ptolemy’s maps until 1511!” he’d say proudly. “Now that’s quite a run, Ruth. Thirteen hundred years, that guy was the expert! Not bad, Ruth. Not bad at all.”

Another favorite topic of the Senator’s was the shipwreck of the Victoria and the Camperdown. This one came up time after time. It didn’t need a particular trigger. One Saturday afternoon in the middle of June, for instance, Ruth was telling the Senator about how much she’d hated the graduation ceremony at her school, and the Senator said, “Remember the wreck of the Victoria and the Camperdown, Ruthie!”

“OK,” Ruth said, agreeably, “if you insist.”

And Ruth Thomas did remember the wreck of the Victoria and the Camperdown, because the Senator had been telling her about the wreck of the Victoria and the Camperdown since she was a toddler. This wreck was even more disturbing for him than the Titanic.

The Victoria and the Camperdown were the flagships of the mighty British Navy. In 1893, they collided with each other in open daylight on calm seas because a commander issued a foolish order during maneuvers. The wreck agitated the Senator so much because it had occurred on a day when no boat should have sunk, and because the sailors were the finest in the world. Even the boats were the finest in the world, and the officers were the brightest in the British Navy, but the boats went down. The Victoria and the Camperdown collided because the fine officers—fully knowing that the order they had received was a foolish one—followed it out of a sense of duty and died for it. The Victoria and the Camperdown proved that anything can happen on the sea. No matter how calm the weather, no matter how skilled the crew, a person in a boat was never safe.

In the hours after the collision of the Victoria and the Camperdown, as the Senator had been telling Ruth Thomas for years, the sea was filled with drowning men. The propellers of the sinking ship chewed through the men horribly. They were chopped to pieces, he had always emphasized.

“They were chopped to pieces, Ruthie,” the Senator said.

She didn’t see how this related to her story about graduation, but she let it go.

“I know, Senator,” she said. “I know.”

The next week, back at Potter Beach, Ruth and the Senator got to talking again about shipwrecks.

“What about the Margaret B. Rouss?” Ruth asked, after the Senator had been quiet for a long time. “That shipwreck ended pretty well for everyone.”

She offered up this ship’s name carefully. Sometimes the name Margaret B. Rouss would calm the Senator down, but sometimes it would agitate him.

“Jesus Christ, Ruthie!” he exploded. “Jesus Christ!”

This time it agitated him.

“The Margaret B. Rouss was filled with lumber, and it took forever to sink! You know that, Ruthie. Jesus Christ! You know it was an exception. You know it’s not usually that easy to be shipwrecked. And I’ll tell you another thing. It is not pleasant to be torpedoed under any conditions, with any cargo, no matter what happened to the crew of the goddamn Margaret B. Rouss.”

“And what did happen to the crew, Senator?”

“You know full well what happened to the crew of the Margaret B. Rouss.”

“They rowed forty miles—”

“—forty-five miles.”

“They rowed forty-five miles to Monte Carlo, where they befriended the Prince of Monaco. And they lived in luxury from that point forward. That’s a happy story about a shipwreck, isn’t it?”

“An unusually easy shipwreck, Ruthie.”

“I’ll say.”

“An exception.”

“My father says it’s an exception when any boat sinks.”

“Well, isn’t he a smartie? And aren’t you a smartie, too? You think because of the Margaret B. Rouss it’s safe for you to spend your life working on the water in someone’s lobster boat?”

“I’m not spending my life on any water, Senator. All I said was maybe I could get a job spending three months on the water. Most of the time I’d be less than two miles from shore. I was just saying I want to work on the water for the summer.”

“You know it’s exceedingly dangerous to put any boat on the open sea, Ruth. It’s very dangerous out there. And most people aren’t going to be able to row any fortyfive miles to any Monte Carlo.”

“I’m sorry I brought it up.”

“In most conditions, you’d be dead from exposure by then. There was a shipwreck in the Arctic Circle. The men were in lifeboats for three days, up to their knees in icy water.”

“Which shipwreck?”

“I do not recall the name.”

“Really?” Ruth had never heard of a shipwreck the Senator did not know by name.

“The name doesn’t matter. The wrecked sailors landed on an Icelandic island eventually. They all had frostbite. The Eskimos tried to revive their frozen limbs. What did the Eskimos do, Ruthie? They rubbed the men’s feet vigorously with oil. Vigorously! The men were screaming, begging the Eskimos to stop. But the Eskimos kept on vigorously rubbing the men’s feet with oil. I can’t recall the name of the shipwreck. But you should remember that when you get on a boat.”

“I’m not planning on sailing to Iceland.”

“Some of those men on the Icelandic island fainted from the pain of the vigorous rubbing, and they died right there.”

“I’m not saying that shipwrecks are good, Senator.”

“Every one of those men eventually needed amputations.”

“Senator?”

“To the knee, Ruthie.”

“Senator?” Ruth said again.

“They died from the pain of the rubbing.”

“Senator, please.”

“The survivors had to stay in the Arctic until the next summer, and the only thing they had for food was blubber, Ruth.”

“Please,” she said.

Please. Please.

Because there was Webster, standing before them. He was coated in mud up to his skinny waist. He had tight curls sweated into his hair and dashes of mud across his face. And he was holding an elephant’s tusk flat across his filthy, outstretched hands.

“Oh, Senator,” Ruth said. “Oh, my God.”

Webster laid the tusk on the sand before the Senator’s feet, as one would lay a gift before a regent. Well, the Senator had no words for this gift. The three people on the beach—the old man, the young woman, the tiny, muddy young man—regarded the elephant tusk. No one moved until Cookie rose up stiffly and slouched toward the thing with suspicion.

“No, Cookie,” Senator Simon said, and the dog assumed the posture of a Sphinx, her nose stretched toward the tusk as if to smell it.

At last, in an apologetic and hesitant way, Webster said, “I guess he was a small elephant.”

Indeed, the tusk was small. Very small for an elephant that had grown to a mighty size during 138 years of myth. The tusk was slightly longer than one of Webster’s arms. It was a slim tusk, with a modest arc. At one end was a dull point, like a thumb. At the other end was the ragged edge of its break from the skeleton. There were deep black, cracked grooves in the ivory.

“He was just a small elephant, I guess,” Webster repeated, because the Senator had not yet responded. This time, Webster sounded almost desperate. “I guess we thought it would be bigger, right?”

The Senator stood up, as slowly and stiffly as if he’d been sitting on the beach for 138 years, waiting for the tusk. He stared at it some more, and then he put his arm around Webster.

“That’s a good job, son,” he said.

Webster sank to his knees, and the Senator eased himself down beside him and put his hand on the boy’s lank shoulder.

“Are you disappointed, Webster?” he asked. “Did you think that I would be disappointed? It’s a beautiful tusk.”

Webster shrugged, and his face looked stricken. A breeze came up, and Webster gave a thin shiver.

“I guess it was just a small elephant,” he repeated.

Ruth said, “Webster, it’s a terrific elephant tusk. You did a good job, Webster. You did a great job.”

Then Webster gave two hard sobs.

“Oh, come on, now, boy,” the Senator said, and his voice, too, was choked. Webster was crying. Ruth turned her head. She could still hear him, though, making those sad noises, so she stood up and walked away from the rocks toward the spruce trees lining the shore. She left Webster and the Senator sitting on the beach for a good long time while she wandered among the trees, picking up sticks and breaking them. The mosquitoes were after her, but she didn’t care. She hated to see people crying. Every once in a while she looked toward the beach, but she could see that Webster was still sobbing and the Senator was still comforting him, and she wanted no part of it.

Ruth sat herself down, with her back to the beach, on a mossy log.

She lifted a flat rock in front of her, and a salamander scooted out, giving her a start. Maybe she’d become a veterinarian, she thought absently. She’d recently read a book, given to her by the Senator, about the breeding of bird dogs, and she had found it rather beautiful. The book, written in 1870, had the loveliest language. She’d been moved almost to tears by a description of the best Chesapeake labrador the author had ever seen, one that had retrieved a downed seabird by leaping over crashing ice floes and swimming far out past the point of invisibility. The dog, whose name was Bugle, had returned to shore, nearly frozen to death, but carrying the bird ever so gently in its soft mouth. Not a mark on it.

Ruth stole a glance over her shoulder back to Webster and the Senator. Webster appeared to have stopped crying. She wandered down to the shoreline, where Webster was sitting, staring ahead grimly. The Senator had taken the tusk to a warm pool of tidewater to rinse it off. Ruth Thomas went over, and he straightened up and handed her the tusk. She dried it on her shirt. It was light as bone and yellow as old teeth, its hollow inside packed with mud. It was warm. She hadn’t even seen Webster find it! All those hours of sitting on the beach watching him search the mud, and she had not seen the moment when he found it!

“You didn’t see him find it, either,” she said to the Senator. He shook his head. Ruth weighed it in her hands. “Unbelievable,” she said.

“I didn’t think he would actually find it, Ruth,” the Senator said, in a desperate whisper. “Now what the hell am I supposed to do with him? Look at him, Ruth.”

Ruth looked. Webster was trembling like an old engine in idle.

“Is he upset?” she asked.

“Of course he’s upset! This project kept him going for a year. I don’t know,” the Senator whispered in panic, “what to do with the boy now.”

Webster Pommeroy got up and came to stand beside Ruth and the Senator. The Senator straightened to his full height and smiled widely.

“Did you clean it off?” Webster asked. “Does it look n-n-nicer?”

The Senator spun around and hugged tiny Webster Pommeroy close to him. He said, “Oh, it’s splendid! It’s gorgeous! I’m so proud of you, son! I am so proud of you!”

Webster sobbed again, and recommenced crying. Ruth, reflexively, shut her eyes.

“Do you know what I think, Webster?” Ruth heard the Senator ask.

“I think it is a magnificent find. I really do. And I think we should bring it to Mr. Ellis.”

Ruth’s eyes flew open in alarm.

“And do you know what Mr. Ellis is going to do when he sees us coming with this tusk?” the Senator asked, his huge arm draped over Webster’s shoulder. “Do you know, Webster?”

Webster did not know. He shrugged pathetically.

The Senator said, “Mr. Ellis is going to grin. Isn’t that right, Ruthie? Won’t that be something? Don’t you think Mr. Ellis will love this?”

Ruth did not answer.

“Don’t you think so, Ruthie? Don’t you?”

3

Lobsters, by instinctive force,

Act selfishly, without design.

Their feelings commonly are coarse,

Their honor always superfine.

—The Doctor and the Poet

J. H. Stevenson

1718–1785

MR. LANFORD ELLIS lived in Ellis House, which dated back to 1883.

The house was the finest structure on Fort Niles Island, and it was finer than anything on Courne Haven, too. It was built of black, tomb-grade granite in the manner of a grand bank or train station, in only slightly smaller proportions. There were columns, arches, deepset windows, and a glinting tile lobby the size of a vast, echoing Roman bath house. Ellis House, on the highest point of Fort Niles, was as far away from the harbor as possible. It stood at the end of Ellis Road. Rather, Ellis House stopped Ellis Road abruptly in its tracks, as if the house were a big cop with a whistle and an outstretched, authoritative arm.

As for Ellis Road, it dated back to 1880. It was an old work road that had connected the three quarries of the Ellis Granite Company on Fort Niles Island. At one time, Ellis Road had been a busy thoroughfare, but by the time Webster Pommeroy, Senator Simon Addams, and Ruth Thomas made their way along the road toward Ellis House, on that June morning in 1976, it had long since fallen into disuse.

Alongside Ellis Road ran the dead length of the Ellis Rail, a two-mile track, dating from 1882, that had been laid down to carry the tons of granite blocks from the quarries to the sloops waiting in the harbor.

Those heavy sloops steamed away to New York and Philadelphia and Washington for years and years. They moved in slow formation down to cities that always needed paving blocks from Courne Haven Island and more monument-grade granite from Fort Niles Island. For decades, the sloops carried off the granite interior of the two islands, returning, weeks later, packed with the coal needed to power the excavation of still more granite, to scour out more deeply the guts of the islands.

Beside the ancient Ellis Rail lay an orange-rusted scattering of Ellis Granite Company quarry tools and machine parts—peen hammers and wedges and shims and other tools—that nobody, not even Senator Simon, could identify anymore. The great Ellis Granite Company lathe was rotting in the woods nearby, bigger than a locomotive engine car, never to be moved again. The lathe sat miserably in the murk and vines as if it had been consigned there as punishment. Its 140 tons of clockwork gears were weathered together in an angry lockjaw grip. Rusted pythonic lengths of cable lurked in the grass all around.

They walked. Webster Pommeroy and Senator Simon Addams and Ruth Thomas walked up Ellis Road, next to the Ellis Rail, toward Ellis House, bearing the elephant tusk. They were not smiling, not laughing. Ellis House was not a place any of them frequented.

“I don’t know why we’re bothering,” Ruth said. “He’s not even going to be here. He’s still in New Hampshire. He won’t be here until next Saturday.”

“He came to the island early this year,” the Senator said.

“What are you talking about?”

“This year, Mr. Ellis arrived on April eighteenth.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“I’m not kidding you.”

“He’s been here? He’s been here the whole time? Since I got back from school?”

“That’s right.”

“Nobody told me.”

“Did you ask anybody? You shouldn’t be so surprised. Everything is different now at Ellis House from the way it used to be.”

“Well. I guess I should know that.”

“Yes, Ruthie. I suppose you should.”

The Senator fanned mosquitoes off his head and neck as he walked, using a fan he’d made from fern fronds.

“Is your mother coming to the island this summer, Ruth?”

“No.”

“Did you see your mother this year?”

“Not really.”

“Oh, is that right? You didn’t visit Concord this year?”

“Not really.”

“Does your mother like living in Concord?”

“Apparently. She’s been living there long enough.”

“I’ll bet her house is nice. Is it nice?”

“I’ve told you about a million times that it’s nice.”

“Do you know that I haven’t seen your mother in a decade?”

“And you’ve told me that about a million times.”

“So you say she’s not coming to visit the island this summer?”

“She never comes,” Webster Pommeroy said abruptly. “I don’t know why everybody keeps talking about her.”

That stopped the conversation. The threesome did not talk for a long while, and then Ruth said, “Mr. Ellis really came out here on April eighteenth?”

“He really did,” the Senator said.

This was unusual news, even astonishing. The Ellis family came to Fort Niles Island on the third Saturday of June, and they had been doing so since the third Saturday of June 1883. They lived the rest of the year in Concord, New Hampshire. The original Ellis patriarch, Dr. Jules Ellis, had started the practice in 1883, moving his growing family to the island in the summers to get away from the diseases of the city, and also to keep an eye on his granite company. It was not known to any of the locals what kind of doctor Dr. Jules Ellis was, exactly. He certainly didn’t act like a physician. He acted rather like a captain of industry. But that was during a different era, as Senator Simon liked to point out, when a man could be many things. This was back when a man could wear many hats.

None of the natives on Fort Niles liked the Ellis family, but it was an odd point of pride that Dr. Ellis had elected to build Ellis House on Fort Niles and not on Courne Haven, where the Ellis Granite Company was also at work. This point of pride had little actual value; the islanders should not have been flattered. Dr. Jules Ellis had chosen Fort Niles for his home not because he liked that island better. He had selected it because, by building Ellis House on the island’s high, east-facing cliffs, he could keep an eye on both Fort Niles and Courne

Haven, right across Worthy Channel. He could live atop one island and watch the other carefully and also enjoy the advantage of keeping an eye on the rising sun.

During the reign of Dr. Jules Ellis, summertime would bring quite a crowd to Fort Niles Island. In time, there were five Ellis children arriving every summer, together with numerous members of the extended Ellis family, a continuing rotation of well-dressed Ellis summer guests and business associates, and a summer household staff of sixteen Ellis servants. The servants would bring the Ellis summer household necessities up from Concord on trains and then over on boats. On the third Saturday of June, the servants would appear at the docks, unloading trunks and trunks of summer china and linens and crystal and curtains. In photographs, these piles of trunks resemble structures in themselves, looking like awkward buildings. This enormous event, the arrival of the Ellis family, lent great importance to the third Saturday of June.

The Ellises’ servants also brought across on boats several riding horses for the summer. Ellis House had a fine stable, in addition to a well-cultivated rose garden, a ballroom, an icehouse, guest cottages, a lawn tennis court, and a goldfish pond. The family and their friends, on Fort Niles Island for the summer, indulged themselves in sundry forms of recreation. And at the end of the summer, on the second Saturday of September, Dr. Ellis, his wife, his five children, his riding horses, his sixteen servants, his guests, the silver, the china, the linens, the crystal, and the curtains would leave. The family and servants would crowd onto their ferry, and the goods would be packed into the towering stacks of trunks, and everything and everyone would be shipped back to Concord, New Hampshire, for the winter.

But all this was long ago. This mighty production had not taken place for years.

By Ruth Thomas’s nineteenth summer, in 1976, the only Ellis who still came to Fort Niles Island was Dr. Jules Ellis’s eldest son, Lanford Ellis. He was ancient. He was ninety-four years old.

All of Dr. Jules Ellis’s other children, save one daughter, were dead. There were grandchildren and even great-grandchildren of Dr. Ellis who might have enjoyed the great house on Fort Niles, but Lanford Ellis disliked and disapproved of them, and he kept them away. It was his right. The house was entirely his; he alone had inherited it. Mr. Lanford Ellis’s one surviving sibling, Vera Ellis, was the only family member for whom he cared, but Vera Ellis had stopped coming to the island ten summers earlier. She considered herself too frail to make the trip. She considered herself in poor health. She had spent many happy summers on Fort Niles, but preferred now to rest in Concord, the year round, with her live-in companion to care for her.

So, for ten years, Lanford Ellis had been spending his summers in Fort Niles alone. He kept no horses and invited no guests. He did not play croquet or take boating excursions. He had no staff with him at Ellis House except one man, Cal Cooley, who was both groundskeeper and assistant. Cal Cooley even cooked the old man’s meals. Cal Cooley lived in Ellis House throughout the year, keeping his eye on things.

Senator Simon Addams, Webster Pommeroy, and Ruth Thomas walked on toward Ellis House. They walked side by side, Webster holding the tusk against one of his shoulders as if it were a Revolutionary War musket. On their left ran the stagnant Ellis Rail. Deep in the woods on their right stood the morbid remains of the “peanut houses,” the tiny shacks built by the Ellis Granite Company a century earlier to house its Italian immigrant workers. There were once over three hundred Italian immigrants packed into these shacks. They were not welcome in the community at large, although they were allowed to have the occasional parade down Ellis Road on their holidays. There used to be a small Catholic church on the island to accommodate the Italians.

No more. By 1976, the Catholic church had long since burned to the ground.

During the reign of the Ellis Granite Company, Fort Niles was like a real town, busy and useful. It was like a Fabergé egg—an object encrusted in the greatest detail. So much crowded on to such a small surface! There had been two drygoods stores on the island. There had been a dime museum, a skating rink, a taxidermist, a newspaper, a pony racetrack, a hotel with a piano bar, and, across the street from each other, the Ellis Eureka Theater and the Ellis Olympia Dance Hall. Everything had been burned or wrecked by 1976. Where had it all gone? Ruth wondered. And how had everything fit there, in the first place? Most of the land had returned to woods. Of the Ellis empire, only two buildings remained: the Ellis Granite Company Store and Ellis House. And the company store, a three-story wooden structure down by the harbor, was vacant and falling in on itself. Of course, the quarries were there, holes in the earth over a thousand feet deep—smooth and oblique—now filled with spring water.

Ruth Thomas’s father called the peanut houses in the back of the woods “guinea huts,” a term he must have learned from his father or grandfather, because the peanut houses were empty even when Ruth’s father was a boy. Even when Senator Simon Addams was a boy, the peanut houses were emptying out. The granite business was dying by 1910 and dead by 1930. The need for granite ran out before the granite itself did. The Ellis Granite Company would have dug in the quarries forever, if there had been a market. The company would have dug the granite until both Fort Niles and Courne Haven were gutted. Until the islands were thin shells of granite in the ocean. That’s what the islanders said, anyway. They said the Ellis family would have taken everything, but for the fact that no one any longer wanted the stuff from which the islands were made.

The threesome walked up Ellis Road and slowed down only once, when Webster saw a dead snake in their path and stopped to poke it with the tip of the elephant tusk.

“Snake,” he said.

“Harmless,” said Senator Simon.

At another point, Webster stopped walking and tried to hand the tusk to the Senator.

“You take it,” he said. “I don’t want to go up there and see any Mr. Ellis.”

But Senator Simon refused. He said Webster had found the tusk and should get the credit for his find. He said there was nothing to fear in Mr. Ellis. Mr. Ellis was a good man. Although there had been people in the Ellis family to fear in the past, Mr. Lanford Ellis was a decent man, who, by the way, thought of Ruthie as practically his own granddaughter.

“Isn’t that right, Ruthie? Doesn’t he always give you a big grin? And hasn’t he always been good to your family?”

Ruth did not answer. The three continued walking.

They did not speak again until they reached Ellis House. There were no open windows, not even any open curtains. The hedges outside were still wrapped in protective material against the vicious winter winds. The place looked abandoned. The Senator climbed the broad, black granite steps to the dark front doors and rang the bell. And knocked. And called. There was no answer. In the noose-shaped driveway was parked a green pickup truck, which the three recognized as Cal Cooley’s.

“Well, it looks like old Cal Cooley is here,” the Senator said.

He walked around to the back of the house, and Ruth and Webster followed. They walked past the gardens, which were not gardens anymore so much as unkempt brush piles. They walked past the tennis court, which was overgrown and wet. They walked past the fountain, which was overgrown and dry. They walked toward the stable, and found its wide, sliding door gaping open. The entrance was big enough for two carriages, side by side. It was a beautiful stable, but it had been so long out of use that it no longer even had a trace of the smell of horses.

“Cal Cooley!” Senator Simon called. “Mr. Cooley?”

Inside the stable, with its stone floors and cool, empty, odorless stalls, was Cal Cooley, sitting in the middle of the floor. He was sitting on a simple stool before something enormous and was polishing the object with a rag.

“My God!” the Senator said. “Look what you’ve got!”

What Cal Cooley had was a huge piece of a lighthouse, the top piece of a lighthouse. It was, in fact, the magnificent glass-and-brass circular lens of a lighthouse. It was probably seven feet tall. Cal Cooley stood up from his stool, and he was close to seven feet tall, too. Cal Cooley had thick, combed-back blue-black hair and oversized blue-black eyes. He had a big square frame and a thick nose and a huge chin and a deep, straight line right across his forehead that made him look as if he’d run into a clothesline. He looked as if he might be part Indian. Cal Cooley had been with the Ellis family for about twenty years, but he hadn’t seemed to age a day, and it would have been difficult for a stranger to guess whether he was forty years old or sixty.

“Why, it’s my good friend the Senator,” Cal Cooley drawled.

Cal Cooley was originally from Missouri, a place he insisted on pronouncing Missourah. He had a prominent Southern accent, which— although Ruth Thomas had never been to the South—she believed he had a tendency to exaggerate. She believed, for the most part, that Cal Cooley’s whole demeanor was phony. There were many things about Cal Cooley that she hated, but she was particularly offended by his phony accent and his habit of referring to himself as Old Cal Cooley. As in “Old Cal Cooley can’t wait for spring,” or “Old Cal Cooley looks like he needs another drink.”

Ruth could not tolerate this affectation.

“And look! It’s Miss Ruth Thomas!” Cal Cooley drawled on. “She is always such an oasis to behold. And look who’s with her: a savage.”

Webster Pommeroy, muddied and silent under Cal Cooley’s gaze, stood with the elephant’s tusk in his hand. His feet shifted about quickly, nervously, as if he were preparing to race.

“I know what this is,” Senator Simon Addams said, approaching the huge and magnificent glass that Cal Cooley had been polishing. “I know exactly what this is!”

“Can you guess, my friend?” Cal Cooley asked, winking at Ruth Thomas as if they had a wonderful shared secret. She looked away. She felt her face get hot. She wondered if there was some way she could arrange her life so that she could live on Fort Niles forever without ever seeing Cal Cooley again.

“It’s the Fresnel lens from the Goat’s Rock lighthouse, isn’t it?” the Senator asked.

“Yes, it is. Exactly right. Have you ever visited it? You must have been to Goat’s Rock, eh?”

“Well, no,” the Senator admitted, flushing. “I can never go out to a place like Goat’s Rock. I don’t go on boats, you know.”

Which Cal Cooley knew perfectly well, Ruth thought.

“Is that so?” Cal asked innocently.

“I have a fear of water, you see.”

“What a terrible affliction,” Cal Cooley murmured.

Ruth wondered whether Cal Cooley had ever been severely beaten up in his life. She would have enjoyed seeing it.

“My goodness,” the Senator marveled. “My goodness. How did you ever acquire the lighthouse from Goat’s Rock? It’s a remarkable lighthouse. It’s one of the oldest lighthouses in the country.”

“Well, my friend. We bought it. Mr. Ellis has always fancied it. So we bought it.”

“But how did you get it here?”

“On a boat and then a truck.”

“But how did you get it here without anyone knowing about it?”

“Does nobody know about it?”

“It’s gorgeous.”

“I am restoring it for Mr. Ellis. I am polishing every individual inch and every single screw. I’ve already been polishing for ninety hours, I estimate. I expect that it will take me months to finish. But won’t it gleam then?”

“I didn’t know the Goat’s Rock lighthouse was for sale. I didn’t know you could buy such a thing.”

“The Coast Guard has replaced this beautiful artifact with a modern device. The new lighthouse doesn’t even need an attendant. Isn’t that remarkable? Everything is all automated. Very inexpensive to operate. The new lighthouse is completely electric and perfectly ugly.”

“This is an artifact,” the Senator said. “You’re right. Why, it’s suitable for a museum!”

“That’s right, my friend.”

Senator Simon Addams studied the Fresnel lens. It was a beautiful thing to see, all brass and glass, with beveled panes as thick as planks, layered over one another in tiers. The small section that Cal Cooley had already disassembled, polished, and reassembled was a gleam of gold and crystal. When Senator Simon Addams passed behind the lens to look at the whole thing, his image became distorted and wavy, as though seen through ice.

“I have never seen a lighthouse before,” he said. His voice was choked with emotion. “Not in person. I have never had the opportunity.”

“It’s not a lighthouse,” Cal Cooley corrected fastidiously. “It is merely the lens of a lighthouse, sir.”

Ruth rolled her eyes.

“I have never seen one. Oh, my goodness, this is such a treat for me, such a treat. Of course, I’ve seen pictures. I’ve seen pictures of this very lighthouse.”

“This is a pet project for me and Mr. Ellis. Mr. Ellis asked the state whether he could buy it, they named a price, and he accepted. And, as I say, I have been working on this for approximately ninety hours.”

“Ninety hours,” the Senator repeated, staring at the Fresnel lens as if he had been tranquilized.

“Built in 1929, by the French,” Cal said. “She weighs five thousand pounds, my friend.”

The Fresnel lens was perched on its original brass turntable, which Cal Cooley now gave a slight push. The entire lens, at that touch, began to spin with a freakish lightness—huge, silent, and exquisitely balanced.

“Two fingers,” Cal Cooley said, holding up two of his own fingers.

“Two fingers is all it takes to spin that five-thousand-pound weight. Can you believe it? Have you ever seen such remarkable engineering?”

“No,” Senator Simon Addams answered. “No, I have not.”

Cal Cooley spun the Fresnel lens again. What little light was in that stable seemed to throw itself at the great spinning lens and then leap away, bursting into sparks across the walls.

“Look how it eats up the light,” Cal said. He somehow pronounced light so that it rhymed with hot.

“There was a woman on a Maine island once,” the Senator said, “who was burned to death when the sunlight went through the lens and hit her.”

“They used to cover the lenses with dark gunnysacks on sunny days,” Cal Cooley said. “Otherwise, the lenses would have set everything on fire; they’re that strong.”

“I have always loved lighthouses.”

“So have I, sir. So has Mr. Ellis.”

“During the reign of Ptolemy the Second, there was a lighthouse built in Alexandria that was regarded as one of the wonders of the ancient world. It was destroyed by an earthquake in the fourteenth century.”

“Or so history has recorded,” said Cal Cooley. “There is some debate on that.”

“The earliest lighthouses,” the Senator mused, “were built by the Libyans in Egypt.”

“I am familiar with the lighthouses of the Libyans,” said Cal Cooley, evenly.

The Goat’s Rock lighthouse antique Fresnel lens spun and spun in the vast empty stable, and the Senator stared at it, captivated. It spun more and more slowly, and quietly whispered to a stop. The Senator was silent, hypnotized.

“And what do you have?” Cal Cooley asked, finally.

Cal was regarding Webster Pommeroy, holding the elephant’s tusk. Webster, caked with mud and looking most pathetic, clung desperately to his small find. He did not answer Cal, but his feet were tapping nervously. The Senator did not answer, either. He was still entranced by the Fresnel lens.

And so Ruth Thomas said, “Webster found an elephant’s tusk today, Cal. It’s from the wreck of the Clarice Monroe, 138 years ago. Webster and Simon have been looking for it for almost a year. Isn’t it wonderful?”

And it was wonderful. Under any other circumstances, the tusk would have been recognized as an undeniably wonderful object. But not in the shadow of Ellis House, and not in the presence of the intact and beautiful brass-and-glass Fresnel lens crafted by the French in 1929. The tusk seemed suddenly foolish. Besides, Cal Cooley, with his height and demeanor, could diminish anything. Cal Cooley made his ninety hours of polishing seem heroic and productive, while—without saying a word, of course—making a year of a lost boy’s life searching through the mud seem a depressing prank.

The elephant’s tusk suddenly looked like a sad little bone.

“How very interesting,” Cal Cooley said, at length. “What a perfectly interesting project.”

“I thought Mr. Ellis might like to see it,” the Senator said. He had snapped out of his gaze at the Fresnel lens and was now giving Cal Cooley a most unattractive look of supplication. “I thought he might grin when he sees the tusk.”

“He may.”

Cal Cooley did not commit.

“If Mr. Ellis is available today . . .” the Senator began, and then trailed off. The Senator did not wear a hat, but if he were a hat-wearing man, he would have been working the hat brim in his anxious hands. As it was, he was just wringing his hands.

“Yes, my friend?”

“If Mr. Ellis is available, I would like to talk to him about it. About the tusk. You see, I think this is the kind of object that may finally convince him of our need for the Natural History Museum on the island. I’d like to ask Mr. Ellis to consider granting me the use of the Ellis Granite Company Store building for the Natural History Museum.

For the island. For education, you know.”

“A museum?”

“A Natural History Museum. Webster and I have been collecting artifacts now for several years. We have quite a large collection.”

Which Cal Cooley knew. Which Mr. Ellis knew. Which everybody knew. Ruth was now officially furious. Her stomach hurt. She could feel herself frowning, and she willed herself to keep her forehead smooth. She refused to show any emotion in front of Cal Cooley. She willed herself to look impassive. She wondered what a person would have to do to get Cal Cooley fired. Or killed.

“We have many artifacts,” the Senator said. “I recently acquired a pure white lobster, preserved in alcohol.”

“A Natural History Museum,” Cal Cooley repeated, as though he were considering the notion for the very first time. “How intriguing.”

“We need a space for the museum. We already have the artifacts. The building is large enough that we could continue to collect artifacts as time went on. For instance, it might be the place to display this Fresnel lens.”

“You aren’t saying you want Mr. Ellis’s lighthouse?” Cal Cooley looked absolutely aghast.

“Oh, no. No! No, no, no! We don’t want anything from Mr. Ellis except permission to use the company store building. We would rent it, of course. We could offer him some money every month for it. He might appreciate that, you know, since the building hasn’t been used for anything in years. We don’t need any money from Mr. Ellis. We don’t want to take his possessions.”

“I certainly hope you aren’t asking for money.”

“You know what?” Ruth Thomas said. “I’m going to wait outside. I don’t feel like standing here anymore.”

“Ruth,” Cal Cooley said with concern. “You look agitated, sweetheart.”

She paid him no heed. “Webster, you want to come with me?”

But Webster Pommeroy preferred to race his feet in place beside the Senator, holding his hopeful tusk. So Ruth Thomas walked out of the stable alone, back through the abandoned pastures, toward the rock cliffs facing east and Courne Haven Island. She hated to watch Simon Addams grovel before Mr. Lanford Ellis’s caretaker. She had seen it before and couldn’t stand it. So she walked to the edge of the cliff and picked lichen off some rocks. Across the channel, she could clearly see Courne Haven Island. A heat mirage floated above it, like a mushroom cloud.

This would be the fifth time Senator Simon Addams had formally visited Mr. Lanford Ellis. The fifth time that Ruth Thomas knew of, that is. Mr. Ellis never granted the Senator a meeting. There may have been other visits that Ruth hadn’t been told about.

There may have been more hours spent waiting in the front yard of Ellis House for nothing, more incidents of Cal Cooley explaining, with insincere apologies, that he was sorry, but Mr. Ellis was not feeling well and would not be receiving guests. Each time, Webster had come along, each time carrying some discovery or find with which the Senator hoped to convince Mr. Ellis of the necessity of a Natural History Museum. The Natural History Museum would be a public place, the Senator was always ready to explain with sincerity and heart, where the people of the island—for only a dime’s admission!—could explore the artifacts of their singular history. Senator Simon had a most eloquent speech prepared for Mr. Ellis, but he had never had a chance to deliver it. He had recited the speech to Ruth several times. She listened politely, although each time it broke her heart a little.

“Plead less,” she always suggested. “Be more assertive.”

It was true that some of Senator Simon’s artifacts were uninteresting. He collected everything and was not much of a curator, not one for picking among objects and discarding the worthless ones. The Senator thought all old objects had worth. On an island, people rarely throw anything away, so, essentially, every basement on Fort Niles Island was already a museum—a museum of obsolete fishing gear or a museum of the possessions of dead ancestors or a museum of the toys of long-grown children. But nowhere was this sorted or catalogued or explained, and the Senator’s desire to create a museum was a noble one.

“It’s the common objects,” he constantly told Ruth, “that become rare. During the Civil War, the most common object in the world was a blue wool Union soldier’s coat. A simple blue coat with brass buttons. Every soldier in the Union had one. Did the soldiers save those after the war, as souvenirs? No. Oh, they saved the general’s dress uniforms and the handsome cavalry britches, but nobody thought to save the simple blue jackets. The men came home from war and wore the jackets to work in the fields, and when the jackets fell apart, their wives made rags and quilt squares from them, and today a common Civil War jacket is one of the most rare things in the world.”

He would explain this to Ruth as he put an empty cereal box or an unopened can of tuna in a crate marked FOR POSTERITY.

“We cannot know today what will be of value tomorrow, Ruth,” he would say.

“Wheaties?” she would reply, incredulous. “Wheaties, Senator? Wheaties?”

So it was not surprising that the Senator had run out of room in his house for his growing collections. And it was not surprising that the Senator would get the idea to seek access to the Ellis Granite Company Store, which had been standing vacant for forty years. It was a rotting, useless space. Still, Mr. Ellis had never once given the Senator an answer or a nod or any acknowledgment, other than to defer the entire subject. It was as though he were waiting the Senator out. It was as though Lanford Ellis expected to outlive the Senator, at which point the matter would be settled without the inconvenience of decision.

The lobster boats were still in the channel, working and circling. From her perch on the cliffs, Ruth saw the boat of Mr. Angus Addams and the boat of Mr. Duke Cobb and the boat of her father. Beyond them, she could see a fourth boat, which may have belonged to someone on Courne Haven Island; she couldn’t identify it. The channel was so littered with lobster trap buoys, it looked like a scatter of confetti on a floor or dense litter on a highway. Men set their traps nearly on top of one another in that channel. It was risky, fishing there. The border between Courne Haven Island and Fort Niles Island had never been established, but nowhere was it more in contention than in Worthy Channel. Men from both islands defined and defended their ground hard, always pushing toward each other. They cut away each other’s traps and waged collective assaults toward the opposite island.

“They’ll drop their traps on our front goddamn doorsteps, if we let them in,” said Angus Addams.

On Courne Haven Island they said the same of Fort Niles fishermen, of course, and both statements were true.

On this day, Ruth Thomas thought the Courne Haven boat was hovering a little close to Fort Niles, but it wasn’t easy to be sure, even from above. She tried counting strings of buoys. She picked a blade of grass and made a whistle with it, pressed between her thumbs. She played a game with herself, pretending that she was seeing this view for the first time in her life. She shut her eyes for a long moment, then opened them slowly. The sea! The sky! It was beautiful. She did live in a beautiful place. She tried to look down on the lobster boats as if she did not know how much they cost and who owned them and how they smelled. How would this scene look to a visitor? How would Worthy Channel look to a person from, say, Nebraska? The boats would look like toys, adorable and sturdy as bathtub boats, manned by hardworking Down East characters who dressed in picturesque overalls and gave each other friendly waves across their bows.

Ya can’t get thah from heah . . .

Ruth wondered whether she would enjoy lobster fishing more if she had her own boat, if she were the captain. Maybe it was just working with her father that was so unpleasant. She couldn’t imagine, though, whom she would enlist as a sternman. She ran over the names of all the young men from Fort Niles and quickly confirmed that, yes, they were all idiots. Every last drunken one of them. Incompetent, lazy, surly, inarticulate, funny-looking. She had no patience for any of them, with the possible exception of Webster Pommeroy, whom she pitied and worried over like a mother. But Webster was a damaged young man, and he was certainly no sternman. Not that Ruth was any lobsterman. She couldn’t kid herself about that. She didn’t know much about navigation, nothing about maintaining a boat. She’d shrieked “Fire!” to her father once when she saw smoke coming out of the hold; smoke that was actually steam from a ruptured hose.

“Ruth,” he’d said, “you’re cute, but you’re not very smart.”

But she was smart. Ruth had always had a sense of being smarter than anyone around her. Where had she got that idea? Who had ever told her such a thing? God knew, Ruth would never publicly admit this sense of hers. It would sound appalling, horrible, to admit what she believed about her own smartness.

“You think you’re smarter than everyone else.” Ruth had often heard this accusation from her neighbors on Fort Niles. A few of the Pommeroy boys had said it to her, as had Angus Addams and Mrs. Pommeroy’s sisters and that old bitch on Langly Road whose lawn Ruth had mowed one summer for two dollars a pop.

“Oh, please,” was Ruth’s standard reply.

She couldn’t deny it with more conviction than this, though, because she did, in fact, think she was considerably smarter than everyone else. It was a feeling, centered not in her head, but in her chest. She felt it in her very lungs.

She was certainly smart enough to figure out how to get her own boat if she wanted one. If that was what she wanted, she could get it. Sure. She was certainly no dumber than any of the men from Fort Niles or Courne Haven who made a good living by lobstering. Why not? Angus Addams knew a woman on Monhegan Island who fished alone and made a good living. The woman’s brother had died and left his boat to her. She had three kids, no husband. The woman’s name was Flaggie. Flaggie Cornwall. She made a good go of it. Her buoys, Angus reported, were painted bright pink, with yellow heartshaped dots. But Flaggie Cornwall was tough, too. She cut away other men’s traps if she thought they were messing with her business. Angus Addams quite admired her. He talked about her often.

Ruth could do that. She could fish alone. She wouldn’t paint her buoys pink with yellow hearts, though. Jesus Christ, Flaggie, have some self-respect! Ruth would paint her buoys a nice, classic teal. Ruth wondered what kind of name Flaggie was. It must be a nickname. Florence? Agatha? Ruth had never had a nickname. She decided that if she became a lobsterman—a lobsterwoman? lobsterperson?—she’d figure out a way to make a great living at it without getting up so goddamn early in the morning. Honestly, was there any reason a smart fisherman had to wake up at four A.M.? There had to be a better way.

“Are you enjoying our view?”

Cal Cooley was standing right behind Ruth. She was startled but didn’t show it. She turned slowly and gave him a steady look.

“Maybe.”

Cal Cooley did not sit down; he stood there, directly behind Ruth Thomas. His knees almost touched her shoulders.

“I sent your friends home,” he said.

“Did Mr. Ellis see the Senator?” Ruth asked, already knowing the answer.

“Mr. Ellis isn’t himself today. He could not see the Senator.”

“That makes him not himself? He never sees the Senator.”

“That may be true.”

“You people have no idea how to act. You have no idea how rude you are.”

“I don’t know what Mr. Ellis thinks about these people, Ruth, but I sent them home. I thought it was too early in the morning to be dealing with the mentally handicapped.”

“It’s four o’clock in the afternoon, you prick.” Ruth liked the way that sounded. Very calm.

Cal Cooley stood behind Ruth for some time. He stood behind her like a butler, but more intimate. Polite, but too near. His nearness created a constant feeling that she did not appreciate. And she did not like speaking to him without seeing him.

“Why don’t you sit down?” she said, at last.

“You want me to sit next to you, do you?” he asked.

“That’s entirely up to you, Cal.”

“Thank you,” he said, and he did sit down. “Very hospitable of you. Thank you for the invitation.”

“It’s your property. I can’t be hospitable on your property.”

“It’s not my property, young lady. It’s Mr. Ellis’s property.”

“Really? I always forget that, Cal. I forget it’s not your property. Do you ever forget that, too?”

Cal did not answer. He asked, “What’s the little boy’s name? The little boy with the tusk.”

“He’s Webster Pommeroy.”

Which Cal Cooley knew.

Cal stared out at the water and recited dully: “Pommeroy the cabin boy was a nasty little nipper. Shoved a glass up in his ass and circumcised the skipper.”

“Cute,” Ruth said.

“He seems like a nice child.”

“He’s twenty-three years old, Cal.”

“And I believe he is in love with you. Is this true?”

“My God, Cal. That is truly relevant.”

“Listen to you, Ruth! You are so educated these days. It is such a pleasure to hear you using such big words. It is rewarding, Ruth. It makes us all so pleased to see that your expensive education is paying off.”

“I know you try to rile me, Cal, but I’m not sure what you gain from it.”

“That’s not true, Ruth. I don’t try to rile you. I’m your biggest supporter.”

Ruth laughed sharply. “You know something, Cal? That elephant tusk really is an important find.”

“Yes. You said as much.”

“You didn’t even pay attention to the story, an interesting story, about an unusual shipwreck. You didn’t ask Webster how he found it. It’s an incredible story, and you didn’t pay any attention at all. It’d be annoying if it wasn’t so damn typical.”

“That’s not true. I pay attention to everything.”

“You pay a great deal of attention to some things.”

“Old Cal Cooley is incapable of not paying attention.”

“You should have paid more attention to that tusk, then.”

“I am interested in that tusk, Ruth. I’m actually holding it for Mr. Ellis so that he can look at it later. I think he’ll be very interested indeed.”

“What do you mean, holding it?”

“I’m holding it.”

“You took it?”

“As I’ve said, I’m holding it.”

“You took it. You sent them away without their tusk. Jesus Christ. Why would a person do something like that?”

“Would you like to share a cigarette with me, young lady?”

“I think you people are all pricks.”

“If you would like to smoke a cigarette, I won’t tell anybody.”

“I don’t fucking smoke, Cal.”

“I’m sure you do lots of bad things you don’t tell anybody about.”

“You took that tusk out of Webster’s hands and sent him away? Well, that’s a downright horrible thing to do. And typical.”

“You sure do look beautiful today, Ruth. I meant to tell you that immediately, but the opportunity did not arise.”

Ruth stood up. “OK,” she said, “I’m going home.”

She started to walk off, but Cal Cooley said, “As a matter of fact, I believe you need to stay.”

Ruth stopped walking. She didn’t turn around, but she stood still, because she knew from his tone what was coming.

“If you’re not too busy today,” Cal Cooley said, “Mr. Ellis would like to see you.”

They walked toward Ellis House together. They walked silently beyond the pastures and the ancient gardens and up the steps to the back verandah and through the wide French doors. They walked through the broad and shrouded living room, down a back hall, up the modest back stairs—the servants’ stairs—along another hall, and finally reached a door.

Cal Cooley stood as though to knock, but, instead, stepped back. He walked a few more paces down the hallway and ducked into a recessed doorway. When he gestured for Ruth to follow, she did. Cal Cooley put his big hands on Ruth’s shoulders and whispered, “I know you hate me.” And he smiled.

Ruth listened.

“I know you hate me, but I can tell you what this is all about if you want to know.”

Ruth did not reply.

“Do you want to know?”

“I don’t care what you tell me or don’t tell me,” Ruth said. “It doesn’t make any difference in my life.”

“Of course you care. First of all,” Cal said, in a hushed voice, “Mr. Ellis simply wants to see you. He’s been asking after you for a few weeks, and I’ve been lying. I’ve told him that you were still at school. Then I said you were working with your father on his boat.”

Cal Cooley waited for Ruth to respond; she didn’t.

“I should think you’d thank me for that,” he said. “I don’t like to lie to Mr. Ellis.”

“Don’t, then,” Ruth said.

“He’s going to give you an envelope,” Cal said. “It has three hundred dollars in it.”

Again, Cal waited for a response, but Ruth did not oblige, so he continued. “Mr. Ellis is going to tell you that it’s fun money, just for you. And, to a certain extent, that’s true. You can spend it on whatever you like. But you know what it’s really for, right? Mr. Ellis has a favor to ask of you.”

Ruth remained silent.

“That’s right,” Cal Cooley said. “He wants you to visit your mother in Concord. I’m supposed to take you there.”

They stood in the recessed doorway. His big hands on her wide shoulders were as heavy as dread. Cal and Ruth stood there for a long time. Finally, he said, “Get it over with, young lady.”

“Shit,” Ruth said.

He dropped his hands. “Just take the money. My suggestion to you is not to antagonize him.”

“I never antagonize him.”

“Take the money and be civil. We’ll figure out the details later.”

Cal Cooley stepped out of the doorway and walked back to the first door. He knocked. He whispered to Ruth, “That’s what you wanted, right? To know? No surprises for you. You want to know everything that’s going on, right?”

He threw open the door, and Ruth stepped inside, alone. The door closed behind her with a beautiful brushing sound, like the swish of expensive fabric.

She was in Mr. Ellis’s bedroom.

The bed itself was made, as seamlessly as though it were never used. The bed was made up as though the bedding had been produced at the same time as the piece of furniture itself and had been tacked or glued to the woodwork. It looked like a display bed in an expensive store. Bookcases were everywhere, holding rows of dark books, each precisely the same shade and size as its neighbors, as though Mr. Ellis owned one volume and had had it repeated throughout the room. The fireplace was lit, and there were heavy duck decoys on the mantel. The musty wallpaper was interrupted by framed prints of clippers and tall ships.

Mr. Ellis was near the fire, sitting in a large, wingback chair. He was very, very old and very thin. A plaid lap rug was pulled high over his waist and tucked around his feet. His baldness was absolute, and his skull looked thin and cold. He held out his arms to Ruth Thomas, his palsied palms upward and open. His eyes were swimming in blue, swimming with tears.

“It’s nice to see you, Mr. Ellis,” Ruth said.

He grinned and grinned.

4

In traveling over the bottom in search of its prey, the lobster walks nimbly on its delicate legs. When taken out of the water, it can only crawl, owing to the heavy weight of the body and the claws, which the slender legs are now unable to sustain.

—The American Lobster: A Study of Its Habits and Development

Francis Hobart Herrick, Ph.D.

1895

THAT NIGHT, when Ruth Thomas told her father she had been to Ellis House, he said, “I don’t care who you spend your time with, Ruth.”

Ruth had gone looking for her father immediately after she left Mr. Ellis. She walked down to the harbor and saw that his boat was in, but the other fishermen said he’d long been done for the day. She tried him at their house, but when she called for him, there was no answer. So Ruth got on her bicycle and rode over to the Addams brothers’ house to see whether he was visiting Angus for a drink. And so he was.

The two men were sitting on the porch, leaning back in folding chairs, holding beers. Senator Simon’s dog, Cookie, was lying on Angus’s feet, panting. It was late dusk, and the air was shimmering and gold. Bats flew low and fast above. Ruth dropped her bicycle in the yard and stepped up on the porch.

“Hey, Dad.”

“Hey, sugar.”

“Hey, Mr. Addams.”

“Hey, Ruth.”

“How’s the lobster business?”

“Great, great,” Angus said. “I’m saving up for a gun to blow my fucking head off.”

Angus Addams, quite the opposite of his twin brother, was getting leaner as he grew older. His skin was damaged from the years spent in the middle of all kinds of bad weather. He squinted, as if looking into a field of sun. He was going deaf after a lifetime spent too near loud boat engines, and he spoke loudly. He hated almost everyone on Fort Niles, and there was no shutting him up when he felt like explaining, in careful detail, why.

Most of the islanders were afraid of Angus Addams. Ruth’s father liked him. When Ruth’s father was a boy, he’d worked as a sternman for Angus and had been a smart, strong, ambitious apprentice. Now, of course, Ruth’s father had his own boat, and the two men dominated the lobster industry of Fort Niles. Greedy Number One and Greedy Number Two. They fished in all weather, with no limits on their catch, with no mercy for their fellows. The boys on the island who worked as sternmen for Angus Addams and for Stan Thomas usually quit after a few weeks, unable to take the pace. Other fishermen—harder drinking, fatter, lazier, stupider fishermen (in Ruth’s father’s opinion)— made easier bosses.

As for Ruth’s father, he was still the handsomest man on Fort Niles Island. He had never remarried after Ruth’s mother left, but Ruth knew he had liaisons. She had some ideas about who his partners were, but he never spoke about them to her, and she preferred not to think about them too much. Her father was not tall, but he had wide shoulders and thin hips. “No fanny at all,” he liked to say. He weighed the same at fortyfive as he had at twentyfive. He was fastidiously neat about his clothing, and he shaved every day. He went to Mrs. Pommeroy once every two weeks for a haircut. Ruth suspected that something may have been going on between her father and Mrs. Pommeroy, but she hated the thought of it so much that she never pursued it.

Ruth’s father’s hair was dark, dark brown, and his eyes were almost green. He had a mustache.

Ruth, at eighteen, thought her father was a fine enough person. She knew he had a reputation as a cheapskate and a lobster hustler, but she also knew that this reputation had grown fertile in the minds of island men who commonly spent the money from a week’s catch on one night in a bar. These were men who saw frugality as arrogant and offensive. These were men who were not her father’s equal, and they knew it and resented it. Ruth also knew that her father’s best friend was a bully and a bigot, but she had always liked Angus Addams, anyway. She did not find him to be a hypocrite, in any case, which put him above many people.

For the most part, Ruth got along with her father. She got along with him best when they weren’t working together or when he wasn’t trying to teach her something, like how to drive a car or mend rope or navigate by a compass. In such situations, there was bound to be yelling. It wasn’t so much the yelling that Ruth minded. What she didn’t like was when her father got quiet on her. He got real quiet, typically, on any subject having to do with Ruth’s mother. She thought he was a coward about it. His quietness sometimes disgusted her.

“You want a beer?” Angus Addams asked Ruth.

“No, thank you.”

“Good,” Angus said. “Makes you fat as all goddamn hell.”

“It hasn’t made you fat, Mr. Addams.”

“That’s because I work.”

“Ruth can work, too,” Stan Thomas said of his daughter. “She’s got an idea to work on a lobster boat this summer.”

“The two of you been saying that for damn near a month now. Summer’s almost over.”

“You want to take her on as a sternman?”

“You take her, Stan.”

“We’d kill each other,” Ruth’s father said. “You take her.”

Angus Addams shook his head. “I’ll tell you the truth,” he said. “I don’t like to fish with anyone if I can help it. Used to be, we fished alone. Better that way. No sharing.”

“I know you hate sharing,” Ruth said.

“I fucking do hate sharing, missy. And I’ll tell you why. In 1936, I only made three hundred and fifty dollars the entire goddamn year, and I fished my balls off. I had close to three hundred dollars in expenses. That left me fifty to live on the whole winter. And I had to take care of my goddamn brother. So, no, I ain’t sharing if I can help it.”

“Come on, Angus. Give Ruth a job. She’s strong,” Stan said. “Come on over here, Ruth. Roll up your sleeves, baby. Show us how strong you are.”

Ruth went over and obediently flexed her right arm.

“She’s got her crusher claw here,” her father said, squeezing her muscle. Then Ruth flexed her left arm, and he squeezed that one, saying, “And she’s got her pincher claw here!”

Angus said, “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

“Is your brother here?” Ruth asked Angus.

“He went over to the Pommeroy house,” Angus said. “He’s all goddamn worried about that goddamn snot-ass kid.”

“He’s worried about Webster?”

“He should just goddamn adopt the little bastard.”

“So the Senator left Cookie with you, did he?” Ruth asked.

Angus growled again and gave the dog a shove with his foot. Cookie woke up and looked around patiently.

“At least the dog’s in loving hands,” Ruth’s father said, grinning. “At least Simon left his dog with someone who’ll take good care of it.”

“Tender loving care,” Ruth added.

“I hate this goddamn dog,” Angus said.

“Really?” Ruth asked, wide-eyed. “Is that so? I didn’t know that. Did you know that, Dad?”

“I never heard anything about that, Ruth.”

“I hate this goddamn dog,” Angus said. “And the fact that I have to feed it corrodes my soul.”

Ruth and her father started laughing.

“I hate this goddamn dog,” Angus said, and his voice rose as he recited his problems with Cookie. “The dog’s got a goddamn ear infection, and I have to buy it some goddamn drops, and I have to hold the dog twice a day while Simon puts the drops in. I have to buy the goddamn drops when I’d rather see the goddamn dog go deaf. It drinks out of the toilet. It throws up every goddamn day, and it has never once in its entire life had a solid stool.”

“Anything else bothering you?” Ruth asked.

“Simon wants me to show the dog some goddamn affection, but that runs contrary to my instinct.”

“Which is?” Ruth asked.

“Which is to stomp on it with heavy boots.”

“You’re terrible,” Ruth’s father said, and bent over laughing. “You’re terrible, Angus.”

Ruth went into the house and got herself a glass of water. The kitchen of the Addams house was immaculate. Angus Addams was a slob, but Senator Simon Addams cared for his twin brother like a wife, and he kept the chrome shining and the icebox full. Ruth knew for a fact that Senator Simon got up at four in the morning every day and made Angus breakfast (biscuits, eggs, a slice of pie) and packed sand- wiches for Angus’s lunch on the lobster boat. The other men on the island liked to tease Angus, saying they wished they had things so good at home, and Angus Addams liked to tell them to shut their fucking mouths and, by the way, they shouldn’t have married such lazy fat goddamn whores in the first place. Ruth looked out the kitchen window to the back yard, where overalls and long underwear swayed, drying. There was a loaf of sweetbread on the counter, so she cut herself a piece and walked back out to the porch, eating it.

“None for me, thanks,” Angus said.

“Sorry. Did you want a piece?”

“No, but I’ll take another beer, Ruth.”

“I’ll get it on my next trip to the kitchen.”

Angus raised his eyebrows at Ruth and whistled. “That’s how educated girls treat their friends, is it?”

“Oh, brother.”

“Is that how Ellis girls treat their friends?”

Ruth did not reply, and her father looked down

Ruth did not reply, and her father looked down at his feet. It became very quiet on the porch. Ruth waited to see whether her father would remind Angus Addams that Ruth was a Thomas girl, not an Ellis girl, but her father said nothing.

Angus set his empty beer bottle on the floor of the porch and said, “I’ll get it my own self, I guess,” and he walked into the house.

Ruth’s father looked up at her. “What’d you do today, sugar?” he asked.

“We can talk about it at dinner.”

“I’m eating dinner here tonight. We can talk about it now.”

So she said, “I saw Mr. Ellis today. You still want to talk about it now?”

Her father said evenly, “I don’t care what you talk about or when you talk about it.”

“Does it make you mad that I saw him?”

That’s when Angus Addams came back out, just as Ruth’s father was saying, “I don’t care who you spend your time with, Ruth.”

“Who the hell is she spending her time with?” Angus asked.

“Lanford Ellis.”

“Dad. I don’t want to talk about it now.”

“Those goddamn bastards again,” Angus said.

“Ruth had a little meeting with him.”

“Dad—”

“We don’t have to keep secrets from our friends, Ruth.”

“Fine,” Ruth said, and she tossed her father the envelope Mr. Ellis had given her. He lifted the flap and peered at the bills inside. He set the envelope on the arm of his chair.

“What the hell is that?” Angus asked. “What is that, a load of cash? Mr. Ellis give you that money, Ruth?”

“Yes. Yes, he did.”

“Well, you fucking give it back to him.”

“I don’t think it’s any of your business, Angus. You want me to give the money back, Dad?”

“I don’t care how these people throw their money around, Ruth,” Stan Thomas said. But he picked up the envelope again, took out the bills, and counted them. There were fifteen bills. Fifteen twenty-dollar bills.

“What’s the goddamn money for?” Angus asked. “What the hell is that goddamn money for, anyhow?”

“Stay out of it, Angus,” Ruth’s father said.

“Mr. Ellis said it was fun money for me.”

“Funny money?” her father asked.

“Fun money.”

“Fun money? Fun money?”

She did not answer.

“This sure is fun so far,” her father said. “Are you having fun, Ruth?”

Again, she did not answer.

“Those Ellis people really know how to have fun.”

“I don’t know what it’s for, but you get your fanny over there and give it back,” Angus said.

The three sat there with the money looming between them.

“And another thing about that money,” Ruth said.

Ruth’s father passed his hand over his face, just once, as though he suddenly realized he was tired.

“Yes?”

“There’s another thing about that money. Mr. Ellis would really like it if I used some of it to go visit Mom. My mother.”

“Jesus Christ!” Angus Addams exploded. “Jesus Christ, you were gone all goddamn year, Ruth! You only just goddamn got back here, and they’re trying to send you away again!”

Ruth’s father said nothing.

“That goddamn Ellis family runs you all over the goddamn place, telling you what to do and where to go and who to see,” Angus continued. “You do every goddamn thing that goddamn family tells you to do. You’re getting to be just as bad as your goddamn mother.”

“Stay out of it, Angus!” Stan Thomas shouted.

“Would that be fine with you, Dad?” Ruth asked, gingerly.

“Jesus Christ, Stan!” Angus sputtered. “Tell your goddamn daughter to stay here, where she goddamn belongs.”

“First of all,” Ruth’s father said to Angus, “shut your goddamn mouth.”

There was no second of all.

“If you don’t want me to see her, I won’t go,” Ruth said. “If you want me to take the money back, I’ll take the money back.”

Ruth’s father fingered the envelope. After a brief silence, he said to his eighteen-year-old daughter, “I don’t care who you spend your time with.”

He tossed the envelope of money back to her.

“What’s the problem with you?” Angus Addams bellowed at his friend. “What’s the problem with all you goddamn people?”

As for Ruth Thomas’s mother, there was certainly a big problem with her.

The people of Fort Niles Island had always had problems with Ruth Thomas’s mother. The biggest problem was her ancestry. She was not like all the people on Fort Niles Island whose families had been in place there forever. She was not like all the people who knew exactly who their ancestors were. Ruth Thomas’s mother was born on Fort Niles, but she wasn’t exactly from there. Ruth Thomas’s mother was a problem because she was the daughter of an orphan and an immigrant.

Nobody knew the orphan’s real name; nobody knew anything at all about the immigrant. Ruth Thomas’s mother, therefore, had a genealogy that was cauterized at both ends—two dead ends of information.

Ruth’s mother had no forefathers, no foremothers, no recorded family traits by which to define herself. While Ruth Thomas could trace back two centuries of her father’s ancestors without leaving the Fort Niles Island cemetery, there was no getting past the orphan and the immigrant who began and completed her mother’s blunt history. Her mother, unaccounted for as such, had always been looked at askance on Fort Niles Island. She’d been produced by two mysteries, and there were no mysteries in anyone else’s history. One should not simply appear on Fort Niles with no family chronicle to account for oneself. It made people uneasy.

Ruth Thomas’s grandmother—her mother’s mother—had been an orphan with the uninspired, hastily invented name of Jane Smith. In 1884, as a tiny baby, Jane Smith was left on the steps of the Bath Naval Orphans’ Hospital. The nurses collected her and bathed her and bestowed upon her that ordinary name, which they decided was as good a name as any. At the time, the Bath Naval Orphans’ Hospital was a relatively new institution. It had been founded just after the Civil War for the benefit of children orphaned by that war; specifically for the children of naval officers killed in battle.

The Bath Naval Orphans’ Hospital was a rigorous and well-organized institution, where cleanliness and exercise and regular bowels were encouraged. It is possible that the baby who came to be known as Jane Smith was the daughter of a sailor, perhaps even a naval officer, but there were no clues whatsoever on the baby to indicate this. There was no note, no telling object, no distinctive clothing. Just a healthy enough baby, swaddled tightly and set quietly on the orphanage steps.

In 1894, when the orphan called Jane Smith turned ten, she was adopted by a certain gentleman by the name of Dr. Jules Ellis. Jules Ellis was a young man, but he had already made a good name for himself. He was the founder of the Ellis Granite Company, of Concord, New Hampshire. Dr. Jules Ellis, it seemed, always took his summer holidays on the Maine islands, where he had several lucrative quarries in operation. He liked Maine. He believed the citizens of Maine to be exceptionally hardy and decent; therefore, when he decided it was time to adopt a child, he sought one from a Maine orphanage. He thought that would vouchsafe him a hearty girl.

His reason for adopting a girl was as follows. Dr. Jules Ellis had a favorite daughter, an indulged nine-year-old named Vera, and Vera insistently asked for a sister. She had several brothers, but she was bored to death with them, and she wanted a girl playmate for companionship over those long, isolated summers on Fort Niles Island. So Dr. Jules Ellis acquired Jane Smith as a sister for his little girl.

“This is your new twin sister,” he told Vera on her tenth birthday.

Ten-year-old Jane was a big, shy girl. On her adoption, she was given the name Jane Smith-Ellis, another invention that she accepted with no more protest than she had shown the first time she was christened. Mr. Jules Ellis had put a great red bow on the girl’s head the day he presented her to his daughter. Photographs were taken on that day; in them, the bow looks absurd on the big girl in the orphanage dress. The bow looks like an insult.

From that time forward, Jane Smith-Ellis accompanied Vera Ellis everywhere. On the third Saturday of every June, the girls traveled to Fort Niles Island, and on the second Saturday of every September, Jane Smith-Ellis accompanied Vera Ellis back to the Ellis mansion in Concord.

There is no reason to imagine that Ruth Thomas’s grandmother was ever considered for a moment to be the actual sister of Miss Vera Ellis.

Although adoption made the girls legal siblings, the thought that they deserved equal respect in the Ellis household would have been farcical. Vera Ellis did not love Jane Smith-Ellis as a sister, but she fully relied on her as a servant. Although Jane Smith-Ellis had the responsibilities of a handmaid, she was, by law, a member of the family, and consequently received no salary for her work.

“Your grandmother,” Ruth’s father had always said, “was a slave to that goddamn family.”

“Your grandmother,” Ruth’s mother had always said, “was fortunate to have been adopted by a family as generous as the Ellises.”

Miss Vera Ellis was not a great beauty, but she had the advantage of wealth, and she passed her days exquisitely dressed. There are photographs of Miss Vera Ellis perfectly outfitted for swimming, riding, skating, reading, and, as she grew older, for dancing, driving, and marrying. These turn-of-the-century costumes were intricate and heavy. It was Ruth Thomas’s grandmother who kept Miss Vera Ellis tight in her buttons, who sorted her kidskin gloves, who tended to the plumes of her hats, who rinsed her stockings and lace. It was Ruth Thomas’s grandmother who selected, arranged, and packed the corsets, slips, shoes, crinolines, parasols, dressing gowns, powders, brooches, capes, lawn dresses, and hand purses necessary for Miss Vera Ellis’s summer sojourn on Fort Niles Island every year. It was Ruth Thomas’s grandmother who packed Miss Vera’s accoutrements for her return to Concord every autumn, without misplacing a single item.

Of course, Miss Vera Ellis was likely to visit Boston for a weekend, or the Hudson Valley during October, or Paris, for the further refinement of her graces. And she needed to be attended to in these circumstances as well. Ruth Thomas’s grandmother, the orphan Jane Smith-Ellis, served well.

Jane Smith-Ellis was no beauty, either. Neither woman was excellent to behold. In photographs, Miss Vera Ellis at least bears a remotely interesting expression on her face—an expression of expensive haughtiness—but Ruth’s grandmother shows not even that. Standing behind the exquisitely bored Miss Vera Ellis, Jane Smith-Ellis shows nothing in her face. Not smarts, not a determined chin, not a sullen mouth. There is no spark in her, but there is no mildness, either. Merely deep and dull fatigue.

In the summer of 1905, Miss Vera Ellis married a boy, from Boston, by the name of Joseph Hanson. The marriage was of little significance, which is to say that Joseph Hanson’s family was good enough, but the Ellises were much better, so Miss Vera retained all power. She suffered no undue inconvenience from the marriage. She never referred to herself as Mrs. Joseph Hanson; she was forever known as Miss Vera Ellis.

The couple lived in the bride’s childhood home, the Ellis mansion in Concord. On the third Saturday of every June, the couple followed the established pattern of moving to Fort Niles Island and, on the second Saturday of every September, moving back to Concord.

What’s more, the marriage between Miss Vera Ellis and Joe Hanson did not in the least change Ruth’s grandmother’s life. Jane Smith-Ellis’s duties were still clear. She was, naturally, of service to Miss Vera on the wedding day itself. (Not as a bridesmaid. Daughters of family friends and cousins filled those roles. Jane was the attendant who dressed Miss Vera, managed the dozens of pearl buttons down the back of the dress, hooked the high wedding boots, handled the French veil.) Ruth’s grandmother also accompanied Miss Vera on her honeymoon to Bermuda. (To collect umbrellas at the beach, to brush sand from Miss Vera’s hair, to arrange for the wool bathing suits to dry without fading.) And Ruth’s grandmother stayed on with Miss Vera after the wedding and honeymoon.

Miss Vera and Joseph Hanson had no children, but Vera had weighty social obligations. She had all those events to attend and appointments to keep and letters to write. Miss Vera used to lie in bed each morning, after picking at the breakfast Ruth’s grandmother had delivered on a tray, and dictate—in an indulgent imitation of a person with a real job dictating to a real employee—the responsibilities of the day.

“See if you can take care of that, Jane,” she would say.

Every day, for years and years.

The routine would surely have continued for many more years but for a particular event. Jane Smith-Ellis became pregnant. In late 1925, the quiet orphan whom the Ellises had adopted from the Bath Naval Orphans’ Hospital was pregnant. Jane was forty-one years old. It was unthinkable. Needless to say, she was unmarried, and no one had considered the possibility that she might take a suitor. Nobody in the Ellis family, of course, had thought of Jane Smith-Ellis for a moment as a woman for intimacy. They’d never expected her to acquire a friend, no less a lover. It was nothing they had ever given thought to. Other servants were constantly getting entangled in all manner of idiotic situations, but Jane was too practical and too necessary to get in trouble. Miss Vera could not spare Jane long enough for Jane to find trouble. And why would Jane look for trouble in the first place?

The Ellis family, indeed, had questions about the pregnancy. They had many questions. And demands. How had this come to pass? Who was responsible for this disaster? But Ruth Thomas’s grandmother, obedient though she generally was, told them nothing except one detail.

“He is Italian,” she said.

Italian? Italian? Outrageous! What were they to surmise? Obviously, the man responsible was one of the hundreds of Italian immigrant workers in the Ellis Granite Company’s quarries on Fort Niles. This was incomprehensible to the Ellis family. How had Jane Smith-Ellis found her way to the quarries? Even more bewildering, how had a worker found his way to her? Had Ruth’s grandmother visited the peanut houses, where the Italians lived, in the middle of the night? Or—horrors!—had an Italian worker visited the Ellis House? Unthinkable. Had there been other encounters? Perhaps years of encounters? Had there been other lovers? Was this a lapse, or had Jane been living a perverse double life? Was it a rape? A whim? A love affair?

The Italian quarry workers spoke no English. They were constantly being replaced, and, even to their immediate supervisors, they were nameless. As far as the quarry foremen were concerned, the Italians may as well have had interchangeable heads. Nobody thought of them as individuals. They were Catholic. They had no social commerce with the local island population, no less with anyone connected to the Ellis family. The Italians were largely ignored. They were noticed, really, only when they came under attack. The newspaper of Fort Niles Island, which folded soon after the granite industry left, had run occasional editorials fulminating against the Italians.

From The Fort Niles Bugle in February 1905: “These Garibaldians constitute the poorest, the most vile, creatures of Europe. Their children and wives are crippled and bent by the depravities of the Italian men.”

“These Neapolitans,” reads a later editorial, “give shocks to our children, who must pass them as they chatter and bark frightfully on our roads.”

It was unthinkable that an Italian, a Garibaldian, a Neapolitan, could have gained access to the Ellis household. Still, when interrogated by the Ellis family about the father of her child, Ruth Thomas’s grandmother would reply only, “He is Italian.”

There was some talk of action. Dr. Jules Ellis wanted Jane to be immediately dismissed, but his wife reminded him that it would be difficult and a trifle rude to dismiss a woman who was, after all, not an employee but a legal member of the family.

“Disown her, then!” thundered Vera Ellis’s brothers, but Vera would not hear of it. Jane had lapsed, and Vera felt betrayed, but, still, Jane was indispensable. No, there was no way around it: Jane must stay with the family because Vera Ellis could not live without her. Even Vera’s brothers had to admit this was a good point. Vera, after all, was impossible, and without the constant tending of Jane, she would have been a murderous little harpy. So, yes, Jane should stay.

What Vera did demand, instead of punishment for Jane, was a measure of punishment for the Italian community on Fort Niles. She was probably unfamiliar with the expression “lynch mob,” but that was not far from what she had in mind. She asked her father whether it would be too much trouble to round up some Italians and have them beaten, or have a peanut house or two burned down, don’t you know. But Dr. Jules Ellis wouldn’t hear of it. Dr. Ellis was far too shrewd a businessman to interrupt work at the quarry or injure his good laborers, so it was decided to hush up the entire matter. It would be handled as discreetly as possible.

Jane Smith-Ellis remained with the Ellis family during her pregnancy, performing her chores for Miss Vera. Her baby was born on the island in June of 1926, on the very night the Ellis family arrived on Fort Niles for the summer. No one had considered altering the schedule to accommodate the hugely pregnant Jane. Jane shouldn’t have been anywhere near a boat in her condition, but Vera had her travel out there, nine months pregnant. The baby was practically delivered on the Fort Niles dock. And the little girl was named Mary. She was the illegitimate daughter of an orphan and an immigrant, and she was Ruth’s mother.

Miss Vera gave Ruth’s grandmother one week’s respite from her duties after the difficult delivery of Mary. At the end of the week, Vera summoned Jane and said, almost tearfully, “I need you, darling. The baby is lovely, but I need you to help me. I simply can’t do without you. You’ll have to tend to me now.”

Thus Jane Smith-Ellis began her schedule of staying up all night to care for her baby and working all day for Miss Vera—sewing, dressing, plaiting hair, drawing baths, buttoning and unbuttoning gown after gown. The servants of Ellis House tried to look after the baby during the day, but they had their own chores to attend to. Ruth’s mother, although legally and rightfully an Ellis, spent her infancy in the servants’ quarters, pantries, and root cellars, passed from hand to hand, quietly, as though she were contraband. It was just as bad in the winter, when the family returned to Concord. Vera gave Jane no relief.

In early July of 1927, when Mary was just over a year old, Miss Vera Ellis became ill with the measles and developed a high fever. A doctor, who was one of the family’s summer guests on Fort Niles, treated Vera with morphine, which eased her discomfort and caused her to sleep for long hours each day. These hours provided Jane Smith-Ellis with the first period of rest she had since coming to Ellis House as a child. This was her first taste of leisure, her first reprieve from duty.

And so, one afternoon, while Miss Vera and baby Mary were both sleeping, Ruth’s grandmother strolled down the steep cliff path on the eastern shore of the island. Was this her first outing? The first free hours of her life? Probably. She carried her knitting with her, in a black bag. It was a lovely clear day, and the ocean was calm. Down at the shore, Jane Smith-Ellis climbed up on a large rock jutting into the sea, and there she perched, quietly knitting. The waves rose and fell evenly and mildly far below her. Gulls circled. She was alone. She continued to knit. The sun shone.

Back at Ellis House, after several hours, Miss Vera awoke and rang her bell. She was thirsty. A housemaid came to her room with a tumbler of water, but Miss Vera would not have it.

“I want Jane,” she said. “You are a darling, but I want my sister Jane. Will you summon her? Wherever could she be?”

The housemaid passed the request to the butler. The butler sent for a young assistant gardener and told him to fetch Jane Smith-Ellis. The young gardener walked along the cliffs until he saw Jane, sitting below on her rock, knitting.

“Miss Jane!” he shouted down, and waved.

She looked up and waved back.

“Miss Jane!” he shouted. “Miss Vera wants you!”

She nodded and smiled. And then, as the young gardener later testified, a great and silent wave rose from the sea and completely covered the enormous rock on which Jane Smith-Ellis was perched. When the gigantic wave receded, she was gone. The tide resumed its easy motion, and there was no sign of Jane. The gardener called for the other servants, who rushed down the cliff path to search for her, but they found not so much as a shoe. She was gone. She had simply been removed by the sea.

“Nonsense,” Miss Vera Ellis declared when she was told that Jane had vanished. “Of course she has not vanished. Go and find her. Now. Find her.”

The servants searched and the citizens of Fort Niles Island searched, but nobody found Jane Smith-Ellis. For days, the search parties scoured the shores, but no trace was discovered.

“Find her,” Miss Vera continued to command. “I need her. No one else can help me.”

And so she continued for weeks, until her father, Dr. Jules Ellis, came to her room with all four of her brothers and carefully explained the circumstances.

“I’m very sorry, my dear,” Dr. Ellis said to his only natural-born daughter. “I’m sorry indeed, but Jane is gone. It is pointless for anyone to search further.”

Miss Vera set her face in a stubborn scowl. “At the very least, can’t someone find her body? Can’t someone dredge for it?”

Miss Vera’s youngest brother scoffed. “One cannot dredge the sea, Vera, as though it were a fishpond.”

“We shall postpone the funeral service as long as we can,” Dr. Ellis assured his daughter. “Perhaps Jane’s body will emerge in time. But you must stop telling the servants to find Jane. It’s a waste of their time, and the household must be tended.”

“You see,” explained Vera’s eldest brother, Lanford, “they will not find her. Nobody will ever find Jane.”

The Ellis family held off on a funeral service for Jane Smith-Ellis until the first week of September. Then, because they had to return to Concord within a few days, they could delay the event no further. There was no talk of waiting until they returned to Concord, where they could put a marker on the family plot; there was no place for Jane there. Fort Niles seemed to be as good a place as any for Jane’s funeral.

With no corpse to bury, Ruth’s grandmother’s funeral was more a memorial service than a funeral. Such a service is not uncommon on an island, where drowning victims often are not recovered. A stone was placed in the Fort Niles cemetery, carved from Fort Niles black granite. It read:

Jane Smith-Ellis

? 1884–July 10, 1927

SORELY MISSED

Miss Vera resignedly attended the service. She did not yet accept that Jane had abandoned her. She was, in fact, rather angry. At the end of the service, Miss Vera asked some of the servants to bring Jane’s baby to her. Mary was just over a year old. She would grow up to be Ruth Thomas’s mother, but at this time she was a tiny little girl. Miss Vera took Mary Smith-Ellis in her arms and rocked her. She smiled down at the child and said, “Well, little Mary. We shall now turn our attention to you.”

5

The popularity of the lobster extends far beyond the limits of our island, and he travels about all parts of the known world, like an imprisoned spirit soldered up in an airtight box.

—Crab, Shrimp, and Lobster Lore

W. B. Lord

1867

CAL COOLEY made the arrangements for Ruth Thomas to visit her mother in Concord. He made the arrangements and then called Ruth and told her to be on her porch, with her bags packed, at six o’clock the next morning. She agreed, but just before six o’clock that morning, she changed her mind. She had a short moment of panic, and she bolted. She didn’t go far. She left her bags on the porch of her father’s house and ran next door to Mrs. Pommeroy.

Ruth guessed that Mrs. Pommeroy would be up and guessed that she might get breakfast out of the visit. Indeed, Mrs. Pommeroy was up.

But she wasn’t alone and she wasn’t making breakfast. She was painting her kitchen. Her two older sisters, Kitty and Gloria, were helping her. All three were wearing black garbage bags to protect their clothes, their heads and arms pushed through the plastic. It was immediately obvious to Ruth that the three women had been up all night. When Ruth stepped into the house, the women lunged toward her at the same time, crushing her between them and leaving paint marks all over her.

“Ruth!” they shouted. “Ruthie!”

“It’s six o’clock in the morning!” Ruth said. “Look at you!”

“Painting!” Kitty shouted. “We’re painting!”

Kitty swiped at Ruth with a paintbrush, streaking more paint across Ruth’s shirt, then dropped to her knees, laughing. Kitty was drunk. Kitty was, in fact, a drunk. (“Her grandmother was the same kind of person,” Senator Simon had once told Ruth. “Always lifting the gas caps off old Model Ts and sniffing the fumes. Staggered around this island in a daze her whole life.”) Gloria helped her sister to stand. Kitty put her hand over her mouth, delicately, to stop laughing, then put her hands to her head, in a ladylike motion, to fix her hair.

All three Pommeroy sisters had magnificent hair, which they wore piled on their heads in the same fashion that had made Mrs. Pommeroy such a famous beauty. Mrs. Pommeroy’s hair grew more silvery every year. It had silvered to the point that, when she turned her head in the sunlight, she gleamed like a swimming trout. Kitty and Gloria had the same gorgeous hair, but they weren’t as attractive as Mrs. Pommeroy. Gloria had a heavy, unhappy face, and Kitty had a damaged face; there was a burn scar on one cheek, thick as a callus, from an explosion at a canning factory many years earlier.

Gloria, the oldest, had never married. Kitty, the next one, was off-and-on married to Ruth’s father’s brother, Ruth’s reckless Uncle Len Thomas. Kitty and Len had no children. Mrs. Pommeroy was the only one of the Pommeroy sisters to have children, that huge batch of sons: Webster and Conway and Fagan and so on and so on. By now, 1976, the boys were grown. Four had left the island, having found lives elsewhere on the planet, but Webster, Timothy, and Robin were still at home. They lived in their old bedrooms in the huge house next to Ruth and her father. Webster, of course, had no job. But Timothy and Robin worked on boats, as sternmen. The Pommeroy boys only found temporary work, on other people’s boats. They had no boats of their own, no real means of livelihood. All signs pointed to Timothy and Robin being hired hands forever. That morning, both were already out fishing; they’d been gone since before daylight.

“What are you doing today, Ruthie?” Gloria asked. “What are you doing up so early?”

“Hiding from somebody.”

“Stay, Ruthie!” said Mrs. Pommeroy. “You can stay and watch us!”

“Watch out for you is more like it,” Ruth said, pointing to the paint on her shirt. Kitty dropped to her knees again at this joke, laughing and laughing. Kitty always took jokes hard, as if she’d been kicked by them. Gloria waited for Kitty to stop laughing and again helped her to stand. Kitty sighed and touched her hair.

Every object in Mrs. Pommeroy’s kitchen was piled on the kitchen table or hidden beneath sheets. The kitchen chairs were in the living room, tossed on the sofa, out of the way. Ruth got a chair and sat in the middle of the kitchen while the three Pommeroy sisters resumed painting. Mrs. Pommeroy was painting windowsills with a small brush. Gloria was painting a wall with a roller. Kitty was scraping old paint off another wall in absurd, drunken lunges.

“When did you decide to paint your kitchen?” Ruth asked.

“Last night,” Mrs. Pommeroy said.

“Isn’t this a disgusting color, Ruthie?” Kitty asked.

“It’s pretty awful.”

Mrs. Pommeroy stepped back from her windowsill and looked at her work. “It is awful,” she admitted, not unhappily.

“Is that buoy paint?” Ruth guessed. “Are you painting your kitchen with buoy paint?”

“I’m afraid it is buoy paint, honey. Do you recognize the color?”

“I can’t believe it,” Ruth said, because she did recognize the color. Astonishingly, Mrs. Pommeroy was painting her kitchen the exact shade that her dead husband had used to paint his trap buoys—a powerful lime green that chewed at the eyes. Lobstermen always use garish colors on their pot buoys to help them spot the traps against the flat blue of the sea, in any kind of weather. It was thick industrial paint, wholly unsuited to the job at hand.

“Are you afraid of losing your kitchen in the fog?” Ruth asked.

Kitty hit her knees laughing. Gloria frowned and said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Kitty. Get a-hold of yourself.” She pulled Kitty up.

Kitty touched her hair and said, “If I had to live in a kitchen this color, I’d vomit all over the place.”

“Are you allowed to use buoy paint indoors?” Ruth asked. “Aren’t you supposed to use indoor paint for indoor painting? Is it going to give you cancer or something?”

“I don’t know,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “I found all these cans of paint in the toolshed last night, and I thought to myself, better not to waste it! And it reminds me of my husband. When Kitty and Gloria came over for dinner, we started giggling, and the next thing I knew, we were painting the kitchen. What do you think?”

“Honestly?” Ruth asked.

“Never mind,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “I like it.”

“If I had to live in this kitchen, I’d vomit so much, my head would fall off,” Kitty announced.

“Watch it, Kitty,” Gloria said. “You might have to live in this kitchen soon enough.”

“I will fucking not!”

“Kitty is welcome to stay in this house anytime,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “You know that, Kitty. You know that, too, Gloria.”

“You’re so mean, Gloria,” said Kitty. “You’re so fucking mean.”

Gloria kept painting her wall, her mouth set, her roller layering clean, even strokes of color.

Ruth asked, “Is Uncle Len throwing you out of your house again, Kitty?”

“Yes,” Gloria said, quietly.

“No!” Kitty said. “No, he’s not throwing me out of the house, Gloria! You’re so fucking mean, Gloria!”

“He says he’ll throw her out of the house if she doesn’t stop drinking,” Gloria said, in the same quiet tone.

“So why doesn’t he stop fucking drinking?” Kitty demanded. “Len tells me I have to stop drinking, but nobody drinks as much as he does.”

“Kitty’s welcome to move in with me,” Mrs. Pommeroy said.

“Why does he still get to be fucking drinking every fucking day?” Kitty shouted.

“Well,” Ruth said, “because he’s a nasty old alcoholic.”

“He’s a prick,” Gloria said.

“He’s got the biggest prick on this island; that’s for sure,” Kitty said.

Gloria kept painting, but Mrs. Pommeroy laughed. From upstairs came the sound of a baby crying.

“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Pommeroy said.

“Now you’ve done it,” Gloria said. “Now you’ve woken up the goddamn baby, Kitty.”

“It wasn’t me!” Kitty shouted, and the baby’s cry became a wail.

“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Pommeroy repeated.

“God, that’s a loud baby,” Ruth said, and Gloria said, “No shit, Ruth.”

“I guess Opal’s home, then?”

“She came home a few days ago, Ruth. I guess she and Robin made up, so that’s good. They’re a family now, and they should be together. I think they’re both pretty mature. They’re both growing up real nice.”

“Truth is,” Gloria said, “her own family got sick of her and sent her back here.”

They heard footsteps upstairs and the cries diminished. Soon after, Opal came down, carrying the baby.

“You’re always so loud, Kitty,” Opal whined. “You always wake up my Eddie.”

Opal was Robin Pommeroy’s wife, a fact that was still a source of wonder to Ruth: fat, dopy, seventeen-year-old Robin Pommeroy had a wife. Opal was from Rockland, and she was seventeen, too. Her father owned a gas station there. Robin had met her on his trips to town when he was filling gas cans for his truck on the island. She was pretty enough (“A cute dirty little slut,” Angus Addams pronounced), with ash-blond hair worn in sloppy pigtails. This morning, she was wearing a housecoat and dingy slippers, and she shuffled her feet like an old woman. She was fatter than Ruth remembered, but Ruth hadn’t seen her since the previous summer. The baby was in a heavy diaper and was wearing one sock. He took his fingers out of his mouth and grabbed at the air.

“Oh, my God!” Ruth exclaimed. “He’s huge!”

“Hey, Ruth,” Opal said shyly.

“Hey, Opal. Your baby’s huge!”

“I didn’t know you were back from school, Ruth.”

“I’ve been back almost a month.”

“You happy to be back?”

“Sure I am.”

“Coming back to Fort Niles is like falling off a horse,” Kitty Pommeroy said. “You never forget how.”

Ruth ignored that. “Your baby’s enormous, Opal! Hey, there, Eddie!

Hey, Eddie boy!”

“That’s right!” Kitty said. “He’s our great big baby boy! Aren’t you, Eddie? Aren’t you our great big boy?”

Opal stood Eddie down on the floor between her legs and gave him her two index fingers to hold. He tried to lock his knees and swayed like a drunk. His belly stuck out comically over his diaper, and his thighs were taut and plump. His arms seemed to be assembled in segments, and he had several chins. His chest was slick with drool.

“Oh, he’s so big!” Mrs. Pommeroy smiled widely. She knelt in front of Eddie and pinched his cheeks. “Who’s my great big boy? How big are you? How big is Eddie?”

Eddie, delighted, shouted, “Gah!”

“Oh, he’s big, all right,” Opal said, pleased. “I can’t hardly lift him anymore. Even Robin says Eddie’s getting too heavy to carry around. Robin says Eddie’d better learn to walk pretty soon, I guess.”

“Look who’s gonna be a great big fisherman!” Kitty said.

“I don’t think I ever saw such a big, healthy boy,” Gloria said. “Look at those legs. That boy’s going to be a football player for sure. Isn’t that the biggest baby you ever saw, Ruth?”

“That’s the biggest baby I ever saw,” Ruth agreed.

Opal blushed. “All the babies in my family are big. That’s what my mom says. And Robin was a big baby, too. Isn’t that right, Mrs. Pommeroy?”

“Oh, yes, Robin was a great big baby boy. But not as big as great big Mr. Eddie!” Mrs. Pommeroy tickled Eddie’s belly.

“Gah!” he shouted.

Opal said, “I can’t hardly feed him enough. You should see him at mealtimes. He eats more than I do! Yesterday he had five strips of bacon!”

“Oh, my God!” Ruth said. Bacon! She couldn’t stop staring at the kid. He didn’t look like any baby she had ever seen. He looked like a fat bald man, shrunken down to two feet high.

“He’s got a great big appetite, that’s why. Don’t you? Don’t you, you great big boy?” Gloria picked up Eddie with a grunt and covered his cheek with kisses. “Don’t you, chubby cheeks? You have a great big healthy appetite. Because you’re our little lumberjack, aren’t you? You’re our little football player, aren’t you? You’re the biggest little boy in the whole world.”

The baby squealed and kicked Gloria heftily. Opal reached out. “I’ll take him, Gloria. He’s got a ca-ca diaper.” She took Eddie and said, “I’ll go upstairs and clean him up. I’ll see you all later. See you later, Ruth.”

“See you later, Opal,” Ruth said.

“Bye-bye, big boy!” Kitty called, and waved bye-bye at Eddie.

“Bye-bye, you great big handsome boy!” Gloria called.

The Pommeroy sisters watched Opal head up the stairs, and they grinned and waved at Eddie until they lost sight of him. Then they heard Opal’s footsteps in the bedroom above and all stopped grinning at the same moment.

Gloria brushed off her hands, turned to her sisters, and said, sternly, “That baby’s too big.”

“She feeds him too much,” Mrs. Pommeroy said, frowning.

“Not good for his heart,” Kitty pronounced.

The women returned to their painting.

Kitty immediately started talking again about her husband, Len Thomas.

“Oh, yeah, he hits me, sure,” she said to Ruth. “But I’ll tell you something. He can’t give anything to me any worse than I can give anything back to him.”

“What?” Ruth said. “What’s she trying to say, Gloria?”

“Kitty’s trying to say Len can’t hit her any harder than she can hit him.”

“That’s right,” Mrs. Pommeroy said with pride. “Kitty has a real good swing on her.”

“That’s right,” Kitty said. “I’ll put his head right through the fucking door if I feel like it.”

“And he’ll do the same to you, Kitty,” Ruth said. “Nice arrangement.”

“Nice marriage,” Gloria said.

“That’s right,” Kitty said, satisfied. “It is a nice marriage. Not like you’d know anything about that, Gloria. And nobody’s kicking anybody out of anybody’s house.”

“We’ll see,” Gloria said, real low.

Mrs. Pommeroy had been a romp as a young girl, but she’d quit drinking when Mr. Pommeroy drowned. Gloria had never been a romp. Kitty had been a romp as a young girl, too, but she’d kept at it. She was a lifetime boozer, a grunt, a dozzler. Kitty Pommeroy was the example of what Mrs. Pommeroy might have become if she had stayed on the bottle. Kitty had lived off-island for a while, back when she was younger. She’d worked in a herring-canning factory for years and years and saved up all her money to buy a fast convertible. And she’d had sex with dozens of men or so Gloria reported. Kitty had had abortions, Gloria said, which was why Kitty couldn’t have babies now. After the explosion in the canning factory, Kitty Pommeroy returned to Fort Niles. She took up with Len Thomas, another prime drunk, and the two of them had been beating each other up ever since. Ruth couldn’t stand her Uncle Len.

“I have an idea, Kitty,” Ruth said.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Why don’t you kill Uncle Len in his sleep some night?”

Gloria laughed, and Ruth continued, “Why don’t you club him to death, Kitty? I mean, before he does it to you. Get a jump on him.”

“Ruth!” Mrs. Pommeroy exclaimed, but she was also laughing.

“Why not, Kitty? Why not bludgeon him?”

“Shut up, Ruth. You don’t know anything.”

Kitty was sitting on the chair Ruth had brought in, lighting a cigarette, and Ruth went over and sat on her lap.

“Get off my goddamn lap, Ruth. You got a bony ass, just like your old man.”

“How do you know my old man has a bony ass?”

“Because I fucked him, stupid,” Kitty said.

Ruth laughed as if this was a big joke, but she had a chilling sense that it may have been true. She laughed to cover her discomfort, and she jumped off Kitty’s lap.

“Ruth Thomas,” Kitty said, “you don’t know a thing about this island anymore. You don’t live here anymore, so you have no right to say anything. You aren’t even from here.”

“Kitty!” Mrs. Pommeroy exclaimed. “That’s nasty!”

“Excuse me, Kitty, but I do so live here.”

“For a few months a year, Ruth. You live here like a tourist, Ruth.”

“I hardly think that’s my fault, Kitty.”

“That’s right,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “It isn’t Ruth’s fault.”

“You think nothing is ever Ruth’s fault.”

“I think I wandered into the wrong house,” Ruth said. “I think I wandered into the house of hate today.”

“No, Ruth,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “Don’t get upset. Kitty’s just teasing you.”

“I’m not upset,” said Ruth, who was getting upset. “I think it’s funny; that’s all.”

“I am not teasing anyone. You don’t know anything about this place anymore. You haven’t practically been here in four goddamn years. A lot changes around a place in four years, Ruth.”

“Yeah, especially a place like this,” Ruth said. “Big changes, everywhere I look.”

“Ruth didn’t want to go away,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “Mr. Ellis sent her away to school. She didn’t have any choice, Kitty.”

“Exactly,” Ruth said. “I was banished.”

“That’s right,” Mrs. Pommeroy said, and went over to nudge Ruth. “She was banished! They took her away from us.”

“I wish a rich millionaire would banish me to some millionaire’s private school,” Kitty muttered.

“No, you don’t, Kitty. Trust me.”

“I wish a millionaire would have banished me to private school,”

Gloria said, in a voice a little stronger than her sister had used.

“OK, Gloria,” Ruth said. “You might wish that. But Kitty doesn’t wish that.”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Kitty barked. “What? I’m too stupid for school?”

“You would have been bored to death at that school. Gloria might have liked it, but you’d have hated it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Gloria asked. “That I wouldn’t have been bored? Why not, Ruth? Because I’m boring? Are you calling me boring, Ruth?”

“Help,” Ruth said.

Kitty was still muttering that she was plenty goddamn smart for any goddamn school, and Gloria was staring Ruth down.

“Help me, Mrs. Pommeroy,” Ruth said, and Mrs. Pommeroy said, helpfully, “Ruth isn’t calling anyone dumb. She’s just saying that Gloria is a little bit smarter than Kitty.”

“Good,” said Gloria. “That’s right.”

“Oh, my God, save me,” Ruth said, and she ducked under the kitchen table as Kitty came at her from across the room. Kitty bent down and started whacking at Ruth’s head.

“Ow,” Ruth said, but she was laughing. It was ridiculous. She’d only come over for breakfast! Mrs. Pommeroy and Gloria were laughing, too.

“I’m not fucking stupid, Ruth!” Kitty slapped her again.

“Ow.”

“You’re the stupid one, Ruth, and you aren’t even from here anymore.”

“Ow.”

“Quit your bitching,” Kitty said. “You can’t take a slap to the head? I got five concussions in my life.” Kitty let up on Ruth for a moment to tick off her concussions on her fingers. “I fell out of a highchair. I fell off a bicycle. I fell in a quarry, and I got two concussions from Len. And I got blown up in a factory explosion. And I got eczema. So don’t tellme you can’t take a goddamn hit, girl!” She smacked Ruth again. Comically, now. Affectionately.

“Ow,” Ruth repeated. “I’m a victim. Ow.”

Gloria Pommeroy and Mrs. Pommeroy kept laughing. Kitty finally quit and said, “Someone at the door.”

Mrs. Pommeroy went to answer the door. “It’s Mr. Cooley,” she said. “Good morning, Mr. Cooley.”

A low drawl came through the room: “Ladies . . .”

Ruth stayed under the table, her head cradled in her arms.

“It’s Cal Cooley, everyone!” Mrs. Pommeroy called.

“I’m looking for Ruth Thomas,” he said.

Kitty Pommeroy lifted a corner of the sheet from the table and shouted, “Tada!” Ruth waggled her fingers at Cal in a childish wave.

“There’s the young woman I’m looking for,” he said. “Hiding from me, as ever.”

Ruth crawled out and stood up.

“Hello, Cal. You found me.” She wasn’t upset to see him; she felt relaxed. It was as if Kitty had knocked her head clear.

“You certainly seem busy, Miss Ruth.”

“I actually am a little busy, Cal.”

“It seems you forgot about our appointment. You were supposed to be waiting for me at your house. Maybe you were too busy to keep your appointment?”

“I was delayed,” Ruth said. “I was helping my friend paint her kitchen.”

Cal Cooley took a long look around the room, noting the dreadful green buoy paint, the sloppy sisters wrapped in garbage bags, the sheet hastily tossed on the kitchen table, the paint on Ruth’s shirt.

“Old Cal Cooley hates to take you away from your work,” Cal Cooley drawled.

Ruth grinned. “I hate to be taken away by old Cal Cooley.”

“You’re up early, buster,” Kitty Pommeroy said, and punched Cal in the arm.

“Cal,” Ruth said, “I believe you know Mrs. Kitty Pommeroy? I believe you two have met? Am I correct?”

The sisters laughed. Before Kitty married Len Thomas—and for several years after—she and Cal Cooley had been lovers. This was a piece of information that Cal Cooley hilariously liked to imagine was top secret, but every last person on the island knew it. And everyone knew they were still occasional lovers, despite Kitty’s marriage. Everyone but Len Thomas, of course. People got a big laugh out of that.

“Nice to see you, Kitty,” Cal said flatly.

Kitty fell to her knees laughing. Gloria helped Kitty up. Kitty touched her mouth and then her hair.

“I hate to take you away from your hen party, Ruth,” Cal said, and Kitty cackled fiercely. He winced.

“I have to go now,” Ruth said.

“Ruth!” Mrs. Pommeroy exclaimed.

“I’m being banished again.”

“She’s a victim!” Kitty shouted. “You watch yourself with that one, Ruth. He’s a rooster, and he’ll always be a rooster. Keep your legs crossed.” Even Gloria laughed at this, but Mrs. Pommeroy did not. She looked at Ruth Thomas—concerned.

Ruth hugged all three sisters. When she got to Mrs. Pommeroy, she gave her a long hug and whispered into her ear, “They’re making me visit my mother.”

Mrs. Pommeroy sighed. Held Ruth close. Whispered in her ear, “Bring her back here with you, Ruth. Bring her back here, where she belongs.”

Cal Cooley often liked to affect a tired voice around Ruth Thomas. He liked to pretend that she made him weary. He often sighed, shook his head, as though Ruth could not begin to appreciate the suffering she caused him. And so, as they walked to his truck from Mrs. Pommeroy’s house, he sighed and shook his head and said, as though defeated by exhaustion, “Why must you always hide from me, Ruth?”

“I wasn’t hiding from you, Cal.”

“No?”

“I was just evading you. Hiding from you is futile.”

“You always blame me, Ruth,” Cal Cooley lamented. “Stop smiling, Ruth. I’m serious. You always have blamed me.”

He opened the door of the truck and paused. “You don’t have any luggage?” he asked.

She shook her head and got into the truck.

Cal said, with dramatic fatigue, “If you bring no clothes to Miss Vera’s house, Miss Vera will have to buy you new clothes.”

When Ruth did not answer, he said, “You know that, don’t you? If this is a protest, it will backfire in your pretty face. You inevitably make things harder for yourself than you have to.”

“Cal,” Ruth whispered conspiratorially, and leaned toward him in the cab of the truck. “I don’t like to bring luggage when I go to Concord. I don’t like anyone at the Ellis mansion to think I’ll be staying.”

“Is that your trick?”

“That’s my trick.”

They drove toward the wharf, where Cal parked the truck. He said to Ruth, “You look very beautiful today.”

Now it was Ruth who sighed dramatically.

“You eat and eat,” Cal continued, “and you never get heavier. That’s marvelous. I always wonder when your big appetite’s going to catch up to you and you’ll balloon on us. I think it’s your destiny.”

She sighed again. “You make me so goddamn tired, Cal.”

“Well, you make me goddamn tired, too, sweetheart.”

They got out of the truck, and Ruth looked down the wharf and across the cove, but the Ellises’ boat, the Stonecutter, was not there. This was a surprise. She knew the routine. Cal Cooley had been ferrying Ruth around for years, to school, to her mother. They always left Fort Niles in the Stonecutter, courtesy of Mr. Lanford Ellis. But this morning Ruth saw only the old lobster boats, bobbing. And a strange sight: there was the New Hope. The mission boat sat long and clean on the water, her engine idling.

“What’s the New Hope doing here?”

“Pastor Wishnell is giving us a ride to Rockland,” Cal Cooley said.

“Why?”

“Mr. Ellis doesn’t want the Stonecutter used for short trips anymore.

And he and Pastor Wishnell are good friends. It’s a favor.”

Ruth had never been on the New Hope, though she’d seen it for years, cruising. It was the finest boat in the area, as fine as Lanford Ellis’s yacht. The boat was Pastor Toby Wishnell’s pride. He may have forsworn the great fishing legacy of the Wishnell family in the name of God, but he had kept his eye for a beautiful boat. He’d restored the New Hope to a forty-foot glass-and-brass enchantress, and even the men on Fort Niles Island, all of whom loathed Toby Wishnell, had to admit that the New Hope was a looker. Although they certainly hated to see her show up in their harbor.

They didn’t see her much, though. Pastor Toby Wishnell was rarely around. He sailed the coast from Casco to Nova Scotia, ministering to every island along the way. He was nearly always at sea. And, though he was based directly across the channel on Courne Haven Island, he did not often visit Fort Niles. He came for funerals and for weddings, of course. He came for the occasional baptism, although most Fort Niles citizens skipped that particular procedure to avoid asking for him. He came to Fort Niles only when he was invited, and that was seldom.

So Ruth was indeed surprised to see his boat.

On that morning, a young man was standing at the end of the Fort Niles dock, waiting for them. Cal Cooley and Ruth Thomas walked toward him, and Cal shook the boy’s hand. “Good morning, Owney.”

The young man did not answer but climbed down the wharf ladder to a neat little white rowboat. Cal Cooley and Ruth Thomas climbed down after him, and the rowboat rocked delicately under their weight. The young man untied his line, seated himself in the stern, and rowed out to the New Hope. He was big—maybe twenty years old, with a large, squarish head. He had a thick square body, with hips as wide as his shoulders. He wore oilskins, like a lobsterman, and had on fisherman’s tall rubber boots. Though he was dressed like a lobsterman, his oilskins were clean and his boots did not smell of bait. His hands on the oars were square and thick like a fisherman’s hands, yet they were clean. He had no cuts or knobs or scars. He was in a fisherman’s costume, and he had a fisherman’s body, but he was obviously not a fisherman. When he pulled the oars, Ruth saw his huge forearms, which bulged like turkey legs and were covered with blond hairs scattered as light as ash. He had a homemade crew cut and yellow hair, a color never seen on Fort Niles Island. Swedish hair. Light blue eyes.

“What’s your name again?” Ruth asked the boy. “Owen?”

“Owney,” Cal Cooley answered. “His name is Owney Wishnell. He’s the pastor’s nephew.”

“Owney?” Ruth said. “Owney, is it? Really? Hello there, Owney.”

Owney looked at Ruth but did not greet her. He rowed quietly all the way out to the New Hope. They climbed a ladder, and Owney hoisted the rowboat up behind him and stowed it on deck. This was the cleanest boat Ruth had ever seen. She and Cal Cooley walked back to the cabin, and there was Pastor Toby Wishnell, eating a sandwich.

“Owney,” Pastor Wishnell said, “let’s get moving.”

Owney hauled up the anchor and set the boat in motion. He sailed them out of the harbor, and they all watched him, although he did not seem aware of them. He sailed out of the shallows around Fort Niles and passed buoys that rocked on the waves with warning bells.

He passed close to Ruth’s father’s lobster boat. It was early in the morning still, but Stan Thomas had been out for three hours. Ruth, leaning over the rail, saw her father hook a trap buoy with his long wooden gaff. She saw Robin Pommeroy in the stern, cleaning out a trap, tossing short lobsters and crabs back into the sea with a flick of his wrist. Fog circled them like a spook. Ruth did not call out. Robin Pommeroy stopped his work for a moment and looked up at the New Hope. It clearly gave him a shock to see Ruth. He stood for a moment, with his mouth hanging open, staring up at her. Ruth’s father did not look up at all. He was not interested in seeing the New Hope with his daughter aboard.

Farther out, they passed Angus Addams, fishing by himself. He did not look up, either. He kept his head down, pushing rotting herring into bait bags, furtively, as if he were stuffing loot into a sack during a bank robbery.

When Owney Wishnell was fully on track and heading on the open sea toward Rockland, Pastor Toby Wishnell finally addressed Cal Cooley and Ruth Thomas. He regarded Ruth silently. He said to Cal, “You were late.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I said six o’clock.”

“Ruth wasn’t ready at six o’clock.”

“We were to leave at six in order to be in Rockland by early afternoon, Mr. Cooley. I explained that to you, didn’t I?”

“It was the young lady’s fault.”

Ruth listened to the conversation with some pleasure. Cal Cooley was usually such an arrogant prick; it was engaging to see him defer to the minister. She’d never seen Cal defer to anyone. She wondered whether Toby Wishnell was really going to chew Cal a new asshole. She would very much like to watch that.

But Toby Wishnell was finished with Cal. He turned to speak to his nephew, and Cal Cooley glanced at Ruth. She raised an eyebrow.

“It was your fault,” he said.

“You’re a brave man, Cal.”

He scowled. Ruth turned her attention to Pastor Wishnell. He was still an exceedingly handsome man, now in his midforties. He had probably spent as much time at sea as any Fort Niles or Courne Haven fisherman, but he did not look like any of the fishermen Ruth had known. There was a fineness about him that matched the fineness of his boat: beautiful lines, an economy of detail, a polish, a finish. His blond hair was thin and straight, and he wore it parted on the side and brushed smooth. He had a narrow nose and pale blue eyes. He wore small, wire-framed glasses. Pastor Toby Wishnell had the look of an elite British officer: privileged, cool, brilliant.

They sailed for a long time without any further conversation. They left in the worst kind of fog, the cold fog that sits on the body like damp towels, hurtful to lungs, knuckles, and knees. Birds don’t sing in the fog, so there were no gulls screaming, and it was a quiet ride. As they sailed farther away from the island, the fog diminished and then vanished, and the day turned clear. But it was, nonetheless, an odd day. The sky was blue, the wind was slight, but the sea was a churning mass—huge round swells, rough and constant. This sometimes happens when there’s a storm much farther out at sea. The sea gets the aftermath of the violence, but there’s no sign in the sky of the storm. It’s as though the sea and the sky are not on terms of communication. They take no notice of each other, as if they’ve never been introduced. Sailors call this a “ground sea.” It’s disorienting to be on so rough an ocean under a picnic-day blue sky. Ruth stood against the rail and watched the water seethe and fume.

“You don’t mind the rough sea?” Pastor Toby Wishnell asked Ruth.

“I don’t get seasick.”

“You’re a lucky girl.”

“I don’t think we’re lucky today,” Cal Cooley drawled. “Fishermen say it’s bad luck to have women or clergy on a boat. And we got both.”

The pastor smiled wanly. “Never begin a trip on a Friday,” he recited. “Never go on a ship that had an unlucky launch. Never go on a boat if her name has been changed. Never paint anything on a boat blue. Never whistle on a boat, or you’ll whistle up a wind. Never bring women or clergy aboard. Never disturb a bird’s nest on a boat. Never say the number thirteen on a boat. Never use the word pig.”

“Pig?” Ruth said. “I never heard that one.”

“Well, it’s been said twice now,” Cal Cooley said. “Pig, pig, pig.

We’ve got clergy; we’ve got women; we’ve got people shouting pig. So now we are doomed. Thank you to all who participated.”

“Cal Cooley is such an old salt,” Ruth said to Pastor Wishnell.

“Being from Missourah and all, he’s just steeped in the lore of the sea.”

“I am an old salt, Ruth.”

“Actually, Cal, I believe you’re a farm boy,” Ruth corrected. “I believe you are a cracker.”

“Just because I was born in Missourah doesn’t mean I can’t be an island man at heart.”

“I don’t think the other island men would necessarily agree, Cal.”

Cal shrugged. “A man can’t help where he’s born. A cat can have kittens in the oven, but that don’t make ’em biscuits.”

Ruth laughed, although Cal Cooley did not. Pastor Wishnell was looking closely at Ruth.

“Ruth?” he said. “Is that your name? Ruth Thomas?”

“Yes, sir,” Ruth said, and stopped laughing. She coughed into her fist.

“You have a familiar face, Ruth.”

“If I look familiar, that’s only because I look exactly like everyone else on Fort Niles. We all look alike, sir. You know what they say about us—we’re too poor to buy new faces, so we share the same one. Ha.”

“Ruth is much prettier than anyone else on Fort Niles,” Cal contributed. “Much darker. Look at those pretty dark eyes. That’s the Italian in her. That’s from her Eye-talian grandpappy.”

“Cal,” Ruth snapped, “stop talking now.” He always seized the opportunity to remind her of her grandmother’s shame.

“Italian?” Pastor Wishnell said, with a frown. “On Fort Niles?”

“Tell the man about your grandpap, Ruth,” Cal said.

Ruth disregarded Cal, as did the pastor. Pastor Wishnell was still looking at Ruth with great attention. At last he said, “Ah . . .” He nodded. “I know now how it is that I recognize you. I believe I buried your father, Ruth, when you were a little girl. That’s it. I believe I presided over your father’s funeral. Didn’t I?”

“No, sir.”

“I’m quite sure of it.”

“No, sir. My father’s not dead.”

Pastor Wishnell considered this. “Your father did not drown? Almost ten years ago?”

“No, sir. I believe you’re thinking of a man named Ira Pommeroy. You presided over Mr. Pommeroy’s funeral about ten years ago. We passed my father baiting lobster as we left the harbor. He’s very much alive.”

“He was found caught up in another man’s fishing lines, that Ira Pommeroy?”

“That’s right.”

“And he had several children?”

“Seven sons.”

“And one daughter?”

“No.”

“But you were there, weren’t you? At the funeral?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So I was not imagining it.”

“No, sir. I was there. You were not imagining it.”

“You certainly seemed to be a member of the family.”

“Well, I’m not, Pastor Wishnell. I’m not a member of that family.”

“And that lovely widow . . . ?”

“Mrs. Pommeroy?”

“Yes. Mrs. Pommeroy. She’s not your mother?”

“No, sir. She’s not my mother.”

“Ruth is a member of the Ellis family,” Cal Cooley said.

“I am a member of the Thomas family,” Ruth corrected. She kept her voice level, but she was mad. What exactly was it about Cal Cooley that brought to her such immediate thoughts of homicide? She never had this reaction to anyone else. All Cal had to do was open his mouth, and she started imagining trucks running over him. Incredible.

“Ruth’s mother is Miss Vera Ellis’s devoted niece,” Cal Cooley explained. “Ruth’s mother lives with Miss Vera Ellis in the Ellis mansion in Concord.”

“My mother is Miss Vera Ellis’s handmaid,” Ruth said, her voice level.

“Ruth’s mother is Miss Vera Ellis’s devoted niece,” Cal Cooley repeated. “We’re going to visit them now.”

“Is that so?” said Pastor Wishnell. “I was certain that you were a Pommeroy, young lady. I was certain that the lovely young widow was your mother.”

“Well, I’m not. And she’s not.”

“Is she still on the island?”

“Yes,” Ruth said.

“With her sons?”

“A few of her sons joined the Army. One’s working on a farm in Orono. Three live at home.”

“How does she survive? How does she make money?”

“Her sons send her money. And she cuts people’s hair.”

“She can survive on that?”

“Everyone on the island gets their hair cut by her. She’s excellent at it.”

“Perhaps I should get a haircut from her someday.”

“I’m sure you’d be satisfied,” Ruth said, formally. She couldn’t believe the way she was talking to this man. I’m sure you’d be satisfied? What was she saying? What did she care about Pastor Wishnell’s hair-related satisfaction?

“Interesting. And what about your family, Ruth? Is your father a lobsterman, then?”

“Yes.”

“A terrible profession.”

Ruth did not respond.

“Savage. Brings out the greed in a man. The way they defend their territory! I have never seen such greed! There have been more murders on these islands over lobster boundaries . . .”

The pastor trailed off. Ruth again did not answer. She’d been watching his nephew, Owney Wishnell, whose back was to her. Owney, standing at the wheel, was still sailing the New Hope toward Rockland. It would have been easy to assume that Owney Wishnell was deaf, the way he had disregarded them all morning. Yet now that Pastor Wishnell had begun to talk about lobstering, a change seemed to come over Owney’s body. His back seemed to draw steady, like that of a hunting cat. A subtle ripple of tension. He was listening.

“Naturally,” Pastor Wishnell resumed, “you would not see it as I do, Ruth. You see only the lobstermen of your island. I see many. I see men like your neighbors all up and down this coast. I see these savage dramas played out on—how many islands is it, Owney? How many islands do we minister to, Owney? How many lobster wars have we seen? How many of those lobster territory disputes have I mediated in the last decade alone?”

But Owney Wishnell did not reply. He stood perfectly still, his paint-can–shaped head facing forward, his big hands resting on the wheel of the New Hope, his big feet—big as shovels—planted in his clean, high lobsterman’s boots. The boat in his command beat down the waves.

“Owney knows how dreadful the lobstering life is,” Pastor Wishnell said after a while. “He was a child in 1965, when some of the fishermen on Courne Haven tried to form a collective. Do you remember that incident, Ruth?”

“I remember hearing about it.”

“It was a brilliant idea, of course, on paper. A fishermen’s collective is the only way to thrive in this business instead of starving. Collective bargaining with wholesalers, collective bargaining with bait dealers, price setting, agreements on trap limits. It would have been a very wise thing to do. But tell that to those blockheads who fish for a living.”

“It’s hard for them to trust each other,” Ruth said. Ruth’s father was dead against any idea of a fishermen’s collective. As was Angus Addams. As was Uncle Len Thomas. As were most of the fishermen she knew.

“As I said, they are blockheads.”

“No,” Ruth said. “They’re independent, and it’s hard for them to change their ways. They feel safer doing things the way they always have, taking care of themselves.”

“Your father?” Pastor Wishnell said. “How does he get his lobster catch to Rockland?”

“He takes it on his boat.” She wasn’t sure how this conversation had turned into an interrogation.

“And how does he get his bait and fuel?”

“He brings them back from Rockland on his boat.”

“And so do all the other men on the island, right? Each man in his own little boat, chugging away to Rockland alone because they can’t trust one another enough to combine the catch and take turns making the trip. Correct?”

“My dad doesn’t want everyone in the world to know how much lobster he’s catching, or what kind of price he’s getting. Why should he want everyone to know that?”

“So he’s enough of a blockhead never to go into partnership with his neighbors.”

“I prefer not to think of my father as a blockhead,” Ruth said, quietly. “Besides, nobody has the capital to start a cooperative.”

Cal Cooley snorted. “Shut up, Cal,” Ruth added, less quietly.

“Well, my nephew Owney saw, close up, the war that came of that last collective attempt, didn’t he? It was Dennis Burden who tried to form the cooperative on Courne Haven. He put his life out for it. And it was Dennis Burden’s little children to whom we brought food and clothing after his neighbors—his own neighbors—set his boat on fire and the poor man could no longer make a living.”

“I heard that Dennis Burden had made a secret deal with the Sandy Point wholesaler,” Ruth said. “I heard he cheated his neighbors.” She paused, then, imitating the pastor’s inflection, added, “His own neighbors.”

The pastor frowned. “That is a myth.”

“That’s not what I heard.”

“Would you have burned the man’s boat?”

“I wasn’t there.”

“No. You were not there. But I was there and Owney was there. And it was a good lesson for Owney on the realities of the lobster business.

He’s seen these medieval battles and disputes on every island from here to Canada. He understands the depravity, the danger, the greed. And he knows better than to become involved in such a profession.”

Owney Wishnell made no comment.

At last, the pastor said to Ruth, “You’re a bright girl, Ruth.”

“Thank you.”

“It seems you’ve had a good education.”

Cal Cooley put in, “Too much of an education. Cost a fucking fortune.”

The pastor gave Cal such a hard look, it almost made Ruth wince. Cal turned his face. Ruth sensed that this was the last time she’d be hearing the word fuck spoken on the New Hope.

“And what will become of you, Ruth?” Pastor Toby Wishnell asked. “You have good sense, don’t you? What will you do with your life?”

Ruth Thomas looked at the back and the neck of Owney Wishnell, who, she could tell, was still listening closely.

“College?” Pastor Toby Wishnell suggested.

What urgency there was in Owney Wishnell’s posture!

So Ruth decided to engage. She said, “More than anything else, sir, I would like to become a lobster fisherman.”

Pastor Toby Wishnell gazed at her, coolly. She returned the gaze.

“Because it’s such a noble calling, sir,” she said.

That was the end of the conversation. Ruth had shut it right up. She couldn’t help herself. She could never help herself from mouthing off. She was mortified at the way she had spoken to this man. Mortified, and a little proud. Yeah! She could sass the best of them! But, good God, what an awkward silence. Maybe she should have minded her manners.

The New Hope rocked and bumped on the rough sea. Cal Cooley looked pallid, and he quickly went out on deck, where he clung to the railing. Owney sailed on, silent, the back of his neck flushed plum. Ruth Thomas was deeply uncomfortable alone in the presence of Pastor Wishnell, but she hoped that her discomfort was not apparent. She tried to look relaxed. She did not try to converse further with the pastor. Although he did have one last thing to say to her. They were still an hour from Rockland when Pastor Toby Wishnell told Ruth one last thing.

He leaned toward her and said, “Did you know that I was the first man in the Wishnell family not to become a lobster fisherman, Ruth? Did you know that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good,” he said. “Then you’ll understand when I tell you this. My nephew Owney will be the second Wishnell not to fish.”

He smiled, leaned back, and watched her carefully for the rest of the trip. She maintained a small, defiant smile. She wasn’t going to show this man her discomfort. No, sir. He fixed his cool, intelligent gaze on her for the next hour. She just smiled away at him. She was miserable.

Cal Cooley drove Ruth Thomas to Concord in the two-tone Buick the Ellis family had owned since Ruth was a little girl. After telling Cal she was tired, she lay down on the back seat and pretended to sleep. He literally whistled “Dixie” during the entire drive. He knew Ruth was awake, and he knew he was annoying her intensely.

They arrived in Concord around dusk. It was raining lightly, and the Buick made a sweet hissing sound on the wet macadam—a sound that Ruth never heard on a Fort Niles dirt road. Cal turned into the long driveway of the Ellis mansion and let the car coast to a stop. Ruth still pretended to be asleep, and Cal pretended to wake her up. He twisted around in the front seat and poked her hip.

“Try to drag yourself back into consciousness.”

She opened her eyes slowly and stretched with great drama. “Are we here already?”

They got out of the car, walked to the front door, and Cal rang the bell. He put his hands in his jacket pockets.

“You are so goddamned pissed off about being here,” Cal said, and laughed. “You hate me so much.”

The door opened, and there was Ruth’s mother. She gave a little gasp and stepped out on the doorstep to put her arms around her daughter. Ruth laid her head on her mother’s shoulder and said, “Here I am.”

“I’m never sure if you’ll really come.”

“Here I am.”

They held each other.

Ruth’s mother said, “You look wonderful, Ruth,” although, with her daughter’s head lying on her shoulder, she could not really see.

“Here I am,” Ruth said. “Here I am.”

Cal Cooley coughed decorously.

6

The young animals that issue from the eggs of the lobster are distinct in every way, including shape, habits, and mode of transportation, from the adult.

—William Saville-Kent

1897

MISS VERA ELLIS had never wanted Ruth’s mother to marry.

When Mary Smith-Ellis was a little girl, Miss Vera would say, “You know how difficult it was for me when your mother died.”

“Yes, Miss Vera,” Mary would say.

“I barely survived without her.”

“I know, Miss Vera.”

“You look so much like her.”

“Thank you.”

“I can’t do a thing without you!”

“Yes, I know.”

“My helpmate!”

“Yes, Miss Vera.”

Ruth’s mother had a most peculiar life with Miss Vera. Mary Smith-Ellis never had close friends or sweethearts. Her life was circumscribed by service—mending, corresponding, packing, shopping, braiding, reassuring, aiding, bathing, and so on. She had inherited the very workload that once burdened her mother and had been raised into servitude, exactly as her mother had been.

Winters in Concord, summers on Fort Niles. Mary did go to school, but only until she was sixteen, and only because Miss Vera did not want a complete idiot as a companion. Other than those years of schooling, Mary Smith-Ellis’s life consisted of chores for Miss Vera. In this manner, Mary passed through childhood and adolescence. Then she was a young woman, then one not so young. She had never had a suitor. She was not unattractive, but she was busy. She had work to do.

It was at the end of the summer of 1955 that Miss Vera Ellis decided to give a picnic for the people of Fort Niles. She had guests visiting Ellis House from Europe, and she wanted to show them the local spirit, so she planned to have a lobster bake on Gavin Beach, to which all the residents of Fort Niles were to be invited. The decision was without precedent. There had never before been social occasions attended by the locals of Fort Niles and the Ellis family, but Miss Vera thought it would be a delightful event. A novelty.

Mary, of course, organized everything. She spoke with the fishermen’s wives and arranged for them to bake the blueberry pies. She had a modest, quiet manner, and the fishermen’s wives liked her well enough. They knew she was from Ellis House, but they didn’t hold that against her. She seemed a nice girl, if a bit mousy and shy. Mary also ordered corn and potatoes and charcoal and beer. She borrowed long tables from the Fort Niles grammar school, and arranged to have the pews moved from the Fort Niles church down to the beach. She talked to Mr. Fred Burden of Courne Haven, who was a decent enough fiddler, and hired him to provide music. Finally, she needed to order several hundred pounds of lobster. The fishermen’s wives suggested that she discuss this with Mr. Angus Addams, who was the most prolific fisherman on the island. She was told to wait for his boat, the Sally Chestnut, at the dock in the middle of the afternoon.

So Mary went down to the dock on a windy August afternoon and picked her way around the tossed stacks of wrecked wooden lobster traps and nets and barrels. As each fisherman came past her, stinking in his high boots and sticky slicker, she asked, “Excuse me, sir? Are you Mr. Angus Addams? Excuse me? Are you the skipper of the Sally Chestnut, sir?”

They all shook their heads or grunted crude denials and passed right by. Even Angus Addams himself passed right by, with his head down.

He had no idea who the hell this woman was and what the hell she wanted, and he had no interest in finding out. Ruth Thomas’s father was another of the men who passed Mary Smith-Ellis, and when she asked, “Are you Angus Addams?” he grunted a denial like that of the other men. Except that, after he passed, he slowed down and turned to take a look at the woman. A good long look.

She was pretty. She was nice-looking. She wore tailored tan trousers and a short-sleeved white blouse, with a small round collar decorated with tiny embroidered flowers. She did not wear makeup. She had a thin silver watch on her wrist, and her dark hair was short and neatly waved. She carried a notepad and a pencil. He liked her slim waist and her clean appearance. She looked tidy. Stan Thomas, a fastidious man, liked that.

Yes, Stan Thomas really looked her over.

“Are you Mr. Angus Addams, sir?” she was asking Wayne Pommeroy, who was staggering by with a broken trap on his shoulder. Wayne looked embarrassed and then angry at his embarrassment, and he hustled past without answering.

Stan Thomas was still looking her over when she turned and caught his eye. He smiled. She walked over, and she was smiling, as well, with a sort of sweet hopefulness. It was a nice smile.

“You’re sure you’re not Mr. Angus Addams?” she asked.

“No. I’m Stan Thomas.”

“I’m Mary Ellis,” she said, and held out her hand. “I work at Ellis House.”

Stan Thomas didn’t respond, but he didn’t look unfriendly, so she continued.

“My Aunt Vera is giving a party next Sunday for the whole island, and she’d like to purchase several hundred pounds of lobster.”

“She would?”

“That’s right.”

“Who’s she want to buy it from?”

“I don’t suppose it matters. I was told to look for Angus Addams, but it doesn’t matter to me.”

“I could sell them to her, but she’d have to pay the retail price.”

“Have you got that much lobster?”

“I can get it. It’s right out there.” He waved his hand at the ocean and grinned. “I just have to pick it up.”

Mary laughed.

“It would have to be retail price, though,” he repeated. “If I sell it to her.”

“Oh, I’m sure that would be fine. She wants to be certain there’s plenty of it.”

“I don’t want to lose any money on the deal. I got a distributor in Rockland who expects a certain amount of lobster from me every week.”

“I’m sure your price will be fine.”

“How you plan on cooking the lobster?”

“I suppose . . . I’m sorry . . . I don’t know, really.”

“I’ll do it for you.”

“Oh, Mr. Thomas!”

“I’ll build a big fire on the beach and boil them in garbage cans, with seaweed.”

“Oh, my goodness! Is that how?”

“That’s how.”

“Oh, my goodness! Garbage cans! You don’t say.”

“The Ellis family can buy new ones. I’ll order them for you. Pick them up in Rockland couple days from now.”

“Really?”

“The corn goes right on top. And the clams. I’ll do the whole thing for you. Sister, that’s the only way!”

“Mr. Thomas, we’ll certainly pay you for all that and would be very grateful. I actually had no idea how to do it.”

“No need,” Stan Thomas said. “Hell, I’ll do it for free.” He surprised himself with this tossed-off line. Stan Thomas had never done anything for free in his life.

“Mr. Thomas!”

“You can help me. How about that, Mary? You can be my helper. That would be pay enough for me.”

He put his hand on Mary’s arm and smiled. His hands were filthy and reeked of rotting herring bait, but what the hell. He liked the shade of her skin, which was darker and smoother than he was used to seeing around the island. She wasn’t as young as he’d thought at first. Now that he was up close, he could see she was no kid. But she was slim and had nice round breasts. He liked her serious, nervous little frown. A pretty mouth, too. He gave her arm a squeeze.

“I think you’ll be a real good helper,” he said.

She laughed. “I help all the time!” she said. “Believe me, Mr.

Thomas, I’m a very good helper!”

It poured rain on the day of the picnic, and that was the last time the Ellis family tried entertaining the whole island. It was a miserable day. Miss Vera stayed down at the beach for only an hour and sat under a tarp, griping. Her European guests went for a walk along the beach and lost their umbrellas to the wind. One of the gentlemen from

Austria complained that his camera was destroyed by the rain. Mr. Burden the fiddler got drunk in someone’s car, and played his fiddle in there, with the windows up and the doors locked. They couldn’t get him out for hours. Stan Thomas’s fire pit never really took off, what with the soaked sand and the driving rain, and the women of the island held their cakes and pies close against their bodies, as if they were protecting infants. The affair was a disaster.

Mary Smith-Ellis bustled around in a borrowed fisherman’s slicker, moving chairs under trees and covering tables with bed sheets, but there was no way to salvage the day. The party had been her event to organize, and it was a calamity, but Stan Thomas liked the way she took defeat without shutting down. He liked the way she kept moving around, trying to maintain cheer. She was a nervous woman, but he liked her energy. She was a good worker. He liked that a great deal. He was a good worker himself, and he scorned idleness in any man or woman.

“You should come to my house and warm up,” he told her as she rushed past him at the end of the afternoon.

“Oh, no,” she said. “You should come with me to Ellis House and warm up.”

She repeated this invitation later, after he had helped her return the tables to the school and the pews to the church, so he drove her up to Ellis House at the top of the island. He knew where it was, of course, although he’d never been inside.

“That sure must be a nice place to live,” he said.

They were sitting in his truck in the circular driveway; the window glass was fogged from their breath and their steaming wet clothes.

“Oh, they stay here only for the summer,” Mary said.

“What about you?”

“Of course I stay here, too. I stay wherever the family stays. I take care of Miss Vera.”

“You take care of Miss Vera Ellis? All the time?”

“I’m her helpmate,” Mary said, with a wan smile.

“And what’s your last name again?”

“Ellis.”

“Ellis?”

“That’s right.”

He couldn’t figure this out exactly. He couldn’t figure out who this woman was. A servant? She sure acted like a servant, and he’d seen the way that Vera Ellis bitch harped at her. But how come her last name was Ellis? Ellis? Was she a poor relative? Who ever heard of an Ellis hauling chairs and pews all over the place and bustling around in the rain with a borrowed slicker. He thought about asking her what the hell her story was, but she was a sweetheart, and he didn’t want to antagonize her. Instead, he took her hand. She let him take it.

Stan Thomas, after all, was a good-looking young man, with a trim haircut and handsome dark eyes. He wasn’t tall, but he had a fine, lean figure and an appealing intensity, a directness, that Mary liked very much. She didn’t mind his taking her hand at all, even after so short an acquaintance.

“How long are you going to be around?” he asked.

“Until the second week of September.”

“That’s right. That’s when they—you—always leave.”

“That’s right.”

“I want to see you again,” he said.

She laughed.

“I’m serious,” he said. “I’m going to want to do this again. I like holding your hand. When can I see you again?”

Mary thought silently for a few minutes and then said, in an open way, “I’d like to see you some more, too, Mr. Thomas.”

“Good. Call me Stan.”

“Yes.”

“So when can I see you?”

“I’m not sure.”

“I’m probably going to want to see you tomorrow. What about tomorrow? How can I see you tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow?”

“Is there any reason I can’t see you tomorrow?”

“I don’t know,” Mary said, and turned to him suddenly with a look of near panic. “I don’t know!”

“You don’t know? Don’t you like me?”

“Yes, I do. I like you, Mr. Thomas. Stan.”

“Good. I’ll come by for you tomorrow around four o’clock. We’ll go for a drive.”

“Oh, my goodness.”

“That’s what we’re going to do,” said Stan Thomas. “Tell whoever you have to tell.”

“I don’t know that I have to tell anybody, but I don’t know whether I’ll have time to go for a drive.”

“Do whatever you have to do, then. Figure out a way. I really do want to see you. Hey! I insist on it!”

“Fine!” She laughed.

“Good. Am I still invited inside?”

“Of course!” Mary said. “Please do come inside!”

They got out of the truck, but Mary did not head up the walk to the grand front door. Dashing through the rain, she went around the side, and Stan Thomas chased her. She ran along the granite edge of the house, under the protection of the great eaves, and ducked inside a plain wooden door, holding it open for Stan. They were in a back hallway, and she took his slicker and hung it on a wall peg.

“We’ll go to the kitchen,” she said, and opened another door. A set of spiral iron stairs twisted down to a huge, old-fashioned cellar kitchen. There was a massive stone fireplace with iron hooks and pots and crevices that looked as though they were still being used for baking bread. One wall was lined with sinks, another with stoves and ovens. Bundled herbs hung from the ceilings, and the floor was clean worn tile. At the wide pine table in the center of the room sat a tiny middleaged woman with short red hair and a keen face, nimbly snipping beans into a silver bowl.

“Hello, Edith,” said Mary.

The woman nodded her hello and said, “She wants you.”

“She does!”

“She keeps calling down for you.”

“Since what time?”

“Since all afternoon.”

“Oh, but I was busy returning all the chairs and tables,” Mary said, and she rushed over to one of the sinks, washed her hands in a speedy blur, and patted them dry on her slacks.

“She doesn’t know you’re back yet, Mary,” said the woman named Edith, “so you may as well have a cup of coffee and a seat.”

“I should really see what she needs.”

“What about your friend here?”

“Stan!” Mary said, and spun to look at him. Clearly, she had forgotten he was there. “I’m sorry, but I won’t be able to sit here and warm up with you, after all.”

“Have a cup of coffee and a seat, Mary,” said Edith, still snipping the beans. Her voice was commanding. “She doesn’t know you’re back yet.”

“Yes, Mary, have a cup of coffee and a seat,” said Stan Thomas, and Edith the bean-snipper flashed him a sidelong look. It was a fast snatch of a look, but it took in a whole lot of information.

“And why don’t you have a seat, sir?” Edith said.

“Thank you, ma’am, I will.” He sat.

“Get your guest a cup of coffee, Mary.”

Mary winced. “I can’t,” she said. “I have to check on Miss Vera.”

“She won’t die if you sit here for five minutes and dry off,” Edith said.

“I can’t!” Mary said. She flashed past Stan Thomas and Edith, right out the kitchen door. They heard her quick footsteps fluttering up the stairs as she called out, “Sorry!” and she was gone.

“I guess I can get the coffee for myself,” Stan Thomas said.

“I’ll get it for you. This is my kitchen.”

Edith left the beans and poured Stan a cup of coffee. Without asking how he took it, she added a splash of cream and did not offer any sugar, which was fine with him. She made herself a cup of the same.

“Are you courting her?” she asked, after she sat down. She was looking at him with a suspicion she made no attempt to mask.

“I only just met her.”

“Are you interested in her?”

Stan Thomas did not answer, but he raised his eyebrows in ironic surprise.

“I don’t have any advice for you, you know,” Edith said.

“You don’t have to give me any advice.”

“Somebody should.”

“Somebody like who?”

“You know, she’s already married, Mr.—?”

“Thomas. Stan Thomas.”

“She’s already married, Mr. Thomas.”

“No. She doesn’t wear a ring. She didn’t say anything.”

“She’s married to that old bitch up there.” Edith thrust a thin yellow thumb at the ceiling. “See how she scampers away even before she’s called?”

“Can I ask you a question?” Stan said. “Who the hell is she?”

“I don’t like your mouth,” Edith said, although her tone did not suggest she minded it all that much. She sighed. “Mary is technically Miss Vera’s niece. But she’s really her slave. It’s a family tradition. It was the same thing with her mother, and that poor woman only got out of the slavery by drowning. Mary’s mother was the one who got swept off by the wave back in twenty-seven. They never found her body. You heard about that?”

“I heard about that.”

“Oh, God, I’ve told this story a million times. Dr. Ellis adopted Jane as a playmate for his little girl—who is now that screaming pain-in-my-hole upstairs. Jane was Mary’s mother. She got pregnant by some Italian quarry worker. It was a scandal.”

“I heard something about it.”

“Well, they tried to keep it quiet, but people do like a good scandal.”

“They sure like a good one around here.”

“So she drowned, you know, and Miss Vera took over the baby and raised that little girl to be her helper, to replace the mother. And that’s who Mary is. And I, for one, cannot believe that the people who watch out for children allowed it.”

“What people who watch out for children?”

“I don’t know. I just can’t believe it’s legal for a child to be born into slavery in this day and age.”

“You don’t mean slavery.”

“I know exactly what I mean, Mr. Thomas. We all sat here in this house watching it come to pass, and we asked ourselves why nobody put a stop to it.”

“Why didn’t you put a stop to it?”

“I’m a cook, Mr. Thomas. I’m not a police officer. And what do you do? No, I’m sure I know. You live here, so of course you’re a fisherman.”

“Yes.”

“You make good money?”

“Good enough.”

“Good enough for what?”

“Good enough for around here.”

“Is your job dangerous?”

“Not too bad.”

“Would you like a real drink?”

“I sure would.”

Edith the cook went to a cabinet, moved around some bottles, and came back with a silver flask. She poured amber liquid from it into two clean coffee cups. She gave one to Stan. “You’re not a drunk, are you?” she asked.

“Are you?”

“Very funny, with my workload. Very funny.” Edith stared at Stan Thomas narrowly. “And you never married anyone from around here?”

“I never married anyone from around anywhere,” Stan said, and he laughed.

“You seem good-natured. Everything’s a big joke. How long have you been courting Mary?”

“Nobody’s courting anybody, ma’am.”

“How long have you been interested in Mary?”

“I only met her this week. I guess this is a bigger deal than I thought. I think she’s a nice girl.”

“She is a nice girl. But don’t they have nice girls right here on your island?”

“Hey, now take it easy.”

“Well, I think it’s unusual that you’re not married. How old are you?”

“I’m in my twenties. My late twenties.” Stan Thomas was twenty-five.

“A good-looking, good-natured man like you with a good business? Who isn’t a drunk? And not married yet? My understanding is that people marry young around here, especially the fishermen.”

“Maybe nobody around here likes me.”

“Smart mouth. Maybe you have bigger ambitions.”

“Listen, all I did was drive Mary around to do some errands.”

“Do you want to see her again? Is that your idea?”

“I was thinking about it.”

“She’s almost thirty years old, you know.”

“I think she looks swell.”

“And she is an Ellis—legally an Ellis—but she doesn’t have any money, so don’t go getting any ideas about that. They’ll never give her a dime except to keep her dressed and fed.”

“I don’t know what kind of ideas you think I have.”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

“Well, I can see you’re trying to figure something out. I can see that pretty clear.”

“She doesn’t have a mother, Mr. Thomas. She is considered important around this house because Miss Vera needs her, but nobody in this house looks out for Mary. She’s a young woman without a mother to watch over her, and I’m trying to find out your intentions.”

“Well, you don’t talk like a mother. All respect to you, ma’am, but you talk like a father.”

This pleased Edith. “She doesn’t have one of those, either.”

“That’s a tough break.”

“How do you think you’ll go about seeing her, Mr. Thomas?”

“I think I’ll pick her up and take her for a drive sometimes.”

“Will you?”

“What do you make of that?”

“It’s none of my business.”

Stan Thomas laughed right out loud. “Oh, I’ll bet you can make just about anything your business, ma’am.”

“Very funny,” she said. She took another swig of hooch. “Everything’s a big joke with you. Mary’s leaving in a few weeks, you know. And she won’t be back until next June.”

“Then I’ll have to pick her up and take her for a drive every day, I guess.”

Stan Thomas treated Edith to his biggest smile, which was most winning.

Edith pronounced, “You’re in for a heap of trouble. Too bad, because I don’t dislike you, Mr. Thomas.”

“Thank you. I don’t dislike you, either.”

“Don’t you mess up that girl.”

“I don’t plan to mess up anybody,” he said.

Edith evidently thought their conversation was over, so she got back to the beans. Since she did not ask Stan Thomas to leave, he sat there in the kitchen of Ellis House for a while longer, hoping Mary would come back and sit with him. He waited and waited, but Mary did not return, so he finally went home. It was dark by then, and still raining.

He figured he’d have to see her another day.

They were married the next August. It wasn’t a hasty wedding. It wasn’t an unexpected wedding, in that Stan told Mary back in June of 1956—the day after she returned to Fort Niles Island with the Ellis family—that they were going to get married by the end of that summer. He told her that she was going to stay on Fort Niles with him from now on and she could forget about being a slave to goddamn Miss Vera Ellis. So it had all been arranged well in advance. Still, the ceremony itself had the marks of haste.

Mary and Stan were married in Stan Thomas’s living room by Mort Beekman, who was then the traveling pastor for the Maine islands. Mort Beekman preceded Toby Wishnell. He was, at the time, the skipper of the New Hope. Unlike Wishnell, Pastor Mort Beekman was well liked. He had an air about him of not giving a shit, which was fine with everyone concerned. Beekman was no zealot, and that too put him in good standing with the fishermen in his farflung parishes.

Stan Thomas and Mary Smith-Ellis had no witnesses at their ceremony, no rings, no attendants, but Pastor Mort Beekman, true to his nature, went right ahead with the ceremony. “What the hell do you need a witness for, anyhow?” he asked. Beekman happened to be on the island for a baptism, and what did he care about rings or attendants or witnesses? These two young people certainly looked like adults. Could they sign the certificate? Yes. Were they old enough to do this without anyone’s permission? Yes. Was it going to be a big hassle? No.

“Do you want all the praying and Scriptures and stuff?” Pastor Beekman asked the couple.

“No, thanks,” Stan said. “Just the wedding part.”

“Maybe a little praying . . .” Mary suggested hesitantly.

Pastor Mort Beekman sighed and scraped together a marriage ceremony with a little praying, for the sake of the lady. He couldn’t help noticing that she looked like hell, what with all the paleness and all the trembling. The whole ceremony was over in about four minutes. Stan Thomas slipped the pastor a ten-dollar bill on his way out the door.

“Much appreciated,” Stan said. “Thanks for coming by.”

“Sure enough,” said the pastor, and headed down to the boat so that he could get off the island before dark; there was never any decent lodging for him on Fort Niles, and he wasn’t about to stay overnight on that inhospitable rock.

It was the least ostentatious wedding in the history of the Ellis family. If, that is, Mary Smith-Ellis could be considered a member of the Ellis family, a matter now seriously in question.

“As your aunt,” Miss Vera had told Mary, “I must tell you that I think marriage would be a mistake for you. I think it a big mistake for you to handcuff yourself to this fisherman and to this island.”

“But you love this island,” Mary had said.

“Not in February, darling.”

“But I could visit you in February.”

“Darling, you’ll have a husband to look after, and there will be no time for visiting. I had a husband once myself, and I know. It was most restrictive,” she declared, although it had not in the least been restrictive.

To the surprise of many, Miss Vera did not put up further argument against Mary’s wedding plans. For those who had witnessed Vera’s violent outrage over Mary’s mother’s pregnancy thirty years earlier, and her tantrums at Mary’s mother’s death twentynine years earlier (not to mention her daily bouts of temper over sundry insignificant matters), this calm in the face of Mary’s news was a mystery. How could Vera stand for this? How could she lose another helpmate? How could she tolerate this disloyalty, this abandonment?

Perhaps nobody was more surprised by this reaction than Mary herself, who had lost ten pounds over the course of that summer from anxiety about Stan Thomas. What to do about Stan Thomas? He was not pressing her to see him, he was not taking her away from her responsibilities, but he persistently insisted that they would marry by the end of the summer. He’d been saying so since June. There did not seem to be room for negotiation.

“You think it’s a good idea, too,” he reminded her, and she did think so. She did like the idea of marrying. It wasn’t something she had thought about much before, but now it seemed exactly right. And he was so handsome. And he was so confident.

“We’re not getting any younger,” he reminded her, and indeed they were not.

Still, Mary vomited twice on the day she had to tell Miss Vera she was to marry Stan Thomas. She couldn’t put it off any longer and finally broke the news in the middle of July. But the conversation, surprisingly, was not difficult at all. Vera did not become enraged, although she had frequently become enraged over much smaller issues. Vera made her “this is a big mistake” statement as a concerned aunt, and then resigned herself to the idea entirely, leaving Mary to ask all the panicky questions.

“What will you do without me?” she asked.

“Mary, you sweet, sweet girl. Don’t let it cross your mind.” This was accompanied by a warm smile, a pat on the hand.

“But what will I do? I’ve never been away from you!”

“You are a lovely, capable young woman. You’ll be fine without me.”

“But you don’t think I should do this, do you?”

“Oh, Mary. What does it matter what I think?”

“You think he’ll be a bad husband.”

“I have never spoken a word against him.”

“But you don’t like him.”

“You’re the one who has to like him, Mary.”

“You think I’ll end up poor and alone.”

“Oh, you never will, Mary. You’ll always have a roof over your head.

You’ll never end up selling matches in the city or something dreadful like that.”

“You think I won’t make friends here on the island. You think I’ll be lonely, and you think I’ll go crazy in the winter.”

“Who wouldn’t make friends with you?”

“You think I’m loose, running around with a fisherman. You think I’m turning out to be like my mother.”

“The things I think!” Miss Vera said, and laughed.

“I will be happy with Stan,” Mary said. “I will.”

“Then I couldn’t be happier for you. A happy bride is a radiant bride.”

“But where should we get married?”

“At a church of God, I dearly hope.”

Mary fell silent, as did Miss Vera. It was a tradition for Ellis brides to marry in the gardens of Ellis House, attended by the Episcopal Bishop of Concord, boated in for the occasion. Ellis brides had lavish weddings, witnessed by every available member of the Ellis family and by all the family’s dearest friends. Ellis brides had elegant receptions at Ellis House. So when Miss Vera Ellis suggested a marriage at an unnamed “church of God,” Mary had reason to be silent.

“But I want to get married here, at Ellis House.”

“Oh, Mary. You don’t want that headache. You should have a simple ceremony and get it over with.”

“But will you be there?” Mary asked, after a long while.

“Oh, darling.”

“Will you?”

“I would only cry and cry, darling, and spoil your special day.”

Later that afternoon, Mr. Lanford Ellis—Vera’s older brother and the reigning patriarch of the family—called Mary Smith-Ellis to his room to congratulate her on her forthcoming marriage. He expressed his hope that Stan Thomas was an honorable young man. He said, “You should buy yourself a pretty wedding gown,” and he passed her an envelope. She picked at the flap, and he said, “Don’t open it here.” He gave her a kiss. He gave her a squeeze on the hand and said, “We have always had the fondest feelings for you.” And he did not say more.

Mary didn’t open the envelope until she was alone in her room that evening. She counted out a thousand dollars in cash. Ten hundred-dollar bills, which she slipped under her pillow. That was a great deal of money for a wedding gown in 1956, but, in the end, Mary was married in a flowered cotton dress that she had sewn for herself two summers earlier. She didn’t want to spend the money. Instead, she decided to hand the envelope and its contents to Stan Thomas.

That money was what she brought to the marriage, along with her clothing and the sheets from her bed. These were all her possessions, after decades of service to the Ellis family.

In the Ellis mansion in Concord, Ruth Thomas’s mother showed her to her room. They had not seen each other for some time. Ruth didn’t like to visit Concord and rarely did. There had been some Christmases, in fact, when Ruth had elected to stay in her room at boarding school. She liked that more than being in Concord and the Ellis mansion. Last Christmas, for instance.

“You look wonderful, Ruth,” her mother said.

“Thank you. You look good, too.”

“Don’t you have any bags?”

“No. Not this time.”

“We put up new wallpaper for you.”

“It looks nice.”

“And here’s a picture of you when you were a little girl.”

“Look at that,” Ruth said, and leaned toward the framed photograph hanging on the wall next to the dresser. “That’s me?”

“That’s you.”

“What do I have in my hands?”

“Pebbles. Pebbles from the Ellises’ driveway.”

“Boy, look at those fists!”

“And there I am,” Ruth’s mother said.

“There you are.”

“I’m trying to get you to hand me the pebbles.”

“It doesn’t look as if you’re going to get them.”

“No, it doesn’t. I’ll bet I didn’t get them.”

“How old was I?”

“About two. So adorable.”

“And how old were you?”

“Oh. Thirty-three or so.”

“I never saw that picture before.”

“No, I don’t think you have.”

“I wonder who took it.”

“Miss Vera took it.”

Ruth Thomas sat down on the bed, a handsome brass heirloom covered with a lace spread. Her mother sat beside her and asked, “Does it smell a bit musty in here?”

“No, it’s fine.”

They sat quietly for a time. Ruth’s mother stood and raised the window shades. “We may as well let in some light,” she said, and sat down again.

“Thank you,” Ruth said.

“When I bought that wallpaper, I thought it was cherry blossoms, but now that I look at it, I think it’s apple blossoms. Isn’t that funny? I don’t know why I didn’t see that at first.”

“Apple blossoms are nice.”

“It doesn’t make any difference, I suppose.”

“Either way is nice. You did a good job with the wallpapering.”

“We paid a man to do it.”

“It looks really pretty.”

After another long silence, Mary Smith-Ellis Thomas took her daughter’s hand and asked, “Should we go see Ricky now?”

. . .

Ricky was in a baby’s crib, although he was nine years old. He was the size of a small child, a three-year-old, perhaps, and his fingers and toes were curled like talons. His hair was black and short, matted in the back because of the way he swiveled his head back and forth, back and forth. He was forever grinding his head against the mattress, forever flipping his face from side to side, as though searching desperately for something. And his eyes, too, rolled to the left and to the right, always seeking. He made screeching sounds and highpitched whines and howls, but when Mary approached, he settled into a steady muttering.

“Here’s Mama,” she said. “Here’s Mama.”

She lifted him out of the crib and placed him, on his back, on a sheepskin mat on the floor. He could not sit up or hold up his head. He could not feed himself. He could not speak. On the sheepskin mat, his small, crooked legs flopped to one side and his arms to the other. Back and forth he swung his head, back and forth, and his fingers waved and tensed, fluttering in the air the way sea plants flutter in the water.

“Is he getting any better?” Ruth asked.

“Well,” her mother said, “I think so, Ruth. I always think he’s getting a little better, but nobody else ever sees it.”

“Where’s his nurse?”

“Oh, she’s around. She may be down in the kitchen, taking a break. She’s a new woman, and she seems very nice. She likes to sing to Ricky. Doesn’t she, Ricky? Doesn’t Sandra sing to you? Because she knows you like it. Doesn’t she?”

Mary spoke to him the way mothers speak to newborns, or the way Senator Simon Addams spoke to his dog Cookie, in a loving voice with no expectation of reply.

“Do you see your sister?” she asked. “Do you see your big sister? She came to visit you, little boy. She came to say hello to Ricky.”

“Hello there, Ricky,” said Ruth, trying to follow the cadence of her mother’s voice. “Hello there, little brother.”

Ruth felt sick. She bent over and patted Ricky’s head, which he whipped away from under her palm, and she felt his matted hair slip away in a flash—gone. She pulled back her hand, and he let his head rest for a moment. Then he flipped it with a suddenness that made Ruth start.

Ricky was born when Ruth was nine years old. He was born in a hospital in Rockland. Ruth never saw him when he was a baby, because her mother didn’t return to the island after Ricky was born. Her father went to Rockland with his wife when the baby was due, and Ruth stayed with Mrs. Pommeroy next door. Her mother was supposed to come back with a baby, but she never did. She didn’t come back, because something was wrong with the baby. Nobody had expected that.

According to what Ruth had heard, her father, from the moment he saw the severely retarded infant, started laying out the blame, fast and mean. He was disgusted and he was angry. Who had done this to his son? He immediately decided that the baby had inherited the sad condition from Mary’s ancestors. After all, what did anyone know of the Bath Naval Hospital orphan or of the Italian immigrant? Who knew what monsters had lurked in that dark past? Stan Thomas’s ancestors, on the other hand, were accounted for back to ten generations, and nothing of this sort had ever appeared. There had never been any freaks in Stan’s family. Obviously, Stan said, this is what you get for marrying someone whose background isn’t known. Yes, this is what you get.

Mary, still exhausted in her hospital bed, came back with her own demented defense. She was not normally a fighter, but she fought this time. She fought back dirty. Oh, yes, she said, all Stan’s ancestors could be accounted for, precisely because they were all related to one another. They were all siblings and first cousins, and it doesn’t take a genius to realize that, after enough generations of inbreeding and incest, this is what you get. This child, this Rickyboy with the flippy head and the clawed hands.

“This is your son, Stan!” she said.

It was an ugly, wretched fight, and it upset the nurses in the maternity ward, who heard every cruel word. Some of the younger nurses cried. They had never heard anything like it. The head nurse came on duty at midnight and led Stan Thomas away from his wife’s room. The head nurse was a big woman, not easily intimidated, even by a tough-mouthed lobsterman. She hustled him away while Mary was still screaming at him.

“For the love of God,” the nurse snapped at Stan, “the woman needs her rest.”

A few afternoons later, a visitor came to see Mary and Stan and the new baby in the hospital; it was Mr. Lanford Ellis. Somehow, he had heard the news. He had sailed over to Rockland on the Stonecutter to pay his respects and to offer Mary and Stan the Ellis family’s condolences on their tragic situation. Stan and Mary were coolly reconciled by this time. At least they could be in the same room.

Lanford Ellis told Mary of a conversation he’d had with his sister Vera, and of their consensus. He and his sister had discussed the immediate problem and had agreed that Mary should not take the baby to Fort Niles Island. Mary would have no medical support there, no professional help for Ricky. The doctors had already announced that he would need round-the-clock care for the rest of his life. Did Mary and Stan have a plan?

Mary and Stan admitted that they did not. Lanford Ellis was sympathetic.

He understood that this was a difficult time for the couple, and he had a suggestion. Because of the Ellis family’s attachment to Mary, they were prepared to help. Lanford Ellis would pay for Ricky’s care at an appropriate institution. For life. No matter the cost. He had heard of an excellent private facility in New Jersey.

“New Jersey?” Mary Thomas said, incredulous.

New Jersey did seem far away, Lanford Ellis conceded. But the home was said to be the best in the country. He had spoken with the administrator that morning. If Stan and Mary weren’t comfortable with the arrangement, there was one other possibility . . .

Or . . .

Or what?

Or, if Mary and her family moved to Concord, where Mary could resume her position as companion to Miss Vera, the Ellis family would provide Ricky with private care right there, at the Ellis mansion. Lanford Ellis would have part of the servants’ wing converted into a comfortable area for young Ricky. He would pay for good private nurses and for the finest medical care. For life. He would also find Stan Thomas a good job and would send Ruth to a good school.

“Don’t you fucking dare,” Stan Thomas said, in a dangerously low voice. “Don’t you fucking dare try to take my wife back.”

“It is merely a suggestion,” said Lanford Ellis. “The decision is yours.” And he left.

“Did you people fucking poison her?” Stan Thomas shouted after Lanford as the old man walked away, down the hospital hall. Stan followed him. “Did you poison my wife? Did you people make this happen? Answer me! Did you goddamn people set this whole fucking thing up just to get her back?”

But Lanford Ellis had no more to say, and the big nurse stepped in once more.

Naturally, Ruth Thomas never knew the details of the argument her parents had following Mr. Ellis’s offer. But she did know that a few points were made immediately clear, right there in the hospital room. There was no way on earth that Mary Smith-Ellis Thomas, child of an orphan, was going to put her son, no matter how disabled, into an institution. And there was no way on earth that Stan Thomas, tenth-generation islander, was going to move to Concord, New Hampshire. Nor would he allow his daughter to move there, where she might be turned into a slave of Miss Vera Ellis, like her mother and her grand-mother before her.

These points having been established, there was little room for negotiation. And whatever the severity of the argument, the decision was quick and final. Mary went to Concord with her son. She returned to the Ellis mansion and to her position with Vera Ellis. Stan Thomas went back to the island to join his daughter, alone. Not immediately, however. He went missing for a few months.

“Where did you go?” Ruth asked him when she was seventeen years old. “Where did you run off to for all that time?”

“I was angry,” he replied. “And it’s none of your business.”

“Where’s my mother?” Ruth asked her father, back when she was nine years old and he finally came back to Fort Niles, alone. His explanation was a disaster—something about what didn’t matter and what wasn’t worth asking about and what should be forgotten. Ruth puzzled over this, and then Mr. Pommeroy drowned, and she thought—it made perfect sense—that her mother may have drowned, too. Of course. That was the answer. A few weeks after reaching this conclusion, Ruth began receiving letters from her mother, which was confusing. She thought for a time that the letters came from heaven. As she grew older, she more or less pieced the story together. Eventually, Ruth felt she understood the event completely.

Now, in Ricky’s room, which smelled of his medicines, Ruth’s mother took a bottle of lotion from the dresser and sat on the floor beside her son. She rubbed the lotion into his strange feet, massaging and stretching his toes and pressing her thumbs into his curled arches.

“How’s your father?” she asked.

Ricky shrieked and muttered.

“He’s well,” Ruth said.

“Is he taking good care of you?”

“Maybe I’m taking good care of him.”

“I used to worry about your not getting enough love.”

“I got enough.”

Ruth’s mother looked so concerned, though, that Ruth tried to think of something to reassure her, some loving incident related to her father. She said, “On my birthdays, when he gives me presents, he always says, ‘Now, don’t go using your x-ray vision on it, Ruth.’”

“X-ray vision?”

“Before I open the present, you know? When I’m looking at the box? He always says that. ‘Don’t go using your x-ray vision on it, Ruth.’

He’s pretty funny.”

Mary Smith-Ellis Thomas nodded slowly, without looking the slightest bit less concerned.

“He gives you nice birthday presents?”

“Sure.”

“That’s good.”

“On my birthdays when I was little he used to stand me up on a chair and say, ‘Do you feel any bigger today? You sure look bigger.’”

“I remember him doing that.”

“We have a real good time,” Ruth said.

“Is Angus Addams still around?”

“Oh, sure. We see Angus about every day.”

“He used to scare me. I once saw him beating

“He used to scare me. I once saw him beating a child with a buoy. Back when I was first married.”

“No kidding. A child?”

“Some poor boy who was working on his boat.”

“Oh, not a child, then. His sternman, probably. Some lazy teenager. Angus is a tough boss, that’s for sure. He can’t fish with anyone these days. He doesn’t get along with anyone.”

“I don’t think he ever thought much of me.”

“He doesn’t like to let on that he thinks much of anybody.”

“You have to understand, Ruth, that I had never met people like that. You know, it was the first winter I was on Fort Niles that Angus Addams lost his finger while he was fishing. Do you remember hearing about that? It was such cold weather, and he wasn’t wearing gloves, so his hands got frozen. And I guess he caught his finger in—what is it?”

“The winch head.”

“He caught his finger in the winch head and it got twisted in some rope and was pulled right off. The other man on the boat said Angus kicked the finger overboard and kept fishing the rest of the day.”

“The way I heard it,” Ruth said, “he cauterized his hand with the lit end of his cigar so he could keep fishing all day.”

“Oh, Ruth.”

“I don’t know if I believe it, though. I’ve never once seen Angus Addams with a cigar in his mouth that was actually lit.”

“Oh, Ruth.”

“One thing’s for sure. He’s definitely missing a finger.”

Ruth’s mother said nothing. Ruth looked down at her hands.

“Sorry,” she said. “You were trying to make a point?”

“Just that I’d never been around people who were so rough.”

Ruth thought to point out that many people found Miss Vera Ellis pretty rough, but she bit her tongue and said, “I see.”

“I’d been on the island only a year, you know, when Angus Addams came over to our house with Snoopy, his cat. He said, ‘I’m sick of this cat, Mary. If you don’t take it off my hands, I’ll shoot it right here in front of you.’ And he was carrying a gun. You know how big his voice is, how angry he always sounds? Well, I believed him, so of course I took the cat. Your father was furious; he told me to give the cat back, but Angus threatened again to shoot it in front of me. I didn’t want to see that cat get shot. Your dad said he wouldn’t do it, but I couldn’t be sure. She was a pretty cat. Do you remember Snoopy?”

“I think so.”

“Such a pretty, big white cat. Your father said Angus was playing a trick on us, his way to unload the cat. I guess it was a trick, because a few weeks later Snoopy had five kittens, and those kittens were our problem. Then I was the one who got angry, but your father and Angus thought it was a big joke. And Angus thought it was clever of him to trick me like that. He and your father teased me about it for months. Your father, you know, ended up drowning the kittens.”

“That’s too bad.”

“It was. But I think there was something wrong with those kittens, anyway.”

“Yeah,” Ruth said. “They couldn’t swim.”

“Ruth!”

“I’m just kidding. Sorry. It was a stupid joke.” Ruth hated herself. She was amazed once again at how swiftly she reached this point with her mother, this point of making a cruel joke at the expense of a woman who was so fragile. Despite her best intentions, she would, within minutes, say something that hurt her mother. In the company of her mother, Ruth could feel herself turn into a charging rhinoceros. A rhinoceros in a china shop. But why was her mother so easy to wound? Why was her mother such a china shop in the first place? Ruth wasn’t used to women like her. She was used to women like the Pommeroy sisters, who strode through life as though they were invincible. Ruth was more comfortable around tough people. Tough people made Ruth feel less like a . . . rhinoceros.

Mary rubbed her son’s legs and gently rotated each of his feet, stretching the ankle. “Oh, Ruth,” she said, “I was so hurt the day the kittens were drowned.”

“I’m sorry,” Ruth said, and she truly was. “I’m sorry.”

“Thank you, sweetheart. Do you want to help with Ricky? Will you help me rub him?”

“Sure,” Ruth said, although she could think of nothing less appealing.

“You can rub his hands. They say it’s good to keep them from getting too twisted, poor little guy.”

Ruth poured some lotion into her palm and started to rub one of Ricky’s hands. Immediately, she felt a movement in her stomach, a building wave like seasickness. Such an atrophied, lifeless little hand!

Ruth was once fishing with her father when he pulled up a trap with a molting lobster. It was not unusual, in the summertime, to find lobsters with new, soft shells only days old, but this lobster had probably molted an hour or so before. Its perfect and empty shell lay beside it in the trap, useless now, hollow armor. Ruth had held the naked lobster in her palm, and handling it had given her the same seasickness she now experienced in handling her brother. A lobster with no shell was boneless meat; when Ruth picked it up, the limp lobster hung on her hand, offering no more resistance than a wet sock. It hung there like something melting, as if it would eventually drip from her fingers. It was nothing like a normal lobster, nothing like one of those snappy fierce little tanks. And yet she could feel its life in her hand, its blood whirring in her palm. Its flesh was a bluish jelly, like a raw scallop. She had shuddered. Just by handling it, she had begun to kill it, leaving her fingerprints on its thin-skinned organs. She had flung it over the side of the boat and watched it sink, translucent. It didn’t have chance. It didn’t have a chance in the world. Something probably ate it before it even touched bottom.

“There,” said Ruth’s mother. “That’s good of you.”

“Poor little guy,” Ruth made herself say, working the lotion into her brother’s strange fingers, his wrist, his forearm. Her voice sounded strained, but her mother seemed not to notice. “Poor little guy.”

“Did you know that when your father was a little boy in the Fort Niles school, back in the forties, the teachers taught the children to tie knots? That was an important part of the curriculum on the island. And they were taught how to read tidal charts, too. In school! Can you imagine?”

“It was probably a good idea,” Ruth said. “It makes sense for island kids to know those things. Especially back then. They were going to be fishermen, right?”

“But in school, Ruth? Couldn’t they first teach the children to read and leave the knots till the afternoon?”

“I’m sure they learned to read, too.”

“That’s why we wanted to send you to private school.”

“Dad didn’t want it.”

“I meant the Ellises and I. I’m very proud of you, Ruth. I’m proud of how well you did. Eleventh in the class! And I’m proud that you learned French. Will you say something in French for me?”

Ruth laughed.

“What?” her mother asked. “What’s funny?”

“Nothing. It’s just that whenever I speak French around Angus Addams, he says, ‘What? Your what hurts?’”

“Oh, Ruth.” She sounded sad. “I’d hoped you would speak some French to me.”

“It’s not worth it, Mom. I have a stupid accent.”

“Well. Whatever you want, honey.”

They were quiet for a spell, and then Ruth’s mother said, “Your father probably wished you’d stayed on the island and learned to tie knots!”

“I’m sure that’s exactly what he wished,” Ruth said.

“And tides! I’m sure he wanted you to learn tides. I could never learn them, though I tried. Your father tried to teach me how to operate a boat. Driving the boat was easy, but somehow I was supposed to know where all the rocks and ledges were, and which ones popped up during which tides. They had practically no buoys out there, and the ones they had were always drifting off course, and your father would yell at me if I tried to navigate according to them. He didn’t trust the buoys, but how was I to know? And currents! I thought you were supposed to point the boat and pull the throttle. I didn’t know anything about currents!”

“How could you know?”

“How could I know, Ruth? I thought I knew about island life, because I’d spent my summers there, but I didn’t know a thing. I had no idea about how bad the wind gets in the winter. Did you know that some people lost their minds from it?”

“I think most people on Fort Niles did,” Ruth said and laughed.

“It doesn’t stop! My first winter there, the wind started blowing at the end of October and didn’t die down until April. I had the strangest dreams that winter, Ruth. I kept dreaming that the island was about to blow away. The trees on the island had long, long roots that reached right down to the ocean floor, and they were the only thing keeping the island from drifting away in the wind.”

“Were you scared?”

“I was terrified.”

“Wasn’t anybody nice to you?”

“Yes. Mrs. Pommeroy was nice to me.”

There was a knock at the door, and Ruth’s mother started. Ricky started, too, and began flipping his head back and forth. He screeched; it was a terrible sound, like the screech of an old car’s bad brakes.

“Shhh,” his mother said. “Shhh.”

Ruth opened the nursery door, and there stood Cal Cooley.

“Catching up?” he asked. He came in and bent his tall frame into a rocking chair. He smiled at Mary but did not look at Ricky.

“Miss Vera wants to go for a drive,” he said.

“Oh!” Mary exclaimed, and jumped to her feet. “I’ll fetch the nurse. We’ll get our coats. Ruth, go get your coat.”

“She wants to go shopping,” Cal said, still smiling, but looking at Ruth now. “She heard that Ruth arrived with no luggage.”

“And how did she hear that, Cal?” Ruth asked.

“Beats me. All I know is she wants to buy you some new clothes, Ruth.”

“I don’t need anything.”

“Told you so,” he said, with the greatest satisfaction. “I told you to bring your own clothes or Miss Vera would end up buying you new things and pissing you off.”

“Look, I don’t care,” Ruth said. “Whatever you people feel like making me do, I don’t care. I do not give a shit. Just get it over with.”

“Ruth!” exclaimed Mary, but Ruth didn’t care. The hell with all of them. Cal Cooley didn’t seem to care, either. He just shrugged.

They drove to the dress shop in the old two-tone Buick. It took Mary and Cal nearly an hour to get Miss Vera dressed and bundled up and down the stairs to the car, where she sat in the front passenger seat with her beaded purse on her lap. She had not been out of the house for several months, Mary said.

Miss Vera was so small; she was like a bird perched in the front seat. Her hands were tiny, and she trembled her thin fingers lightly across her beaded purse, as though reading Braille or praying with an endless rosary. She had lace gloves with her, which she set beside her on the seat. Whenever Cal Cooley turned a corner, she would put her left hand on the gloves, as though she were afraid they would slide away. She gasped at every turn, although Cal was driving at approximately the speed of a healthy pedestrian. Miss Vera wore a long mink coat and a hat with a black veil. Her voice was very quiet, with a slight waver. She smiled when she spoke, pronounced her words with a trace of a British accent, and delivered her every line wistfully.

“Oh, to go on a drive . . .” she said.

“Yes,” agreed Ruth’s mother.

“Do you know how to drive, Ruth?”

“I do,” said Ruth.

“Oh, how clever of you. I was never proficient, myself. I would always collide . . .” The memory set Miss Vera to tittering. She put her hand to her mouth, as shy girls do. Ruth had not remembered Miss Vera to be a giggler. It must have come with age, a late affectation. Ruth looked at the old woman and thought about how, back on Fort Niles Island, Miss Vera made the local men working on her yard drink from the garden hose. She wouldn’t allow them into the kitchen for a glass of water. Not on the hottest day. That practice of hers was so hated that it gave rise to an expression on the island: Drinking out of the hose. It indicated the lowest depth of insult. My wife got the house and the kids, too. That bitch really left me drinking out of the hose.

Cal Cooley, at a fourway intersection, paused at a stop sign and let another car pass through. Then, as he started to move, Miss Vera cried, “Wait!”

Cal stopped. There were no other cars in sight. He started up again.

“Wait!” repeated Miss Vera.

“We have the right of way,” Cal said. “It’s our turn to go.”

“I think it more prudent to wait. Other cars may be coming.”

Cal shifted into park and waited at the stop sign. No other cars appeared. For several minutes they sat in silence. Eventually a station wagon pulled up behind the Buick and the driver honked one short burst. Cal said nothing. Mary said nothing. Miss Vera said nothing. Ruth sank down into her seat and thought how full the world was of assholes. The station wagon driver honked again, twice, and Miss Vera said, “So rude.”

Cal rolled down his window and waved the station wagon by. It passed. They sat in the Buick at the stop sign. Another car pulled up behind them, and Cal waved it past, too. A red, rusted pickup truck passed them from the other direction. Then, as before, there were no cars to be seen.

Miss Vera clenched her gloves in her left hand and said, “Go!”

Cal drove slowly through the intersection and continued to the highway. Miss Vera giggled again. “An exploit!” she said.

They drove into the center of Concord, and Mary directed Cal Cooley to park in front of a ladies’ dress shop. The name, Blaire’s, was painted in gold on the window in elegant cursive.

“I won’t go in,” Miss Vera said. “It is too much effort. But tell Mr. Blaire to come here. I shall tell him what we need.”

Mary went into the shop and soon reappeared with a young man. She looked apprehensive. The young man walked to the passenger side of the car and tapped on the window. Miss Vera frowned. He grinned and gestured for her to roll down her window. Ruth’s mother stood behind him in a posture of overriding anxiety.

“Who the devil?” Miss Vera said.

“Maybe you should roll down your window and see what he wants,” Cal suggested.

“I’ll do no such thing!” She glared at the young man. His face shone in the morning sun, and he smiled at her, again making the window-rolling gesture. Ruth slid over in the back seat and rolled down her window.

“Ruth!” Miss Vera exclaimed.

“Can I help you?” Ruth asked the man.

“I’m Mr. Blaire,” the young man said. He reached his hand through the window to shake Ruth’s.

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Blaire,” she said. “I’m Ruth Thomas.”

“He is not!” Miss Vera declared. She spun in her seat with a sudden and shocking agility and glared fiercely at the young man. “You are not Mr. Blaire. Mr. Blaire has a silver mustache!”

“That’s my father, ma’am. He’s retired, and I run the store.”

“Tell your father that Miss Vera Ellis wishes to speak to him.”

“I’d be happy to tell him, ma’am, but he’s not here. My father lives in Miami, ma’am.”

“Mary!”

Ruth’s mother rushed over to the Buick and stuck her head in Ruth’s window.

“Mary! When did this happen?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about it.”

“I don’t need any clothes,” Ruth said. “I don’t need anything. Let’s go home.”

“When did your father retire?” Ruth’s mother asked the young Mr. Blaire. She was pale.

“Seven years ago, ma’am.”

“Impossible! He would have informed me!” Miss Vera said.

“Can we go someplace else?” Ruth asked. “Isn’t there another shop in Concord?”

“There is no shop in Concord but Blaire’s,” Miss Vera said.

“Well, we’re happy to hear that you think so,” said Mr. Blaire. “And I’m sure we can help you, ma’am.”

Miss Vera did not reply.

“My father taught me everything he knew, ma’am. All his customers are now my customers. As satisfied as ever!”

“Take your head out of my car.”

“Ma’am?”

“Remove your damn head from my car.”

Ruth started laughing. The young man pulled his head from the Buick and walked stiffly and quickly back into his shop. Mary followed, trying to touch his arm, trying to mollify him, but he shook her off.

“Young lady, this is not amusing.” Miss Vera turned again in her seat and leveled an evil glare at Ruth.

“Sorry.”

“Imagine!”

“Shall we head back home, Miss Vera?” Cal asked.

“We shall wait for Mary!” she snapped.

“Naturally. That’s what I meant.”

“That is not, however, what you said.”

“Pardon me.”

“Oh, the nitwits!” Miss Vera exclaimed. “Everywhere!”

Mary came back and sat silently beside her daughter. Cal pulled away from the curb, and Miss Vera said, with exasperation, “Careful! Careful, careful, careful.”

Nobody spoke on the drive home until they pulled up to the house. There, Miss Vera turned and smiled yellowly at Ruth. She giggled once again. She had composed herself. “We have a nice time, your mother and I,” she said. “After all those years of living with men, we are at last alone together. We don’t have husbands to tend to or brothers or fathers looking over us. Two independent ladies, and we do as we choose. Isn’t that right, Mary?”

“Yes.”

“I missed your mother when she ran off and married your father, Ruth. Did you know that?”

Ruth said nothing. Her mother looked at her nervously and said, in a low voice, “I’m sure Ruth knows that.”

“I remember her walking out of the house after she told me she was marrying a fisherman. I watched her walk away. I was upstairs in my bedroom. You know that room, Ruth? How it looks out over the front walk? Oh, my little Mary looked so small and brave. Oh, Mary. Your little shoulders were so square, as if to say, I can do anything! You dear girl, Mary. You poor, dear, sweet girl. You were so brave.”

Mary closed her eyes. Ruth felt an appalling, bilious anger rising in her throat.

“Yes, I watched your mother walk away, Ruth, and it made me cry. I sat in my room and shed tears. My brother came in and put his arm around me. You know how kind my brother Lanford is. Yes?”

Ruth could not speak. Her jaw was clenched so fiercely, she could not imagine releasing it to issue a single word. Certainly not a civil word. She might have let out a greased string of curses. She might have been able to do that for this wicked bitch.

“And my wonderful brother said to me, ‘Vera, everything will be fine.’ Do you know what I replied? I said, ‘Now I know how poor Mrs. Lindbergh felt!’”

They sat in silence for what seemed a year, letting that sentence hang over them. Ruth’s mind roiled. Could she hit this woman? Could she step out of this ancient car and walk back to Fort Niles?

“But now she is with me, where she belongs,” Miss Vera said. “And we do as we please. No husbands to tell us what to do. No children to look after. Except Ricky, of course. Poor Ricky. But he doesn’t ask much, heaven knows. Your mother and I are independent women, Ruth, and we have a good time together. We enjoy our independence, Ruth. We like it very much.”

Ruth stayed with her mother for a week. She wore the same clothes every day, and no one said another word about it. There were no more shopping trips. She slept in her clothes and put them on again every morning after her bath. She did not complain.

What did she care?

This was her survival strategy: Fuck it.

Fuck all of it. Whatever they asked of her, she would do. Whatever outrageous act of exploitation she saw Miss Vera commit against her mother, she would ignore. Ruth was doing time in Concord. Getting it over with. Trying to stay sane. Because if she’d reacted to everything that galled her, she’d have been in a constant state of disgust and rage, which would have made her mother more nervous and Miss Vera more predatory and Cal Cooley more smug. So she sat on it. Fuck it.

Every night before she went to bed she kissed her mother on the cheek. Miss Vera would ask coyly, “Where’s my kiss?” and Ruth would cross the room on steel legs, bend, and kiss that lavender cheek. She did this for her mother’s sake. She did this because it was less trouble than throwing an ashtray across the room. She could see the relief it brought her mother. Good. Whatever she could do to help, fine. Fuck it.

“Where’s my kiss?” Cal would ask every night.

And every night Ruth would mutter something like “Goodnight, Cal. Try to remember not to murder us in our sleep.”

And Miss Vera would say, “Such hateful words for a child your age.”

Yeah, Ruth thought. Yeah, whatever. She knew she should keep her mouth shut entirely, but she enjoyed getting a stab or two into Cal Cooley now and again. Made her feel like herself. Familiar, somehow. Comforting. She would carry the satisfaction to bed with her and curl up against it, as if it were a teddy bear. Her nightly poke at Cal would help Ruth Thomas go to sleep without stewing for hours over the eternal, nagging question: What fate had shoved her into the lives of the Ellis family? And why?

7

In every batch of segmenting lobster eggs, one is sure to meet with irregular forms, and in some cases, the greater number appear to be abnormal.

—The American Lobster: A Study of Its Habits and Development

Francis Hobart Herrick, Ph.D.

1895

AT THE END of the week, Cal Cooley and Ruth drove back to Rockland, Maine. It rained the whole time. She sat in the front seat of the Buick with Cal, and he did not shut up. He teased her about her one set of clothes and about the shopping trip to Blaire’s, and he did grotesque imitations of her mother’s servile attendance on Miss Vera.

“Shut up, Cal,” Ruth said.

“Oh, Miss Vera, shall I wash your hair now? Oh, Miss Vera, shall I file your corns now? Oh, Miss Vera, shall I wipe your butt now?”

“Leave my mother alone,” Ruth said. “She does what she has to do.”

“Oh, Miss Vera, shall I lie down in traffic now?”

“You’re worse, Cal. You kiss more Ellis ass than anyone. You play that old man for every penny, and you suck up like crazy to Miss Vera.”

“Oh, I don’t think so, sweetheart. I think your mother wins the prize.”

“Up yours, Cal.”

“So articulate, Ruth!”

“Up yours, you sycophant.”

Cal burst out laughing. “That’s better! Let’s eat.”

Ruth’s mother had sent them off with a basket of bread and cheese and chocolates, and Ruth now opened it. The cheese was a small wheel, soft and wax-covered, and when Ruth cut into it, it released a deadly odor, like something rotting at the bottom of a damp hole. Specifically, it smelled like vomit at the bottom of that hole.

“Jesus fuck!” Cal shouted.

“Oh, my God!” Ruth said, and she stuffed the cheese back into the basket, slamming down the wicker cover. She pulled the top of her sweatshirt up over her nose. Two useless measures.

“Throw it out!” Cal shouted. “Get that out of here.”

Ruth opened the basket, rolled down the window, and flung out the cheese. It bounced and spun on the highway behind them. She hung her head out of the window, taking deep breaths.

“What was that?” Cal demanded. “What was that?”

“My mom said it was sheep’s milk cheese,” Ruth said, when she caught her breath. “It’s homemade. Somebody gave it to Miss Vera for Christmas.”

“To murder her!”

“Apparently it’s a delicacy.”

“A delicacy? She said it was a delicacy?”

“Leave her alone.”

“She wanted us to eat that?”

“It was a gift. She didn’t know.”

“Now I know where the expression ‘cut the cheese’ comes from.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

“I never knew why they said that before, but now I know,” Cal said. “Cut the cheese. Never thought about it.”

Ruth said, “That’s enough, Cal. Do me a favor and don’t talk to me for the rest of the trip.”

After a long silence, Cal Cooley said thoughtfully, “Where does the expression ‘blow a fart’ come from, I wonder?”

Ruth said, “Leave me alone, Cal. Please, for the love of God, just leave me alone.”

When they arrived at the dock in Rockland, Pastor Wishnell and his nephew were already there. Ruth could see the New Hope, sitting on flat gray sea speckled with rain. There were no greetings.

Pastor Wishnell said, “Drive me to the store, Cal. I need oil, groceries, and stationery.”

“Sure,” Cal said. “No problem.”

“Stay here,” Pastor Wishnell said to Owney, and Cal, imitating the pastor’s inflection, pointed at Ruth and said, “Stay here.”

The two men drove off, leaving Ruth and Owney on the dock, in the rain. Just like that. The young man was wearing a brand-new yellow slicker, a yellow rain hat, and yellow boots. He stood still and broad, looking out to sea, his big hands clasped behind his back. Ruth liked the size of him. His body was dense and full of gravity. She liked his blond eyelashes.

“Did you have a good week?” Ruth asked Owney Wishnell.

He nodded.

“What did you do?”

He sighed. He grimaced, as if he were trying hard to think. “Not much,” he finally said. His voice was low and quiet.

“Oh,” Ruth said. “I went to see my mother in Concord, New Hampshire.”

Owney nodded, frowned, and took a deep breath. He seemed about to say something, but, instead, he clasped his hands behind his back again and was silent, his face blank. He’s incredibly shy, Ruth thought. She found it charming. So big and so shy!

“To tell you the truth,” Ruth said, “it makes me sad to see her. I don’t like it on the mainland; I want to get back to Fort Niles. What about you? Would you rather be out there? Or here?”

Owney Wishnell’s face turned pink, bright cherry, pink again, then back to normal. Ruth, fascinated, watched this extraordinary display and asked, “Am I bothering you?”

“No.” He colored again.

“My mother always presses me to get away from Fort Niles. Not really presses, but she made me go to school in Delaware, and now she wants me to move to Concord. Or go to college. But I like it out there.” Ruth pointed at the ocean. “I don’t want to live with the Ellis family. I want them to leave me alone.” She didn’t understand why she was rambling on to this huge, quiet, shy young man in the clean yellow slicker; it occurred to her that she sounded like a child or a fool. But when she looked at Owney, she saw that he was listening. He wasn’t looking at her as if she were a child or a fool. “You’re sure I’m not bothering you?”

Owney Wishnell coughed into his fist and stared at Ruth, his pale blue eyes flickering with his effort. “Um,” he said and coughed again. “Ruth.”

“Yes?” It thrilled her to hear him say her name. She hadn’t known that he was aware of it. “Yes, Owney?”

“Do you want to see something?” he asked. He blurted out this line as if it were a confession. He said it most urgently, as if he were about to reveal a cache of stolen money.

“Oh, yes,” Ruth said, “I’d love to.”

He looked uncertain, strained.

“Show me,” Ruth said. “Show me something. Sure. Show me whatever you want to show me.”

“Have to hurry,” Owney said, and he snapped alive. He rushed to the end of the dock, and Ruth rushed after him. He hustled down the ladder and into a rowboat, untied it in a flash, and gestured for Ruth to follow. He was already rowing, it seemed, as she tumbled into the boat. He pulled at the oars with beautiful, solid strokes—swish, swish, swish—and the boat shimmied across the waves.

He rowed past the New Hope, past all the other boats docked in the harbor, never easing his pace. His knuckles on the oars were white, and his mouth was a tight, concentrated line. Ruth held on to both sides of the boat, once again amazed at his strength. This was not at all what she’d expected to be doing about thirty seconds ago, when she was standing on the dock. Owney rowed until they were out of the protected cove, and the waves had become swells that bounced and rocked against the little rowboat. They reached a huge granite rock—a small granite island, really—and he steered the boat behind it. They were completely out of sight of the shore. Waves lapped at the rock.

Owney stared ahead at the ocean, frowning and breathing heavily. He rowed away from the island, into the sea about forty feet, and stopped. He stood up in the rowboat and peered into the water, then sat down and rowed another ten feet, and peered into the water again. Ruth leaned over but saw nothing.

Owney Wishnell reached to the bottom of the rowboat for a fishing gaff, a long stick with a hook at one end. Slowly, he dipped it in the water and started to pull, and Ruth saw that he’d snagged the gaff on a buoy, like the ones lobstermen used for marking where they’d set traps. But this buoy was plain white, with none of the lobstermen’s bright identifying colors. And instead of bobbing on the surface, the buoy was on a short line, which kept it hidden several feet below. Nobody could have found it without knowing exactly, precisely, where to look.

Owney threw the buoy into the boat and then, hand over hand, pulled the line it was attached to until he reached the end. And there was a handmade wooden lobster trap. He heaved it aboard; it was packed with huge, snapping lobsters.

“Whose trap is that?” Ruth asked.

“Mine!” Owney said.

He flicked open the trap door and pulled out the lobsters, one by one, holding up each for Ruth to see and then tossing it into the water.

“Hey!” she said after the third one. “Don’t throw them back! They’re good!”

He threw them back, every one. The lobsters were indeed good. They were enormous. They were packed in that trap like fish in a deep-sea net. They were, however, behaving oddly. When Owney touched them, they didn’t snap or fight. They lay still in his hand. Ruth had never seen anything like these obedient lobsters. And she’d never seen anything close to this many in a single trap.

“Why are there so many? Why don’t they fight you?” she asked.

“Because they don’t,” he said. He tossed another one in the ocean.

“Why don’t you keep them?” Ruth said.

“Can’t!” Owney cried.

“When did you set the trap?”

“Last week.”

“Why do you keep the buoy under water, where you can’t see it?”

“Hiding it.”

“From who?”

“Everyone.”

“How did you find the trap, then?”

“I just knew where it was,” he said. “I know where they are.”

“ ‘They’?”

He threw the last of the lobsters into the sea and tossed the trap over the side with a mighty splash. As he wiped his hands on his overalls, he said, with tragic urgency, “I know where the lobsters are.”

“You know where the lobsters are.”

“Yes.”

“You really are a Wishnell,” she said. “Aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Where are your other traps, Owney?”

“Everywhere.”

“Everywhere?”

“All over the coast of Maine?”

“Yes.”

“Your uncle knows?”

“No!” He looked aghast, horrified.

“Who built the traps?”

“Me.”

“When?”

“At night.”

“You do all this behind your uncle’s back.”

“Yes.”

“Because he’d kill you, right?”

No answer.

“Why do you throw them back, Owney?”

He put his hands over his face, then let them drop. He looked as if he was about to cry. He could only shake his head.

“Oh, Owney.”

“I know.”

“This is crazy.”

“I know.”

“You could be rich! My God, if you had a boat and some gear, you could be rich!”

“I can’t.”

“Because somebody—”

“My uncle.”

“—would find out.”

“Yes.”

“He wants you to be a minister or something pathetic like that, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s a big fucking waste, isn’t it?”

“I don’t want to be a minister.”

“I don’t blame you, Owney. I don’t want to be a minister, either. Who else knows about this?”

“We have to go,” Owney said. He grabbed the oars and spun the boat around, his broad, straight back toward the shore, and started to pull through the water in his beautiful long strokes, like a gorgeous machine.

“Who else knows, Owney?”

He stopped rowing and looked at her. “You.”

She looked right back at him, right at his big, square blond head, at his blue Swedish eyes.

“You,” he repeated. “Only you.”

8

As the lobster increases in size, it grows bolder and retires farther from shore, although it never really loses its instinct for digging, and never abandons the habit of concealing itself under stones when the necessity arises.

—The American Lobster: A Study of Its Habits and Development

Francis Hobart Herrick, Ph.D.

1895

GEORGES BANK, at the end of the Ice Age, was a forest, lush and thick and primeval. It had rivers, mountains, mammals. Then it was covered by the sea and became some of the finest fishing ground on earth. The transformation took millions of years, but it didn’t take the Europeans long to find the place once they reached the New World, and they fished the hell out of it.

The big boats sailed out with nets and lines for every kind of fish— redfish, herring, cod, mackerel, whales of many varieties, squid, tuna, swordfish, dogfish—and there were draggers, too, for scallops. By the end of the nineteenth century, the bank had became an international city afloat; German, Russian, American, Canadian, French, and Portuguese boats all pulled up tons of fish. Each boat had men aboard to shovel the flopping fish into the holds as thoughtlessly as men shovel coal. Each vessel stayed out there for a week, even two weeks at a stretch. At night, the lights from the hundreds of ships shone on the water like the lights of a small city.

The boats and ships out there, stuck in the open sea, a day from any shore, were sitting targets for bad weather. The storms came up fast and mean and could wipe out a whole fleet, devastating the community it came from. A village might send a few fishing boats out on a routine trip to Georges Bank and a few days later find itself a village of widows and orphans. The newspapers listed the dead men and their surviving dependents, too. This was perhaps the crux of the tragedy. It was imperative to count who was left, to estimate how many souls remained on shore without fathers, brothers, husbands, sons, uncles to support them. What was to become of them?

46 DEAD, the headline would read. 197 DEPENDENTS LEFT BEHIND.

That was the truly sad number. That was the number everyone needed to know.

Lobster fishing is not like this, though, and never was. It is dangerous enough, but it isn’t as deadly as deep-sea fishing. Not by a long shot. Lobster towns don’t lose men in battalions. Lobstermen fish alone, are rarely out of sight of shore, are generally home by early afternoon to eat pie and drink beer and sleep with their boots on the couch. Widows and orphans are not created in crowds. There are no unions of widows, no clutches of widows. Widows in lobster-fishing communities appear one at a time, through random accidents and freak drownings and strange fogs and storms that come and go without doing other havoc.

Such was the case of Mrs. Pommeroy, who, in 1976, was the only widow in Fort Niles; that is, the only fisherman’s widow. She was the only woman who had lost her man to the sea. What did this status afford her? Very little. The fact that her husband had been a drunk who fell overboard on a calm sunny day lessened the catastrophic dimensions of the event, and as the years went by her tragedy was by and large forgotten. Mrs. Pommeroy was something of a calm sunny day herself, and she was so lovely that people had difficulty remembering to pity her.

Besides, she had managed well without a husband to support her. She had survived without Ira Pommeroy, and did not show the world any signs of suffering from her loss. She had her big house, which had been built and paid for long before she was born and was constructed so solidly that it required little upkeep. Not that anyone cared about upkeep. She had her garden. She had her sisters, who were irritating but devoted. She had Ruth Thomas for daughterly companionship. She had her sons, who, though pretty much a pack of deadbeats, were no worse deadbeats than anyone else’s sons, and they did contribute to their mother’s support.

The Pommeroy boys who stayed on the island had small incomes, of course, because they could work only as sternmen on other people’s boats. The incomes were small because the Pommeroy boats and Pommeroy territory and Pommeroy fishing gear had all been lost at the death of their father. The other men on the island had bought everything up for a pittance, and it could never be recovered. Because of this, and because of their natural laziness, the Pommeroy boys had no future on Fort Niles. They couldn’t, once they were grown men, start to assemble a fishing business. They grew up knowing this, so it came as no surprise that a few of them had left the island for good. And why not? They had no future at home.

Fagan, the middle child, was the only Pommeroy son with ambitions. He was the only one with a goal in life, and he pursued it successfully. He was working on a squalid little potato farm in a remote, landlocked county of northern Maine. He had always wanted to get away from the ocean, and that’s what he had done. He had always wanted to be a farmer. No seagulls, no wind. He sent money home to his mother. He called her every few weeks to tell her how the potato crop was doing. He said he hoped to be the foreman of the farm someday. He bored her senseless, but she was proud of him for having a job, and she was happy to get the money he sent.

Conway and John and Chester Pommeroy had joined the military, and Conway (a Navy man all the way, as he liked to say, as though he were an admiral) was lucky enough to have caught the last year or so of action in the Vietnam War. He was a sailor on a river patrol boat in a nasty area of contention. He had two tours of duty in Vietnam. He passed the first without injury, though he sent boastful and crude letters to his mother explaining in explicit detail how many of his buddies had bought it and exactly what stupid mistakes those idiots had made that caused them to buy it. He also described for his mother what his buddies’ bodies looked like after they’d bought it, and assured her that he would never buy it because he was too smart for that shit.

In 1972, Conway, on his second tour of duty, nearly bought it himself, with a bullet near the spine, but he got fixed up after six months in an Army hospital. He married the widow of one of his idiot buddies who really did buy it back on the river patrol boat, and he moved to Connecticut. He used a walking stick to get around. He collected disability. Conway was fine. Conway was not a drain on his widowed mother.

John and Chester had joined the Army. John was sent to Germany, where he stayed on after his Army service was over. What a Pommeroy boy could do with himself in a European country was beyond the imagination of Ruth Thomas, but nobody heard from John, so everyone assumed he was fine. Chester did his time in the Army, moved to California, indulged in a lot of drugs, and took up with some weirdoes who considered themselves fortunetellers. They called themselves the Gypsy Bandoleer Bandits.

The Gypsy Bandoleer Bandits traveled around in an old school bus, making money by reading palms and tarot cards, though Ruth heard they really made their money by selling marijuana. Ruth was pretty interested in that part of the story. She’d never tried marijuana herself, but was interested in it. Chester came back to visit the island once— without his Gypsy Bandit brothers—when Ruth Thomas was home from school, and he tried to give her some of his famous spiritual advice. This was back in 1974. He was wasted.

“What kind of advice do you want?” Chester asked. “I can give you all kinds.” He ticked off the different kinds on his fingers. “I can give you advice about your job, advice about your love life, advice about what to do, special advice, or regular advice.”

“Do you have any pot?” Ruth asked.

“Oh, yeah.”

“Can I try it? I mean, do you sell it to people? I have money. I could buy some.”

“I know a card trick.”

“I don’t think so, Chester.”

“Yes, I do know a card trick.” He shoved a pack of cards in Ruth’s face and slurred, “Pig a card.”

She wouldn’t pick one.

“Pig a card!” shouted Chester Pommeroy, the Gypsy Bandoleer Bandit.

“Why should I?”

“Pig a fuggin’ card! Come on! I already planted the fuggin’ card, and I know it’s the three of hearts, so pig the fuggin’ card, will ya?”

She wouldn’t. He threw the deck at the wall.

She asked, “Can I please try some pot now?”

He scowled and waved her out of his face. He kicked a table and called her a stupid bitch. He had really turned into a freak, Ruth decided, so she stayed out of his way the rest of the week. That all happened when Ruth was sixteen, and it was the last time she saw Chester Pommeroy. She heard he had a bunch of children but wasn’t married to anybody. She never did get any of his marijuana.

With four of the Pommeroy boys off the island for good, that left three living at home. Webster Pommeroy, who was the oldest and smartest, was small, stunted, depressed, shy, and gifted only at plowing through the mudflats for artifacts for Senator Simon Addams’s future Museum of Natural History. Webster brought no income to his mother, but he didn’t cost much. He still wore the clothes of his childhood and barely ate a thing. Mrs. Pommeroy loved him the most and worried about him the most, and didn’t care that he made no contribution to the family, as long as he wasn’t spending day after day on the couch with a pillow over his head, sighing mournfully.

At the other end was the wellknown idiot Robin Pommeroy, the youngest. At seventeen, he was married to Opal from town and father of the enormous baby Eddie. Robin worked as a sternman on Ruth’s father’s boat. Ruth’s father more or less hated Robin Pommeroy because the kid would not shut up all day. Since overcoming his speech defect, Robin had become a ceaseless motor mouth. And he wouldn’t talk just to Ruth’s father, who was the only one there. He would talk to himself, too, as well as the lobsters. He’d get on the radio during breaks and talk to all the other lobster boats. Whenever he saw another lobster boat cruising nearby, he’d grab the radio and say to the approaching skipper, “Don’t you look pretty, coming along?” Then he’d turn off the microphone and wait for a reply, which was usually along the lines of “Stuff it, kid.” Sadly, he’d ask Ruth’s father, “How come nobody ever tells us we look pretty coming along?”

Robin was always dropping things off the boat accidentally. He’d somehow let the gaff slide out of his hands, and then he’d run down the length of the boat to catch it. Too late. This didn’t happen every day; it happened almost every day. It was a real annoyance to Ruth’s father, who’d back the boat and try to catch up with the tool. Ruth’s father had taken to keeping spares of all his tools, just in case. Ruth suggested that he attach a small buoy to each tool so that at least it would float. She called this “Robin-proofing.”

Robin was tiresome, but Ruth’s father tolerated the kid because he was cheap, cheap, cheap. Robin accepted much less money than any other sternman. He had to accept less money, because nobody wanted to work with him. He was dumb and lazy, but he was strong enough to do the job, and Ruth’s father was saving a lot of money off Robin Pommeroy. He tolerated the kid because of the bottom line.

That left Timothy. Always the quietest, Timothy Pommeroy was never a bad child, and he grew up to be a pretty decent guy. He didn’t bother anybody. He looked like his father, with the heavy doorknob fists and the tight muscles and the black hair and squinty eyes. He worked on the boat of Len Thomas, Ruth Thomas’s uncle, and he was a good worker. Len Thomas was a windbag and a hothead, but Timothy quietly pulled up traps, counted lobsters, filled bait bags, and stood in the stern while the boat was moving, facing away from Len and keeping his thoughts to himself. It was a good arrangement for Len, who usually had trouble finding sternmen who’d put up with his legendary temper. He once came at a sternman with a wrench and knocked the kid out for the whole afternoon. But Timothy did not provoke Len’s anger. He made a pretty respectable living, Timothy did.

He gave it all to his mother except the portion he used to buy his whiskey, which he drank, all by himself, every night, in his bedroom, with the door firmly closed.

All of which is to say that Mrs. Pommeroy’s many sons did not turn out to be a financial burden on her and, indeed, were kind enough to pass along some money. Everything considered, they’d turned out fine, except for Webster. Mrs. Pommeroy subsidized the money her sons passed her way by cutting hair.

She was good at cutting hair. She had a gift. She curled and colored the hair of women and seemed to have a natural instinct for shape, but she specialized, as it were, in men’s hair. She cut the hair of men who had previously had only three kinds of haircuts in their lives: haircuts from their mothers, haircuts from the Army, haircuts from their wives. These were men who had no interest in style, but they let Mrs. Pommeroy do frivolous things with their hair. They sat under her hand with pure vanity, enjoying the attention as much as any starlet.

The fact was, she could make a man look wonderful. Mrs. Pommeroy magically hid baldness, encouraged beards for the weak-chinned, thinned the wild brush of uncontrollable curls, and tamed the most headstrong cowlicks. She flattered and joked with each man, nudging him and teasing him as she worked his hair, and the flirtation immediately made the guy more attractive, brought color to the cheek and a shine to the eye. She could almost rescue men from true ugliness. She could even make Senator Simon and Angus Addams look respectable. When she was through with an old crank like Angus, even he would be blushing right up the back of his neck from the pleasure of her company. When she was through with a naturally good-looking man like Ruth’s father, he would be embarrassingly handsome, movie-matinee-idol handsome.

“Go hide,” she’d tell him. “Get on out of here, Stan. If you start walking around town looking like that, it’s your own fault if you get raped.”

Surprisingly, the ladies of Fort Niles didn’t mind letting Mrs. Pommeroy groom their husbands. Perhaps it was because the results were so nice. Perhaps it was because they wanted to help a widow, and this was the easy way to do it. Perhaps the women felt guilty around Mrs. Pommeroy for even having husbands, for having men who had thus far managed to avoid getting drunk and falling overboard. Or perhaps the women had come to loathe their husbands so much over the years that the thought of personally dragging their own fingers through the dirty hair of those stinking, greasy, shiftless fishermen was sickening. They’d just as soon let Mrs. Pommeroy do it, since she seemed to like it so much, and since it put their men in a good goddamn mood, for once.

So it was that when Ruth returned from visiting her mother in Concord, she went right to Mrs. Pommeroy’s house, and found her cutting the hair of the entire Russ Cobb family. Mrs. Pommeroy had all the Cobbs there: Mr. Russ Cobb, his wife, Ivy, and their youngest daughter, Florida, who was forty years old and still living with her parents.

They were a miserable family. Russ Cobb was almost eighty, but he still went out fishing every day. He’d always said he would fish as long as he could throw his leg over the boat. The previous winter, he’d lost half his right leg at the knee, amputated because of his diabetes, or “sugars,” as he called it, but he still went fishing every day, throwing what remained of that leg over the boat. His wife, Ivy, was a disappointed-looking woman who painted holly sprigs, candles, and Santa Claus faces on sand dollars and tried to sell them to her neighbors as Christmas ornaments. The Cobbs’ daughter, Florida, never said a word. She was devastatingly silent.

Mrs. Pommeroy had already set Ivy Cobb’s frothy white hair in curlers and was tending to Russ Cobb’s sideburns when Ruth came in.

“So thick!” Mrs. Pommeroy was telling Mr. Cobb. “Your hair is so thick, you look like Rock Hudson!”

“Cary Grant!” he bellowed.

“Cary Grant!” Mrs. Pommeroy laughed. “OK! You look like Cary Grant!”

Mrs. Cobb rolled her eyes. Ruth walked across the kitchen and kissed Mrs. Pommeroy on the cheek. Mrs. Pommeroy took her hand, held it for a long moment. “Welcome home, sweetheart.”

“Thank you.” Ruth felt she was home.

“Did you have a good time?”

“I had the worst week of my life.” Ruth meant to say this in a sarcastic, joking manner, but it accidentally came out of her mouth as the unadorned truth.

“There’s pie.”

“Thank you very much.”

“Did you see your father?”

“Not yet.”

“I’ll be done here in a bit,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “You take a seat, sweetheart.”

So Ruth took herself a seat, next to silent Florida Cobb, on a chair that had been painted that dreadful trap-buoy green. The kitchen table and the corner cupboard had also been painted that frightening green, so the whole kitchen matched terribly. Ruth watched Mrs. Pommeroy perform her usual magic on ugly Mr. Cobb. Her hands were constantly at work in his hair. Even when she wasn’t cutting, she was stroking his head, fingering his hair, patting him, tugging at his ears. He leaned his head back into her hands like a cat rubbing against a favorite person’s leg.

“Look how nice,” she murmured, like an encouraging lover. “Look how nice you look.”

She trimmed his sideburns and shaved his neck in arcs through foamy suds and wiped him down with a towel. She pressed her body against his back. She was as affectionate with Mr. Cobb as if he were the last person she would ever touch, as if his ugly skull was to be her final human contact on this earth. Mrs. Cobb, in her steel gray curlers, sat watching, her gray hands in her lap, her steel eyes on her husband’s ruined face.

“How are things, Mrs. Cobb?” Ruth asked.

“We got goddamn raccoons all over our goddamn yard,” Mrs. Cobb said, demonstrating her remarkable trick of talking without moving her lips. When Ruth was a child, she used to lure Mrs. Cobb into conversation only to watch this trick. In truth, at the age of eighteen Ruth was luring her into conversation for the same reason.

“Sorry to hear that. Did you ever have trouble with raccoons before?”

“Never had them at all.”

Ruth stared at the woman’s mouth. It honestly didn’t budge. Incredible. “Is that right?” she asked.

“I’d like to shoot one.”

“Wasn’t a raccoon on this island until 1958,” Russ Cobb said. “Had them on Courne Haven, but not here.”

“Really? What happened? How did they get here?” Ruth asked, knowing exactly what he was about to say.

“They brought ’em over here.”

“Who did?”

“Courne Haven people! Threw some pregnant raccoons in a sack. Rowed ’em over. Middle of the night. Dumped ’em on our beach. Your great-uncle David Thomas saw it. Walking home from his girl’s house. Seen strangers on the beach. Seen ’em letting something out of a bag. Seen ’em row away. Few weeks later, raccoons everywhere. All over the goddamn place. Eating people’s chickens. Garbage. Everything.”

Of course, the story Ruth had heard from family members was that it was Johnny Pommeroy who had seen the strangers on the beach, right before he went off to get killed in Korea in 1954, but she let it slide.

“I had a pet baby raccoon when I was a little girl,” Mrs. Pommeroy said, smiling at the memory. “That raccoon bit my arm, come to think of it, and my father killed him. I think it was a him. I always called it a him, anyway.”

“When was that, Mrs. Pommeroy?” Ruth asked. “How long ago?”

Mrs. Pommeroy frowned and rubbed her thumbs deep into Mr. Cobb’s neck. He groaned, so happy. She said innocently, “Oh, I guess that was the early 1940s, Ruth. Goodness, I’m so old. The 1940s! Such a long time ago.”

“Wasn’t a raccoon, then,” Mr. Cobb said. “Couldn’t have been.”

“Oh, it was a little raccoon, all right. He had a striped tail and the cutest little mask. I called him Masky!”

“Wasn’t a raccoon. Couldn’t have been. Wasn’t a raccoon on this island until 1958,” Mr. Cobb said. “Courne Haven folks brought ’em over in 1958.”

“Well, this was a baby raccoon,” Mrs. Pommeroy said, by way of explanation.

“Probably a skunk.”

“I’d like to shoot a raccoon!” Mrs. Cobb said with such force that her mouth actually moved, and her silent daughter, Florida, actually started.

“My father sure shot Masky,” Mrs. Pommeroy said.

She toweled off Mr. Cobb’s hair and brushed the back of his neck with a tiny pastry brush. She patted talcum powder under his frayed shirt collar and rubbed oily tonic into his wiry hair, shaping it into an excessively curved pompadour.

“Look at you!” she said, and gave him an antique silver hand mirror. “You look like a country music star. What do you think, Ivy? Isn’t he a handsome devil?”

“Silly,” said Ivy Cobb, but her husband beamed, his cheeks shiny as his pompadour. Mrs. Pommeroy took the sheet off him, gathering it up carefully so as not to spill his hair all over her glaring green kitchen, and Mr. Cobb stood up, still admiring himself in the antique mirror. He turned his head slowly from side to side and smiled at himself, grinning like a handsome devil.

“What do you think of your father, Florida?” Mrs. Pommeroy asked. “Doesn’t he look fine?”

Florida Cobb blushed deeply.

“She won’t say nothing,” Mr. Cobb said, suddenly disgusted. He plunked the hand mirror down on the kitchen table and dug some money out of his pocket. “Never says a goddamn word. Wouldn’t say shit if she had a mouthful of it.”

Ruth laughed and decided to get herself a piece of pie after all.

“I’ll take those curlers out for you now, Ivy,” Mrs. Pommeroy said.

Later, after the Cobbs had gone, Mrs. Pommeroy and Ruth sat on the front porch. There was an old couch out there, upholstered in big bleeding roses, that smelled as if it had been rained on, or worse. Ruth drank beer and Mrs. Pommeroy drank fruit punch, and Ruth told Mrs. Pommeroy about visiting her mother.

“How’s Ricky?” Mrs. Pommeroy asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. He’s just, you know . . . He flops around.”

“That was the saddest thing, when that baby was born. You know, I never saw that poor baby.”

“I know.”

“I never saw your poor mother after that.”

Yah poah mothah . . . Ruth had missed Mrs. Pommeroy’s accent.

“I know.”

“I tried to call her. I did call her. I told her to bring her baby back here to the island, but she said he was much too sick. I made her describe what was wrong with him, and, I’ll tell you something; it didn’t sound too bad to me.”

“Oh, it’s bad.”

“It didn’t sound to me like something we couldn’t take care of out here. What did he need? He didn’t need much. Some medicine. That’s easy. Jesus, Mr. Cobb takes medicine every single day for his sugars, and he manages. What else did Ricky need? Someone to watch him. We could have done that. That’s a person’s child; you find a place for him. That’s what I told her. She cried and cried.”

“Everyone else said he should be in an institution.”

“Who said? Vera Ellis said that. Who else?”

“The doctors.”

“She should have brought that baby here to his home. He would’ve been just fine out here. She still could bring him out here. We’d take care of that child as good as anyone else.”

“She said you were her only friend. She said you were the only person out here who was nice to her.”

“That’s sweet. But it’s not true. Everyone was nice to her.”

“Not Angus Addams.”

“Oh, he loved her.”

“Loved? Loved?

”

“He liked her as much as he likes anyone.”

Ruth laughed. Then she said, “Did you ever meet someone named Owney Wishnell?”

“Who’s that? From Courne Haven?”

“Pastor Wishnell’s nephew.”

“Oh, yes. That great big blond boy.”

“Yes.”

“I know who he is.”

Ruth didn’t say anything.

“Why?” Mrs. Pommeroy asked. “Why do you ask?”

“Nothing,” Ruth said.

The porch door swung open, kicked by Robin Pommeroy’s wife, Opal, whose hands were so full of her huge son that she couldn’t operate the doorknob. The baby, on seeing Mrs. Pommeroy, let out a crazy holler, like a delighted gorilla toddler.

“There’s my baby grandson,” Mrs. Pommeroy said.

“Hey, Ruth,” Opal said shyly.

“Hey, Opal.”

“Didn’t know you were here.”

“Hey, big Eddie,” Ruth said to the baby. Opal brought the child over and bent down, heaving a bit, so that Ruth could kiss the boy’s enormous head. Ruth slid over on the sofa to make space for Opal, who sat down, lifted her Tshirt, and gave a breast to Eddie. He lunged for it and set to sucking with concentration and a lot of wet noise. He sucked at that breast as if he were drawing breath through it.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” Ruth asked.

“Yeah,” said Opal. She yawned without covering her mouth, showing off a mine of silver fillings.

The three women on the couch all stared at the big baby locked so fiercely onto Opal’s breast.

“He sucks like a regular old bilge pump,” Ruth said.

“Bites, too,” said the laconic Opal.

Ruth winced.

“When did you feed him last?” Mrs. Pommeroy asked.

“I don’t know. An hour ago. Half hour.”

“You should try to keep him on a schedule, Opal.”

She shrugged. “He’s always hungry.”

“Of course he is, sweetheart. That’s because you feed him all the time. Builds his appetite. You know what they say. If the mama’s a-willin’, the baby’s a-takin’.”

“They say that?” Ruth asked.

“I just made it up,” Mrs. Pommeroy said.

“It’s nice how you made it rhyme like that,” Ruth said, and Mrs. Pommeroy grinned and punched her. Ruth had missed the delight of teasing people without being afraid they’d burst into tears on her. She punched Mrs. Pommeroy back.

“My idea is, I let him eat whenever he wants,” Opal said. “I figure if he’s eating, he’s hungry. He ate three hot dogs yesterday.”

“Opal!” Mrs. Pommeroy exclaimed. “He’s only ten months old!”

“I can’t help it.”

“You can’t help it? He got the hot dogs himself?” Ruth asked. Mrs. Pommeroy and Opal laughed, and the baby suddenly popped himself off the breast with the loud sound of a tight seal breaking. He lolled his head like a drunk, and then he laughed, too.

“I told a baby joke!” Ruth said.

“Eddie likes you,” Opal said. “You like Roof? You like your Auntie Roof, Eddie?” She set the baby on Ruth’s lap, where he grinned crookedly and spat up yellow soup on her pants. Ruth handed him back to his mother.

“Oops,” said Opal. She heaved the baby up and went into the house, coming out a moment later to toss a bathroom towel at Ruth. “I think it’s nap time for Eddie,” she said, and disappeared into the house again.

Ruth wiped the hot, foamy puddle off her leg. “Baby barf,” she said.

“They feed that baby too much,” Mrs. Pommeroy said.

“He makes the necessary adjustments, I’d say.”

“She was feeding him chocolate fudge sauce the other day, Ruth. With a spoon. Right out of the jar. I saw it!”

“That Opal isn’t very smart.”

“She’s got great big boobs, though.”

“Oh, lucky her.”

“Lucky baby Eddie. How could she have such big boobs when she’s only seventeen? I didn’t even know what boobs were when I was seventeen.”

“Yes, you did. Jesus, Mrs. Pommeroy, you were already married when you were seventeen.”

“Yes, that’s right. But I didn’t know what boobs were when I was twelve. I saw my sister’s chest and asked her what those big things were. She said it was baby fat.”

“Gloria said that?”

“Kitty said that.”

“She should’ve told you the truth.”

“She probably didn’t know the truth.”

“Kitty? Kitty was born knowing the truth.”

“Imagine if she’d told me the truth? Imagine if she said, ‘They’re tits, Rhonda, and someday grown men will want to suck on them.’”

“Grown men and young boys, too. And other people’s husbands, knowing Kitty.”

“Why did you ask me about Owney Wishnell, Ruth?”

Ruth gave Mrs. Pommeroy a quick glance, then looked out at the yard. She said, “No reason.”

Mrs. Pommeroy watched Ruth for a long moment. She tilted her head. She waited.

“It’s not true that you were the only person on this island who was nice to my mother?” Ruth said.

“No, Ruth, I told you. We all liked her. She was wonderful. She was a little sensitive, though, and sometimes had trouble understanding the way some people are.”

“Angus Addams, for instance.”

“Oh, a lot of them. She couldn’t understand all the drinking. I used to tell her, Mary, these men are cold and wet ten hours a day their whole lives. That can really chafe a person. They need to drink, or there’s no way to deal with it.”

“My dad didn’t ever drink so much.”

“He didn’t talk to her so much, either. She was lonely out here. She couldn’t stand the winters.”

“I think she’s lonely in Concord.”

“Oh, I’m sure of it. Does she want you to move there with her?”

“Yeah. She wants me to go to college. She says that’s what the Ellises want. She says Mr. Ellis’ll pay for it, of course. Vera Ellis thinks if I stay here much longer, I’ll get pregnant. She wants me to move to Concord and then go to some small, respectable women’s college, where the Ellises know the president.”

“People do get pregnant out here, Ruth.”

“I think Opal has a big enough baby to go around for all of us. And besides, a person has to have sex to get pregnant these days. So they say.”

“You should be with your mother if that’s what she wants. There’s nothing keeping you here. People out here, Ruth, they’re not really your people.”

“I’ll tell you what. I’m not going to do a single thing with my life that the Ellises want me to do. That’s my plan.”

“That’s your plan?”

“For now.”

Mrs. Pommeroy took off her shoes and put her feet up on the old wooden lobster trap she used for a table on the porch. She sighed. “Tell me some more about Owney Wishnell,” she said.

“Well, I met him,” Ruth said.

“And?”

“And he’s an unusual person.”

Again, Mrs. Pommeroy waited, and Ruth looked out at the front yard. A seagull standing on a child’s toy truck stared back at her. Mrs. Pommeroy was staring at her, too.

“What?” Ruth asked. “What’s everyone staring at?”

“I think there’s more to tell,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “Why don’t you tell me, Ruth?”

So Ruth started to tell Mrs. Pommeroy about Owney Wishnell, although it hadn’t been her original intention to tell anyone about him. She told Mrs. Pommeroy about Owney’s clean fisherman’s outfit and his ease with boats and about his rowing her out behind the rock to show her his lobster traps. She told about Pastor Wishnell’s threatening speeches on the evils and immoralities of lobster fishing and about Owney’s nearly crying when he showed her his packed, useless trap of lobsters.

“That poor child,” Mrs. Pommeroy said.

“Not exactly a child. I think he’s about my age.”

“Bless his heart.”

“Can you believe it? He’s got traps all along the coast, and he tosses the lobsters back. You should see how he handles them. It’s the strangest thing. He sort of puts them in a trance.”

“He looks like a Wishnell, right?”

“Yes.”

“Handsome, then?”

“He has a big head.”

“They all do.”

“Owney’s head is really huge. It looks like a weather balloon with ears.”

“I’m sure he’s handsome. They all have big chests, too, the Wishnells, except Toby Wishnell. Lots of muscles.”

“Maybe it’s baby fat,” Ruth said.

“Muscle,” said Mrs. Pommeroy, and smiled. “They’re all big old Swedes. Except the pastor. Oh, how I used to want to marry a Wishnell.”

“Which one?”

“Any of them. Any Wishnell. Ruth, they make so much money. You’ve seen their houses over there. The prettiest houses. The prettiest yards. They always have these sweet little flower gardens . . . I don’t think I ever talked to a Wishnell, though, when I was a girl. Can you believe that? I’d see them in Rockland sometimes, and they were so handsome.”

“You should have married a Wishnell.”

“How, Ruth? Honestly. Regular people don’t marry Wishnells. Besides, my family would have killed me if I’d married someone from Courne Haven. Besides, I never even met a Wishnell. I couldn’t tell you which one I wanted to marry.”

“You could’ve had your pick of them,” Ruth said. “A sexy looker like you?”

“I loved my Ira,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. But she patted Ruth’s arm for the compliment.

“Sure you loved your Ira. But he was your cousin.”

Mrs. Pommeroy sighed. “I know. But we had a good time. He used to take me over to the sea caves on Boon Rock, you know. With the stalactites, or whatever they were, hanging down everywhere. God, that was pretty.”

“He was your cousin! People shouldn’t marry their cousins! You’re lucky your kids weren’t born with dorsal fins!”

“You’re terrible, Ruth! You’re terrible!” But she laughed.

Ruth said, “You wouldn’t believe how scared of Pastor Wishnell that Owney is.”

“I believe everything. Do you like that Owney Wishnell, Ruth?”

“Do I like him? I don’t know. No. Sure. I don’t know. I think he’s . . . interesting.”

“You never talk about boys.”

“I never meet any boys to talk about.”

“Is he handsome?” Mrs. Pommeroy asked again.

“I told you. He’s big. He’s blond.”

“Are his eyes very blue?”

“That sounds like the title of a love song.”

“Are they very blue or not, Ruth?” She sounded slightly annoyed.

Ruth changed her tone. “Yes. They are very blue, Mrs. Pommeroy.”

“Do you want to know something funny, Ruth? I always secretly hoped you’d marry one of my boys.”

“Oh, Mrs. Pommeroy, no.

”

“I know. I know.”

“It’s just—”

“I know, Ruth. Look at them. What a bunch! You couldn’t end up with any of them. Fagan is a farmer. Can you imagine that? A girl like you could never live on a potato farm. John? Who knows about John? Where is he? We don’t even know. Europe? I can hardly remember what John’s like. It’s been so long since I’ve seen him, I can hardly remember his face. Isn’t that a terrible thing for a mother to say?”

“I can hardly remember John either.”

“You’re not his mother, Ruth. And then there’s Conway. Such a violent person, for some reason. And now he walks with a limp. You’d never marry a man with a limp.”

“No limpers for me!”

“And Chester? Oh, boy.”

“Oh, boy.”

“Thinks he can tell fortunes? Rides around with those hippies?”

“Sells dope.”

“Sells dope?” Mrs. Pommeroy said, surprised.

“Just kidding,” Ruth lied.

“He probably does.” Mrs. Pommeroy sighed. “And Robin. Well, I have to admit I never thought you’d marry Robin. Not even when you were both little. You never thought much of Robin.”

“You probably thought he wouldn’t be able to ask me to marry him. He wouldn’t be able to pronounce it. It’d be like Would you pwease mawwey me, Woof? It would have been embarrassing for everyone.”

Mrs. Pommeroy shook her head and wiped her eyes quickly. Ruth noticed the gesture and stopped laughing.

“What about Webster?” Ruth asked. “That leaves Webster.”

“That’s the thing, Ruth,” Mrs. Pommeroy said, and her voice was sad. “I always thought you’d marry Webster.”

“Oh, Mrs. Pommeroy.” Ruth moved over on the couch and put her arm around her friend.

“What happened to Webster, Ruth?”

“I don’t know.”

“He was the brightest one. He was my brightest son.”

“I know.”

“After his father died . . .”

“I know.”

“He didn’t even grow any more.”

“I know. I know.”

“He’s so timid. He’s like a child.” Mrs. Pommeroy wiped tears off both cheeks with the back of her hand—a fast, smooth motion. “Me and your mom both have a son that didn’t grow, I guess,” she said. “Oh, brother. I’m such a crybaby. How about that?” She wiped her nose on her sleeve and smiled at Ruth. They brought their foreheads together for a moment. Ruth put her hand on the back of Mrs. Pommeroy’s head, and Mrs. Pommeroy closed her eyes. Then she pulled back and said, “I think something was taken from my sons, Ruthie.”

“Yes.”

“A lot was taken from my sons. Their father. Their inheritance. Their boat. Their fishing ground. Their fishing gear.”

“I know,” Ruth said, and she felt a rush of guilt, as she had for years, whenever she thought of her father on his boat with Mr. Pommeroy’s traps.

“I wish I could have another son for you.”

“What? For me?”

“To marry. I wish I could have one more son, and make him normal. A good one.”

“Come on, Mrs. Pommeroy. All your sons are good.”

“You’re sweet, Ruth.”

“Except Chester, of course. He’s no good.”

“In their way, they’re good enough. But not good enough for a bright girl like you. I’ll bet I could get it right, you know, if I had another go at it.” Mrs. Pommeroy’s eyes teared up again. “Now, what a thing for me to say, a woman with seven kids.”

“It’s OK.”

“Besides, I can’t expect you to wait around for a baby to grow up, can I? Listen to me.”

“I am listening.”

“I’m talking crazy now.”

“A little crazy,” Ruth admitted.

“Oh, things don’t always work out, I guess.”

“Not always. I think they must work out sometimes.”

“I guess. Don’t you think you should go live with your mother, Ruth?”

“No.”

“There’s nothing out here for you.”

“That’s not true.”

“Truth is, I like having you around, but that’s not fair. There’s nothing here for you. It’s like a prison. It’s your little San Quentin. I always thought, ‘Oh, Ruth will marry Webster,’ and I always thought, ‘Oh, Webster will take over his dad’s lobster boat.’ I thought I had it all figured out. But there’s no boat.”

And there’s barely a Webster, Ruth thought.

“Don’t you ever think you should live out there?” Mrs. Pommeroy stretched out her arm and pointed. She had clearly intended to point west, toward the coast and the country that lay beyond it, but she was pointing in the dead-wrong direction. She was pointing toward the open sea. Ruth knew what she was trying to say, though. Mrs. Pommeroy, famously, did not have a great sense of direction.

“I don’t need to marry one of your sons to stay here with you, you know,” Ruth said.

“Oh, Ruth.”

“I wish you wouldn’t tell me I should go. I get that enough from my mom and Lanford Ellis. I belong on this island as much as anyone. Forget about my mother.”

“Oh, Ruth. Don’t say that.”

“All right, I don’t mean forget about her. But it doesn’t matter where she lives or who she lives with. It doesn’t matter to me. I’ll stay here with you; I’ll go where you go.” Ruth was smiling as she said this, and nudging Mrs. Pommeroy the way Mrs. Pommeroy often nudged her. A teasing little poke, a loving one.

“But I’m not going anywhere,” Mrs. Pommeroy said.

“Fine. Me neither. It’s decided. I’m not budging. This is where I stay from now on. No more trips to Concord. No more bullshit about college.”

“You can’t make a promise like that.”

“I can do whatever I want. I can make even bigger promises.”

“Lanford Ellis would kill you if he heard you talking like that.”

“Hell with it. The hell with them. From now on, whatever Lanford Ellis says to do, I do the opposite. Fuck the Ellises. Watch me! Watch me, world! Look out, baby!”

“But why do you want to spend your life on this crappy island? These aren’t your people out here, Ruth.”

“Sure they are. Yours and mine. If they’re your people, they’re my people!”

“Listen to you!”

“I’m feeling pretty grand today. I can make big promises today.”

“I guess so!”

“You don’t think I mean any of it.”

“I think you say the sweetest things. And I think, in the end, you’ll do whatever you want.”

They sat out there on the porch couch for another hour or so. Opal wandered out a few more times in a bored and aimless way with Eddie, and Mrs. Pommeroy and Ruth took turns heaving him onto their laps and trying to bounce him around without hurting themselves. The last time Opal left, she didn’t go into the house; she wandered down toward the harbor, to go “downstreet to the store,” she said. Her sandals flipflopped against her soles, and her big baby smacked his lips as he sat, heavy, on her right hip. Mrs. Pommeroy and Ruth watched the mother and baby descend the hill.

“Do you think I look old, Ruth?”

“You look like a millions bucks. You’ll always be the prettiest woman out here.”

“Look at this,” Mrs. Pommeroy said, and she lifted her chin. “My throat’s all droopy.”

“It is not.”

“It is, Ruth.” Mrs. Pommeroy tugged at the loose flesh under her chin. “Isn’t that horrible, how it hangs there? I look like a pelican.”

“You do not look like a pelican.”

“I look like a pelican. I could carry a whole salmon in here, like a ratty old pelican.”

“You look like a very young pelican,” Ruth said.

“Oh, that’s better, Ruth. Thank you very much.” Mrs. Pommeroy stroked her neck, and asked, “What were you thinking when you were alone with Owney Wishnell?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“Sure you do. Tell me.”

“I don’t have anything to tell.”

“Hmm,” said Mrs. Pommeroy. “I wonder.” She pinched the skin on the back of her hand. “Look how dry and saggy I am. If I could change anything about myself, I’d try to get my old skin back. I had beautiful skin when I was your age.”

“Everyone has beautiful skin when they’re my age.”

“What would you change about your appearance if you could, Ruth?”

Without hesitating, Ruth replied, “I wish I was taller. I wish I had smaller nipples. And I wish I could sing.”

Mrs. Pommeroy laughed. “Who said your nipples were too big?”

“Nobody. Come on, Mrs. Pommeroy. Nobody’s ever seen them but me.”

“Did you show them to Owney Wishnell?”

“No,” Ruth said. “But I’d like to.”

“You should, then.”

That little exchange took both of them by surprise; they’d shocked each other. The idea lingered on the porch for a long, long time. Ruth’s face burned. Mrs. Pommeroy was quiet. She seemed to be thinking very carefully about Ruth’s comment. “OK,” she said at last, “I guess you want him.”

“Oh, I don’t know. He’s weird. He hardly ever talks—”

“No, you want him. He’s the one you want. I know about these things, Ruth. So we’ll have to get him for you. We’ll figure it out somehow.”

“Nobody has to figure anything out.”

“We’ll figure it out, Ruth. Good. I’m happy that you want someone. That’s appropriate for a girl your age.”

“I’m not ready for anything stupid like that,” Ruth said.

“Well, you’d better get ready.”

Ruth didn’t know what to say to that. Mrs. Pommeroy swung her legs up on the couch and put her bare feet on Ruth’s lap. “Feet on you, Ruth,” she said, and she sounded deeply sad.

“Feet on me,” Ruth said, and felt a sudden and sharp awkwardness about her admission. She felt guilty about everything she’d said: guilty about her frank sexual interest in a Wishnell, guilty about leaving her mother, guilty about her weird promise never to leave Fort Niles, guilty about confessing that she’d never in a million years marry one of Mrs. Pommeroy’s sons. God, it was true, though! Mrs. Pommeroy could have a son every year for the rest of her life, and Ruth would never marry one of them. Poor Mrs. Pommeroy!

“I love you, you know,” she said to Mrs. Pommeroy. “You’re my favorite person.”

“Feet on you, Ruth,” Mrs. Pommeroy said quietly, by way of reply.

Later that afternoon, Ruth left Mrs. Pommeroy and wandered over to the Addams house to see what the Senator was up to. She didn’t feel like going home yet. She didn’t feel like talking to her father when she was blue, so she thought she’d talk to the Senator instead. Maybe he’d show her some old photographs of shipwreck survivors and cheer her up. But when she reached the Addams house, she found only Angus. He was trying to thread a length of pipe, and he was in an appalling mood. He told her the Senator was down at Potter Beach again with that skinny goddamn nitwit Webster Pommeroy, looking for a goddamn elephant’s tusk.

“No,” Ruth said, “they already found the elephant’s tusk.”

“For Christ’s sake, Ruthie, they’re looking for the goddamn other tusk.” He said it as if he was mad at her for some reason.

“Jeez,” she said. “Sorry.”

When she got down to Potter Beach, she found the Senator pacing unhappily on the rocky sand, with Cookie close at his heels.

“I don’t know what to do with Webster, Ruth,” the Senator said. “I can’t talk him out of it.”

Webster Pommeroy was far out in the mudflats, scrambling around awkwardly, looking unsettled and panicky. Ruth might not have recognized him. He looked like a kid floundering around out there, a stupid little kid in big trouble.

“He won’t quit,” the Senator said. “He’s been like this all week. It was pissing rain two days ago, and he wouldn’t come in. I’m afraid he’s going to hurt himself. He cut his hand yesterday on a tin can, digging around out there. It wasn’t even an old tin can. Tore his thumb right open. He won’t let me look at it.”

“What happens if you leave?”

“I’m not leaving him out there, Ruth. He’d stay out there all night. He says he wants to find the other tusk, to replace the one Mr. Ellis took.”

“So go up to Ellis House and demand that tusk back, Senator. Tell those fuckers you need it.”

“I can’t do that, Ruth. Maybe Mr. Ellis is holding on to the tusk while he decides about the museum. Maybe he’s having it appraised or something.”

“Mr. Ellis probably never even saw the thing. How do you know that Cal Cooley didn’t keep it?”

They watched Webster flail around some more.

The Senator said, quietly, “Maybe you could go up to Ellis House and ask about it?”

“I’m not going up there,” Ruth said. “I’m never going up there ever again.”

“Why’d you come down here today, Ruth?” the Senator asked, after a painful silence. “Do you need something?”

“No, I just wanted to say hello.”

“Well, hello, Ruthie.” He wasn’t looking at her; he was watching Webster with an expression of intense concern.

“Hello to you. This isn’t a good time for you, is it?” asked Ruth.

“Oh, I’m fine. How’s your mother, Ruth? How was your trip to Concord?”

“She’s doing OK, I guess.”

“Did you send her my regards?”

“I think I did. You could write her a letter if you really wanted to make her day.”

“That’s a fine idea, a fine idea. Is she as pretty as ever?”

“I don’t know how pretty she ever was, but she looks fine. I think she’s lonely there, though. The Ellises keep telling her they want me to go to college; they’d pay for it.”

“Mr. Ellis said that?”

“Not to me. But my mom talks about it, and Miss Vera, and even Cal Cooley. It’s coming, Senator. Mr. Ellis will be making an announcement about it soon, I bet.”

“Well, that sounds like a pretty good offer.”

“If it came from anyone else, it would be a great offer.”

“Stubborn, stubborn.”

The Senator paced the length of the beach. Ruth followed him, and Cookie followed Ruth. The Senator was hugely distracted.

“Am I bothering you?” Ruth asked.

“No,” the Senator said. “No, no. But you can stay. You can stay here and watch.”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s nothing,” Ruth said. But she couldn’t stand watching Webster beating around in the mud so painfully. And she didn’t want to follow the Senator around if all he was going to do was pace up and down the beach, wringing his hands. “I was heading home anyway.”

So she headed home. She was out of ideas, and there was nobody else on Fort Niles she wanted to talk to. There was nothing on Fort Niles she wanted to do. She might as well check in with her father, she decided. She might as well make some dinner.

9

If tossed into the water back or head first, the animal, unless exhausted, immediately rights itself, and, with one or two vigorous flexations of the tail, shoots off obliquely toward the bottom, as if sliding down an inclined plane.

—The American Lobster: A Study of Its Habits and Development

Francis Hobart Herrick, Ph.D.

1895

THE SECOND Courne Haven–Fort Niles lobster war took place between 1928 and 1930. It was a pathetic war, not worth discussing.

The third Courne Haven–Fort Niles lobster war was an ugly, short, four month affair that raged in 1946 and had a greater effect on some islanders than the bombing of Pearl Harbor. This war prevented the island men from fishing in a year that saw the largest total catch of lobsters known in the fisheries of Maine: six thousand licensed fishermen took in a record nineteen million pounds of lobster that year. But the men on Fort Niles and Courne Haven missed the bounty because they were too busy fighting.

The fourth Courne Haven–Fort Niles lobster war began in the mid-1950s. The cause of this war was not clearly defined. There was no single instigation, no one angry event that lit the fuse. So how did it begin? With pushing. With slow, typical, everyday pushing.

According to the laws of Maine, any man with a lobstering license may put a trap anywhere in Maine waters. That’s what the laws say. The reality is different. Certain families fish certain territories because they have always done so; certain areas belong to certain islands because they always have; certain waterways are under the control of certain people because they always have been. The ocean, though not marked by fences and deeds, is strictly marked by traditions, and it would serve a novice well to pay attention to those traditions.

The barriers, though invisible, are real, and they are constantly being tested. It is the nature of man to try to extend his property, and lobstermen are no exception. They push. They see what they can get away with. They shove and bump the boundaries whenever they can, trying to move each empire a foot here, a foot there.

Maybe Mr. Cobb has always stopped his line of traps at the mouth of a certain inlet. But what would happen if, one day, Mr. Cobb decided to set a few traps a few dozen feet farther in, to a spot where Mr. Thomas has traditionally fished? What harm could there be in a few dozen feet? Maybe the move would go unnoticed. Mr. Thomas isn’t as diligent as he once was, thinks Mr. Cobb. Perhaps Mr. Thomas has been ill or has had a bad year or has lost his wife and isn’t paying as close attention as he used to, and maybe—just maybe—the push will go unnoticed.

And it may. Mr. Thomas might not feel the crunch. Or, for whatever reasons, he may not care enough to challenge Mr. Cobb. Then again, maybe he will care. Maybe he’ll be immensely annoyed. Maybe Mr. Thomas will send a message of dissatisfaction. Maybe when Mr. Cobb goes to pull his traps the next week, he’ll find that Mr. Thomas has tied a halfhitch knot in the middle of each line, as a warning. Maybe Mr. Thomas and Mr. Cobb are neighbors who’ve never had any conflict in the past. Maybe they’re married to sisters. Maybe they’re good friends. Those harmless knots are Mr. Thomas’s way of saying, “I see what you’re trying to do here, friend, and I ask you to please back the hell out of my territory while I still have patience with you.”

And perhaps Mr. Cobb will back away, and that will be the end of it. Or perhaps he won’t. Who knows what reasons he may have for persisting? Perhaps Mr. Cobb is resentful that Mr. Thomas feels entitled to such a big piece of the ocean in the first place, when Mr. Thomas isn’t even that gifted a fisherman. And maybe Mr. Cobb is angry because of a rumor he heard that Mr. Thomas is keeping illegal short lobsters, or maybe Mr. Thomas’s son has looked in a lecherous manner at Mr. Cobb’s attractive thirteen-year-old daughter on more than one occasion. Perhaps Mr. Cobb has had troubles of his own at home and needs more money. Perhaps Mr. Cobb’s grandfather once laid claim to that same inlet, and Mr. Cobb is taking back what he believes rightfully belongs to his family.

So next week he sets his traps in Mr. Thomas’s territory again, only now he doesn’t think of it as Mr. Thomas’s territory but as free ocean and his own property as a free American man. And he’s a little pissed off, to tell you the truth, at that greedy bastard Thomas for tying knots in a man’s fishing lines, for Christ’s sake, when all a man is trying to do is make a goddamn living. What the hell was that supposed to mean, tying knots in his lines? If Mr. Thomas has a problem, why doesn’t he talk about it like a man? And by now Mr. Cobb doesn’t care if Mr. Thomas tries cutting his traps away, either. Let him cut! The hell with it! Let him try. He’ll clobber the bastard.

And when Mr. Thomas finds his neighbor’s pot buoys floating in his territory again, he has to make a choice. Cut the traps away? Mr. Thomas wonders how serious Cobb is. Who are Cobb’s friends and allies? Can Thomas afford to lose traps if Cobb retaliates by cutting them? Is it such great territory, after all? Worth fighting for? Did any Cobb ever have a legitimate claim to it? Is Cobb being malicious or is he ignorant?

There are so many reasons that can lead a man to set traps accidentally in another man’s area. Did these traps happen to drift there in a storm? Is Cobb a young hothead? Should a man protest every affront? Must a man be on constant guard against his neighbors? On the other hand, should a man sit in silence while some greedy bastard eats from his dinner plate, for Christ’s sake? Should a man be deprived of his means for making a living? What if Cobb decides to take over the whole area? What if Cobb pushes Thomas into someone else’s traps and causes more trouble for Thomas? Must a man spend hours of his every working day making such decisions?

In fact, he must.

If he is a lobsterman, he must make these decisions every day. It’s the way of the business. And over the years, a lobsterman develops a policy, a reputation. If he’s fishing for a living, fishing to feed his family, he cannot afford to be passive, and in time he’ll come to be known as either a pusher or a cutter. It’s hard to avoid becoming one or the other. He must fight to extend his territory by pushing another man’s trap line, or he must fight to defend his territory by cutting away the traps of anyone who pushes in on his.

Both pusher and cutter are derogatory terms. Nobody wants to be called either one, but nearly every lobsterman is one or the other. Or both. In general, pushers are young men, and cutters are older. Pushers have few traps in their fleet; cutters have many. Pushers have little to lose; cutters have everything to defend. The tension between pushers and cutters is constant, even within a single community, even within a single family.

On Fort Niles Island, Angus Addams was the most famous resident cutter. He cut away anybody and everybody who came near him, and he boasted about it. He said, of his cousins and neighbors, “They’ve been pushing my fanny around for fifty years, and I’ve cut away every last one of those bastards.” As a rule, Angus cut without warning. He didn’t waste time tying friendly warning knots in the lines of a fisherman who, ignorantly or accidentally, may have strayed into his domain. He didn’t care who the errant fisherman was or what his motives were. Angus Addams cut away with rage and consistency, cursing as he sawed through the wet, seaweedslick rope, cursing those who were trying to take what was rightfully his. He was a good fisherman; he knew he was constantly being followed and watched by lesser men who wanted a piece of what he had. For the love of Christ, he wasn’t going to hand it to them.

Angus Addams had even cut away Ruth’s father, Stan Thomas, who was his best friend in the world. Stan Thomas was not much of a pusher, but he had once set traps past Jatty Rock, where the only buoys that ever bobbed were the yellow-and-green–striped buoys of Angus Addams. Stan observed that Angus hadn’t laid a trap there for months and thought he’d give it a try. He didn’t think Angus would notice. But Angus noticed. And Angus cut away every last trap in the line of his best friend, pulled up the severed red-and-blue Thomas buoys, tied them together with a yard of rope, and quit fishing for the day, he was so goddamn mad. He set out to find Stan Thomas. He motored all over the inlets and islands in and out of Worthy Channel until he saw the Miss Ruthie floating ahead, surrounded with seagulls greedy for the bait. Angus sped up to the boat. Stan Thomas stopped his work and looked over at his friend.

“Something wrong, Angus?” Stan asked.

Angus Addams threw the severed buoys onto Stan’s deck without saying a word. He threw the buoys down with a triumphant gesture, as if they were the severed heads of his worldly enemies. Stan looked at the buoys impassively.

“Something wrong, Angus?” he repeated.

“You push me again,” Angus said, “the next thing I’ll cut is your goddamn throat.”

That was Angus’s standard threat. Stan Thomas had heard it a dozen times, sometimes directed to a malefactor and sometimes in the gleeful retelling of a story over beers and cribbage. But Angus had never before directed it at Stan. The two men, the two best friends, looked at each other. Their boats bobbed below them.

“You owe me for twelve traps,” Stan Thomas said. “Those were brand-new. I could tell you to sit down and make me twelve brandnew traps, but you can give me twelve of your old ones, and we’ll forget about it.”

“You can jump up my ass.”

“You haven’t set any traps there all spring,” Stan said.

“Don’t you fucking think you have any play with me because we have a goddamn history, Stan.”

Angus Addams was purple around his neck, but Stan Thomas stared him down without showing any anger. “If you were anyone else,” Stan said, “I’d punch you in the teeth right now for the way you’re talking to me.”

“Don’t give me no special goddamn treatment.”

“That’s right. You didn’t give me any.”

“That’s right. And I won’t ever give you none, neither, so keep your goddamn traps the hell away from my ass.”

And he pulled his boat away, giving Stan Thomas the finger as he sped off. Stan and Angus did not speak to each other for nearly eight months. And that encounter was between good friends, between two men who ate dinner together several nights a week, between two neighbors, between a teacher and his protégé. That was an encounter between two men who did not believe that the other was working day and night to destroy him, which was what the men of Fort Niles Island and Courne Haven Island happen to believe of each other. Correctly, for the most part.

It’s a dicey business. And it was that sort of pushing and cutting that brought about the fourth lobster war, back in the late 1950s. Who started it? Hard to say. Hostility was in the air. There were men back from Korea who wanted to take up fishing again and found that their territory had been eaten away. There were, in the spring of 1957, several young men who had just come of age and had bought their own boats. They were trying to find a place for themselves. The fishing had been good the year before, so everyone had enough money to buy more traps and bigger boats with bigger engines, and the fishermen were pressing against one another.

There was some cutting on both sides; there was some pushing. Curses were shouted over the bows of some boats. And, over the course of several months, the rancor grew more intense. Angus Addams got tired of cutting away Courne Haven traps in his territory, so he started messing with the enemy in more imaginative ways. He took all his household garbage aboard, and when he found alien traps in his way, he’d pull them up and stuff them with garbage. Once, he stuffed an old pillow into someone’s trap so that no lobsters could get in, and he wasted one entire afternoon driving nails through a trap; it ended up looking like a spiked instrument of torture. Angus had another trick; he’d stuff someone’s straying trap with rocks and throw it back into the sea. It was a lot of work, that trick. He had to load the rocks on his own boat, with sacks and a wheelbarrow, which took a lot of time. But Angus considered it time well spent. He liked to think of the Courne Haven bastard straining and struggling to pull up a trap, only to find it full of rubble.

Angus got a big kick out of these games until the day he pulled up one of his own traps and found in it a child’s doll, with a rusty pair of scissors stuck in its chest. That was an alarming, violent message to pull from the sea. Angus Addams’s sternman shrieked like a girl when he saw it. The doll horrified even Angus. Its blond hair was wet and slathered across its face, which was cracked china. The doll’s stiff lips formed a shocked O. A crab had found its way into the trap and was clinging to the doll’s dress.

“What the fuck is this?” Angus shouted. He pulled the stabbed doll from his trap and yanked out the scissors. “What the fuck is this, some kind of fucking threat?”

He brought the doll back to Fort Niles and showed it around, thrusting it into people’s faces in a manner that was pretty damned unsettling. The people on Fort Niles were generally dismissive of Angus Addams’s rages, but this time they paid attention. There was something about the savagery of the stabbed doll that angered everyone. A doll? What the hell was that supposed to mean? Garbage and nails were one thing, but a murdered doll? If someone on Courne Haven had a problem with Angus, why couldn’t that person say it to his face? And whose doll was it? It probably belonged to some fisherman’s poor daughter. What kind of a man would stab his little girl’s doll, just to make a point? And what exactly was the point?

Those people over on Courne Haven were animals.

The next morning, many of the Fort Niles lobstermen gathered at the dock much earlier than usual. It was more than an hour before sunrise, still dark. There were stars in the sky, and the moon was low and dim. The men set off toward Courne Haven in a small fleet. Their engines threw up a huge, stinking cloud of diesel fumes. They didn’t have a particular intent, but they motored with determination over to Courne Haven and stopped their boats right outside the harbor. There were twelve of them, the fishermen of Fort Niles, a small blockade. Nobody spoke. A few of the men smoked cigarettes.

After about a half hour, they could see activity on the Courne Haven dock. The Courne Haven men coming down to begin their day of fishing looked out to the sea and saw the line of boats. They gathered in a small group on the dock and kept looking at the boats. Some of the men were drinking from thermoses of coffee, and wisps of steam rose among them. The group grew larger as more men came down to start their day of fishing and found the huddle on the dock.

Some of the men pointed. Some of them smoked cigarettes, too. After about fifteen minutes, it was clear they didn’t know what to do about the blockade. No one made a move toward his boat. They all shuffled around, talking to each other. Across the water, the Fort Niles men in their boats could hear the watery distillations of Courne Haven conversation. Sometimes a cough or a laugh would carry clearly. The laughter was killing Angus Addams.

“Fucking pussies,” he said, but only a few in the blockade could hear him, because he muttered it under his breath.

“What’s that?” said the man in the boat beside him, Angus’s cousin Barney.

“What’s so funny?” asked Angus. “I’ll show them funny.”

“I don’t think they’re laughing at us,” said Barney. “I think they’re just laughing.”

“I’ll show them funny.”

Angus Addams went to his helm and gunned his motor, powering his boat forward, right into the Courne Haven harbor. He sped among the boats, smacking up a mean wake in his path, then slowed down near the dock. It was low tide, and his boat was far, far below the gathered Courne Haven fishermen. They moved to the edge of the dock to look down at Angus Addams. None of the other Fort Niles fishermen had followed him; they hung back at the mouth of the harbor. No one knew what to do.

“YOU PEOPLE LIKE PLAYING WITH DOLLS?” Angus Addams bellowed. His friends in their boats could hear him clear across the water. He held up and shook the murdered doll. One of the Courne Haven men said something that made his friends laugh.

“COME ON DOWN HERE!” Angus shouted. “COME ON DOWN AND SAY THAT!”

“What’d he say?” Barney Addams asked Don Pommeroy. “Did you hear what that guy said?”

Don Pommeroy shrugged.

Just then, a big man walked down the path to the dock and the fishermen parted to make way for him. He was tall and wide and wasn’t wearing a hat on his gleaming head of blond hair. He had some ropes, neatly coiled, over his shoulder, and was carrying a tin lunchbox. The laughter on the Courne Haven dock stopped. Angus Addams said nothing; that is, nothing that his friends could hear.

The blond man, not looking at Angus, climbed down from the dock, his lunchbox tucked under his arm, and stepped into a rowboat. He released it from its post and began to row. His stroke was beautiful to behold: a long pull followed by a quick, muscular snap. In very little time, he reached his boat and climbed aboard. By now, the men at the mouth of the harbor could see that this was Ned Wishnell, a true high-line fisherman and the current patriarch of the Wishnell dynasty. They looked at his boat with envy. It was twenty-five feet long, immaculate, white, with a clean blue stripe all around it. Ned Wishnell started it up and headed out of the harbor.

“Where the hell’s he going?” said Barney Addams.

Don Pommeroy shrugged again.

Ned Wishnell came right at them, right toward their blockade, as if it weren’t there. The Fort Niles fishermen looked at each other warily, wondering whether they were supposed to stop this man. It didn’t seem right to let him pass, but Angus Addams wasn’t with them to give instructions. They watched, paralyzed, as Ned Wishnell sailed right through, passing between Don Pommeroy and Duke Cobb without looking left or right. The Fort Niles boats bobbed in his wake. Don had to grab his rail, or he would have fallen over. The men watched as Ned Wishnell sped off, smaller and smaller as he went out to sea.

“Where the hell’s he going?” Barney apparently still expected an answer.

“I think he’s going fishing,” said Don Pommeroy.

“Hell of a note,” said Barney. He squinted out at the ocean. “Didn’t he see us?”

“Course he seen us.”

“Why didn’t he say anything?”

“What the hell did you think he’d say?”

“I don’t know. Something like, ‘Hey, fellas! What’s going on?’”

“Shut up, Barney.”

“I don’t see why I should,” said Barney Addams, but he did.

Ned Wishnell’s impudence utterly dissolved any menace the Fort Niles men may have presented, so the rest of the Courne Haven fishermen, one at a time, climbed down their dock, got into their boats, and set out for a day of lobstering. Like their neighbor Ned, they passed through the Fort Niles blockade without looking to the left or right. Angus Addams screamed at them for a while, but this embarrassed the rest of the Fort Niles men, who, one at a time, turned around and headed home. Angus was the last to go. He was, as Barney reported later, “sweating bullets, cursing stars, sewing buttonholes, and everything else.” Angus was outraged at being deserted by his friends, furious that what could have been a pretty decent blockade had turned comic and useless.

This might have been the end of the fourth Fort Niles–Courne Haven lobster war, right there. If the incidents that morning had closed the quarrel, in fact, it wouldn’t even have been remembered as a lobster war; rather, just another in the long series of disputes and confrontations. As the summer went on, the pushing and cutting continued, but sporadically. For the most part, it was Angus Addams doing the cutting, and the men on both islands were used to that. Angus Addams held on to what was his like a bull terrier. For everyone else, new boundaries were set. Some territory got shifted; some new fishermen took over old areas; some old fishermen cut back on their workload; some fishermen home from the war resumed their profession. Everything settled down to a normal, tense peace.

For a few weeks.

At the end of April, Angus Addams happened to go to Rockland to sell his lobsters at the same time as Don Pommeroy. Don, a bachelor, was a known fool. He was the softer brother of Ira Pommeroy, the scowling, hardknuckled husband of Rhonda Pommeroy, the father of Webster and Conway and John and Fagan and so on. Angus Addams didn’t think much of either of the Pommeroys, but he ended up spending a night drinking with Don at the Wayside Hotel, because it was too rough and too dark to head back home, and he was bored. Angus might have preferred to drink alone in his hotel room, but that’s not how things ended up. The men met at the wholesaler’s place, and Don said, “Let’s have a refresher, Angus,” and Angus agreed.

There were some men from Courne Haven at the Wayside that night. Fred Burden the fiddler was there with his brother-in-law, Carl Cobb. Because it was a night of windy, icy rain, and because the Courne Haven men and the Fort Niles men were the only ones at the bar, they found themselves in conversation. It wasn’t unfriendly conversation. In fact, it began when Fred Burden ordered a drink sent down to Angus Addams.

“That’s to keep your strength up,” Fred called over, “after a long day of cutting away our traps.”

It was a hostile opening line, so Angus Addams called back, “You’d better send me the whole bottle, then. I cut away a hell of a lot more than one drink’s worth today.”

This was hostile, too, but it didn’t lead to fighting. It led to laughing all around. The men had all had enough drinks to be jovial but not enough to start fighting. Fred Burden and Carl Cobb moved down the bar to sit next to their neighbors from Fort Niles. Of course they knew one another. They clapped each other on the back, ordered up some more beers and whiskeys, talked about their new boats and the new wholesaler and the newest trap design. They talked about the new fishing limitations the state was imposing, and what idiots the new wardens were. They had absolutely everything in common, so there was a lot to talk about.

Carl Cobb had been stationed in Germany during the Korean War, and he took out his wallet and showed off some German money. Everyone looked at Angus Addams’s stump, where he’d lost his finger in the winch, and made him tell the story about kicking his finger overboard and searing the wound with his cigar. Fred Burden told the other men that the summer tourists on Courne Haven had decided the island was too rowdy and had pooled their money to hire a policeman for the months of July and August. The policeman was a redheaded teenager from Bangor, and he’d been beaten up three times in his first week on the island. The summer people had even got the kid a police car, which the stupid kid had flipped over in a high-speed chase across the island, trying to catch a guy with no license plate on his car.

“A high-speed chase!” Fred Burden said. “On an island four miles long! For Christ’s sake, how far was the guy gonna go? Damn kid could’ve killed somebody.”

As it was, Fred Burden went on, the dazed young policeman was dragged out of his wrecked car and beaten up again, this time by a neighbor, furious at finding a police car overturned in his garden. After three weeks, the young policeman went home to Bangor. The police car was still on the island. One of the Wishnells bought it and fixed it up for his kid to drive around. The summer tourists were enraged, but Henry Burden and everyone else told them that if they didn’t like it on Courne Haven, they should go back to Boston, where they could have all the policemen they wanted.

Don Pommeroy said that was one good thing about Fort Niles—no summer tourists. The Ellis family owned damn near the whole island, and they wanted it all to themselves.

“That’s one good thing about Courne Haven, though,” Fred Burden said. “No Ellis family.”

Everyone laughed. That was a good point.

Angus Addams told about the old days on Fort Niles, when the granite industry was still thriving. They’d had a policeman back then, and he was the perfect cop for an island. He was an Addams, first of all, so he knew everybody, and he knew how things operated. He left the islanders alone and mostly made sure the Italians didn’t cause too much trouble. Roy Addams was his name; he’d been hired by the Ellis family to keep order. The Ellises didn’t care what old Roy did as long as nobody was getting murdered or robbed. He had a squad car—a big Packard sedan, with wooden panels—but he never drove it. Roy had his own theory of policing. He’d sit in his house, listening to the radio, and if anything happened on the island, everyone would know where to find him. Once he heard about a crime, he’d go have a talk with the perpetrator. That was a good island policeman, Angus said. Fred and his brother-in-law agreed.

“There wasn’t even a jail,” Angus said. “You got in trouble, you had to sit in old Roy’s living room for a while.”

“That sounds about right,” Fred said. “That’s how it should be with police on an island.”

“If there’s going to be any police at all, that is,” said Angus.

“That’s right. If.”

Angus then told the joke about the polar bear kid who wants to know if there’s any koala blood in his family, and Fred Burden said that reminded him of the one about the three Eskimos in the bakery. And Don Pommeroy told the one about the Japanese guy and the iceberg, but he screwed it up, so Angus Addams had to tell it right. Carl Cobb said he’d heard it a different way, and he gave his whole version, and it was practically the same. That was a waste of time. Don contributed the joke about the Catholic lady and the talking frog, but he wrecked it pretty bad, too.

Angus Addams went off to the bathroom, and when he came back, Don Pommeroy and Fred Burden were arguing. They were really going at it. Someone had said something. Someone had started something. It sure hadn’t taken long. Angus Addams went over to figure out what the fight was about.

“There’s no way,” Fred Burden was saying, his face red and his lips spitting when he talked. “No way you could! He’d kill you!”

“I’m just saying I could,” Don Pommeroy said, slowly and with dignity. “I’m not saying it would be easy. I’m just saying I could do it.”

“What’s he talking about?” Angus asked Carl.

“Don bet Fred Burden a hundred bucks he could beat up a five-foot monkey in a fight,” Carl said.

“What?”

“You’d get creamed!” Fred was shouting now. “You’d get creamed by a five-foot monkey!”

“I’m a good fighter,” Don said.

Angus rolled his eyes and sat down. He felt sorry for Fred Burden. Fred Burden was from Courne Haven, but he didn’t deserve to get into a stupid conversation like this with a known fool like Don Pommeroy.

“Have you ever seen a goddamn monkey?” Fred demanded. “The way a monkey is built? A five-foot monkey would have a six-foot arm span. You know how strong a monkey is? You couldn’t beat up a two-foot monkey. You’d get demolished!”

“But he wouldn’t know how to fight,” Don said. “That’s where my advantage is. I know how to fight.”

“Now that’s stupid. We’re assuming he’d know how to fight.”

“No we ain’t.”

“Then what are we talking about? How can we talk about fighting a five-foot monkey if the monkey can’t even fight?”

“I’m just saying I could beat one if he could fight.” Don was speaking very calmly. He was the prince of logic. “If a five-foot monkey could fight, I could beat him.”

“What about the teeth?” Carl Cobb asked, genuinely interested now.

“Shut up, Carl,” said his brother-in-law Fred.

“That’s a good question,” Don said, and nodded sagely. “The monkey wouldn’t be allowed to use his teeth.”

“Then he wouldn’t be fighting!” Fred shouted. “That’s how a monkey would fight! By biting!”

“No biting allowed,” Don said, and his verdict was final.

“He would be boxing? Is that it?” Fred Burden demanded. “You’re saying you could beat a five-foot monkey in a boxing match?”

“Exactly,” said Don.

“But a monkey wouldn’t know how to box,” Carl Cobb observed, frowning.

Don nodded with composed satisfaction. “Exactly,” he said, “why I would win.”

This left Fred Burden with no choice but to punch Don out, so he did. Angus Addams said later he’d have done it himself if Don had said another goddamn word about boxing a five-foot monkey, but Fred was the first who couldn’t take it any more, so he laid one across Don’s ear. Carl Cobb looked so surprised that it really annoyed Angus, so Angus punched Carl. Then Fred punched Angus. Carl punched Angus, too, but not hard. Don came up off the floor and threw himself, bent over and howling, right into Fred’s gut, sending Fred tumbling backward into some empty barstools, which clattered and wavered and fell.

The two men—Fred and Don—set to rolling on the floor of the bar. They had somehow got laid up against each other head to foot and foot to head, which was not an effective posture for fighting. They looked like a large clumsy starfish—all arms and legs. Fred Burden was on top, and he dug his boot tip into the floor and spun himself and Don in a circle, trying to get a grip.

Carl and Angus had stopped fighting. They hadn’t had that strong an interest in it, anyway. Each had got in a punch, and that took care of that. Now they stood beside each other, backs to the bar, watching their friends on the floor.

“Get ’em, Fred!” Carl hooted, and shot a sheepish look at Angus.

Angus shrugged. He didn’t particularly care if Don Pommeroy got beat up. He deserved it, the idiot. A five-foot monkey. For Christ’s sake.

Fred Burden set his teeth into Don’s shin and clamped. Don howled at the injustice, “No biting! No biting!” He was outraged, it seemed, because he’d made that rule perfectly clear with regard to the monkey fight. Angus Addams, standing at the bar, watched the awkward scramble on the floor for a while and then sighed, turned around, and asked the bartender if he could settle the tab. The bartender, a small, slight man with an anxious expression, was holding a baseball bat that was half his height.

“You don’t need that,” Angus said, nodding at the bat.

The bartender looked relieved and slid the bat back under the bar. “Should I call the police?”

“You don’t need to worry. It’s no big deal, buddy. Just let ’em fight it out.”

“What are they fighting about?” the bartender asked.

“Ah, they’re old friends,” Angus said, and the bartender smiled with relief, as if that explained everything. Angus settled his bill and walked past the men (who were wrestling and grunting on the floor) to go upstairs and get some sleep.

“Where you going?” Don Pommeroy, on the floor, shrieked after Angus as he was leaving. “Where the hell you going?”

Angus had walked out on the fight because he thought it was nothing, but it turned out to be something after all.

Fred Burden was a tenacious bastard, and Don was as stubborn as he was stupid, and neither man let up on the other. The fight went on for a good ten minutes after Angus went to bed. The way Carl Cobb described it, Fred and Don were “two dogs in a field,” biting, kicking, punching. Don tried to break a few bottles over Fred’s head, and Fred broke a few of Don’s fingers so fiercely, you could hear them snap. The bartender, a not very bright man who had been told by Angus not to worry about the fight, didn’t.

Even when Fred was sitting on top of Don’s chest, fistfuls of hair in his hands, pounding Don’s head into the floor, the bartender did not intervene. Fred pounded until Don was unconscious, then sat back, heaving. The bartender was polishing an ashtray with his towel when Carl said, “Maybe you should call somebody.” The bartender looked over the bar and saw that Don was not moving and that his face was mashed up. Fred was bloody, too, and one of his arms was hanging in a funny way. The bartender called the police.

Angus Addams didn’t hear about any of this until the next morning, when he got up for breakfast and prepared to head back to Fort Niles. He learned that Don Pommeroy was in the hospital, and that things didn’t look good. He hadn’t woken up, Angus heard. He had some “internal damage,” and the rumor was that a lung was punctured.

“Son of a bitch,” Angus said, deeply impressed.

He’d never thought the fight would turn into something so serious. The police had questions for Angus, but they let him go. They were still holding Fred Burden, but he was so beat up himself that he hadn’t yet been charged with anything. The police weren’t sure what to do, because the bartender—their one sober, reliable witness—insisted that the two men were old friends who were only kidding around.

Angus arrived at the island late in the afternoon, and went looking for Don’s brother Ira, but Ira had already heard the news. He’d received a telephone call from the Rockland police, informing him that his brother had been beaten into a coma by a Courne Haven fisherman in a bar. Ira went wild. He stormed around, flexing and unflexing his muscles and waving his fists in the air and shouting. His wife, Rhonda, tried to calm him down, but he wouldn’t hear her. He was going to take a shotgun over to Courne Haven and “cause some trouble.” He was going to “show somebody.” He was going to “teach them a thing or two.” He got together with some of his friends and worked them up into a serious froth. Nobody ended up taking any shotguns on board, but the tense peace that existed between the two islands was shattered, and the fourth Courne Haven lobster war was under way.

The daily details of this war are not significant; it was a typical lobster war. There was fighting, cutting, pushing, vandalism, theft, aggression, accusation, paranoia, intimidation, terror, cowardice, and threats. There was virtually no commerce. It’s hard enough to make a living at fishing, but it’s harder still when the fisherman has to spend his days defending his property or attacking the property of another man.

Ruth’s father, with little fuss and no hesitation, took his traps out of the water, just as his father had done during the first Courne Haven–Fort Niles lobster war, back in 1903. He took his boat out of the water and stored it in his front yard. “I don’t get involved in these things,” he told his neighbors. “I don’t care who did what to who.” Stan Thomas had it all figured out. By sitting out the war, he would lose less money than his neighbors. He knew it wouldn’t last forever.

The war lasted seven months. Stan Thomas used the time to fix up his boat, build new traps, tar his lines, paint his buoys. While his neighbors fought steadily and drove themselves and each other back into poverty, he polished his business apparatus to sparkling perfection. Sure, they took over his fishing territory, but he knew they’d burn themselves out and that he’d be able to take it all back—and more. They would be beaten. In the meantime, he fixed his gear and made every piece of brass and every barrel gorgeous. His brand-new wife, Mary, helped a great deal, and painted up his buoys very prettily. They had no trouble with money; the house had long been paid for, and Mary was wonderfully frugal. She’d lived her whole life in a room that was ten feet square and had never owned a thing. She expected nothing, asked for nothing. She could make a hearty stew out of a carrot and a chicken bone. She planted a garden, sewed patches into her husband’s clothing, darned his socks. She was used to this kind of work. Not all that much difference between darning wool socks and pairing and matching silk stockings.

Mary Smith-Ellis Thomas tried, gently, to persuade her husband to take a job at Ellis House and not go back to lobstering, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He didn’t want to be near any of those assholes, he told her. “You could work in the stables,” she said, “and you’d never see them.” But he didn’t want to shovel the shit of the horses of any of those assholes, either. So she let it drop. It had been a quiet fantasy of Mary’s, that her husband and the Ellises would grow to love one another, and that she would be welcomed back at Ellis House. Not as a servant but as a member of the family. Maybe Vera Ellis would come to admire Stan. Maybe Vera would invite Stan and Mary for luncheons. Maybe Vera would pour Stan a cup of tea and say, “I’m so happy Mary married such a resourceful gentleman.”

One night in bed in her new home with her new husband, Mary started, in the meekest way, to hint at this fantasy. “Maybe we could go to visit Miss Vera . . .” she began, but her husband interrupted her with the information that he would eat his own feces before he would visit Vera Ellis.

“Oh,” said Mary.

So she let it go. She put all her resourcefulness toward helping her husband through the dry months of the lobster war, and, in return, she received small, precious acknowledgments of her worth. He liked to sit in the living room and watch her sew curtains. The house was immaculate, and he found endearing her attempts at decoration. Mary set wildflowers on the windowsill in water glasses. She polished his tools. That was the most adorable thing.

“Come here,” he’d tell her at the end of the day, and he’d pat his knee.

Mary would go over and sit on his lap. He’d open his arms. “Come in here,” he’d say, and she’d fold up against him. When she dressed prettily, or styled her hair in a nice way, he called her Mint, because she looked freshly minted, shiny as a new coin.

“Come here, Mint,” he’d say.

Or, while watching her iron his shirts, he’d say, “Nice work there, Mint.”

They spent every day, all day, together, because he was not going out to sea. There was a feeling in their house that they were working together toward a common goal, and that they were a team, untainted by sordid quarrels of the rest of the world. The Courne Haven–Fort Niles lobster war raged around them, corroding everybody but them. They were Mr. and Mrs. Stan Thomas. They needed, Mary believed, only each other. They made their home stronger while the homes of others shook.

It was—those seven war months—the happiest time of their marriage. Those seven war months gave Mary Smith-Ellis Thomas a soaring joy, a sense that she had made the unquestionably right decision in leaving Vera Ellis to marry Stan. She had a true sense of worth. She was well accustomed to working, but was not at all accustomed to working for her own future, for her own benefit. She had a husband, and he loved her. She was essential to him. He told her so.

“You’re a great kid, Mint.”

After seven months of daily care, Stan Thomas’s fishing gear was a paragon. He wanted to rub his hands together like a millionaire when he looked over his gear and his boat. He wanted to laugh like a tyrant as he watched his friends and neighbors fight themselves into ruin.

Fight it out, he silently urged the others. Go ahead. Fight it out.

The longer the others fought, the weaker they would become. All the better for Stan Thomas when, finally, he would put his boat back in the water. He willed the war to go on, but in November of 1957 the fourth Courne Haven–Fort Niles lobster war ended. Lobster wars tend to die down in the winters. Many fishermen stop working in November under the best of circumstances, because the weather is too rough. With fewer fishermen out there, the chance of confrontation eventually grows lower. The war might have run itself out because of the weather. Both islands might have sunk into their winter slumbers, and when spring came, the old disputes might have been dropped. But that’s not how it happened in 1957.

On November 8, a young man from Courne Haven Island, by the name of Jim Burden, set out for a day of lobster fishing. He had meant to fuel up his boat first thing in the morning, but before he could get to the pumps, he found a stranger’s buoys, painted a hideous, garish green, bobbing among his traps. They were the buoys of Ira Pommeroy, from Fort Niles Island. Jim recognized them immediately. And he knew who Ira Pommeroy was. Ira Pommeroy, wife of Rhonda, father of Webster and Conway and John and so on, was the brother of Don Pommeroy. Who was in a hospital in Rockland, learning how to walk again, an ability he had lost after being beaten by Fred Burden. Who was Jim Burden’s father.

Ira Pommeroy had been harassing Fred Burden and young Jim for months, and Jim had had enough of it. Jim Burden had set these traps right off the north coast of Courne Haven only the day before. They were so near Courne Haven that Jim could practically see them from his house. They were in a place where a Fort Niles fisherman had no business. To set those rogue traps, Ira Pommeroy must have come over in the middle of the night. What would drive a man to do that? Didn’t the man ever sleep?

It should be noted that the buoys Ira Pommeroy had set on Jim’s little shoreline were dummies. There were no traps at the end of those lines; there were cement blocks. Ira Pommeroy’s plan was not to take Jim Burden’s lobsters. The plan was to drive Jim Burden nuts, and it worked. Jim, a mildmannered nineteen-year-old who’d been pretty much intimidated by this lobster war, lost every shred of meekness in an instant and went after Ira Pommeroy. Jim was in a hot rage. He didn’t usually curse, but as he sped his boat over the waves, he said under his breath things like “Damn it, damn it, damn it. Damn him!”

He got to Fort Niles and set out to look for Ira Pommeroy’s boat. He didn’t know for sure whether he’d recognize it, but he was damn sure set on finding it. He more or less knew his way around the waters near Fort Niles, but he still had a few close calls with rocky ledges he couldn’t spot from behind the throttle. And he wasn’t paying all that much attention to the bottom or to landmarks that would help get him back home. He wasn’t thinking about getting back home. He was looking for any boat belonging to a Fort Niles fisherman.

He scanned the horizon for flocks of seagulls and followed the seagulls to the lobster boats. Whenever he found a boat, he would zoom right up to it, slow down, and peer at it, trying to see who was aboard. He didn’t say anything to the fishermen, and they didn’t say anything to him. They stopped their work and looked at him. What’s that kid up to? What the hell is the matter with that kid’s face? He’s purple, for Christ’s sake.

Jim Burden didn’t say a word. He zoomed off, searching for Ira Pommeroy. He hadn’t planned exactly what he was going to do once he found him, but his thoughts were somewhere along the lines of murder.

Unluckily for Jim Burden, he didn’t think to look for Ira Pommeroy’s boat in the Fort Niles harbor, which is where it sat, bobbing quietly. Ira Pommeroy had taken the day off. He was exhausted from a night spent dropping cement blocks near Courne Haven, and he’d slept in until eight in the morning. While Jim Burden was speeding around the Atlantic looking for Ira, Ira was in bed with his wife, Rhonda, making another son.

Jim Burden went way out. He went much farther out to sea than any lobster boat needs to go. He went past all the pot buoys of any kind. He followed what he thought was a flock of seagulls far, far out to sea, but the seagulls, as he came nearer, vanished. They dissolved into the sky like sugar in hot water. Jim Burden slowed his boat down and looked around. Where was he? He could see Fort Niles Island shimmering in the distance, a pale gray apparition. His anger was now frustration, and even that was beginning to wane, replaced with something like anxiety. The weather was getting bad. The sea was high. The sky was whipped with fast, black clouds, which had come up quickly. Jim wasn’t sure at all where he was.

“Damn it,” Jim Burden said. “Damn him.

”

And then he ran out of gas.

“Damn it,” he said again, and this time he meant it.

He tried to start up the engine, but there was no doing so. No going anywhere. It hadn’t occurred to him that this could happen. He hadn’t thought about the gas tank.

“Oh, boy,” said nineteen-year-old Jim Burden.

He was now afraid as well as embarrassed. Some fisherman he was. Paying his gas tank no mind. How stupid could you get? Jim got on the radio and put out a staticky call for help. “Help,” he said, “I’m out of gas.” He wasn’t sure if there was a more nautical way to say this. He didn’t know all that much about boating, really. This was the first year he’d been out to haul by himself. He’d worked for years as a sternman for his father, so he thought he knew all about the ocean, but now he realized he’d been a mere passenger before. His dad had taken care of everything, while he’d just done the muscle work in the back of the boat. He hadn’t been paying attention all those years, and now he was alone on a boat in the middle of nowhere.

“Help!” he said into the radio again. Then he remembered the word. “Mayday!” he said. “Mayday!”

The first voice to get back to him was that of Ned Wishnell, and it made young Jim wince. Ned Wishnell was the best fisherman in Maine, people said. Something like this would never happen to Ned Wishnell, to any Wishnell. Jim had been hoping somewhere in the back of his mind that he could get through this without Ned Wishnell’s finding out.

“Is that Jimmy?” Ned’s voice cracked.

“This is the Mighty J,” Jim replied. He thought it would make him sound more adult to name his boat. But he was immediately embarrassed by the name. The Mighty J! Yeah, right.

“Is that Jimmy?” Ned’s voice came again.

“This is Jimmy,” Jim said. “I’m out of gas. Sorry.”

“Where are you, son?”

“I . . . uh . . . don’t know.” He hated to say it, hated to admit it. To Ned Wishnell, of all people!

“Didn’t make that out, Jimmy.”

“I don’t know!” Jim shouted it now. Humiliating. “I don’t know where I am!”

There was silence. Then an unintelligible gargle.

“Didn’t make that out, Ned,” Jim said. He was trying to sound like the older man, imitating his cadence. Trying to maintain some dignity.

“You see any landmarks?” Ned asked.

“Fort Niles is, um, maybe two miles to the west,” Jimmy said, but as he said it, he realized he could no longer see that distant island. A fog had come up, and it was growing as dark as evening, although it was only ten in the morning. He didn’t know which way he was pointing.

“Drop your anchor. Stay put,” Ned Wishnell said, and signed off.

Ned found the kid. It took him several hours, but he found Jimmy. He had notified the other fishermen, and they’d all been looking for Jimmy. Even some fishermen from Fort Niles went out to look for Jim Burden. It was terrible weather. On a normal day, everyone would have headed in because of the weather, but they all stayed out, looking for young Jimmy. Even Angus Addams went out looking for Jim Burden. It was the right thing to do. The kid was only nineteen, and he was lost.

But it was Ned Wishnell who found him. How, nobody knew. But the guy was a Wishnell—a gifted fisherman, a hero on the water—so nobody was surprised that he found a small boat in the fog in the big ocean without the faintest clue about where to look. Everyone was accustomed to nautical miracles from Wishnells.

By the time Ned got to the Mighty J, the weather was really rough, and Jim Burden had been pulled—despite his little anchor—far away from where he’d sent his call for help. Not that Jim knew where he’d been in the first place. He heard Ned Wishnell’s boat before he could see it. He heard the motor through the fog.

“Help!” he shouted. “Mayday!”

Ned circled him and emerged out of the fog in that huge, gleaming boat of his, with that handsome, manly face of his. Ned was angry. He was angry and silent. His day of fishing had been ruined. Jim Burden could see the anger immediately, and it shrank his guts. Ned Wishnell pulled his boat up right beside the Mighty J. It had begun to rain. It was warm for Maine in November, which meant that it was miserable and freezing and wet. The wind blew the rain sideways. In his gloves, Jim’s hands were chapped and scarlet, but Ned Wishnell wasn’t wearing gloves. He wasn’t wearing a hat. Seeing this, Jim quickly took off his hat and dropped it at his feet. He immediately regretted this decision as the freezing rain pinged his scalp.

“Hi,” he said, lamely.

Ned tossed a line over to Jim and said, “Latch on.” His voice was tight with irritation.

Jim tied the boats together—his small, cheap boat up against that Wishnell beauty. The Mighty J bounced, silent and useless, as Ned’s boat chugged and chugged in a competent idle.

“You sure it’s the gas run out?” Ned asked.

“Pretty sure.”

“Pretty sure?” Disgusted.

Jim did not reply.

“It’s not another kind of engine trouble?”

“I don’t think so,” Jim said. But his voice had no authority. He knew he’d lost any right to sound knowledgeable.

Ned looked grim. “You don’t know if your boat has run out of gas.”

“I’m—I’m not sure.”

“I’ll take a look,” Ned said.

He leaned over his rail to pull the Mighty J closer, to get it side by side with his boat. He used his fishing gaff to yank Jim’s boat, and he did it with a jerky motion. He was really annoyed. He was usually gorgeously smooth with boats. Jim also leaned over to pull the boats closer. The boats bounced and bounced in the rough sea. They separated and smashed together. Ned put one booted foot on his rail and made a move to swing himself over to the Mighty J. It was a stupid move. It was a very stupid move for a high-line sailor like Ned Wishnell. But Ned was annoyed and was being careless. And something happened. The wind blew, a wave rose, a foot slipped, a hand lost its grip. Something happened.

Ned Wishnell was in the water.

Jim stared down at the man, and his first reaction was almost amusement. Ned Wishnell was in the water! It was the damnedest thing. Like seeing a nun naked. Would you look at that? Ned was soaked from the drop, and when he popped out of the water, he gasped, and his mouth made an unimpressive, weak little circle. Ned looked up at Jim Burden with panic, an expression wholly incongruous on a Wishnell. Ned Wishnell looked desperate, stricken. And this gave Jim Burden a moment to enjoy a second reaction, which was pride. Ned Wishnell needed Jim Burden’s help. Now wasn’t that a hell of a note?

Would you look at that?

Jim’s reactions were fleeting, but they prevented him from taking the lightning-fast action that might have saved Ned Wishnell’s life. If he’d grabbed a gaff and thrust it down to Ned immediately, if he’d reached down to save Ned even as the man was falling in, things might have been different. But Jim stood there for that quick moment of amusement and pride—and a swell came and knocked the two boats together. Smashed them together, with a force that almost threw Jim off his feet. Between the two boats was Ned Wishnell, of course, and when the boats separated after the collision, he was gone. He had sunk.

He must have been badly banged up. He was wearing long boots, and they had probably filled up with water, and he couldn’t swim.

Whatever had happened, Ned Wishnell was gone.

That was the end of the fourth Fort Niles–Courne Haven lobster war. That pretty much did it. Losing Ned Wishnell was tragic for both islands. The reaction on Fort Niles and Courne Haven was almost like the nationwide reaction a few years later, when Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot. A shocked citizenry faced an impossibility come true— and everyone felt changed by (perhaps even a little complicit in) the death. There was a sense on both islands that something was fundamentally wrong if this could happen, if the fight went so far that a man like Ned Wishnell died because of it.

It is not certain that the death of another fisherman could have stirred this feeling. Ned Wishnell was the patriarch of a dynasty that had seemed inviolable. He hadn’t been participating in this lobster war. Not that he’d taken his gear out of the water, as Stan Thomas had done, but Ned Wishnell had always been above this kind of conflict, like Switzerland. What need did he have to push or cut? He knew where the lobsters were. Other fishermen tried to follow him around, tried to learn his secrets, but Ned didn’t care. He didn’t try to chase them off. He barely noticed them. They could never make the catches he made. He was intimidated by nobody. He had no malice. He could afford not to have any.

The fact that Ned Wishnell had drowned while trying to help a boy who’d been sucked into this war struck everyone as ugly. It horrified even Ira Pommeroy, who had basically been responsible for the tragedy. Ira started drinking hard, much harder than usual, and it was then that he turned from a regular drunk into a serious drunk. A few weeks after the drowning of Ned Wishnell, Ira Pommeroy asked his wife, Rhonda, to help him write a letter of condolence to Mrs. Ned Wishnell. But there was no way to reach the Widow Wishnell. She was no longer on Courne Haven Island. She had disappeared.

She wasn’t from there to begin with. Like all Wishnells, Ned had married a beauty from away. Mrs. Ned Wishnell was a ginger-haired, leggy, intelligent girl from a prominent Northeastern family that had always summered at Kennebunkport, Maine. She was nothing like the wives of the other fishermen; that was for sure. Her name was Allison, and she’d met Ned when she was sailing with her family up the Maine coast. She’d seen this man in his fishing boat and been captivated by his looks, by his fascinating silence, by his competence. She encouraged her parents to follow his boat into the harbor at Courne Haven, and she approached him with great boldness. He excited her a good deal; he made her tremble. He was nothing like the men she knew, and she married him—to her family’s astonishment—within weeks. She’d been crazy about the man, but there was nothing to keep her on Courne Haven Island after her husband drowned. She was mortified by the war, by the drowning.

The beautiful Allison Wishnell learned the details of her husband’s death, and looked around her and wondered what the hell she was doing on this rock in the middle of the ocean. It was a ghastly feeling. It was like waking up in a stranger’s dirty bed after a night of drinking. It was like waking up in jail in a foreign land. How had she got here? She looked around at her neighbors and decided they were animals. And what was this house, this fish-smelling house, in which she was living? And why was there only one store on the island, a store that sold nothing but dusty canned goods? And what was with this appalling weather? Whose idea was that?

Mrs. Ned Wishnell was very young, just over twenty, when her husband drowned. Immediately after the funeral, she went back to her parents. She dropped her married name. She became Allison Cavanaugh again and enrolled in Smith College, where she studied art history and never told anybody that she had been a lobster fisherman’s wife. She left it all behind. She even left her son behind on the island. There didn’t seem to be much negotiating involved in that decision, and even less trauma. People said Mrs. Ned Wishnell had never been all that attached to her boy anyway; that something about her child frightened her. The Wishnells on Courne Haven made a strong case that the baby should remain with the family, and that was that. She gave him up.

The boy was to be raised by his uncle, a young man who had just come out of the seminary, a young man who had ambitions to be a traveling minister for all the obscure Maine islands. The uncle’s name was Toby. Pastor Toby Wishnell. He was the youngest brother of Ned Wishnell, and just as handsome, although in a more delicate way. Toby Wishnell was the first Wishnell not to be a fisherman. The baby— Ned Wishnell’s little boy—would be his charge. The baby’s name was Owney, and he was just one year old.

If Owney Wishnell missed his mother when she left, he didn’t show it. If Owney Wishnell missed his drowned father, he didn’t show that, either. He was a big, blond, quiet baby. He caused no one any trouble, except when he was taken out of the bath. Then he’d scream and fight, and his strength was a wonder. The only thing Owney Wishnell wanted, it seemed, was to be in the water all the time.

A few weeks after Ned Wishnell was buried, when it became evident that the lobster war was over, Stan Thomas put his boat back into the water and started fishing with supremacy. He fished with a single-mindedness that would soon earn him the nickname Greedy Number Two (the natural successor to Angus Addams, who had long been known as Greedy Number One). His little period of domesticity with his wife was over. Mary Smith-Ellis Thomas was clearly no longer his partner. His partner was whatever teenage boy was slaving away as his sternman.

Stan came home to Mary late every afternoon exhausted and absorbed. He kept a journal of each fishing day so that he could chart the abundance of lobsters in each area of the ocean. He spent long nights with maps and calculators, and he did not include Mary in this work.

“What are you doing?” she’d ask. “What are you working on?”

“Fishing,” he’d say.

To Stan Thomas, any work related to fishing was itself the act of fishing, even if it took place on dry land. And since his wife was not a fisherman, her views were of no service to him. He stopped calling her over to his lap, and she would not have dared to climb there uninvited. It was a bleak time in her life. Mary was beginning to realize something about her husband that was not pleasant. During the lobster war, when he’d pulled his boat and gear out of the water, she’d interpreted his acts as those of a man of virtue. Her husband was staying out of the war, she thought, because he was a peaceful man. She had gravely misunderstood, and it was now becoming clear to her. He had stayed out of the war to protect his interests and to make a killing when the war was over and he could start fishing again. And now that he was making a killing, he could scarcely stop gloating for a minute.

He spent his evenings transcribing the notes he had taken on his boat into ledgers full of long, complicated figures. The records were meticulous and dated back for years. Some evenings, he would page backward through his ledgers and muse over exceptionally great batches of lobsters in days gone by. He would talk to his ledgers. “I wish it could be October all year round,” he would tell the columns of figures.

Some nights, he’d talk to his calculator as he worked. He’d say, “I hear you, I hear you.” Or “Quit teasing!”

In December, Mary told her husband she was pregnant.

“Way to go, Mint,” he said, but he wasn’t as excited as she hoped he’d be.

Mary secretly sent a letter to Vera Ellis, telling her of the pregnancy, but she got no response. That devastated her; she cried and cried. The only person, in fact, who was at all interested in Mary’s pregnancy was her neighbor Rhonda Pommeroy, who, as usual, was pregnant herself.

“I’ll probably have a boy,” Rhonda said, tipsily.

Rhonda was drunk, as usual. Drunk in a charming way, as usual, as though she were a young girl and this was the first alcohol she had ever tasted. Drunk like wheee! “I’ll probably have another boy, Mary, so you have to have a girl. Did you feel it when you got pregnant?”

“I don’t think so,” Mary said.

“I feel it every time. It’s like click! And this one’s a boy. I can always tell. And yours is going to be a girl. I’ll bet it’s a girl! How about that? When she grows up, she can marry one of my boys! And we can be related!” Rhonda nudged Mary so hard, she almost knocked her over.

“We’re already related,” Mary said. “Through Len and Kitty.”

“You’re going to like having a baby,” Rhonda said. “It’s the funnest thing.”

But it wasn’t the funnest thing, not for Mary. She got stuck on the island for the delivery, and it was a living nightmare. Her husband couldn’t take the screaming and all the women around, so he went fishing and left her to deliver the baby without his help. It was a cruel act on many levels. There had been bad storms all week, and none of the other men on the island had dared to put out their boats. On this day, Stan and his terrified sternman set out alone. He’d prefer to risk his life, it seemed, than help his wife or even listen to her pain. He’d been expecting a boy, but he was polite enough to conceal his disappointment when he came home from fishing and met his little girl. He didn’t get to hold her at first, because Senator Simon Addams was there, hogging the baby.

“Oh, isn’t she the dearest little baby?” Simon said, again and again, as the women laughed at his tenderness.

“What should we name her?” Mary asked her husband, quietly. “Do you like the name Ruth?”

“I don’t care what you name her,” Stan Thomas said, of his daughter, who was only an hour old. “Name her whatever you like, Mint.”

“Do you want to hold her?” Mary asked.

“I have to wash up,” he said. “I smell like a bait bag.”

10

What say you to a ramble among the fairy rock pools, weed-covered ledges, and gem-decked parterres bordering the gardens of the sea?

—Crab, Shrimp, and Lobster Lore

W. B. Lord

1867

JULY ARRIVED for Fort Niles. It was now the middle of the summer of 1976. It wasn’t as exciting a month as it might have been.

The Bicentennial passed on Fort Niles without any outstanding revelry. Ruth thought she lived in the only place in America that wasn’t getting its act together for a decent celebration. Her dad even went out to haul that day, although, out of some patriotic stirring, he gave Robin Pommeroy the day off. Ruth spent the holiday with Mrs. Pommeroy and her two sisters. Mrs. Pommeroy had tried to sew costumes for them all. She wanted the four of them to dress up as Colonial dames and march in the town parade, but she’d managed to finish only Ruth’s costume by the morning of the Fourth, and Ruth refused to dress up alone. So Mrs. Pommeroy put the costume on Opal, and baby Eddie immediately vomited all over it.

“The dress looks more authentic now,” Ruth said.

“He was eating pudding this morning,” Opal said, shrugging. “Pudding always makes Eddie barf.”

There was a short parade up Main Street, but there were more people in the parade than there were people to watch it. Senator Simon Addams recited the Gettysburg Address from memory, but he always recited the Gettysburg Address from memory, given any opportunity. Robin Pommeroy set off some cheap fireworks sent to him by his brother Chester. He burned his hand so severely that he would be unable to go fishing for two weeks. This made Ruth’s father angry enough to fire Robin and hire a new sternman, Duke Cobb’s ten-year-old grandson, who was skinny and weak as a third-grade girl and, unhelpfully, scared of lobsters. But the kid came cheap.

“You could’ve hired me,” Ruth told her father. She sulked about it for a while, but she didn’t really mean it, and he knew that.

So the month of July was almost passed, and then one afternoon Mrs. Pommeroy received a most unusual telephone call. The call came from Courne Haven Island. It was Pastor Toby Wishnell on the line.

Pastor Wishnell wanted to know whether Mrs. Pommeroy would be available to spend a day or two on Courne Haven. It seemed there was to be a big wedding on the island, and the bride had confided to the pastor that she was concerned about her hair. There were no professional hairdressers on Courne Haven. The bride wasn’t young anymore, and she wanted to look her best.

“I’m not a professional hairdresser, Pastor,” Mrs. Pommeroy said.

Pastor Wishnell said that was quite all right. The bride had hired a photographer from Rockland, at considerable cost, to document the wedding, and she wanted to look pretty for the pictures. She was relying on the pastor to help her out. It was a strange request to be made to a pastor, Toby Wishnell readily admitted, but he had received stranger ones. People expected their pastors to be fonts of information on all manner of subjects, Pastor Wishnell told Mrs. Pommeroy, and this lady was no exception. The pastor explained, further, that this bride felt somewhat more entitled than others to ask the pastor so unusual and personal a favor, because she was a Wishnell. She was actually Pastor Wishnell’s second cousin, Dorothy Wishnell, known as Dotty. Dotty was to marry Fred Burden’s oldest son, Charlie, on July 30.

In any case, the pastor went on, he had mentioned to Dotty that there was a gifted hair stylist right over on Fort Niles. That, at least, was what he had heard from Ruth Thomas. Ruth Thomas had told him that Mrs. Pommeroy was quite good with hair. Mrs. Pommeroy told the pastor that she was really nothing special, that she’d never been to school or anything.

The pastor said, “You’ll do fine. And another thing . . .” Apparently, Dotty, having heard that Mrs. Pommeroy was so good at styling hair, wondered whether Mrs. Pommeroy would also cut the groom’s hair. And the best man’s, if she didn’t mind. And the hair of the maid of honor, the mother of the bride, the father of the bride, the flower girls, and some members of the groom’s family. If it wouldn’t be too much trouble. And, said Pastor Wishnell, while he was thinking of it, he could use a little trim himself.

“Since the professional photographer who is coming is known to be expensive,” the pastor continued, “and since almost everyone on the island will be at the wedding, they want to look their best. It’s not often that a professional photographer comes here. Of course, the bride will pay you well. Her father is Babe Wishnell.”

“Ooh,” Mrs. Pommeroy said, impressed.

“Will you do it, then?”

“That’s a whole lot of haircuts, Pastor Wishnell.”

“I can send Owney to pick you up in the New Hope,” the pastor said. “You can stay here as long as you are needed. It might be a nice way for you to make some extra money.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever cut so much hair at once. I don’t know that I could do it all in one day.”

“You could bring a helper.”

“May I bring one of my sisters?”

“Certainly.”

“May I bring Ruth Thomas?” Mrs. Pommeroy asked.

This gave the pastor a moment’s pause. “I suppose so,” he said, after a cool beat. “If she’s not too busy.”

“Ruth? Busy?” Mrs. Pommeroy found this idea hilarious. She laughed out loud, right into the pastor’s ear.

At that very moment, Ruth was down at Potter Beach with Senator Simon Addams again. She was beginning to be depressed when she spent time down there, but she didn’t know what else to do with herself. So she continued to stop at the beach a few hours every day to keep the Senator company. She also liked to keep an eye on Webster, for the sake of Mrs. Pommeroy, who constantly worried about her oldest, strangest boy. And she also went there because it was difficult to talk with anyone else on the island. She couldn’t very well hang out with Mrs. Pommeroy all the time.

Not that watching Webster dig in the mud was still fun. It was painful and sad to watch. He’d lost all his grace. He floundered. He was searching for that second tusk as if he was both dying to find it and terrified of finding it. Ruth thought Webster might sink down in the mud one day and never show up again. She wondered whether that was, in fact, his plan. She wondered whether Webster Pommeroy was plotting the world’s most awkward suicide.

“Webster needs a purpose in life,” the Senator said.

The thought of Webster Pommeroy seeking a purpose in life depressed Ruth Thomas even more. “Isn’t there anything else you can have him do with his time?”

“What else, Ruth?”

“Isn’t there something he can do for the museum?”

The Senator sighed. “We have everything we need for the museum, except a building. Until we get that, there’s nothing we can do. Digging in the mud, Ruth, is what he’s good at.”

“He’s not so good at it anymore.”

“He’s having some trouble with it now, yes.”

“What are you going to do if Webster finds the other tusk? Throw another elephant in there for him?”

“We’ll take that as it comes, Ruth.”

Webster hadn’t found anything good in the mudflats lately. He hadn’t turned up anything other than a lot of junk. He did find an oar, but it wasn’t an old oar. It was aluminum. (“This is magnificent!” the Senator had raved to Webster, who looked frantic when he handed it over. “What a rare oar this is!”) Also, Webster had uncovered a vast number of single boots under the mud, and single gloves, kicked and and tossed off by years of lobstermen. And bottles, too. Webster had found a lot of bottles in recent days, and not old ones. Plastic laundry detergent bottles. He hadn’t, though, found anything worth all the time spent in that cold, loose mud. He looked thinner and more anxious every day.

“Do you think he’ll die?” Ruth asked the Senator.

“I hope not.”

“Could he snap completely and kill somebody?”

“I don’t think so,” the Senator said.

On the day Pastor Wishnell called Mrs. Pommeroy, Ruth had already been at Potter Beach with the Senator and Webster for several hours. She and the Senator were looking at a book, a book Ruth had purchased for the Senator at a Salvation Army store in Concord a month earlier. She’d given it to him as soon as she returned from visiting her mother, but he hadn’t yet read it. He said he was finding it difficult to concentrate because he was so concerned about Webster.

“I’m sure it’s a super book, Ruth,” he said. “Thanks for bringing it down here today.”

“Sure,” she said. “I saw it sitting on your porch, and I thought you might want to look at it. You know, if you got bored or something.”

The book was called Hidden Treasure: How and Where to Find It. A Finder’s Guide to the World’s Missing Treasures. It was something that, under normal circumstances, would have brought the Senator all sorts of excitement.

“You do like it?” Ruth asked.

“Oh, yes, Ruth. It’s a swell book.”

“Are you learning anything?”

“Not too much, Ruth, to be honest. I haven’t finished it. I was expecting a little more information from the author, to tell you the truth. You’d think from the title,” Senator Simon said, turning the book over in his hands, “that the author would tell you how to find specific treasures, but she doesn’t give much information about that. So far, she says that if you do find anything, it’s an accident. And she gives some examples of people who got lucky and found treasures when they weren’t looking for anything. That doesn’t seem to me like much of a system.”

“How far have you read?”

“Just the first chapter.”

“Oh. I thought you might like it because of the nice color illustrations. Lots of photographs of lost treasures. Did you see those? Did you see those pictures of the Fabergé eggs? I thought you’d like those.”

“If there are photographs of the objects, Ruth, then they aren’t really lost. Now, are they?”

“Well, Senator, I see what you mean. But the photographs are pictures of lost treasures that regular people already found, on their own. Like that guy who found the Paul Revere goblet. Did you get to that part yet?”

“Ah, not yet,” the Senator said. He was shading his eyes and looking out over the mudflats. “I think it’s going to rain. I hope it doesn’t, because Webster won’t come in when it rains. He’s already got a terrible cold. You should hear his chest rattle.”

Ruth took the book from the Senator. She said, “I saw a part in here—where is it? It says a kid found a marker in California that Sir Francis Drake left. It was made of iron, and it claimed the land as belonging to Queen Elizabeth. It had been there for, like, three centuries.”

“Isn’t that something?”

Ruth offered the Senator a stick of chewing gum. He refused it, so she chewed it herself. “The author says the greatest site of buried treasure anywhere in the world is on Cocos Island.”

“That’s what your book says?”

“It’s your book, Senator. I was thumbing through it when I was coming back from Concord and I saw that thing about Cocos Island. The author says Cocos Island is a real bonanza for people looking for buried treasure. She says Captain James Cook stopped at Cocos Island all the time with loot. The great circumnavigator!”

“The great circumnavigator.”

“So did the pirate Benito Bonito. So did Captain Richard Davis and the pirate Jean Lafitte. I thought you’d be interested . . .”

“Oh, I am interested, Ruth.”

“You know what I thought you’d be interested in? About Cocos Island, I mean? The island is only about as big as Fort Niles. How about that? Wouldn’t that be ironic? Wouldn’t you be right at home there? And with all that buried treasure to find. You and Webster could go there and dig it up together. How about that, Senator?”

It started to rain, big heavy drops.

“I bet the weather’s better on Cocos Island, anyhow,” she said, and laughed.

The Senator said, “Oh, Ruth, we’re not going anywhere, Webster and I. You know that. You shouldn’t say such things, even as a joke.”

Ruth was stung. She recovered and said, “I’m sure you two would come home rich as kings if you ever got to Cocos Island.”

He did not reply.

She wondered why she was pursuing this. Christ, how desperate she sounded. How starved for conversation. It was pathetic, but she missed sitting on the beach with the Senator for hours and hours of uninterrupted drivel, and she wasn’t used to being ignored by him. She was suddenly jealous of Webster Pommeroy for getting all the attention. That’s when she really started to feel pathetic. She stood and pulled up the hood of her jacket and asked, “Are you coming in?”

“It’s up to Webster. I don’t think he’s noticed that it’s raining.”

“You don’t have a waterproof jacket on, do you? Do you want me to get you one?”

“I’m fine.”

“You and Webster should both come in before you get soaked.”

“Sometimes Webster comes in when it rains, but sometimes he stays out there and gets wetter and wetter. It depends on his mood. I guess I’ll stay until he wants to come in. I’ve got sheets on the line at home, Ruth. Would you take them in for me before they get wet?”

The rain was coming down now at a fast, slicing pace.

“I think the sheets are already wet, Senator.”

“You’re probably right. Forget it.”

Ruth ran back to Mrs. Pommeroy’s house through the rain, which was now pounding down. She found Mrs. Pommeroy with her sister Kitty, upstairs in the big bedroom, pulling clothes out of the closet. Kitty, watching her sister, was sitting on the bed. She was drinking coffee, which Ruth knew to be spiked with gin. Ruth rolled her eyes. She was getting fed up with Kitty’s drinking.

“I should just sew something new,” Mrs. Pommeroy was saying. “But I don’t have the time!” Then, “There’s my Ruth. Oh, you’re soaking wet.”

“What are you doing?”

“Looking for a pretty dress.”

“What’s the occasion?”

“I’ve been invited somewhere.”

“Where?” Ruth asked.

Kitty Pommeroy started laughing, followed by Mrs. Pommeroy.

“Ruth,” she said, “you’ll never believe it. We’re going to a wedding on Courne Haven. Tomorrow!”

“Tell her who said so!” Kitty Pommeroy shouted.

“Pastor Wishnell!” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “He’s invited us over.”

“Get out of here.”

“I am getting out of here!”

“You and Kitty are going to Courne Haven?”

“Sure. And you, too.”

“Me?”

“He wants you there. Babe Wishnell’s daughter is getting married, and I’m doing her hair! And you two are my helpers. We’re going to open a little temporary salon.”

“Well, ladidah,” Ruth said.

“Exactly,” said Mrs. Pommeroy.

That night, Ruth asked her father whether she could go to Courne Haven for a big Wishnell wedding. He did not answer right away. They were talking less and less lately, the father and daughter.

“Pastor Wishnell invited me,” she said.

“Do whatever you want,” Stan Thomas said. “I don’t care who you spend your time with.”

Pastor Wishnell sent Owney to pick up everyone the next day, which was Saturday. At seven in the morning of Dotty Wishnell and Charlie Burden’s wedding, Mrs. Pommeroy and Kitty Pommeroy and Ruth Thomas walked to the end of the dock and found Owney waiting for them. He rowed Kitty and Mrs. Pommeroy out to the New Hope. Ruth enjoyed watching him. He came back for her, and she climbed down the ladder and hopped into his rowboat. He was looking at the bottom of the boat, not at her, and Ruth could not think of a single thing to say to him. But she did like looking at him. He rowed toward his uncle’s gleaming mission boat, where Mrs. Pommeroy and Kitty, leaning over the rail, were waving like tourists on a cruise. Kitty shouted, “Looking good, kid!”

“How’s everything going?” Ruth asked Owney.

He was so startled by her question that he stopped rowing; he just let the oars sit on the water.

“I’m fine,” he said. He was staring at her. He wasn’t blushing, and he didn’t seem embarrassed.

“Good,” said Ruth.

They bobbed on the water for a moment.

“I’m fine, too,” said Ruth.

“OK,” said Owney.

“You can keep rowing if you want.”

“OK,” said Owney, and he started to row again.

“Are you related to the bride?” Ruth asked, and Owney stopped rowing.

“She’s my cousin,” Owney said. They bobbed on the water.

“You can row and talk to me at the same time,” Ruth said, and now Owney did blush. He took her out to the boat without saying another word.

“He’s cute,” Mrs. Pommeroy whispered to Ruth when she climbed onto the deck of the New Hope.

“Look who’s here!” Kitty Pommeroy shrieked, and Ruth turned around to see Cal Cooley stepping out of the captain’s bridge.

Ruth let out a scream of horror that was only partly a joke. “For God’s sake,” she said. “He’s everywhere.”

Kitty threw her arms around her old lover, and Cal extricated himself. “That’s quite enough.”

“What the hell are you doing here?” Ruth asked.

“Supervising,” Cal said. “And nice to see you, too.”

“How did you get here?”

“Owney rowed me out earlier. Old Cal Cooley certainly did not swim.”

It was a quick trip to Courne Haven Island, and when they got off the boat, Owney led them to a lemon-yellow Cadillac parked by the dock.

“Whose car is this?” Ruth asked.

“My uncle’s.”

It matched the house, as it turned out. Pastor Wishnell lived a short drive from the Courne Haven dock, in a beautiful house, yellow with lavender trim. It was a three-story Victorian with a tower and a circular porch; bright blooming plants hung from hooks, placed three feet apart, around the entire porch. The slate walkway to the house was lined with lilies. The pastor’s garden, in the back of the house, was a little museum of roses, surrounded by a low brick wall. On the drive over, Ruth had noticed a few other homes on Courne Haven Island, equally nice. Ruth hadn’t been to Courne Haven since she was a little girl, too young to notice the differences between it and Fort Niles.

“Who lives in the big houses?” she asked Owney.

“Summer people,” Cal Cooley answered. “You’re lucky not to have them on Fort Niles. Mr. Ellis keeps them away. One of the many nice things Mr. Ellis does for you. Summer people are vermin.”

It was summer people, too, who owned the sailboats and the speedboats that surrounded the island. On the trip over, Ruth had seen two silvery speedboats darting across the water. They were so close to each other, the head of one boat seemed to be kissing the ass of the other.

They looked like two dragonflies, chasing each other around, trying to have sex in the salty air.

Pastor Wishnell set up Mrs. Pommeroy to cut hair in his back garden, right in front of a white trellis of pink roses. He had brought out a stool and a small side table, where she placed her scissors and combs and a tall glass of water in which to dip the combs. Kitty Pommeroy sat on the low brick wall and had herself a few cigarettes. She buried the butts in the soil under the roses when she thought nobody was looking. Owney Wishnell was sitting on the steps of the back porch in his strangely clean fisherman’s clothes, and Ruth went to sit beside him.

He kept his hands on his knees, and she could see the curling gold filaments of hair on his knuckles. They were such clean hands. She wasn’t used to seeing men with clean hands.

“How long has you uncle lived here?” she asked.

“Forever.”

“This doesn’t look like a house he’d live in. Does somebody else live here?”

“Me.”

“Anyone else?”

“Mrs. Post.”

“Who’s Mrs. Post?”

“She takes care of the house.”

“Shouldn’t you be helping your friends over there?” Cal Cooley asked. He’d come up behind them on the porch without making a sound. Now he lowered his tall body and sat next to Ruth so that she was between the two men.

“I don’t think they need any help, Cal.”

“Your uncle wants you to head back over to Fort Niles, Owney,” Cal Cooley said. “He needs you to pick up Mr. Ellis for the wedding.”

“Mr. Ellis is coming to this wedding?” Ruth asked.

“He is.”

“He never comes over here.”

“Regardless. Owney, it’s time to push off. I’m going with you.”

“May I go with you?” Ruth asked Owney.

“You certainly may not,” said Cal.

“I didn’t ask you, Cal. May I go with you, Owney?”

But Pastor Wishnell was approaching, and when Owney saw him, he quickly jumped off the steps and said to his uncle, “I’m going. I’m going right now.”

“Hurry,” said the pastor as he walked up the steps and onto the porch. He looked over his shoulder and said, “Ruth, Mrs. Pommeroy is going to need your help.”

“I’m not much help cutting hair,” Ruth said, but the pastor and Owney were gone. One in each direction.

Cal looked at Ruth and lifted a satisfied eyebrow. “I wonder why you’re so eager to hang around that boy.”

“Because he doesn’t annoy the fuck out of me, Cal.”

“I annoy the fuck out of you, Ruth?”

“Oh, not you. I didn’t mean you.

”

“I enjoyed our little trip to Concord. Mr. Ellis had a lot of questions for me when I got back. He wanted to know how you and your mother got along, and if you seemed at home there. I told him that you’d both got along swimmingly and that you seemed very much at home there, but I’m sure he’ll want to talk to you about it. Come to think of it, perhaps you should write him a note when you get the chance, thanking him for having sponsored the trip. It’s important to him that the two of you have a good relationship, considering how close your mother and grandmother have been to the Ellis family. And it’s important to him that you get as much time off Fort Niles as possible, Ruth. I told him I’d be happy to take you to Concord at any time, and that we had a good time traveling together. I do enjoy it, Ruth.” He was giving her his heavy-lidded stare now. “Although I can’t get out of my head this idea that someday the two of us will end up in a motel along Route One having filthy sex together.”

Ruth laughed. “Get it out of your head.”

“Why are you laughing?”

“Because Old Cal Cooley is such a funny man,” Ruth said. Which was not at all the truth. The truth was that Ruth was laughing because she had decided—as she often did, with varying degrees of success— that Old Cal Cooley was not going to get to her. She wouldn’t allow it. He could heap upon her loads of his most insidious abuse, but she would not rise to it. Certainly not today.

“I know it’s only a matter of time before you start having filthy sex with somebody, Ruth. All signs point to it.”

“Now we’re going to play a different kind of game,” Ruth said.

“Now you leave me alone for a while.”

“And you should keep yourself away from Owney Wishnell, by the way,” Cal said as he walked down the porch steps and wandered into the garden. “It’s obvious that you’re up to something with that boy, and nobody likes it.”

“Nobody?” Ruth called after him. “Really, Cal? Nobody?”

“Get over here, you big old man,” Kitty Pommeroy said to Cal when she saw him. Cal Cooley turned on his heel and walked stiffly in the other direction. He was going back to Fort Niles to get Mr. Ellis. The bride, Dotty Wishnell, was a likable blonde in her mid-thirties. She’d been married before, but her husband died of testicular cancer. She and her daughter, Candy, who was six years old, were the first to have their hair done. Dotty Wishnell walked over to Pastor Wishnell’s house in her bathrobe, her hair wet and uncombed. Ruth thought this was a pretty relaxed way for a bride to walk around on her wedding day, and it made Ruth like the woman right away. Dotty had an attractive enough face, but she looked exhausted. She had no makeup on yet, and she was chewing gum. She had deep lines across her forehead and around her mouth.

Dotty Wishnell’s daughter was extremely quiet. Candy was going to be her mother’s maid of honor, which Ruth thought an awfully serious job for a six-year-old, but Candy seemed up to it. She had a grown-up face for a child, a face that didn’t belong anywhere near a child.

“Are you nervous about being the maid of honor?” Mrs. Pommeroy asked Candy.

“Obviously not.” Candy had the firm mouth of the aging Queen Victoria. She wore a most judgmental expression, and those lips of hers were firmly set. “I was already a flower girl at Miss Dorphman’s wedding, and we aren’t even related.”

“Who’s Miss Dorphman?”

“Obviously she’s my teacher.”

“Obviously,” Ruth repeated, and Kitty Pommeroy and Mrs. Pommeroy both laughed. Dotty laughed, too. Candy looked at the four women as if she were disappointed in the lot of them.

“Oh, great,” Candy said, as if she had already had this kind of irritating day and wasn’t looking forward to another. “So far, so bad.”

Dotty Wishnell asked Mrs. Pommeroy to take care of Candy first and see whether she could give her thin brown hair some curls. Dotty Wishnell wanted her daughter to look “adorable.” Mrs. Pommeroy said it would be easy to make such an adorable child look adorable, and she would do all she could to make everyone happy.

“I could give her the cutest little bangs,” she said.

“No bangs,” Candy insisted. “No way.”

“She doesn’t even know what bangs are,” Dotty said.

“I do so, Mom,” said Candy.

Mrs. Pommeroy set to work on Candy’s hair while Dotty stood and watched. The two women talked comfortably with each other, although they’d never before met.

“The good thing is,” Dotty told Mrs. Pommeroy, “that Candy doesn’t have to change her name. Candy’s daddy was a Burden, and her new daddy is a Burden, too. My first husband and Charlie were first cousins, believe it or not. Charlie was one of the ushers at my first wedding, and today he’s the groom. Yesterday I said to him, ‘You never know how things are going to turn out,’ and he said, ‘You never know.’ He’s going to adopt Candy, he said.”

“I lost my first husband, too,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “Actually, he was my only husband. I was a young thing like you. It’s true; you never know.”

“How did your husband die?”

“He drowned.”

“What was his last name?”

“It was Pommeroy, sweetheart.”

“I think I remember that.”

“It was in 1967. But we don’t need to talk about that today, because today’s a happy day.”

“You poor thing.”

“You poor thing. Oh, don’t you worry about me, Dotty. What happened to me was a long, long time ago. But you lost your husband only last year, right? That’s what Pastor Wishnell said.”

“Last year,” Dotty replied, staring ahead. The women were silent for a while. “March twentieth, 1975.”

“My dad died,” Candy said.

“We don’t need to talk about that today,” Mrs. Pommeroy said, forming another perfect ring in Candy’s hair with her damp finger. “Today is a happy day. Today is your mommy’s wedding.”

“Well, I’m getting another husband today, that’s for sure,” said Dotty. “I’m getting a new one. This island is no place to live without a husband. And you’re getting a new daddy, Candy. Isn’t that right?”

Candy did not express an opinion on this.

“Does Candy have other little girls to play with on Courne Haven?” Mrs. Pommeroy asked.

“No,” Dotty said. “There are some teenage girls around, but they aren’t too interested in playing with Candy, and next year they’ll be going inland to school. Mostly, it’s little boys around here.”

“It was the same thing with Ruth when she was little! All she had were my boys to play with.”

“Is that your daughter?” Dotty asked, looking at Ruth.

“She’s practically my daughter,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. My daughtah . . . “And she grew up with nothing but boys around.”

“Was that hard on you?” Dotty asked Ruth.

“It was the worst,” Ruth said. “It ruined me completely.”

Dotty’s face collapsed into worry. Mrs. Pommeroy said, “She’s teasing. It was fine. Ruth loved my boys. They were like her brothers. Candy will be fine.”

“I think Candy wishes she could be a girly-girl sometimes, and play girly games for a change,” said Dotty. “I’m the only girl she can play with, and I’m no fun. I haven’t been much fun all year.”

“That’s because my dad died,” Candy said.

“We don’t need to talk about that today, honey,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “Today your mommy’s getting married. Today’s a happy day, sweetheart.”

“I wish there were some little boys my age around here,” said Kitty Pommeroy. Nobody seemed to hear this but Ruth, who snorted in disgust.

“I always wanted a little girl,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “But I had a whole bunch of boys. Is it fun? Is it fun dressing Candy up all pretty? My boys wouldn’t let me touch them. And Ruth always had short hair, so it wasn’t fun to play with.”

“You’re the one who kept it short,” Ruth said. “I wanted my hair to be just like yours, but you were always cutting it.”

“You couldn’t keep it combed, sweetheart.”

“I can dress myself,” Candy said.

“I’m sure you can, sweetheart.”

“No bangs.”

“That’s right,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “We’re not giving you any bangs, even though they’d be beautiful.” She expertly circled the puff of curls she had created on top of Candy’s head with a wide white ribbon. “Adorable?” she asked Dotty.

“Adorable,” said Dotty. “Precious. You did a great job. I can never get her to sit still, and I don’t know anything about styling hair. Obviously. I mean, look at me. This is about as good as I get.”

“There you go. Thank you, Candy.” Mrs Pommeroy bent over and kissed the little girl on the cheek. “You were very brave.”

“Obviously,” said Candy.

“Obviously,” said Ruth.

“You’re next, Dotty. We’ll do the bride, and you can go get dressed, and then we’ll do your friends. Somebody should tell them to start coming over. What do you want me to do with your hair?”

“I don’t know. I guess I just want to look happy,” Dotty instructed.

“Can you do that for me?”

“You can’t hide a happy bride, even under a bad hairstyle,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “I could wrap your head in a towel, and if you’re happy, you’d still look beautiful, marrying your man.”

“Only God can make a happy bride,” Kitty Pommeroy said very seriously, for some reason.

Dotty considered this and sighed. “Well,” she said, and spat her gum into a used tissue she’d fished out of her bathrobe pocket, “see what you can do for me. Just do your best.”

Mrs. Pommeroy set to work on Dotty Wishnell’s wedding day hair, and Ruth left the women and went to look more closely at Pastor Wishnell’s house. She could not make any sense of its delicate, feminine style. She walked the length of the long, curving porch, with its wicker furniture and bright cushions. That must be the work of the mysterious Mrs. Post. She saw a bird feeder, shaped like a little house and cheerfully painted red. Knowing that she was trespassing, but overcome by curiosity, she let herself into the house through the French doors that opened from the porch. Now she was in a small parlor, a sitting room. Brightly covered books lay on end tables, and doilies covered the backs of the sofa and chairs.

She walked next through a living room papered in a print of pale green lilies. A ceramic Persian cat crouched next to the fireplace, and a real tabby cat reclined on the back of a rose-colored couch. The cat looked at Ruth and, unconcerned, went back to sleep. Ruth touched a handmade afghan on a rocking chair. Pastor Wishnell lived here? Owney Wishnell lived here? She walked on. The kitchen smelled of vanilla, and a coffee cake sat on the counter. She noticed stairs at the back of the kitchen. What was upstairs? She was out of her mind, to be snooping around like this. She’d be hard put to explain to anyone what she was doing upstairs in Pastor Toby Wishnell’s house, but she was dying to find Owney’s bedroom. She wanted to see where he slept.

She walked up the steep wooden stairs and, on the next floor, peered into an immaculate bathroom, with a potted fern hanging in the window and a small cake of lavender soap in a dish above the sink. There was a framed photograph of a small girl and a small boy, kissing. BEST FRIENDS, it read below in pink script.

Ruth moved to the doorway of a bedroom containing stuffed animals propped against the pillows. The next bedroom had a beautiful sleigh bed and its own bathroom. The last bedroom had a single bed with a rose-covered quilt. Where did Owney sleep? Not with the teddy bears, surely. Not on the sleigh bed. She couldn’t picture that. She had no sense of Owney at all in this house.

But Ruth kept exploring. She climbed up to the third floor. It was hot, with sloping ceilings. Seeing a partly closed door, she naturally pushed it open. And walked in on Pastor Wishnell.

“Oh,” Ruth said.

He looked at her from behind an ironing board. He was in his black trousers. He wasn’t wearing a shirt. That’s what he was ironing. His torso was long and seemed to have no muscle or fat or hair. He lifted his shirt off the ironing board, slid his arms into the starched sleeves, and fastened the buttons, bottom to top, slowly.

“I was looking for Owney,” Ruth said.

“He’s gone to Fort Niles to pick up Mr. Ellis.”

“Oh, really? Sorry.”

“You knew that very well.”

“Oh, that’s right. Yes, I did know that. Sorry.”

“This is not your house, Miss Thomas. What made you think you were free to wander about it?”

“That’s right. Sorry to have bothered you.” Ruth backed into the hallway.

Pastor Wishnell said, “No, Miss Thomas. Come in.”

Ruth paused, then stepped back into the room. She thought to herself, Fuck, and looked around. Well, this was certainly Pastor Wishnell’s room. This was the first room in the house that made any sense. It was stark and blank. The walls and ceiling were white; even the bare wooden floor was whitewashed. The room smelled faintly of shoe polish. The pastor’s bed was a narrow brass frame, with a blue woollen blanket and a thin pillow. Under the bed was a pair of leather slippers.

The bedside table held no lamp or book, and the room’s single window had only a window shade, no curtain. There was a dresser, and on it a small pewter plate holding a few coins. The dominant object in the room was a large, dark wooden desk, beside which was a bookcase filled with heavy volumes. The desk held an electric typewriter, a stack of paper, a soup can of pencils.

Hanging above the desk was a map of the coast of Maine, covered with pencil marks. Ruth looked for Fort Niles, instinctively. It was unmarked. She wondered what that meant. Unsaved? Ungrateful?

The pastor unplugged the iron, wrapped the cord around it, and set it on his desk.

“You have a pretty house,” Ruth said. She put her hands in her pockets, trying to look casual, as if she’d been invited here. Pastor Wishnell folded the ironing board and placed it inside the closet.

“Were you named after the Ruth of the Bible?” he asked. “Have

a seat.”

“I don’t know who I was named after.”

“Don’t you know your Bible?”

“Not too much.”

“Ruth was a great woman of the Old Testament. She was the model of female loyalty.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“You might enjoy reading the Bible, Ruth. It contains many wonderful stories.”

Ruth thought, Exactly. Stories. Action-adventure. Ruth was an atheist. She had decided that the year before, when she learned the word. She was still having fun with the idea. She hadn’t told anyone, but the knowledge gave her a thrill.

“Why aren’t you helping Mrs. Pommeroy?” he asked.

“I’m going to do that right now,” Ruth said, and thought about making a run for it.

“Ruth,” Pastor Wishnell said, “sit down. You can sit on the bed.”

There was no bed in the world that Ruth wanted less to sit on than Pastor Wishnell’s. She sat down.

“Don’t you ever get tired of Fort Niles?” he asked. He tucked his shirt into his pants, in four smooth strokes, with flat palms. His hair was damp, and she could see the tooth marks from a comb. His skin was pale as fine linen. He leaned against the side of the desk, folded his arms, and looked at her.

“I haven’t been able to spend enough time there to get tired of it,” Ruth said.

“Because of school?”

“Because Lanford Ellis is always sending me away,” she said. She thought that statement made her sound a little pathetic, so she shrugged blithely, trying to indicate that it was no big deal.

“I think Mr. Ellis is interested in your wellbeing. I understand that he paid for your schooling and has offered to pay for your college education. He has vast resources, and he obviously cares what becomes of you. Not such a bad thing, is it? You are meant for better things than Fort Niles. Don’t you think?”

Ruth did not reply.

“You know, I don’t spend very much time on my island, either, Ruth. I’m hardly ever here on Courne Haven. In the last two months, I’ve preached twenty-one sermons, visited twenty-nine families, and attended eleven prayer meetings. I often lose count of weddings, funerals, and christenings. For many of these people, I am their only connection to the Lord. But I am also called upon to give worldly advice. They need me to read business papers for them or to help them find a new car. Many things. You’d be surprised. I settle disputes between people who would otherwise end up attacking each other physically. I am a peacemaker. It’s not an easy life; sometimes I’d like to stay home and enjoy my nice house.”

He made a gesture, indicating his nice house. It was a small gesture, though, and seemed to take in only his bedroom, which wasn’t, as far as Ruth could see, much to enjoy.

“I do leave my home, though,” Pastor Wishnell continued, “because I have duties, you see. I’ve been to every island in Maine in the course of my life. There are times when they all look the same to me, I must admit. Of all the islands I visit, though, I think Fort Niles is the most isolated. It is certainly the least religious.”

That’s because we don’t like you, Ruth thought.

“Is that right?” she said.

“Which is a pity, because it is the isolated people of the world who most need fellowship. Fort Niles is a strange place, Ruth. They’ve had chances, over the years, to become more involved in the world beyond their island. But they are slow and suspicious. I don’t know whether you’re old enough to remember when there was talk of building a ferry terminal.”

“Sure.”

“So you know about that failure. Now, the only tourists who can visit these islands are those with their own boats. And every time someone needs to go into Rockland from Fort Niles, he has to take his lobster boat. Every penny nail, every can of beans, every shoelace on Fort Niles has to come on some man’s lobster boat.”

“We have a store.”

“Oh, please, Ruth. Scarcely. And every time a lady from Fort Niles needs to do her grocery shopping or visit a doctor, she has to get a ride on some man’s lobster boat.”

“It’s the same thing over on Courne Haven,” Ruth said. She thought she’d already heard the pastor’s view on this subject, and she wasn’t interested in hearing it again. What did it have to do with her? He clearly enjoyed giving a little sermon. Lucky me, Ruth thought grimly.

“Well, Courne Haven’s fortunes are closely tied to those of Fort Niles. And Fort Niles is slow to act; your island is the last to embrace any change. Most of the men on Fort Niles still make their own traps, because, without reason, they’re suspicious of the wire ones.”

“Not everyone.”

“You know, Ruth, all over the rest of Maine, the lobstermen are starting to consider fiberglass boats. Just as an example. How long will it be before fiberglass comes to Fort Niles? Your guess is as good as mine. I can easily imagine Angus Addams’s reaction to such an idea. Fort Niles always resists. Fort Niles resisted size limitations on lobsters harder than anyone in the state of Maine. And now there’s talk all over the rest of Maine of setting voluntary trap limits.”

“We’ll never set trap limits,” Ruth said.

“They may be set for you, young lady. If your fishermen will not do it voluntarily, it may become a law, and there will be wardens crawling all over your boats, just as there were when the size limits were set. That’s how innovation comes to Fort Niles. It has to be rammed down your stubborn throats until you choke on it.”

Did he just say that? She stared at him. He was smiling slightly, and he had spoken in an even, mild tone. Ruth was appalled by his snide little speech, uttered with such ease. Everything he said was true, of course, but that haughty manner! She herself may have said some nasty things about Fort Niles in her time, but she had the right to speak critically of her own island and her own people. Hearing such condescension from someone so smug and unattractive was intolerable. She felt indignantly defensive, suddenly, of Fort Niles. How dare he!

“The world changes, Ruth,” he went on. “There was a time when many of the men on Fort Niles were hakers. Now there’s not enough hake left in the Atlantic to feed a kitty cat. We’re losing redfish, too, and pretty soon the only lobster bait left will be herring. And some of the herring the men are using these days is so bad, even the seagulls won’t eat it. There used to be a granite industry out here that made everyone rich, and now that’s gone, too. How do the men on your island expect to make a living in ten, twenty years? Do they think every day for the rest of time will be the same? That they can count on big lobster catches forever? They’re going to fish and fish until there’s only one lobster left, and then they’ll fight to the death over the last one. You know it, Ruth. You know how these people are. They’ll never agree to do what’s in their best interest. You think those fools will come to their senses and form a fishing cooperative, Ruth?”

“It’ll never happen,” Ruth said. Fools?

“Is that what your father says?”

“That’s what everyone says.”

“Well, everyone may be right. They’ve certainly fought it hard enough in the past. Your friend Angus Addams came to a cooperative meeting once on Courne Haven, back when our Denny Burden nearly bankrupted his family and got himself killed trying to form a collective between the two islands. I was there. I saw how Angus behaved. He came with a bag of popcorn. He sat in the front row while some more highly evolved individuals discussed ways that the two islands could work together for the benefit of everyone. Angus Addams sat there, grinning and eating popcorn. When I asked him what he was doing, he said, ‘I’m enjoying the show. This is funnier than the talking pictures.’ Men like Angus Addams think they’re better off working alone forever.

Am I correct? Is that what every man thinks over on your island?”

“I don’t know what every man on my island thinks,” Ruth said.

“You’re a bright young woman. I’m sure you know exactly what they think.”

Ruth chewed on the inside of her lip. “I think I should go help Mrs. Pommeroy now,” she said.

“Why do you waste your time with people like that?” Pastor Wishnell asked.

“Mrs. Pommeroy is my friend.”

“I’m not talking about Mrs. Pommeroy. I’m talking about Fort Niles lobstermen. I’m talking about Angus Addams, Simon Addams—”

“Senator Simon is not a lobsterman. He’s never even been in a boat.”

“I’m talking about men like Len Thomas, Don Pommeroy, Stan Thomas—”

“Stan Thomas is my father, sir.”

“I know perfectly well that Stan Thomas is your father.”

Ruth stood up.

“Sit down,” said Pastor Toby Wishnell.

She sat down. Her face was hot. She immediately regretted sitting down. She should have walked out of the room.

“You don’t belong on Fort Niles, Ruth. I’ve been asking around about you, and I understand that you have other options. You should take advantage of them. Not everyone is so fortunate. Owney, for instance, does not have your choices. I know you have some interest in my nephew’s life.”

Ruth’s face got hotter.

“Well, let’s consider Owney. What will become of him? That’s my worry, not yours, but let’s think about it together. You’re in a much better position than Owney is. The fact is, there is no future for you on your island. Every pigheaded fool who lives there ensures that. Fort Niles is doomed. There is no leadership over there. There is no moral core. My heavens, look at that rotted, rundown church! How was that allowed to happen?”

Because we fucking hate you, Ruth thought.

“The whole island will be abandoned in two decades. Don’t look surprised, Ruth. That’s what may well happen. I sail up and down this coast year after year, and I see communities trying to survive. Who on Fort Niles even tries? Do you have any form of government, an elected official? Who is your leader? Angus Addams? That snake? Who’s coming down the pike in the next generation? Len Thomas? Your father? When has your father ever considered anyone else’s interests?”

Ruth was getting ambushed. “You don’t know anything about my father,” she said, trying to sound as measured as Pastor Wishnell, but sounding, in fact, somewhat shrill.

Pastor Wishnell smiled. “Ruth,” he said, “mark my words. I know a great deal about your father. And I’ll repeat my prediction. Twenty years from now, your island will be a ghost town. Your people will have brought it on themselves through stubbornness and isolation. Does twenty years seem far away? It isn’t.”

He leveled a cool gaze on Ruth. She tried to level one back.

“Don’t think that because there have always been people on Fort Niles, there always will be. These islands are fragile, Ruth. Did you ever hear of the Isles of Shoals, from the early nineteenth century? The population got smaller and more inbred, and the society fell to pieces. The citizens burned down the meeting house, copulated with their siblings, hanged their only pastor, practiced witchcraft. When the Reverend Jedidiah Morse visited in 1820, he found only a handful of people. He married everyone immediately, to prevent further sin. It was the best he could do. A generation later, the islands were deserted. That could happen to Fort Niles. You don’t think so?”

Ruth had no comment.

“One more thing,” Pastor Wishnell said, “that came to my attention the other day. A lobsterman on Frenchman’s Island told me that back when the state first introduced size limitations on lobsters, a certain lobsterman named Jim used to keep short lobsters and sell them to the summer people on his island. He had a nice little illegal business going, but word got around, because word always gets around, and someone notified the fishing warden. The fishing warden started following old Jim, trying to catch him with the shorts. He even inspected Jim’s boat a few times. But Jim kept his shorts in a sack, weighted with a rock, that hung down from the stern of his boat. So he never got caught.

“One day, though, the fishing warden was spying on Jim with binoculars and saw him filling the sack and dumping it over the stern. So the warden chased Jim in his police boat, and Jim, knowing he was about to be caught, throttled his boat as fast as it could go, and took off for home. He drove it right up on the beach, grabbed the sack, and made a run for it. The warden chased him, so Jim dropped the sack and climbed up a tree. When the warden opened the sack, guess what he found, Ruth?”

“A skunk.”

“A skunk. That’s right. You’ve heard this story before, I gather.”

“It happened to Angus Addams.”

“It didn’t happen to Angus Addams. It didn’t happen to anyone. It’s apocryphal.”

Ruth and the pastor stared each other down.

“Do you know what apocryphal means, Ruth?”

“Yes, I know what apocryphal means,” snapped Ruth, who, at just that moment, was wondering what apocryphal meant.

“They tell that story on all the islands in Maine. They tell it because it makes them feel good that an old lobsterman could outsmart the law. But that’s not why I told it to you, Ruth. I told it to you because it’s a good fable about what happens to anyone who snoops around too much. You haven’t been enjoying our conversation, have you?”

She was not about to answer that.

“But you could have saved yourself this unpleasant conversation by staying out of my house. You brought it on yourself, didn’t you, by poking around where you had no right to. And if you feel as though you’ve been sprayed by a skunk, you know where to lay the blame. Isn’t that correct, Ruth?”

“I’m going to help Mrs. Pommeroy now,” Ruth said. She stood up again.

“I think that’s an excellent idea. And enjoy the wedding, Ruth.”

Ruth wanted to run out of that room, but she didn’t want to show Pastor Wishnell how agitated she was by his “fable,” so she walked out with some dignity. Once outside the room, though, she took off down the hall and down the two flights of stairs, through the kitchen, through the living room, and out the parlor door. She sat down in one of the wicker chairs on the porch. Fucking asshole, she was thinking. Unbelievable.

She should have beat it out of that room the moment he started his little oration. What the hell was that all about? He didn’t even know her. I’ve been asking around about you, Ruth. He had no business telling her who she should or shouldn’t hang around with, telling her to stay away from her own father. Ruth sat on the porch in a private, angry chill. It was embarrassing, more than anything, to be lectured to by this minister. And strange, too, to watch him put on his shirt, to sit on his bed. Strange to see his empty little monkish room and his pathetic little ironing board. Freak. She should have told him she was an atheist.

Across the garden, Mrs. Pommeroy and Kitty were still at work on the women’s hair. Dotty Wishnell and Candy were gone, probably getting dressed for the wedding. There was a small clutch of Courne Haven women still waiting for Mrs. Pommeroy’s attention. They all had damp hair. Mrs. Pommeroy had instructed the women to wash their hair at home so that she could devote her time to cutting and setting it. There were a few men in the rose garden, too, waiting for their wives or, perhaps, waiting to have their hair cut.

Kitty Pommeroy was combing out the long blond hair of a pretty young teenager, a girl who looked about thirteen. There were so many blonds on this island! All those Swedes from the granite industry. Pastor Wishnell had mentioned the granite industry, as if anyone still gave a shit about it. So what if the granite industry was finished? Who cared anymore? Nobody on Fort Niles was starving because the granite industry was gone. It was all gloom and doom from that guy. Fucking asshole. Poor Owney. Ruth tried to imagine a childhood spent with that uncle. Grim, mean, hard.

“Where you been?” Mrs. Pommeroy called over to Ruth.

“Bathroom.”

“You OK?”

“Fine,” Ruth said.

“Come over here, then.”

Ruth went over and sat on the low brick wall. She felt battered and slugged, and probably looked it. But nobody, not even Mrs. Pommeroy, took any notice. The group was too busy chatting. Ruth could see that she’d walked into the middle of a completely inane conversation.

“It’s gross,” said the teenage girl being tended to by Kitty. “He steps on all the urchins, and his whole boat gets covered with, like, guts.”

“There’s no need for that,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “My husband always threw urchins back in the water. Urchins don’t harm anyone.”

“Urchins eat bait!” said one of the Courne Haven men in the rose garden. “They get up on your bait bag, they eat the bait and the bag, too.”

“I got spikes in my fingers my whole life from goddamn urchins,” said another man.

“But why does Tuck have to step on them?” asked the pretty teenager. “It’s gross. And it takes time away from fishing. He gets all worked up about it; he has a really bad temper. He calls them whore’s eggs.” She giggled.

“Everyone calls them whore’s eggs,” said the fisherman with the spikes in his fingers.

“That’s right,” said Mrs. Pommeroy. “Having a bad temper takes time away from work. People should settle down.”

“I hate those bottom feeders you pull up sometimes, and they’re all bloated from coming up so fast,” the girl said. “Those fish? With the big eyes? Every time I go out to haul with my brother, we get a ton of those.”

“I haven’t been out on a lobster boat in years,” Mrs. Pommeroy said.

“They look like toads,” said the girl. “Tuck steps on them, too.”

“There’s no reason to be cruel to animals,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “No reason at all.”

“Tuck caught a shark once. He beat it up.”

“Who’s Tuck?” Mrs. Pommeroy asked.

“He’s my brother,” the teenage girl said. She looked at Ruth. “Who are you?”

“Ruth Thomas. Who are you?”

“Mandy Addams.”

“Are you related to Simon and Angus Addams? The brothers?”

“Probably. I don’t know. Do they live on Fort Niles?”

“Yeah.”

“Are they cute?”

Kitty Pommeroy laughed so hard, she fell to her knees.

“Yeah,” said Ruth. “They’re adorable.”

“They’re in their seventies, dear,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “And, actually, they are adorable.”

“What’s the matter with her?” Mandy asked, looking at Kitty, who was wiping her eyes and being helped to her feet by Mrs. Pommeroy.

“She’s drunk,” Ruth said. “She falls down all the time.”

“I am drunk!” Kitty shouted. “I am drunk, Ruth! But you don’t have to tell everyone.” Kitty got control of herself and went back to combing the teenager’s hair.

“Jeez, I think my hair is combed enough,” Mandy said, but Kitty kept combing, hard.

“Christ, Ruth,” Kitty said. “You’re such a blabbermouth. And I do not fall down all the time.”

“How old are you?” Mandy Addams asked Ruth. Her eyes were on Ruth, but her head was pulling against the tug of Kitty Pommeroy’s comb.

“Eighteen.”

“Are you from Fort Niles?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve never seen you around.”

Ruth sighed. She didn’t feel like explaining her life to this dimwit. “I know. I went away to high school.”

“I’m going away to high school next year. Where’d you go?

Rockland?”

“Delaware.”

“Is that in Rockland?”

“Not really,” Ruth said, and as Kitty started to shake with laughter again, she added, “Take it easy, Kitty. It’s going to be a long day. It’s too early to start falling down every two minutes.”

“Is that in Rockland?” Kitty wailed, and wiped her eyes. The Courne Haven fishermen and their wives, gathered in the Wishnell gardens around the Pommeroy sisters, all laughed, too. Well, that’s good, Ruth thought. At least they know the little blond girl is an idiot. Or maybe they were laughing at Kitty Pommeroy.

Ruth remembered what Pastor Wishnell had said about Fort Niles disappearing in twenty years. He was out of his mind. There’d be lobsters enough forever. Lobsters were prehistoric animals, survivors. The rest of the ocean might be exterminated, but the lobsters wouldn’t care. Lobsters can dig down into the mud and live there for months. They can eat rocks. They don’t give a shit, Ruth thought, admiringly. Lobsters would thrive if there was nothing left in the sea to eat except other lobsters. The last lobster in the world would probably eat himself, if he was the only food available. There was no need to get all concerned about lobsters.

Pastor Wishnell was out of his mind.

“Your brother really beat up a shark?” Mrs. Pommeroy asked Mandy.

“Sure. Jeez, I don’t think I ever had my hair combed so much in one day!”

“Everybody’s caught a shark sometime,” one of the fishermen said. “We all beat up a shark one time or another.”

“You just kill them?” Mrs. Pommeroy said.

“Sure.”

“There’s no call for that.”

“No call to kill a shark?” The fisherman sounded amused. Mrs. Pommeroy was a lady and a stranger (an attractive lady stranger), and all the men in the garden were in a good mood around her.

“There’s no reason to be cruel to animals,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. She spoke around a few bobby pins in the corner of her mouth. She was working on the head of a steel-haired old lady, who seemed utterly oblivious of the conversation. Ruth guessed she was the mother of the bride or the mother of the groom.

“That’s right,” said Kitty Pommeroy. “Me and Rhonda, we learned that from our father. He wasn’t a cruel man. He never laid a hand on any of us girls. He stepped out on us plenty, but he never hit nobody.”

“It’s plain cruelty to pick on animals,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “All animals are God’s creatures as much as any of us. I think it shows that there’s something really wrong with you, if you have to be cruel to an animal for no reason.”

“I don’t know,” said the fisherman. “I sure like eating them fine.”

“Eating animals is different from picking on them. Cruelty to animals is unforgivable.”

“That’s right,” repeated Kitty. “I think it’s disgusting.”

Ruth could not believe this conversation. It was the kind of conversation people on Fort Niles had all the time—dumb, circular, uninformed. Apparently it was the kind that people on Courne Haven liked, too.

Mrs. Pommeroy took a bobby pin from her mouth and set a small gray curl on the old lady in the chair. “Although,” she said, “I have to admit I used to shove firecrackers in frogs’ mouths and blow them up.”

“Me, too,” said Kitty.

“But I didn’t know what it would do.

”

“Sure,” said one of the amused Courne Haven fishermen. “How could you know?”

“Sometimes I throw snakes in front of the lawn mower and run over them,” said Mandy Addams, the pretty teenager.

“Now that’s downright cruel,” said Mrs. Pommeroy. “There’s no reason to do that. Snakes are good for keeping pests away.”

“Oh, I used to do that, too,” said Kitty Pommeroy. “Hell, Rhonda, we used to do that together, me and you. We were always chopping up snakes.”

“But we were only children, Kitty. We didn’t know any better.”

“Yeah,” said Kitty, “we were only children.”

“We didn’t know better.”

“That’s right,” Kitty said. “Remember that time you found a nest of baby mice under the sink, and you drowned them?”

“Children don’t know how to treat animals, Kitty,” Mrs. Pommeroy said.

“You drowned each one in a different teacup. You called it a mouse tea party. You kept saying, ‘Oh! They’re so cute! They’re so cute!’”

“I don’t have such a big problem with mice,” said one of the Courne Haven fishermen. “I’ll tell you what I do have a big problem with. Rats.”

“Who’s next?” Mrs. Pommeroy asked brightly. “Whose turn is it to look pretty?”

Ruth Thomas got drunk at the wedding.

Kitty Pommeroy helped. Kitty made friends with the bartender, a fifty-year-old Courne Haven fisherman named Chucky Strachan.

Chucky Strachan had earned the great honor of serving as bartender largely because he was a big drunk. Chucky and Kitty found each other right away, the way two garrulous drunks in a bustling crowd always find each other, and they set out to have a great time at the Wishnell wedding. Kitty appointed herself Chucky’s assistant and made sure to match his customers, drink for drink. She asked Chucky to whip up something nice for Ruth Thomas, something to loosen up the little honey.

“Give her something fruity,” Kitty instructed. “Give her something just as sweet as her.” So Chucky whipped up for Ruth a tall glass of whiskey and a little tiny bit of ice.

“Now that’s a drink for a lady,” Chucky said.

“I meant a cocktail!” Kitty said. “That’s going to taste gross to her! She’s not used to it! She went to private school!”

“Let’s see,” said Ruth Thomas, and she drank down the whiskey Chucky gave her, not in one swallow, but pretty quickly.

“Very fruity,” she said. “Very sweet.”

The drink radiated a pleasant warmth in her bowels. Her lips felt bigger. She had another drink, and she started to feel incredibly affectionate. She gave Kitty Pommeroy a long, strong hug, and said, “You were always my favorite Pommeroy sister,” which couldn’t have been further from the truth but felt good to say.

“I hope things work out for you, Ruthie,” Kitty slurred.

“Aw, Kitty, you’re sweet. You’ve always been so sweet to me.”

“We all want things to work out for you, hon. We’re all just holding our fingers, hoping it all works out.”

“Holding your fingers?” Ruth frowned.

“Crossing our breath, I mean,” Kitty said, and they both nearly fell down laughing.

Chucky Strachan made Ruth another drink.

“Am I a great bartender?” he asked.

“You really know how to mix whiskey and ice in a glass,” Ruth conceded. “That’s for sure.”

“That’s my cousin getting married,” he said. “We need to celebrate. Dotty Wishnell is my cousin! Hey! Charlie Burden is my cousin, too!”

Chucky Strachan leaped out from behind the bar and grabbed Kitty Pommeroy. He buried his face in Kitty’s neck. He kissed Kitty all over her face, all over the good side of her face, the side that wasn’t burn-scarred. Chucky was a skinny guy, and his pants dropped lower and lower over his skinny ass. Each time he bent over the slightest bit, he displayed a nice New England cleavage. Ruth tried to avert her eyes. A matronly woman in a floral skirt was waiting for a drink, but Chucky didn’t notice her. The woman smiled hopefully in his direction, but he slapped Kitty Pommeroy’s bottom and opened himself a beer.

“Are you married?” Ruth asked Chucky, as he licked Kitty’s neck.

He pulled away, threw a fist in the air, and announced, “My name is Clarence Henry Strachan and I am married!”

“May I have a drink, please?” the matronly lady asked politely.

“Talk to the bartender!” shouted Chucky Strachan, and he took Kitty out on the plywood dance floor in the middle of the tent.

The wedding service itself had been insignificant to Ruth. She had barely watched it, barely paid attention. She was amazed by the size of Dotty’s father’s yard, amazed by his nice garden. Those Wishnells certainly had money. Ruth was used to Fort Niles weddings, where the guests brought casseroles and pots of beans and pies. After the wedding, there’d be a great sorting of the serving dishes. Whose tray is this? Whose coffee machine is this?

The wedding of Dotty Wishnell and Charlie Burden, on the other hand, had been catered by a mainland expert. And there was, as Pastor Wishnell had promised, a professional photographer. The bride wore white, and some of the guests who had been to Dotty’s first wedding said this gown was even nicer than the last one. Charlie Burden, a stocky character with an alcoholic’s nose and suspicious eyes, made an unhappy groom. He looked depressed to be standing there in front of everyone, saying the formal words. Dotty’s little daughter, Candy, as maid of honor, had cried, and when her mother tried to comfort her, said nastily, “I’m not crying!” Pastor Wishnell went on and on about Responsibilities and Rewards.

And after it was over, Ruth got drunk. And after she got drunk, she set to dancing. She danced with Kitty Pommeroy and Mrs. Pommeroy and with the groom. She danced with Chucky Strachan, the bartender, and with two handsome young men in tan pants, who, she found out later, were summer people. Summer people at an island wedding! Imagine that! She danced with both of those men a few times, and she got the feeling that she was somehow making fun of them, though she couldn’t later remember what she’d said. She dropped a lot of sarcastic comments that they didn’t seem to get. She even danced with Cal Cooley when he asked her. The band played country music.

“Is the band from here?” she asked Cal, and he said that the musicians had come over on Babe Wishnell’s boat.

“They’re good,” Ruth said. For some reason she was allowing herself to be held very close by Cal Cooley. “I wish I could play an instrument. I’d like to play the fiddle. I can’t even sing. I can’t play anything. I can’t even play a radio. Are you having fun, Cal?”

“I’d have a lot more fun if you’d slide up and down my leg as if it were a greased fire pole.”

Ruth laughed.

“You look good,” he told Ruth. “You should wear pink more often.”

“I should wear pink more often? I’m wearing yellow.”

“I said you should drink more often. I like the way it makes you feel. All soft and yielding.”

“What am I wielding?” Ruth said, but she was only pretending not to understand.

He sniffed her hair. She let him. She could tell he was sniffing her hair, because she could feel his puffs of breath on her scalp. He pressed himself against her leg, and she could feel his erection. She let him do that, too. What the hell, she figured. He ground himself against her. He rocked her slowly. He kept his hands low on her back and pulled her tight against him. She let him do all that. What the hell, she kept thinking. It was Old Cal Cooley, but it felt pretty good. He kissed her on the top of the head, and suddenly it was as if she woke up.

It was Cal Cooley!

“Oh, my God, I have to pee,” Ruth said, and pulled herself away from Cal, which wasn’t easy, because he made a fight to hold her. What was she doing dancing with Cal Cooley? Jesus Christ. She weaved her way out of the tent, out of the yard, and walked down the street until the street ended and the woods began. She stepped behind a tree, lifted her dress, and peed on a flat rock, proudly managing to not splatter her legs. She couldn’t believe she had felt Cal Cooley’s penis, even faintly, pressing through his pants. That was disgusting. She made a pact with herself to do anything she had to do for the rest of her life to forget that she had ever felt Cal Cooley’s penis.

When she walked out of the woods, she took a wrong turn and ended up on a street marked FURNACE STREET. They have street signs here? she wondered. Like the other streets on Courne Haven, this one was unpaved. It was dusk. She passed a small white house with a porch; on the porch was an old woman in a flannel shirt. She was holding a fluffy yellow bird. Ruth peered at the bird and at the woman. She was feeling wobbly on her feet.

“I’m looking for Babe Wishnell’s house,” she said. “Can you tell me where it is? I think I’m lost.”

“I’ve been taking care of my sick husband for years,” the woman said, “and my memory’s not what it ought to be.”

“How’s your husband doing, ma’am?”

“He doesn’t have many good days anymore.”

“Really sick, is he?”

“Dead.”

“Oh.” Ruth scratched a mosquito bite on her ankle. “Do you know where Babe Wishnell’s house is? I’m supposed to be at a wedding there.”

“I think it’s right up the next street. After the greenhouse. Take a left,” the woman said. “It’s been some time since I was there.”

“The greenhouse? You guys have a greenhouse on this island?”

“Oh, I don’t think so, love.”

Ruth was confused for a moment; then she figured it out. “Do you mean that I should take a left after the house that’s painted green?”

“I think you should, yes. But my memory’s not what it ought to be.”

“I think your memory’s just fine.”

“Aren’t you a love? Who’s getting married?”

“Babe Wishnell’s daughter.”

“That little girl?”

“I guess so. Excuse me, ma’am, but is that a duckling you’re holding?”

“This is a chick, love. Oh, it’s awful soft.” The woman grinned at Ruth, and Ruth grinned back.

“Well, then, thank you for your help,” Ruth said. She headed up the street to the house that was green and found her way back to the wedding.

As she stepped into the tent, a hot, dry hand caught her by the arm. She said, “Hey!” It was Cal Cooley.

“Mr. Ellis wants to see you,” he said, and before she could protest, Cal led her over to Mr. Ellis. Ruth had forgotten that he was coming to the wedding, but there he was, sitting in his wheelchair. He grinned up at her, and Ruth, who had been doing a lot of grinning lately, grinned back. Good God, he was thin. He couldn’t have weighed a hundred and ten pounds, and he’d once been a tall, strong man. His head was a bald, yellow globe, burnished as the head of a well-used cane. He had no eyebrows. He wore an ancient black suit with silver buttons. Ruth was astonished, as always, at how poorly he had aged compared with his sister, Miss Vera. Miss Vera liked to affect frailty, but she was perfectly hale. Miss Vera was little, but she was sturdy as firewood. Her brother was a wisp. Ruth couldn’t believe, when she’d seen him earlier in the spring, that he’d made the trip to Fort Niles this year from Concord. And now she could not believe that he had made the trip from Fort Niles to Courne Haven for the wedding. He was ninety-four years old.

“It’s nice to see you, Mr. Ellis,” she said.

“Miss Thomas,” he replied, “you look well. Your hair is very pretty away from your face.” He squinted up at her with his rheumy blue eyes. He was holding her hand. “You will have a seat?”

She took a deep breath and sat down on a wooden folding chair beside him. He let go of her. She wondered whether she smelled of whiskey. One had to sit awfully close to Mr. Ellis so that he could hear and be heard, and she didn’t want her breath to give her away.

“My granddaughter!” he said, and smiled a wide smile that threatened to crack his skin.

“Mr. Ellis.”

“I can’t hear you, Miss Thomas.”

“I said, Hello, Mr. Ellis. Hello, Mr. Ellis”

“You haven’t been to see me in some time.”

“Not since I came over with Senator Simon and Webster Pommeroy.” Ruth had some difficulty enunciating the words Senator and Simon. Mr. Ellis did not seem to notice. “But I’ve been meaning to come by. I’ve been busy. I’ll come up to Ellis House very soon and see you.”

“We shall have a meal.”

“Thank you. That’s very nice, Mr. Ellis.”

“Yes. You’ll come on Thursday. Next Thursday.”

“Thank you. I look forward to it.” Thursday!

“You haven’t told me how you found your visit to Concord.”

“It was lovely, thank you. Thank you for encouraging me to go.”

“Wonderful. I received a letter from my sister saying as much. It might not be amiss for you to write her a note thanking her for her hospitality.”

“I will,” Ruth said, not even wondering how he knew that she hadn’t done so. Mr. Ellis always knew things like that. Of course she would write a note, now that it had been suggested. And when she did write, Mr. Ellis would undoubtedly know of it even before his sister received the note. That was his way: omniscience. Mr. Ellis dug around in a pocket of his suit and came up with a handkerchief. He unfolded it and passed it, with a palsied hand, across his nose. “What do you suppose will come of your mother when my sister passes away?” he asked. “I ask only because Mr. Cooley raised the question the other day.”

Ruth’s stomach tightened as if it had been cinched. What the hell was that supposed to mean? She thought for a moment and then said what she certainly would not have said had she not been drinking.

“I only hope she will be taken care of, sir.”

“Come again?”

Ruth did not reply. She was quite sure that Mr. Ellis had heard her. Indeed he had, because he finally said, “It is very expensive to take care of people.”

Ruth was as uncomfortable as ever with Lanford Ellis. She never had a sense, when meeting with him, what the outcome would be: what he would tell her to do, what he would withhold from her, what he would give her. It had been this way since she was a child of eight and Mr. Ellis had called her into his study, handed her a stack of books, and said, “Read these in the order I have placed them, from top to bottom. You are to stop swimming in the quarries with the Pommeroy boys unless you wear a bathing suit.” There had never been an implication of threat in these instructions. They were simply issued.

Ruth followed Mr. Ellis’s commands because she knew the power this man had over her mother. He had more power over her mother than Miss Vera did, because he controlled the family money. Miss Vera exercised her control over Mary Smith-Ellis Thomas in petty daily cruelties. Mr. Ellis, on the other hand, had never once treated Ruth’s mother in a cruel way. Ruth was aware of this. For some reason, this knowledge had always filled her with panic, not peace. And so, at the age of eight, Ruth read the books Mr. Ellis had given her. She did as she was told. He had not quizzed her on the books or asked her to return them. She did not acquire a bathing suit for her swims in the quarries with the Pommeroy boys; she merely stopped swimming with them. That seemed to have been an acceptable solution, because she heard no more about it.

Meetings with Mr. Ellis were also significant because they were rare. He called Ruth into his presence only twice a year or so, and began each conversation with an expression of fondness. He would then chastise her lightly for not coming to visit him on her own. He called her granddaughter, love, dear. She was aware, and had been from early childhood, that she was considered his pet and was therefore lucky. There were others on Fort Niles—grown men, even—who would have liked an audience with Mr. Ellis even once, but could not obtain one. Senator Simon Addams, for instance, had been trying for years to meet with him. Ruth was thought by many on Fort Niles to have some special influence with the man, though she scarcely ever saw him. For the most part, she heard of his requests and demands and displeasure or pleasure from Cal Cooley. When she did see Mr. Ellis, his instructions to her were usually simple and direct.

When Ruth was thirteen, he had summoned her to tell her that she would be attending private school in Delaware. He said nothing of how or why this was to be or whose decision it had been. Nor did he ask her opinion. He did say that her schooling was expensive but would be taken care of. He told her that Cal Cooley would drive her to school in early September and that she would be expected to spend her Christmas holiday with her mother in Concord. She would not return to Fort Niles until the following June. These were facts, not matters for discussion.

On a less momentous matter, Mr. Ellis summoned Ruth when she was sixteen to say that she was to wear her hair away from her face from now on. That was his only instruction to her for the year. And she followed it and had been doing so ever since, wearing it in a ponytail. He apparently approved.

Mr. Ellis was one of the only adults in Ruth’s life who had never called her stubborn. This was surely because, in his presence, she was not.

She wondered whether he was going to tell her not to drink anymore tonight. Was that the point of this? Would he tell her to stop dancing like a trollop? Or was this something bigger, an announcement that it was time for her to go to college? Or move to Concord with her mother? Ruth wanted to hear none of these things.

In general, she avoided Mr. Ellis strenuously because she was terrified of what he would ask of her and of the certainty that she would obey. She had not yet heard directly from Mr. Ellis what her plans for the fall were to be, but she had a strong sense that she would be asked to leave Fort Niles. Cal Cooley had indicated that Mr. Ellis wanted her to go to college, and Vera Ellis had mentioned the college for women where the dean was a friend. Ruth was sure the subject would come up soon. She had even got a message about leaving from Pastor Wishnell, of all people, and the signs pointed to a decision soon from Mr. Ellis himself. There was nothing Ruth hated more in her character than her unquestioning obedience of Mr. Ellis. And while she had made up her mind that she would disregard his wishes from now on, she didn’t feel up to asserting her independence tonight.

“How have you been spending your days lately, Ruth?” Mr. Ellis asked.

Wanting no instructions from him at all tonight, Ruth decided to divert him. This was a new tactic, a bold tactic. But she had been drinking and, as a consequence, felt bolder than usual.

“Mr. Ellis,” she said, “do you remember the elephant tusk we brought you?”

He nodded.

“Have you had a chance to look at it?”

He nodded again. “Very well,” he said. “I understand you have been spending a great deal of your time with Mrs. Pommeroy and her sisters.”

“Mr. Ellis,” Ruth said, “I wonder whether we can talk about that elephant tusk. For just a moment.”

That’s right. She would be the one to direct this conversation. How hard could that be? She certainly did it with everyone else. Mr. Ellis raised an eyebrow. That is to say, he raised the skin below where an eyebrow would be if he happened to have an eyebrow.

“It took my friend several years to find that tusk, Mr. Ellis. That young man, Webster Pommeroy, he’s the one who found it. He worked hard. And my other friend, Senator Simon?” Ruth pronounced the name this time without a hitch. She felt dead sober now. “Senator Simon Addams? You know him?”

Mr. Ellis did not respond. He found his handkerchief again and made another pass at his nose.

Ruth went on. “He has many interesting artifacts, Mr. Ellis. Simon Addams has been collecting unusual specimens for years. He would like to open a museum on Fort Niles. To display what he has collected. He’d call it the Fort Niles Museum of Natural History and believes that the Ellis Granite Company Store building would be suitable for his museum. Since it is vacant. Perhaps you’ve heard about this idea? I think he has asked your permission for years . . . I think he . . . It may not seem like an interesting project to you, but it would mean everything to him, and he is a good man. Also, he would like the elephant tusk back. For his museum. If he can have a museum, that is.”

Mr. Ellis sat in his wheelchair with his hands on his thighs. His thighs were not much wider than his wrists. Under his suit jacket, he wore a thick, black sweater. He reached into an inside pocket of his suit and pulled out a small brass key, which he held between his thumb and forefinger. It trembled like a divining rod. Handing it to Ruth, he said, “Here is the key to the Ellis Granite Company Store building.”

Ruth gingerly took the key. It was cool and sharp and could not have been a greater surprise. She said, “Oh!” She was astonished.

“Mr. Cooley will bring the elephant tusk to your house next week.”

“Thank you, Mr. Ellis. I appreciate this. You don’t have to—”

“You will join me for dinner on Thursday.”

“I will. Yes. Terrific. Should I tell Simon Addams . . . Um, what shall I tell Simon Addams about the building?”

But Mr. Ellis was finished talking to Ruth Thomas. He shut his eyes and ignored her, and she went away.

Ruth Thomas went to the other side of the tent, as far as she could get from Mr. Ellis. She felt sober and a little sick, so she made a quick stop at the card table that served as a bar and had Chucky Strachan mix her another glass of whiskey and ice. Between Pastor Wishnell and Mr. Ellis, this had been a day of strange conversations, and now she was wishing that she had stayed home with the Senator and Webster Pommeroy. She found a chair in the corner, behind the band, and claimed it. When she put her elbows on her knees and her face in her hands, she could hear her pulse in her head. At the sound of applause, she looked up. A man in his mid-sixties, with a blond-gray brush haircut and the face of an old soldier, was standing in the middle of the tent, a champagne glass raised in his hand. It was Babe Wishnell.

“My daughter!” he said. “Today is my daughter’s wedding, and I’d like to say some words!”

There was more applause. Somebody shouted, “Go to it, Babe!” and everyone laughed.

“My daughter isn’t marrying the best-looking man on Courne Haven, but, then, it isn’t legal to marry her father! Charlie Burden? Where’s Charlie Burden?”

The groom stood up, looking agonized.

“You got yourself a good Wishnell girl today, Charlie!” Babe Wishnell bellowed; more applause. Somebody shouted, “Go get her, Charlie!” and Babe Wishnell glared in the direction of the voice. The laughter stopped.

But then he shrugged and said, “My daughter’s a modest girl. When she was a teenager, she was so modest, she wouldn’t even walk over a potato patch. You know why? Because potatoes have eyes! They might have looked up her skirt!”

Here, he pantomimed a girl, daintily lifting her skirts. He fluttered his hand about in a feminine way. The crowd laughed. The bride, holding her daughter on her lap, blushed.

“My new son-in-law reminds me of Cape Cod. I mean, his nose reminds me of Cape Cod. Does anyone know why his nose reminds me of Cape Cod? Because it’s a prominent projection!” Babe Wishnell roared at his own joke. “Charlie, I’m just playing with you. You can sit down now, Charlie. Let’s have a hand for Charlie. He’s a pretty goddamn good sport. Now, these two are going on a honeymoon. They’re going to Boston for the week. I hope they have a good time.”

More applause, and the same voice shouted, “Go get her, Charlie!” This time Babe Wishnell ignored the voice.

“I hope they have a hell of a good time. They deserve it. Especially Dotty, because she’s had a tough year, losing her husband. So I hope you have a hell of a good time, Charlie and Dotty.” He raised his glass. The guests murmured and raised their glasses, too. “Good for them to get away for a while,” Babe Wishnell said. “Leaving the kid with Dotty’s mother and me, but what the hell. We like the kid. Hiya, kid!”

He waved at the kid. The kid, Candy, on her mother’s lap, was as regal and inscrutable as a lioness.

“But that reminds me of when I took Dotty’s mother on our honeymoon.”

Someone in the crowd whooped, and everyone laughed. Babe Wishnell shook his finger, like tut-tut-tut, and continued. “When I took Dotty’s mother on our honeymoon, we went to Niagara Falls. This was back in the Revolutionary War! No, it was 1945. I was just out of the war. World War Two, that is! Now, I’d gotten stove up pretty bad in a wreck in the South Pacific. I’d seen some pretty serious action over there in New Guinea, but I was ready for action on my honeymoon! You bet! I was ready for a different kind of action!”

Everyone looked to Gladys Wishnell, who was shaking her head.

“So we went to Niagara Falls. We had to take that boat, The Maid of the Mist. Now, I didn’t know if Gladys was the type to get seasick. I thought she might get all woozy on me under that waterfall, because you go—you know, you go right under the goddamn thing. So I went to the pharmacy, and I bought a bottle of—what’s it called? A bottle of Drambuie? What’s it called that you take for seasickness?”

“Dramamine!” Ruth Thomas called out.

Babe Wishnell peered through the darkening tent at Ruth. He gave her a stern, perceptive look. He didn’t know who she was, but he accepted her answer.

“Dramamine. That’s right. I bought a bottle of Dramamine from the pharmacist. And since I was there anyhow, I bought a package of rubbers, too.”

This brought shrieks of joy and applause from the wedding guests. Everyone looked at Dotty Wishnell and her mother, Gladys, both of whom were wearing the same priceless expression of disbelief and horror.

“Yeah, I bought Dramamine and a package of rubbers. So the pharmacist gives me the Dramamine. He gives me the rubbers. He looks at me and he says, ‘If it makes her so goddamn sick to her stomach, why do you keep doing it to her?’”

The wedding guests roared. They applauded and whistled. Dotty Wishnell and her mother both doubled over, laughing. Ruth felt a hand on her shoulder. She looked up. It was Mrs. Pommeroy.

“Hey,” Ruth said.

“May I sit here?”

“Sure, sure.” Ruth patted the seat next to her, and Mrs. Pommeroy sat down.

“Hiding?” she asked Ruth.

“Yeah. Tired?”

“Yeah.”

“I know Charlie Burden thinks he’s going to get rich, marrying a Wishnell girl,” Babe Wishnell continued, as the laughter died down. “I know he thinks it’s his lucky day. He probably has his eye on some of my boats and gear. Well, he may get it. He may get all my boats in the end. But there’s one ship I’d never want Charlie and Dotty to have. Do you know what ship that is? Hardship.”

The crowd said, “Awww . . .” Gladys Wishnell wiped her eyes.

“My new son-in-law ain’t the smartest guy on the island. I heard they were going to make him the master of the lighthouse over on Crypt Rock for a spell. Well, that didn’t work out so great. Charlie turned the light off at nine o’clock. They asked him why, and he said, ‘All good people should be in bed by nine o’clock.’ That’s right! Lights out, Charlie!”

The guests laughed heartily. Charlie Burden looked as if he might throw up.

“Yeah, let’s have a hand for Charlie and Dotty. I hope they have a real good time. And I hope they stay on here on Courne Haven forever. They might like it over there in Boston, but I’m not one for cities. I don’t like cities at all. Never have. There’s only one city I like. It’s the best city in the world. Do you know what city that is? Generosity.”

The crowd said “Awww . . .” again.

“He’s a real joker,” Ruth said to Mrs. Pommeroy.

“He likes those puns,” she agreed.

Mrs. Pommeroy took Ruth’s hand as they watched Babe Wishnell finish his toast with some more puns, some more jabs at his new son-in-law.

“That man could buy and sell every last one of us,” Mrs. Pommeroy said, wistfully.

There were cheers for Babe Wishnell at the end of his toast, and he took a dramatic bow and said, “And now, I’m real honored because Lanford Ellis is here with us. He wants to say a couple words, and I think we all want to hear whatever he has to say. That’s right. It’s not too often we see Mr. Ellis. It’s a real honor for me that he’s come to my daughter’s wedding. So there he is, over there. Let’s keep it real quiet now, everyone. Mr. Lanford Ellis. A very important man. Going to say some words.”

Cal Cooley rolled Mr. Ellis in his wheelchair to the center of the room. The tent became silent. Cal tucked Mr. Ellis’s blanket tighter.

“I am a lucky man,” Mr. Ellis began, “to have such neighbors.” Very slowly, he looked around at all those in the tent. It was as if he were tallying each neighbor. A baby started to cry, and there was a rustle as the mother took the child out of the tent. “There is a tradition on this island—and on Fort Niles, too—of hard work. I remember when the Swedes on Courne Haven were making cobblestones for the Ellis Granite Company. Three hundred good quarrymen could each make two hundred cobblestones a day for five cents each. My family always appreciated the hard work.”

“This is an interesting wedding toast,” Ruth whispered to Mrs. Pommeroy.

Mr. Ellis went on. “Now you are all lobstermen. That’s fine work, too. Some of you are Swedes, the descendants of Vikings. The Vikings used to call the ocean the Path of the Lobster. I am an old man. What will happen to Fort Niles and Courne Haven when I am gone? I am an old man. I love these islands.”

Mr. Ellis stopped speaking. He was looking at the ground. He had no expression on his face, and an observer might have thought that the man had no idea where he was, that he had forgotten he was speaking to an audience. The silence lasted a long time. The wedding guests began to look at one another. They shrugged and looked at Cal Cooley, standing a few feet behind Mr. Ellis. But Cal did not appear concerned; he wore his usual expression of bored disgust. Somewhere, a man coughed. It was so quiet, Ruth could hear the wind in the trees.

After a few minutes, Babe Wishnell stood up.

“We want to thank Mr. Ellis for coming all the way over to Courne Haven,” he said. “How about that, everyone? That means a lot to us. How about a big hand for Mr. Lanford Ellis? Thanks a lot, Lanford.”

The crowd broke into relieved applause. Cal Cooley wheeled his boss to the side of the tent. Mr. Ellis was still looking at the ground. The band started to play, and a woman laughed too loudly.

“Well, that was an unusual toast, too,” said Ruth.

“Do you know who’s over at Pastor Wishnell’s house, sitting on the back steps of the house all by himself?” Mrs. Pommeroy asked Ruth.

“Who?”

“Owney Wishnell.” Mrs. Pommeroy handed Ruth a flashlight.

“Why don’t you go find him? Take your time.”

11

From hunger to cannibalism is a short step, and although the lobster fry are kept from congregating, there still occur chances of individuals coming momentarily into contact with one another, and, if hungry, they make the most of their opportunities.

—A Method of Lobster Culture

A. D. Mead, Ph.D.

1908

RUTH, WITH HER WHISKEY in one hand and Mrs. Pommeroy’s flashlight in the other, found her way over to Pastor Wishnell’s house. There were no lights on inside. She walked to the back of the house and discovered, as Mrs. Pommeroy had said she would, Owney. He was sitting on the steps. He made a big shadow in the dark. As Ruth slowly moved the beam of the flashlight over him, she saw that he was wearing a gray sweatshirt with a zipper and a hood. She went over and sat beside him and turned off the flashlight. They sat in the dark for a while.

“Want some?” Ruth asked. She offered Owney her glass of whiskey. He accepted it and took a long swallow. The contents of the glass didn’t seem to surprise him. It was as if he was expecting whiskey from Ruth Thomas at that moment, as if he’d been sitting here waiting for it. He handed her the glass, she drank some, and passed it back to him.

The drink was soon gone. Owney was so quiet, she could scarcely hear him breathing. She set the glass on the step, near the flashlight.

“Do you want to go for a walk?” she asked.

“Yes,” Owney said, and he stood up.

He offered her his hand, and she took it. A solid grip. He led her back through the garden, over the low brick wall, past the roses. She had left the flashlight on the steps of the house, and so they picked their way carefully. It was a clear night, and they could see their way. They walked through a neighbor’s yard, and then they were in the woods.

Owney led Ruth to a path. Now it was dark, because of the overhang, the shadow of spruces. The path was narrow, and Owney and Ruth walked single file. Because she didn’t want to fall, she put her right hand on his right shoulder to balance herself. As she felt more confident, she took her hand off his shoulder, but reached for him whenever she was unsure.

They did not speak. Ruth heard an owl.

“Don’t be afraid,” Owney said. “The island’s full of noises.”

She knew those noises. The woods were at once familiar and disorienting. Everything smelled, looked, sounded like Fort Niles but wasn’t Fort Niles. The air was sweet, but it was not her air. She had no idea where they were, until, suddenly, she sensed a great opening to her right, and she realized they were high up, along the edge of a gutted quarry. It was an old Ellis Granite Company scar, like the ones on Fort Niles. Now they moved with great caution, because the path Owney had chosen was only four feet or so from what seemed to be a serious drop. Ruth knew that some of the quarries were several hundred feet deep. She took baby steps because she was wearing sandals, and the soles were slippery. She was aware of a slickness beneath her feet.

They walked along the edge of the quarry for a while and then were back in the woods. The sheltering trees, the enclosed space, the embracing darkness was a relief, after the wide gape of the quarry. At one point they crossed an old railway. As they got deeper into the woods, it was hard to see, and after they had walked a half hour, in silence, the dark suddenly became thicker, and Ruth saw why. Just to her left was a shelf of granite reaching up into the darkness. It may have been a wall a hundred feet high of good black granite; it swallowed up the light. She reached out and brushed the surface with her fingers; it was damp and cool and mossy.

She said, “Where are we going?” She could really barely see Owney.

“For a walk.”

She laughed, a quiet, nice sound that didn’t travel at all.

“Is there a destination?” she asked.

“No,” he said, and, to her great delight, he laughed. Ruth joined him; she liked the sound of their laughter in these woods.

Now they stopped. Ruth leaned back against the granite wall. It was slightly tilted, and she tilted with it. She could just make out Owney standing in front of her. She reached out to his arm and felt along it all the way down to his hand. Nice hand.

“Come here, Owney,” she said, and laughed again. “Come in here.” She pulled him close, and he put his arms around her, and there they stood. Against her back was the cold dark granite; against the front of her was Owney Wishnell’s big warm body. She pulled him closer and pressed the side of her face to his chest. She really, really liked the way he felt. His back was wide. She didn’t care if this was all they did. She didn’t care if they held each other this way for hours and did nothing else.

No, actually; she did care.

Now everything was going to change, she knew, and she lifted her face and kissed him on the mouth. To be exact, she kissed him in the mouth, a thoughtful and long wet kiss and—what a nice surprise!—what a fat, excellent tongue Owney Wishnell had! God, what a lovely tongue. All slow and salty. It was a gorgeous tongue.

Ruth had kissed boys before, of course. Not many boys, because she didn’t have access to many. Was she going to kiss the Pommeroy sons? No, there hadn’t been many eligible boys in Ruth’s life, but she’d kissed a few when she’d had the chance. She had kissed a strange boy on a bus to Concord one Christmas, and she had kissed the son of a cousin of Duke Cobb’s who’d been visiting for a week from New Jersey, but those episodes were nothing like kissing Owney Wishnell’s big soft mouth.

Maybe this was why Owney spoke so slowly all the time, Ruth thought; his tongue was too big and soft to form quick words. Well, what of it. She put her hands on the sides of his face and he put his hands on the sides of her face, and they kissed the hell out of each other. Each held the other’s head firmly, the way you hold that of an errant child and get right in his face and say, “Listen!” And they kissed and kissed. It was great. His thigh was shoved so hard up into her crotch that it almost lifted her off the ground. He had a hard, muscled thigh. Good for him, Ruth thought. Nice thigh. She didn’t care if they never did anything but kiss.

Yes, she did. She did care.

She took his hands off her face, took his big wrists in her own hands, and pushed his hands down to her body. She placed his hands on her hips, and he pushed himself even closer against her and—he was deep in her mouth now with that gorgeous sweet tongue—he moved his hands up her body until his palms were covering her breasts. Ruth realized that if she didn’t get his mouth on her nipples soon she was going to die. That’s right, she thought, I will die. So she unbuttoned the front of her sundress and pulled away the fabric and pushed his head down, and—he was brilliant! He made a touching, quiet little moan. It was as if her whole breast was in his mouth. She could feel it all the way to her lungs. She wanted to growl. She wanted to arch back into it, but there was no room to arch, with that rock wall behind her.

“Is there someplace we can go?” she asked.

“Where?”

“Someplace softer than this rock?”

“OK,” he said, but it took them ages to separate from each other. It took them several tries, because she kept pulling him back, and he kept grinding his groin into hers. It went on and on. And when they finally did pull away from each other and headed up the trail, they raced. It was as if they were swimming under water, holding their breath and trying to make it to the surface. Forget about roots and rocks and Ruth’s slippery sandals; forget about his helpful hand under her elbow. There was no time for those delicacies, because they were in a hurry. Ruth didn’t know where they were off to, but she knew it was going to be a place where they could continue, and that knowledge set her pace and his. They had business to attend to. They practically ran for it. No talking.

They finally broke out of the woods onto a small beach. Ruth could see lights across the water and knew they were facing Fort Niles, which meant they were way on the other side of Courne Haven from the wedding party. Good. The farther away the better. There was a shed on a ridge above the level of sand, and it had no door, so they went right in there. Piles of old traps in the corner. An oar on the floor. A child’s school desk, with the tiny kid’s chair attached. A window covered with a wool blanket, which Owney Wishnell tore away without hesitation. He flipped the dust from the blanket, kicked away an old glass buoy from the middle of the floor, and spread out the blanket. Now moonlight came through the empty window.

As if this had been worked out well in advance, Ruth Thomas and Owney Wishnell stripped off their clothes. Ruth was faster, because all she had on was that sundress, which was already mostly unbuttoned. Off it came, then the blue cotton underpants and the sandals kicked away and—there!—she was done. But Owney took forever. Owney had to take off his sweatshirt and the flannel shirt that was under that (with buttons at the cuffs that had to be dealt with) and the under-shirt beneath it all. He had to take off a belt, unlace his tall workboots, pull off his socks. He took off his jeans and—this was taking forever— finally his white underwear, and he was done.

They didn’t exactly tackle each other, but they collected each other very quickly, and then realized this would be a whole lot easier if they were on the ground, so that happened pretty quickly, too. Ruth was on her back, and Owney was on his knees. He pushed her knees back against her chest and opened her legs, hands on her shins. She thought about all the people who would be outraged if they knew of this—her mother, her father, Angus Addams (if he knew she was naked with a Wishnell!), Pastor Wishnell (terrifying even to think of his reaction), Cal Cooley (he would lose his mind), Vera Ellis, Lanford Ellis (he would kill her! Hell, he would have them both killed!)—and she smiled and reached her hand forward through her legs and took his cock and helped him put it inside her. Just like that.

It is extraordinary what people can do even if they’ve never done it before.

Ruth had thought a lot in the last few years about what it would be like to have sex. Of all the things she’d thought about sex, though, she’d never considered that it might be so easy and so immediately hot. She’d thought of it as something to be puzzled out with difficulty and a lot of talking. And she could never really picture sex, because she couldn’t picture who exactly she’d be puzzling it out with. She figured her partner would have to be much older, somebody who knew what he was doing and would be patient and instructive. This goes here; no, not like that; try again, try again. She’d thought that sex would be difficult at first, like learning to drive. She’d thought that sex was something that might grow on her slowly, after a great deal of grim practice, and that it would probably hurt a lot in the beginning.

Yes, it is truly extraordinary what people can do even if they’ve never done it before.

Ruth and Owney went at it like pros, right from the start. There, in that shack on the filthy woolen blanket, they were doing raunchy, completely satisfying things to each other. They were doing things it might take other partners months to figure out. She was on top of him; he was on top of her. There seemed no part of each other that they were not willing to put into the other’s mouth. She was up on his face; he was leaning up against the child’s desk while she crouched in front of him and sucked him as he clutched her hair. She was lying on her side, with her legs positioned like a runner in mid-stride while he fingered her. He was sliding his fingers into her slippy tight cracks and licking his fingers. Then he was sliding his fingers into her slippy tight cracks again and putting his fingers in her mouth, so that she could taste herself on his hands.

Incredibly, she was saying, “Yes, yes, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me.”

He was flipping her over onto her stomach and lifting her hips into the air and, yes, yes, he was fucking her, fucking her, fucking her.

Ruth and Owney fell asleep, and when they woke, it was windy and cold. They hurried into their clothes and made the difficult hike back into town, through the woods and past the quarry. Ruth could see the quarry more clearly, now that the sky was starting to lighten. It was a huge hole, bigger than anything on Fort Niles. They must have made cathedrals out of that rock.

They came out of the woods in Owney’s neighbor’s yard, stepped over the low brick wall, and walked into Pastor Wishnell’s rose garden. There was Pastor Wishnell on the steps of the porch, waiting for them. In one hand, he held Ruth’s empty whiskey glass. In the other, Mrs. Pommeroy’s flashlight. When he saw them coming, he shone the flashlight on them, although he really didn’t need to. It was light enough outside now for him to see perfectly well who they were. No matter. He shone the flashlight on them.

Owney dropped Ruth’s hand. She immediately thrust it into the pocket of her yellow sundress and clasped the key, the key to the Ellis Granite Company Store, the key Mr. Lanford Ellis had handed her only hours before. She hadn’t thought about the key since taking off into the woods with Owney, but now it was extremely important that she locate it, that she confirm it had not been lost. Ruth held on to the key so tightly that it bit into her palm—as Pastor Wishnell came off the porch and walked toward them. She clung to the key. She could not have said why.

12

In severe winters, lobsters are either driven into deeper water, or, if living in harbors, seek protection by burrowing into the mud when this is available.

—The American Lobster: A Study of Its Habits and Development

Francis Hobart Herrick, Ph.D.

1895

RUTH SPENT MOST of the fall of 1976 in hiding. Her father had not expressly thrown her out of the house, but he did not make her feel welcome there after the incident. The incident was not that Ruth and Owney had been caught by Pastor Wishnell, hiking out of the Courne Haven woods at daybreak after Dotty Wishnell’s wedding. That was unpleasant, but the incident occurred four days later, at dinner, when Ruth asked her father, “Don’t you even want to know what I was doing in the woods with Owney Wishnell?”

Ruth and her father had been stepping around each other for days, not speaking, somehow managing to avoid eating meals together. On this night, Ruth had roasted a chicken and had it ready when her father came in from fishing. “Don’t worry about me,” he’d said, when he saw Ruth setting the table for two. “I’ll pick some dinner up over at Angus’s,” and Ruth said, “No, Dad, let’s eat here, you and me.”

They didn’t talk much over dinner. “I did a good job with this chicken, didn’t I?” Ruth asked, and her father said that, sure, she’d done a real good job. She asked how things were working out with Robin Pommeroy, whom her father had recently hired back, and Stan said the kid was as stupid as ever, what did you expect? That sort of talk. They finished dinner quietly.

As Stan Thomas picked up his plate and headed to the sink, Ruth asked, “Dad. Don’t you even want to know what I was doing in the woods with Owney Wishnell?”

“No.”

“No?”

“How many times do I have to tell you? I don’t care who you spend your time with, Ruth, or what you do with him.”

Stan Thomas rinsed off his plate, came back to the table, and took Ruth’s plate without asking whether she was finished with dinner and without looking at her. He rinsed her plate, poured himself a glass of milk, and cut himself a slice of Mrs. Pommeroy’s blueberry cake, which was sitting on the counter under a sweaty tent of plastic wrap. He ate the cake with his hands, leaning over the sink. He wiped the crumbs on his jeans with both hands and covered the cake with the plastic wrap again.

“I’m heading over to Angus’s,” he said.

“You know, Dad,” she said, “I’ll tell you something.” She didn’t get up from her chair. “I think you should have an opinion about this.”

“Well,” he said, “I don’t.”

“Well, you should. You know why? Because we were having sex.”

He picked his jacket off the back of his chair, put it on, and headed for the door.

“Where are you going?” Ruth asked.

“Angus’s. Said that already.”

“That’s all you have to say? That’s your opinion?”

“Don’t have any opinion.”

“Dad, I’ll tell you something else. There’s a lot of things going on around here that you should have an opinion about.”

“Well,” he said, “I don’t.”

“Liar,” Ruth said.

He looked at her. “That’s no way to talk to your father.”

“Why? You are a liar.”

“That’s no way to talk to any person.”

“I’m just a little tired of your saying you don’t care what goes on around here. I think that’s pretty damn weak.”

“It doesn’t do me any good to care about what’s going on.”

“You don’t care if I go to Concord or stay here,” she said. “You don’t care if Mr. Ellis gives me money. You don’t care if I work on a fishing boat forever or get hauled off to college. You don’t care if I stay up all night having sex with a Wishnell. Really, Dad? You don’t care about that?”

“That’s right.”

“Oh, come on. You’re such a liar.”

“Stop saying that.”

“I’ll say what I want to say.”

“It doesn’t matter what I care, Ruth. Whatever happens to you or your mother won’t have anything to do with me. Believe me. I got nothing to do with it. I learned that a long time ago.”

“Me or my mother?”

“That’s right. I got no say in any decisions involving either one of you. So what the hell.”

“My mother? What are you, kidding me? You could totally dominate my mother if you bothered. She’s never in her life made a decision on her own, Dad.”

“I got no say over her.”

“Who does, then?”

“You know who.”

Ruth and her father looked at each other for a long minute. “You could stand up to the Ellises if you wanted to, Dad.”

“No, I couldn’t, Ruth. And neither can you.”

“Liar.”

“I told you to stop saying that.”

“Pussy,” Ruth said, to her own immense surprise.

“If you don’t watch your fucking mouth,” Ruth’s father said, and he walked out of the house.

That was the incident.

Ruth finished cleaning up the kitchen and headed over to Mrs. Pommeroy’s. She cried for about an hour on her bed while Mrs. Pommeroy stroked her hair and said, “Why don’t you tell me what happened?”

Ruth said, “He’s just such a pussy.”

“Where did you learn that word, hon?”

“He’s such a fucking coward. It’s pathetic. Why can’t he be more like Angus Addams? Why can’t he stand up for something?”

“You wouldn’t really want Angus Addams for a father, would you, Ruth?”

This made Ruth cry harder, and Mrs. Pommeroy said, “Oh, sweetheart. You’re sure having a tough time this year.”

Robin came into the room and said, “What’s all the noise? Who’s blubbering?” Ruth shouted, “Get him out of here!” Robin said, “It’s my house, bitch.” And Mrs. Pommeroy said, “You two are like brother and sister.”

Ruth stopped crying and said, “I can’t believe this fucking place.”

“What place?” Mrs. Pommeroy asked. “What place, hon?”

Ruth stayed at the Pommeroy house through July and August and on into the beginning of September. Sometimes she went next door to her house, to her father’s house, when she knew he’d be out hauling, and picked up a clean blouse or a book to read, or tried to guess what he’d been eating. She had nothing to do. She had no job. She had given up even pretending that she wanted to work as a sternman, and nobody asked her anymore what plans she had. She was clearly never going to be offered work on a boat. And for people who didn’t work on boats on Fort Niles in 1976, there wasn’t a whole lot else to do.

Ruth had nothing to occupy herself. At least Mrs. Pommeroy could do needlepoint. And Kitty Pommeroy had her alcoholism for companionship. Webster Pommeroy had the mudflats to sift through, and Senator Simon had his dream of the Museum of Natural History. Ruth had nothing. Sometimes she thought she most resembled the oldest citizens of Fort Niles, the tiny ancient women who sat at their front windows and parted the curtains to see what was going on out there, on the rare instances that anyone walked past their homes.

She was sharing Mrs. Pommeroy’s home with Webster and Robin and Timothy Pommeroy, and with Robin’s fat wife, Opal, and their big baby, Eddie. She was also sharing it with Kitty Pommeroy, who’d been thrown out of her house by Ruth’s Uncle Len Thomas. Len had taken up Florida Cobb, of all desperate women. Florida Cobb, Russ and Ivy Cobb’s grown daughter, who rarely said a word and who’d spent her life gaining weight and painting pictures on sand dollars, was now living with Len Thomas. Kitty was in bad shape over this. She’d threatened Len with a shotgun, but he took it away from her and blasted it into her oven.

“I thought Florida Cobb was my goddamn friend,” Kitty said to Ruth, although Florida Cobb had never been anyone’s friend.

Kitty told Mrs. Pommeroy the whole sad story of her last night at home with Len Thomas. Ruth could hear the two women talking in Mrs. Pommeroy’s bedroom, with the door shut. She could hear Kitty sobbing and sobbing. When Mrs. Pommeroy finally came out, Ruth asked, “What did she say? What’s the story?”

“I don’t want to hear it twice, Ruth,” Mrs. Pommeroy said.

“Twice?”

“I don’t want to hear it once out of her mouth and once out of mine. Just forget it. She’ll be staying here from now on.”

Ruth was beginning to realize that Kitty Pommeroy woke up every day more drunk than most people would be in their entire lives. At night, she would cry and cry, and Mrs. Pommeroy and Ruth would put her to bed. She’d punch them as they struggled with her up the stairs. This happened nearly every day. Kitty even clocked Ruth in the face once and made her nose bleed. Opal was never any help in dealing with Kitty. She was afraid of getting hit, so she sat in the corner and cried while Mrs. Pommeroy and Ruth took care of everything.

Opal said, “I don’t want my baby growing up around all this yelling.”

“Then move into your own goddamn house,” Ruth said.

“You move into your own goddamn house!” Robin Pommeroy said to Ruth.

“You all are just like brothers and sisters,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “Always teasing each other.”

Ruth couldn’t see Owney. She hadn’t seen him since the wedding. Pastor Wishnell was making sure of that. The pastor had decided to spend the fall on a grand tour of the Maine islands, with Owney as his captain, sailing the New Hope to every dock in the Atlantic from Portsmouth to Nova Scotia, preaching, preaching, preaching.

Owney never called Ruth, but how could he? He had no number for her, no idea that she was living with Mrs. Pommeroy. Ruth didn’t so much mind not being called; they’d probably have had little to say to each other on the phone. Owney wasn’t much of a conversationalist in person, and she couldn’t imagine dallying away hours with him over the line. They’d never had all that much to talk about. Ruth didn’t want to talk to Owney, anyhow. She wasn’t curious to catch up with Owney on local gossip, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t missing him or, rather, craving him. She wanted to be with him. She wanted him in the room with her so that she could feel again the comfort of his body and his silence. She wanted to have sex with him again, in the worst way. She wanted to be naked with Owney, and thinking about that filled up a good bit of her time. She thought about it while in the bathtub and in bed. She talked to Mrs. Pommeroy again and again about the one time she’d had sex with Owney. Mrs. Pommeroy wanted to hear all the different parts, everything the two of them had done, and she seemed to approve.

Ruth was sleeping on the top floor of the big Pommeroy house, in the bedroom Mrs. Pommeroy had first tried to give her when she was nine—the bedroom with the faint, rusty blood spatters on the wall where that long-ago Pommeroy uncle had taken his life with a shotgun blast in the mouth.

“As long as it doesn’t bother you,” Mrs. Pommeroy told Ruth.

“Not a bit.”

There was a heating vent on the floor, and if Ruth lay with her head near it, she could hear conversations throughout the house. The eaves-dropping brought her comfort. She could hide and pay attention. And, for the most part, Ruth’s occupation that autumn was hiding. She was hiding from her father, which was easy, because he wasn’t looking for her. She was hiding from Angus Addams, which was slightly more difficult, because Angus would cross the street if he saw her and tell her what a dirty little whore she was, fucking around with a Wishnell, trash-mouthing her father, slinking around town.

“Yeah,” he’d say. “I heard about it. Don’t think I didn’t fucking hear about it.”

“Leave me alone, Angus,” Ruth would say. “It’s none of your business.”

“You slutty little slut.”

“He’s just teasing you,” Mrs. Pommeroy would tell Ruth if she happened to be there, witnessing the insult. This made both Ruth and Angus indignant.

“You call that teasing?” Ruth would say.

“I’m not goddamn teasing anyone,” Angus would say, equally disgusted. Mrs. Pommeroy, refusing to become upset, would say, “Of course you are, Angus. You’re just a big tease.”

“You know what we have to do?” Mrs. Pommeroy told Ruth again and again. “We have to let the dust settle. Everyone loves you here, but people are a little worked up.”

The biggest portion of Ruth’s hiding occupation during August involved Mr. Ellis, which meant she was hiding from Cal Cooley. More than anything else, she did not want to see Mr. Ellis, and she knew Cal would someday fetch her and bring her to Ellis House. She knew that Lanford Ellis would have a plan for her, and she wanted no part of it. Mrs. Pommeroy and Senator Simon helped her hide from Cal. When Cal came to the Pommeroy house looking for Ruth, Mrs. Pommeroy would tell him she was with Senator Simon, and when Cal asked for Ruth over at the Senator’s, he was told she was at Mrs. Pommeroy’s place. But the island was only four miles long; how long could that game last? Ruth knew that when Cal really wanted to catch her, he would. And he did catch her, one morning at the end of August, at the Ellis Granite Company Store building, where she was helping the Senator build display cases for his museum.

The inside of the Ellis Granite Company Store was dark and unpleasant. When the store was closed, almost fifty years earlier, everything had been stripped from the place, and now it was a gutted, dry building with boards over the windows. Still, Senator Simon couldn’t have been happier with Ruth’s strange gift to him, after the Wishnell wedding, of the key to the padlock that had kept him out of the place so long. He couldn’t believe his fortune. He was so excited about creating the museum, in fact, that he temporarily abandoned Webster Pommeroy. He was willing to leave Webster down at Potter Beach alone to scour the mud for the last elephant tusk. He had no energy these days to worry about Webster. All his energy was devoted to fixing up the building.

“This is going to be a splendid museum, Ruth.”

“I’m sure it will be.”

“Mr. Ellis really said it was fine to make the place into a museum?”

“He didn’t say that in so many words, but after I told him what you wanted, he gave me the key.”

“So it must be fine with him.”

“We’ll see.”

“He’ll be delighted when he sees the museum,” Senator Simon said. “He will feel like a patron.”

Ruth was beginning to understand that a major part of Senator Simon’s museum was going to be a library for his vast collection of books—books for which he had no more room in his house. The Senator had more books than artifacts. So the Senator had to build bookshelves. He’d already planned it. There was to be a section for books on shipbuilding, a section for books on piracy, a section for books on exploration. He was going to devote the entire downstairs for his museum. The storefront would be a gallery of sorts, for rotating exhibits. The old office rooms and storage rooms would have books and permanent displays. The basement would be for storage. (“Archives,”

he called it.) He had no plans for the top floor of the building, which was an abandoned threeroom apartment where the manager of the general store had lived with his family. But the downstairs was all accounted for. The Senator was planning to dedicate an entire room to the “display and discussion” of maps. As far as Ruth could see, the display itself was not coming along very quickly. The discussion, though, was well advanced.

“What I wouldn’t give,” Senator Simon told Ruth that afternoon in August, “to see an original copy of the Mercator-Hondius map.” He showed her a reproduction of that very map in a volume he’d ordered years earlier from an antiquarian book dealer in Seattle. This insistence of the Senator’s to show Ruth every book he handled, to talk over every interesting illustration, was slowing down considerably the preparation of the museum. “Sixteen thirty-three. You can see they’ve got the Faroe Islands right, and Greenland. But what is this? Oh, dear. What could that land mass possibly be? Do you know, Ruth?”

“Iceland?”

“No, no. That’s Iceland, Ruth. Right where it should be. This is a mythical island, called Frislant. It shows up on all kinds of old maps. There’s no such place. Isn’t that the strangest thing? It is drawn so distinctly, as if the cartographers were certain of it. It was probably a mistake in a sailor’s report. That’s where the mapmakers got their information, Ruth. They never left home. That’s the remarkable thing, Ruth. They were just like me.”

The Senator fingered his nose. “But they did get it wrong sometimes. You can see Gerhardus Mercator is still convinced that there’s a Northeast Passage to the Orient. He obviously had no idea of the polar ice factor! Do you think the mapmakers were heroes, Ruth? I do.”

“Oh, sure, Senator.”

“I think they were. Look how they shaped a continent from the outside in. North Africa’s sixteenth-century maps, for instance, are correct around the edges. They knew how to chart those coasts, the Portuguese. But they didn’t know what was going on inside, or how big the continent was. Oh, no, they sure didn’t know that, Ruth.”

“No. Do you think we could take some of these boards off the windows?”

“I don’t want anyone to see what we’re doing. I want it to be a surprise to everyone once we’re finished.”

“What are we doing, Senator?”

“Making a display.” The Senator was paging through another one of his map books, and his face was soft and loving as he said, “Oh, for the love of mud, did they ever get that wrong. The Gulf of Mexico is huge.”

Ruth looked over his shoulder at a reproduction of an ungainly, ancient map but couldn’t make out any of the writing on the page. “We need to get more light in here, I think. Don’t you think we should start cleaning this place a little, Senator?”

“I like the stories about how wrong they got it. Like Cabral. Pedro Cabral. Sailed west in 1520 trying to find India and ran right into Brazil! And John Cabot was trying to find Japan and ended up in Newfoundland. Verrazano was looking for a westward passage to the Spice Islands and ends up in New York Harbor. He thought it was a sea lane. The risks they took! Oh, how they tried!”

The Senator was in low-level ecstasy now. Ruth started to unpack a box marked SHIPWRECKS: PHOTOS/PAMPHLETS III. This was one of the many boxes containing items for the display the Senator planned to call either “Wages of Neptune” or “We Are Punished,” a display entirely devoted to accidents at sea. The first item she pulled out was a folder, labeled Medical in Senator Simon’s remarkable, antique script. She knew exactly what it was. She remembered looking through it when she was a little girl, peering at the ghastly pictures of shipwreck survivors, as Senator Simon told her the story of each man and each wreck.

“This could happen to you, Ruth,” he’d say. “This could happen to anyone in a boat.”

Now Ruth opened the folder and looked at each familiar old nightmare: the infected bluefish bite; the dinner plate–size leg ulcer; the man whose buttocks had rotted away after he’d sat on a wet coil of rope for three weeks; the saltwater boils; the blackening sunburns; the feet swollen with water bite; the amputations; the mummified corpse in the lifeboat.

“Here’s a lovely print!” Senator Simon said. He was looking through another box, this one marked SHIPWRECKS: PHOTOS/PAMPHLETS VI. From a file labeled Heroes, the Senator pulled an etching of a woman on a beach. Her hair was in a loose bun, and a heavy length of rope was slung over one shoulder.

“Mrs. White,” he said fondly. “Hello, Mrs. White. From Scotland.

When a ship wrecked on the rocks near her home, she had the sailors on board throw her a rope. Then she dug her heels into the sand and pulled the sailors to shore, one at a time. Doesn’t she look hale?”

Ruth agreed that Mrs. White looked hale, and dug further through the Medical file. She found index cards scribbled with brief notes in Simon’s handwriting.

One card read only: “Symptoms: shivers, headaches, reluctance to move, drowsiness, torpor, death.”

Another read: “Thirst: drink urine, blood, fluid of own blisters, spirit fluid of compass.”

Another: “Dec. 1710, Nottingham wrecked Boon Island. 26 days. Crew ate ship’s carpenter.”

Another: “Mrs. Rogers, stewardess of Stella. Helped ladies into lifeboat, gave up own vest. DIES! GOES DOWN WITH SHIP!”

Ruth handed that last card to Senator Simon and said, “I think this one belongs in the Heroes file.” He squinted at the card and said, “You’re absolutely right, Ruth. How did Mrs. Rogers ever get in the Medical file? And look what I just found in the Heroes file that doesn’t belong there at all.”

He handed Ruth an index card reading: “Augusta M. Gott, capsized, Gulf Stream, 1868. Erasmus Cousins (of BROOKSVILLE, MAINE!) selected by lot to be eaten. Saved only by sight of rescue sail. E. Cousins had bad stammer rest of life; E. Cousins—NEVER RETURNED TO SEA!”

“Do you have a cannibalism file?” Ruth asked.

“This is much more poorly organized than I thought,” said Senator Simon, mournfully.

It was at that moment that Cal Cooley stepped through the front door of the Ellis Granite Company Store building, without knocking.

“There’s my Ruth,” he said.

“Shit,” Ruth said, simply and with dread.

Cal Cooley hung around a long time in the Ellis Granite Company Store that afternoon. He rifled through Senator Simon’s belongings, taking things out of order and putting things back in the wrong place. He agitated Senator Simon no end by handling some of the artifacts quite rudely. Ruth tried to keep her mouth shut. Her stomach hurt.

She tried to be quiet and stay out of the way so that he wouldn’t talk to her, but there was no avoiding him on his mission. After an hour of being a nuisance, Cal said, “You never went to see Mr. Ellis for dinner in July, as he invited you to do.”

“Sorry about that.”

“I doubt it.”

“I forgot. Tell him I’m sorry.”

“Tell him yourself. He wants to see you.”

Senator Simon brightened and said, “Ruth, maybe you can ask Mr. Ellis about the basement!”

Senator Simon had recently found row upon row of locked file cabinets in the basement of the Ellis Granite Company Store. They were full, Senator Simon was sure, of fascinating Ellis Granite Company documents, and the Senator wanted permission to go through them and perhaps display a few of the choice items in the museum. He had written Mr. Ellis a letter requesting permission but had received no response.

“I can’t make it up there today, Cal,” Ruth said.

“Tomorrow’s fine.”

“I can’t make it up there tomorrow, either.”

“He wants to talk to you, Ruth. He has something to tell you.”

“I’m not interested.”

“I think it would be to your benefit to stop by. I’ll give you a ride, if that makes it easier.”

“I’m not going, Cal,” Ruth said.

“Why don’t you go see him, Ruth?” Senator Simon said. “You could ask him about the basement. Maybe I could come with you . . .”

“How does this weekend look? Maybe you can come for dinner Friday night. Or breakfast on Saturday?”

“I’m not going, Cal.”

“How does next Sunday morning sound? Or the Sunday after that?”

Ruth thought for a moment. “Mr. Ellis will be gone by the Sunday after that.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Because he always leaves Fort Niles on the second Saturday of September. He’ll be back in Concord the Sunday after next.”

“No, he won’t. He made it very clear to me that he’s not leaving Fort Niles until he sees you.”

This shut Ruth up.

“My goodness,” Senator Simon said, aghast. “Mr. Ellis isn’t planning on spending the winter here, is he?”

“I guess that’s up to Ruth,” Cal Cooley said.

“But that would be astonishing,” Senator Simon said. “That would be unheard of! He’s never stayed here.” Senator Simon looked at Ruth with panic. “What would that mean?” he said. “My goodness, Ruth. What are you going to do?”

Ruth had no answer, but she didn’t need one, because the conversation was abruptly ended by Webster Pommeroy, who charged into the Ellis Granite Company Store building with a hideous object in his hands. He was covered with mud from the chest down, and his face was so contorted that Ruth thought he must have found the second elephant tusk. But, no, it was not a tusk he was carrying. It was a round, filthy object that he thrust at the Senator. It took Ruth a moment to see what it was, and when she did, her body turned cold. Even Cal Cooley blanched when he realized that Webster Pommeroy was carrying a human skull.

The Senator turned it around and around in his doughy hands. The skull was intact. There were still teeth in the jaw, and a rubbery, shriveled skin, with long, muddy hairs hanging from it, covered the bone. It was a horror. Webster was shaking savagely.

“What’s that?” Cal Cooley asked, and for once his voice was free of sarcasm. “Who the hell is that?”

“I have no idea,” the Senator said.

But he did have an idea, as it turned out. Several days later—after the Rockland police came out on a Coast Guard boat to examine the skull and take it away for forensic tests—a distraught Senator Simon told the horrified Ruth Thomas of his supposition.

“Ruthie,” he said, “I’ll bet you any money in the world that’s the skull of your grandmother, Jane Smith-Ellis. That’s what they’re going to find out if they find out anything. The rest of her is probably still out there in the mudflats, where she’s been rotting since the wave took her in 1927.” He clutched Ruth’s shoulders in an uncommonly fierce grip. “Don’t you ever tell your mother I said that. She would be devastated.”

“So why did you tell me?” Ruth demanded. She was outraged.

“Because you’re a strong girl,” the Senator said. “And you can take it. And you always want to know exactly what’s going on.”

Ruth started crying; her tears came sudden and hard. “Why don’t you all just leave me alone?” she shouted.

The Senator looked crushed. He hadn’t meant to upset her. And what did she mean, you all? He tried to console Ruth, but she wasn’t having it. He was sad and confused by her lately; she was edgy all the time. He couldn’t make any sense of Ruth Thomas these days. He couldn’t figure out what she wanted, but she did seem awfully unhappy.

It was a hard fall. The weather got cold overly fast, taking everyone by surprise. The days grew shorter too quickly, locking the whole island in a state of irritation and misery.

Just as Cal Cooley had predicted, the second weekend of September came and went and Mr. Ellis didn’t budge. The Stonecutter stayed in the harbor, rocking about where everyone could see it, and word soon spread across the island that Mr. Ellis was not leaving and the reason had something to do with Ruth Thomas. By the end of September, the Stonecutter was a distressing presence. Having the Ellis boat sitting in the harbor so late into the fall was weird. It was like an anomaly of nature—a total eclipse, a red tide, an albino lobster. People wanted answers. How long did Mr. Ellis intend to stick around? What was he asking for? Why didn’t Ruth deal with him and get it over with? What were the implications?

By the end of October, several local fishermen had been hired by Cal Cooley to take the Stonecutter out of the water, clean it, store it on land. Obviously, Lanford Ellis was going nowhere. Cal Cooley didn’t come looking for Ruth Thomas again. She knew the terms. She had been summoned, and she knew that Mr. Ellis was waiting for her. And the whole island knew it, too. Now the boat was up on land in a wooden cradle where every man on the island could see it when he went down to the dock each morning to haul. The men didn’t stop to look at it, but they were aware of its presence as they walked by. They felt its large, expensive oddity. It made them skittish, the way a new object in a familiar trail unnerves a horse.

The snow began in the middle of October. It was going to be an early winter. The men pulled their traps out of the water for good much earlier than they liked to, but it was getting harder to go out there and deal with the ice-caked gear, the frozen hands. The leaves were off the trees, and everyone could see Ellis House clearly on the top of the hill. At night, there were lights in the upstairs rooms.

In the middle of November, Ruth’s father came over to Mrs. Pommeroy’s house. It was four in the afternoon, and dark. Kitty Pommeroy, already blindly drunk, was sitting in the kitchen, staring at a pile of jigsaw puzzle pieces on the table. Robin and Opal’s little boy, Eddie, who had recently learned to walk, was standing in the middle of the kitchen in a soggy diaper. He held an open jar of peanut butter and a large wooden spoon, which he was dipping into the jar and then sucking. His face was covered with peanut butter and spit. He was wearing one of Ruth’s T-shirts—it looked like a dress on him—that read VARSITY. Ruth and Mrs. Pommeroy had been baking rolls, and the shocking-green kitchen radiated heat and smelled of bread, beer, and wet diapers.

“I’ll tell you,” Kitty was saying. “How many years was I married to that man and I never once refused him. That’s what I can’t understand, Rhonda. Why’d he have to step out on me? What’d Len want that I couldn’t give him?”

“I know, Kitty,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “I know, honey.”

Eddie dipped his spoon into the peanut butter and then, with a squeal, threw it across the kitchen floor. It skidded under the table.

“Jesus, Eddie,” said Kitty. She lifted the tablecloth, looking for the spoon.

“I’ll get it,” Ruth said, and got down on her knees and ducked under the table. The tablecloth fluttered down behind her. She found the spoon, covered with peanut butter and cat hair, and also found a full pack of cigarettes, which must have been Kitty’s.

“Hey, Kit,” she started to say, but stopped, because she heard her father’s voice, greeting Mrs. Pommeroy. Her father had actually come over! He hadn’t come over in months. Ruth sat up, under the table, leaned against its center post, and was very quiet.

“Stan,” Mrs. Pommeroy said, “how nice to see you.”

“Well, it’s about the fuck time you stopped by and saw your own goddamn daughter,” said Kitty Pommeroy.

“Hey, Kitty,” Stan said. “Is Ruth around?”

“Somewhere,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “Somewhere. She’s always around somewhere. It is nice to see you, Stan. Long time. Want a hot roll?”

“Sure. I’ll give one a try.”

“Were you out to haul this morning, Stan?”

“I had a look at ’em.”

“Keep any?”

“I kept a few. I think this is about it for everyone else, though. But I’ll probably stay out there for the winter. See what I can find. How’s everything over here?”

There was an attention-filled silence. Kitty coughed into her fist. Ruth made herself as small as she could under the large oak table.

“We’ve missed having you come by for dinner,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “You been eating with Angus Addams these days?”

“Or alone.”

“We always have plenty to eat over here, Stan. You’re welcome any time you like.”

“Thanks, Rhonda. That’s nice of you. I miss your cooking,” he said. “I was wondering if you know what Ruthie’s plans might be.”

Ruthie. Hearing this, Ruth had a touch of heartache for her father.

“I suppose you should talk to her about that yourself.”

“She say anything to you? Anything about college?”

“You should probably talk to her yourself, Stan.”

“People are wondering,” Stan said. “I got a letter from her mother.”

Ruth was surprised. Impressed, even.

“Is that right, Stan? A letter. That’s been a long time coming.”

“That’s right. She said she hasn’t heard from Ruth. She said she and Miss Vera were disappointed Ruth hadn’t made a decision about college. Has she made a decision?”

“I couldn’t say, Stan.”

“It’s too late for this year, of course. But her mother said maybe she could start after Christmas. Or maybe she could go next fall. It’s up to Ruth, I don’t know. Maybe she has other plans?”

“Should I leave?” Kitty asked. “You want to tell him?”

“Tell me what?”

Under the table, Ruth felt queasy.

“Kitty,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “Please.”

“He doesn’t know, right? You want to tell him in private? Who’s telling him? Is she going to tell him?”

“That’s OK, Kitty.”

“Tell him what?” Stan Thomas asked. “Tell me what in private?”

“Stan,” Mrs. Pommeroy said, “Ruth has something to tell you.

Something you’re not going to like. You need to talk to her soon.”

Eddie staggered over to the kitchen table, lifted a corner of the tablecloth, and peeked in at Ruth, who was sitting with her knees pulled up to her chest. He squatted over his huge diaper and stared at her. She stared back. His baby face had a puzzled look.

“I’m not going to like what?” Stan said.

“It’s really something Ruth should talk to you about, Stan. Kitty spoke too freely.”

“About what?”

Kitty said, “Well, guess what, Stan. What the hell. We think Ruth’s going to have a baby.”

“Kitty!” Mrs. Pommeroy exclaimed.

“What? Don’t holler at me. Christ’s sake, Rhonda, Ruth doesn’t have the guts to tell him. Get it the hell over with. Look at the poor guy, wondering what the hell’s going on.”

Stan Thomas said nothing. Ruth listened. Nothing.

“She hasn’t told anyone but us,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “Nobody knows about it, Stan.”

“They’ll know soon enough,” Kitty said. “She’s getting fat as all hell.”

“Why?” Stan Thomas asked blankly. “Why do you think my daughter’s having a baby?”

Eddie crawled under the kitchen table with Ruth, and she handed him his filthy peanut butter spoon. He grinned at her.

“Because she hasn’t had her period in four months and she’s getting fat!” Kitty said.

“I know this is upsetting,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “I know it’s hard, Stan.”

Kitty snorted in disgust. “Don’t worry about Ruth!” she put in, loudly, firmly. “This is no big deal!”

Silence hung in the room.

“Come on!” Kitty said. “There’s nothing to having a baby! Tell him,

Rhonda! You had about twenty of ’em! Easy breezy! Anyone with clean hands and common sense can do it!”

Eddie stuck the spoon in his mouth, pulled it out, let forth a delighted howl. Kitty lifted the tablecloth and peered in. She started to laugh.

“Didn’t even know you was there, Ruth!” Kitty shouted. “Forgot all about you!”

Epilogue

Giants are met with in all the higher groups of animals. They interest us not only on account of their absolute size, but also in showing to what degree individuals may surpass the mean average of their race. It may be a question whether lobsters which weigh from 20–25 pounds are to be regarded as giants in the technical sense, or simply as sound and vigorous individuals on whose side fortune has always fought in the struggle of life. I am inclined to the latter view, and to look upon the mammoth lobster simply as a favorite of nature, who is larger than his fellows because he is their senior. Good luck has never deserted him.

—The American Lobster: A Study of Its Habits and Development

Francis Hobart Herrick, Ph.D.

1895

BY THE SUMMER OF 1982, the Skillet County Fishing Cooperative was doing a pretty good business for the three dozen lobstermen of Fort Niles Island and Courne Haven Island who had joined it. The office of the cooperative was located in the sunny front room of what had once been the Ellis Granite Company Store but was now the Intra-Island Memorial Museum of Natural History. The cooperative’s founder and manager was a competent young woman named Ruth Thomas-Wishnell. Over the past five years, Ruth had bullied and cajoled her relatives and most of her neighbors into entering the delicate network of trust that made the Skillet County Coop successful.

To put it simply, this had not been simple.

The idea for the cooperative had come to Ruth the first time she saw her father and Owney’s uncle Babe Wishnell in the same room together. This was at the christening of Ruth and Owney’s son, David, in early June of 1977. The christening took place in the living room of Mrs. Pommeroy’s home, was performed by the cheerless Pastor Toby Wishnell, and was witnessed by a handful of glum-looking residents of both Fort Niles and Courne Haven. Baby David had thrown up all over his borrowed antique christening gown only moments before the ceremony, so Ruth had taken him upstairs to change him into something less elegant but much cleaner. While she was changing him, he’d begun to cry, so she sat with him for a while in Mrs. Pommeroy’s bedroom, letting him nurse at her breast.

When, after a quarter of an hour, Ruth came back to the living room, she noticed that her father and Babe Wishnell—who had not so much as looked at each other all morning, and were sitting sullenly on opposite sides of the room—had each produced a small notebook from somewhere on his person. They were scribbling in these note-books with identical stubs of pencils and looked utterly absorbed, frowning and silent.

Ruth knew exactly what her father was doing, because she’d seen him do it a million times, so she had no trouble guessing what Babe Wishnell was up to. They were calculating. They were taking care of their lobster business. They were shuffling numbers around, comparing prices, planning where to drop traps, adding expenses, making money. She kept an eye on them both during the brief, unemotional ceremony, and neither man once looked up from his rows of figures.

Ruth got to thinking.

She got to thinking even harder a few months later, when Cal Cooley appeared unannounced at the Natural History Museum, where Ruth and Owney and David were now living. Cal climbed the steep stairs to the apartment above the growing clutter of Senator Simon’s massive collection and knocked on Ruth’s door. He looked miserable. He told Ruth he was on a mission for Mr. Ellis, who, it seemed, had an offer to make. Mr. Ellis wanted to give Ruth the gleaming French Fresnel lens from the Goat’s Rock lighthouse. Cal Cooley could scarcely deliver this news without crying. Ruth got a big kick out of that. Cal had spent months and months polishing every inch of brass and glass on that precious lens, but Mr. Ellis was adamant. He wanted Ruth to have it. Cal could not imagine why. Mr. Ellis had specifically instructed Cal to tell Ruth that she could do whatever she wanted with the thing. Although, Cal said, he suspected Mr. Ellis would like to see the Fresnel lens displayed as the centerpiece of the new museum.

“I’ll take it,” Ruth said, and immediately asked Cal to please leave.

“By the way, Ruth,” Cal said, “Mr. Ellis is still waiting to see you.”

“Fine,” Ruth said. “Thank you, Cal. Out you go.”

After Cal left, Ruth considered the gift she had just been offered. She wondered what it was all about. No, she still had not been up to see Mr. Ellis, who had remained on Fort Niles the entire previous winter. If he was trying to lure her up to Ellis House, she thought, he could forget it; she wasn’t going. Although she did not feel entirely comfortable with the idea of Mr. Ellis hanging about, waiting for her to visit. She knew it upset the chemistry of the island, having Mr. Ellis on Fort Niles as a permanent resident, and she knew her neighbors were aware that she had something to do with it. But she wasn’t going up there. She had nothing to say to him and was not interested in anything he had to say to her. She would, however, accept the Fresnel lens. And, yes, she would do whatever she wanted with it.

That night she had a long conversation with her father, Senator Simon, and Angus Addams. She told them about the gift, and they tried to imagine what the thing was worth. They didn’t have a clue, though. The next day, Ruth started calling auction houses in New York City, which took some research and gumption, but Ruth did it. Three months later, after intricate negotiations, a wealthy man from North Carolina took possession of the Goat’s Rock lighthouse Fresnel lens, and Ruth Thomas-Wishnell had in her hands a check for $22,000.

She had another long conversation.

This one was with her father, Senator Simon, Angus Addams, and Babe Wishnell. She had lured Babe Wishnell over from Courne Haven with the promise of a big Sunday dinner, which Mrs. Pommeroy ended up cooking. Babe Wishnell didn’t much like coming to Fort Niles, but it was hard to refuse the invitation of a young woman who was, after all, now a relative. Ruth said to him, “I had such a good time at your daughter’s wedding, I feel I should thank you with a nice meal,” and he could not turn her down.

It was not the most relaxed meal, but it would have been a good deal less relaxed had Mrs. Pommeroy not been there to flatter and pamper everyone. After dinner, Mrs. Pommeroy served hot rum drinks. Ruth sat at the table, bouncing her son on her lap and laying her idea before Babe Wishnell, her father, and the Addams brothers. She told them she wanted to become a bait dealer. She said she would put up the money for a building to be constructed on the Fort Niles dock, and she would buy the scales and freezers, as well as the heavy boat needed to transport the bait every few weeks from Rockland to the island. She showed them the numbers, which she had been juggling for weeks. She had everything figured out. All she wanted from her father and Angus Addams and Babe Wishnell was their commitment to buy her bait if she gave them a good low price. She could save them ten cents on the bushel right away. And she could save them the trouble of having to cart the bait from Rockland every week.

“You three are the most respected lobstermen on Fort Niles and Courne Haven,” she said, running a light finger over her son’s gums, feeling for a new tooth. “If everyone sees you doing it, they’ll know it’s a good deal.”

“You’re out of your fucking mind,” Angus Addams said.

“Take the money and move to Nebraska,” Senator Simon said.

“I’m in,” Babe Wishnell said, without the slightest hesitation.

“I’m in, too,” said Ruth’s father, and the two highline fishermen exchanged a glance of recognition. They got it. They understood the concept immediately. The numbers looked good. They weren’t idiots.

After six months, when it was clear that the bait dealership was hugely successful, Ruth founded the cooperative. She made Babe Wishnell the president but kept the office on Fort Niles, which satisfied everyone. She handpicked a council of directors, composed of the sanest men from both Fort Niles and Courne Haven. Any man who became a member of the Skillet County Cooperative could get special deals on bait and could sell his lobster catch to Ruth Thomas-Wishnell, right there on the Fort Niles dock. She hired Webster Pommeroy to run the scales. He was so simple, nobody ever accused him of cheating. She appointed her father to set the daily lobster prices, which he arrived at by haggling over the telephone with dealers as far away as Manhattan. She hired someone completely neutral—a sensible young man from Freeport—to operate the pound Ruth had had built for storing the lobster catch before it was carted over to Rockland.

There was a good payout for anyone who joined up, and it saved weeks out of each man’s year not to have to haul the catch to Rockland.

There were some holdouts at first, of course. Ruth’s father had rocks thrown through the windows of his house, and Ruth got some cold stares on the street, and someone once threatened to burn down the Natural History Museum. Angus Addams did not speak to Ruth or her father for over two years, but, in the end, even he joined. These were, after all, islands of followers, and once the highliners were on board, it was not difficult to find members. The system was working. It was all working out just fine. Mrs. Pommeroy did all the secretarial tasks in the Skillet Co-op office. She was good at it, patient and organized. She was also great at calming down the lobstermen when they got too worked up or too paranoid or too competitive. Whenever a lobsterman stormed into the office, howling that Ruth was ripping him off or that someone had sabotaged his traps, he was sure to walk out happy and pacified—and with a nice new haircut, besides.

Ruth’s husband and her father were making a fortune fishing together. Owney was Stan’s sternman for two years; then he bought his own boat (a fiberglass boat, the first one on either island; Ruth had talked him into it), but he and Stan still shared profits. They formed their own corporation. Stan Thomas and Owney Wishnell made a dazzling couple. They were fishing wizards. There weren’t enough hours in the day for all the lobsters they were pulling out of the ocean. Owney was a gifted fisherman, a natural fisherman. He came home to Ruth every afternoon with a sort of a glow, a hum, a low buzz of contentment and success. He came home every afternoon satisfied and proud and wanting sex in the worst way, and Ruth liked that. She liked that a lot.

As for Ruth, she too was content. She was satisfied and enormously proud of herself. As far as she was concerned, she pretty much kicked ass. Ruth loved her husband and her little boy, but mostly she loved her business. She loved the lobster pound and bait dealership, and she was pleased as punch with herself for having put together the co-op and for having convinced those big strong lobstermen to join it. All those men, who’d never before had a good word to say about one another! She’d offered them something so smart and efficient that even they had seen the worth of it. And business was great. Now Ruth was thinking about setting up fuel pumps on the docks of both islands. It would be an expensive investment, but it was sure to pay off fast. And she could afford it. She was making a lot of money. She was proud of that, too. She wondered, more than a little smugly, what had become of all her horsey classmates from that ridiculous school in Delaware. They’d probably just got out of college and were getting engaged to pampered idiots at this very moment. Who knew? Who cared?

More than anything, Ruth had a big sense of pride when she thought of her mother and the Ellises, who had tried so hard to drive her away from this place. They had insisted that there was no future for Ruth on Fort Niles, when, as things had turned out, Ruth was the future here. Yes, she was pretty content.

Ruth got pregnant again in the early winter of 1982, when she was twenty-four and David was a quiet five-year-old who spent most of his day trying not to get clobbered by Opal and Robin Pommeroy’s enormous son, Eddie.

“We’re going to have to move out of the apartment now,” Ruth said to her husband when she was sure she was pregnant. “And I don’t want to live in any of the old crappers down on the harbor. I’m sick of being cold all the time. Let’s build our own house. Let’s build a house that makes sense. A big one.”

She knew exactly where she wanted it to be. She wanted to live way up on Ellis Hill, way up at the top of the island, above the quarries, looking out over Worthy Channel and Courne Haven Island. She wanted a grand house and wasn’t ashamed to admit it. She wanted the view and the prestige of the view. Of course, Mr. Ellis owned the land. He owned pretty much all the good land on Fort Niles, so Ruth would have to talk to him if she was serious about building up there. And she was serious. As her pregnancy went on and the apartment began to feel smaller and smaller, Ruth grew even more serious.

Which is why, seven months pregnant and with her little boy in tow, Ruth Thomas-Wishnell drove her father’s truck all the way up the Ellis Road one afternoon in June of 1982, finally seeking a meeting with Mr. Lanford Ellis.

Lanford Ellis had turned a century old that year. His health was hardly robust. He was all alone in Ellis House, that massive structure of black granite, fit for a mausoleum. He hadn’t left Fort Niles in six years. He spent his days by the fireplace in his bedroom, with a blanket around his legs, sitting in the chair that had belonged to his father, Dr. Jules Ellis.

Every morning, Cal Cooley set up a card table near Mr. Ellis’s chair and brought over his stamp albums, a strong lamp, and a powerful magnifying lens. Some of the stamps in the albums were old and valuable and had been collected by Dr. Jules Ellis. Every morning, Cal would make a fire in the fireplace, no matter the season, because Mr. Ellis was always cold. So that was where he was sitting the day Cal Cooley ushered in Ruth.

“Hello, Mr. Ellis,” she said. “It’s nice to see you.”

Cal directed Ruth to a plush chair, stirred up the fire, left the room. Ruth lifted her little boy onto her lap, which was not easy, because she didn’t have much of a lap these days. She looked at the old man. She could hardly believe he was alive. He looked dead. His eyes were shut. His hands were blue.

“Granddaughter!” Mr. Ellis said. His eyes snapped open, grotesquely magnified behind enormous, insectoid glasses.

Ruth’s son, who was not a coward, flinched. Ruth took a lollipop from her bag, unwrapped it, and put it in David’s mouth. Sugar pacifier. She wondered why she’d brought her son to see this specter. That may have been a mistake, but she was used to taking David with her everywhere. He was such a good kid, so uncomplaining. She should have thought this out better. Too late now.

“You were supposed to come to dinner on Thursday, Ruth,” said the old man.

“Thursday?”

“A Thursday in July of 1976.” He cracked a sly grin.

“I was busy,” Ruth said, and smiled winningly, or so she hoped.

“You’ve cut your hair, girl.”

“I have.”

“You’ve put on weight.” His head bobbed faintly all the time.

“Well, I have a pretty good excuse. I’m expecting another child.”

“I’ve not yet met your first.”

“This is David, Mr. Ellis. This is David Thomas Wishnell.”

“Nice to meet you, young man.” Mr. Ellis stretched out a trembling arm toward Ruth’s boy, offering to shake hands. David scrunched against his mother in terror. The lollipop fell out of his shocked mouth. Ruth picked it up and popped it back in. Mr. Ellis’s arm retreated.

“I want to talk to you about buying some land,” Ruth said. What she really wanted was to get this meeting behind her as quickly as possible. “My husband and I would like to build a house here on Ellis Hill, right near here. I have a reasonable sum to offer . . .”

Ruth trailed off because she was alarmed. Mr. Ellis was suddenly coughing with a strangling sound. He was choking, and his face was turning purple. She didn’t know what to do. Should she get Cal Cooley? She had a quick and calculating thought: she didn’t want Lanford Ellis to die before the land deal was settled.

“Mr. Ellis?” she said, and started to get up.

The trembling arm stretched out again, waving her away. “Sit down,” he said. He took a deep breath, and the coughing started again. No, Ruth realized, he wasn’t coughing. He was laughing. How perfectly horrible.

He stopped, at last, and wiped his eyes. He shook his old turtle head.

He said, “You certainly aren’t afraid of me any longer, Ruth.”

“I never was afraid.”

“Nonsense. You were petrified.” A small, white spit-dot flew from his lips and landed on one of his stamp albums. “But no longer. And good for you. I must say, Ruth, I am pleased with you. I am proud of all you’ve accomplished here on Fort Niles. I have been watching your progress with great interest.”

He pronounced the last word in three exquisite syllables.

“Um, thank you,” Ruth said. This was a strange turn. “I know it was never your intent that I stay here on Fort Niles . . .”

“Oh, it was precisely my intent.”

Ruth looked at him without blinking.

“It was always my hope that you would stay here and organize these islands. Bring some sense to them. As you have done, Ruth. You look surprised.”

She was. Then again, she was not. She thought back.

Her mind slowed, picking around carefully for an explanation, looking closely at the details of her life. She reviewed some ancient conversations, some ancient meetings with Mr. Ellis. What exactly had he expected of her? What were his plans for her when her schooling was over? He had never said.

“I always understood that you wanted me to get off this island and go to college.” Ruth’s voice sounded calm in the big room. And she was calm. She was vitally involved in the conversation now.

“I said no such thing, Ruth. Did I ever talk to you about college? Did I ever say I wanted you to live elsewhere?”

Indeed he had not, she realized. Vera had said it; her mother had said it; Cal Cooley had said it. Even Pastor Wishnell had said it. But not Mr. Ellis. How very interesting.

“I’d like to know something,” Ruth asked, “since we are being so candid. Why did you make me go to school in Delaware?”

“It was an excellent school, and I expected you to hate it.”

She waited, but he did not elaborate.

“Well,” she said, “that explains everything. Thanks.”

He let out a rattling sigh. “Taking into account both your intelligence and your obstinacy, I imagined the school would serve two purposes. It would educate you and would drive you back to Fort Niles. I should not have to spell this out for you, Ruth.”

Ruth nodded. That did explain everything.

“Are you angry, Ruth?”

She shrugged. Oddly, she was not. Big deal, she thought. So he’d been manipulating her whole life. He’d manipulated the life of everyone he had sway over. It was no surprise, really; in fact, it was edifying. And in the end—what of it? Ruth came to this conclusion rapidly and with no fuss. She liked knowing at last what had been going on all these years. There are moments in a person’s life when the big understanding arrives in a snap, and this was such a moment for Ruth Thomas-Wishnell.

Mr. Ellis spoke again. “You could not possibly have married better, Ruth.”

“My, my, my,” she said. On came the surprises! “Well, how do you like that?”

“A Wishnell and a Thomas? Oh, I like it very much. You have founded a dynasty, young lady.”

“Have I, now?”

“You have. And it would have given my father supreme satisfaction to see what you’ve accomplished here in the last few years with the cooperative, Ruth. No other local could have pulled it off.”

“No other local ever had the capital, Mr. Ellis.”

“Well, you were clever enough to acquire that capital. And you’ve spent it wisely. My father would have been proud and delighted at the success of your business. He was always concerned for the future of these islands. He loved them. As do I. As does the entire Ellis family. And after all my family has invested into these islands, I would not want to see Fort Niles and Courne Haven sink for lack of a worthy leader.”

“I’ll tell you something, Mr. Ellis,” Ruth said, and for some reason she could not help smiling. “It was never my intent to make your family proud. Believe me. I have never been interested in serving the Ellis family.”

“Regardless.”

“Yeah, I suppose.” Ruth felt strange and light—and thoroughly comprehending. “Regardless.”

“But you’ve come to speak of business.”

“So I have.”

“You have some money.”

“So I do.”

“And you want me to sell you my land.”

Ruth hesitated.

“Noo,” she said, and she drew the word out. “No, not exactly. I don’t want you to sell me your land, Mr. Ellis. I want you to give it to me.”

Now it was Mr. Ellis who stopped blinking. Ruth tilted her head and returned his gaze.

“Yes?” she said. “Do you understand?”

He did not answer. She gave him time to think about what she’d said, and then explained it, with careful patience. “Your family owes a great debt to my family. It is important and proper that your family make some restitution to my family for the lives of my mother and my grandmother. And for my life, too. Surely you understand?”

Ruth was pleased with that word—restitution. It was exactly the right word.

Mr. Ellis thought this over for some time and then said, “You aren’t threatening me with legal action, are you, Miss Thomas?”

“Mrs. Thomas-Wishnell,” Ruth corrected. “And don’t be absurd. I’m not threatening anybody.”

“I rather thought not.”

“I’m only explaining that you have an opportunity here, Mr. Ellis, to right some of the wrongs that your family inflicted on my family over the years.”

Mr. Ellis did not reply.

“If you ever felt like cleaning up your conscience a bit, this might be your big chance.”

Mr. Ellis still did not reply.

“I shouldn’t have to spell this out for you, Mr. Ellis.”

“No,” he said. He sighed again, took off his glasses, and folded them.

“You should not have to.”

“You understand then?”

He nodded once and turned his head to regard the fire.

Ruth said, “Good.”

They sat in silence. David was asleep by now, and his body made a hot, damp imprint against Ruth’s body. He was heavy. And yet Ruth was comfortable. She thought this brief and forthright exchange with Mr. Ellis was both important and proper. And true. It had gone well. Restitution. Yes. And it was about time. She felt quite at ease.

Ruth watched Mr. Ellis as he watched the fire. She was not angry or sad. Nor did he appear to be so. She felt no resentment toward him. It was a nice fire, she thought. It was unusual, but not unpleasant, to have such a big, Christmasy fire blazing away in the middle of June. With the draperies drawn over the windows, with the smell of woodsmoke in the room, there was no way to know that the day was bright. It was a beautiful fireplace, the pride of the room. It was made of heavy, dark wood—mahogany, perhaps—decorated with nymphs and grapes and dolphins. It was capped by a marble mantelpiece of greenish hue. Ruth admired the workmanship of the fireplace for some time.

“I’ll take the house, too,” she said, at last.

“Of course,” said Mr. Ellis. His hands were clasped on the card table in front of him. His hands were spotty and papery, but now they did not tremble.

“Good.”

“Fine.”

“You’re with me?”

“Yes.”

“And you do understand what all this means, Mr. Ellis? It means you’ll have to leave Fort Niles.” Ruth did not say this in an unkind manner. She was simply correct. “You and Cal should both return to Concord now. Don’t you think?”

He nodded. He was still looking at the fire. He said, “When the weather is good enough to set sail in the Stonecutter . . .”

“Oh, there’s no hurry. You don’t have to leave here today. But I don’t want you dying in this house, do you understand? And I do not want you dying on this island. That would not be appropriate, and it would unsettle everyone too much. I don’t want to have to deal with that. So you do have to leave. And there’s no immediate hurry. But sometime over the next few weeks, we’ll pack you up and move you out of here. I don’t think it’ll be too hard.”

“Mr. Cooley can take care of all that.”

“Of course,” Ruth said. She smiled. “That’ll be a perfect job for Cal.”

They sat for another long time in silence. The fire crackled and shimmered. Mr. Ellis unfolded his eyeglasses and returned them to his face. He turned his gaze upon Ruth.

“Your little boy is sleepy,” he said.

“Actually, I think he’s sleeping. I should get him home to his father. He likes to see his father in the afternoons. Waits for him, you know, to come home from fishing.”

“He’s a handsome boy.”

“We think so. We love him.”

“Naturally you do. He is your son.”

Ruth sat up straighter. Then she said, “I should get back to the harbor now, Mr. Ellis.”

“You won’t have a cup of tea?”

“No. But we are in agreement, yes?”

“I am enormously proud of you, Ruth.”

“Well.” she smiled broadly and made an ironic little flourish with her left hand. “It’s all part of the service, Mr. Ellis.”

With some effort, Ruth got herself up out of the deep chair, still holding David. Her son made a small noise of protest, and she shifted his weight, trying to hold him in a way that would be comfortable for them both. At this point in her pregnancy, she shouldn’t have been carrying him around, but she enjoyed it. She liked holding David, and knew she only had a few more years of it, before he got too big and too independent to permit it. Ruth smoothed back her boy’s fair hair and picked up her canvas bag, which was filled with snacks for David and co-op files for herself. Ruth started toward the door and then changed her mind.

She turned around to confirm a suspicion. She looked over at Mr. Ellis, and, yes, just as she had expected, he was grinning and grinning. He made no attempt to hide his grin from her. Indeed, he let it grow wider. As she saw this, Ruth felt the oddest, the most unaccountable fondness for the man. So she did not walk out. Not just yet. Instead, she walked to Mr. Ellis’s chair and—leaning awkwardly around the weight of her son and her pregnancy—bent down and kissed the old dragon right on the forehead.

Acknowledgments

I WOULD LIKE to thank the New York Public Library for offering me the essential sanctuary of the Allen Room. I also extend my appreciation to the staff of the Vinalhaven Historical Society for helping me sift through that island’s remarkable history. While I consulted many books during this project, I was most helped by The Lobster Gangs of Maine, Lobstering and the Maine Coast, Perils of the Sea, Fish Scales and Stone Chips, the collected works of Edwin Mitchell, the unpublished but thorough “Tales of Matinicus Island,” and a disturbing 1943 volume called Shipwreck Survivors: A Medical Study.

Thanks to Wade Schuman for giving me the idea in the first place; to Sarah Chalfant for nudging it along; to Dawn Seferian for picking it up; to Janet Silver for seeing it through; and to Frances Apt for straightening it out. I am profoundly grateful to the residents of Matinicus Island, Vinalhaven Island, and Long Island for taking me into their homes and onto their boats. Special appreciation goes to Ed and Nan Mitchell, Barbara and David Ramsey, Ira Warren, Stan MacVane, Bunky MacVane, Donny MacVane, Katie Murphy, Randy Wood, Patti Rich, Earl Johnson, Andy Creelman, Harold Poole, Paula Hopkins, Larry Ames, Beba Rosen, John Beckman, and the legendary Ms. Bunny Beckman. Thank you, Dad, for attending U. of M. and for remembering your friends after all those many years. Thank you, John Hodgman, for taking time from your work to help me in the final moments of mine. Thank you, Deborah Luepnitz, for going lobster-by-lobster with me, right from the beginning. And God Bless the Fat Kids.

ELIZABETH GILBERT

Pilgrims

Praise for Pilgrims

‘Gilbert is keen on seeing as many of her characters achieve redemption as possible–in the most creative ways possible … She achieves the enviable feat of telling her characters’ stories in their own words, on their own terms, without pomp or superciliousness’

New York Times Book Review

‘Rendered with care and airtight precision. And her sentences are built solid as a brick shithouse’

Time Out New York

‘An imaginative range, assured comic touch, and dead-on ear for dialogue that’s truly exceptional … A gifted fiction writer’s sympathy for an amusing, believable array of resolute searchers and a reporter’s thoroughness that never gets bogged down in detail … her nimble, sharp prose is like the finger of a gifted illusionist’

Philadelphia Inquirer

‘Each story is full of humour, strength, and strange experiences … Gilbert has taken her encounters with people of every past and place, and infused them with the light and longevity of her own imagination’

Chicago Tribune

‘Gilbert draws her characters beautifully, and her sentences are sharp and bright’

Los Angeles Times

‘Hopeful, deluded, intoxicated, amazed, Gilbert’s characters shoot across the sky, and she catches them like a skilled photographer just as they pop, before they crash, drown or grow dull and fade away…Her fiction, like the best reporting, bristles with sharp, startling details’

The Cleveland Plain Dealer

‘Reading this talented trickster is like watching an acrobat. The risks are cruel. The light-as-a-feather endings can charm. One waits with interest for more of this fabulist’

Hortense Calisher

‘This is a killer collection, a run in the bad part of town, a sideshow of the heart. Elizabeth Gilbert writes with fierce grace about people who are all wised up, beaten down, and still manage to hope and love and get on with it’

Frederick Barthelme, author of Moon Deluxe

Contents

Title

Dedication

Praise

Pilgrims

Elk Talk

Alice to the East

Bird Shot

Tall Folks

Landing

Come and Fetch These Stupid Kids

The Many Things That Denny Brown did not Know (Age Fifteen)

The Names of Flowers and Girls

At the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market

The Famous Torn and Restored Lit Cigarette Trick

Finest Wife

FOR MOM AND DAD

WITH MUCH LOVE

Whan that April with his showres soote

The drought of March hath perced to the roote

And bathed every vein in swich licour,

Of which vertu engendred is the flowr;

Whan Zephyrus, eek, with his sweete breeth

Inspired hath in every holt and heeth

The tender croppes, and the yonge sunne

Hath in the Ram his halve course y-runne,

And smalle fowles maken melodye

That sleepen all the night with open ye

(So pricketh hem Nature in hir corages),

Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages …

––GEOFFREY CHAUCER

Pilgrims

W HEN MY OLD MAN said he’d hired her, I said, “A girl?” A girl, when it wasn’t that long ago women couldn’t work on this ranch even as cooks, because the wranglers got shot over them too much. They got shot even over the ugly cooks. Even over the old ones.

I said, “A girl?”

“She’s from Pennsylvania,” my old man said. “She’ll be good at this.”

“She’s from what?”

When my brother Crosby found out, he said, “Time for me to find new work when a girl starts doing mine.”

My old man looked at him. “I heard you haven’t come over Dutch Oven Pass once this season you haven’t been asleep on your horse or reading a goddamn book. Maybe it’s time for you to find new work anyhow.”

He told us that she showed up somehow from Pennsylvania in the sorriest piece of shit car he’d ever seen in his life. She asked him for five minutes to ask for a job, but it didn’t take that long. She flexed her arm for him to feel, but he didn’t feel it. He liked her, he said, right away. He trusted his eye for that, he said, after all these years.

“You’ll like her, too,” he said. “She’s sexy like a horse is sexy. Nice and big. Strong.”

“Eighty-five of your own horses to feed, and you still think horse is sexy,” I said, and my brother Crosby said, “I think we got enough of that kind of sexy around here already.”

She was Martha Knox, nineteen years old and tall as me, thick-legged but not fat, with cowboy boots that anyone could see were new that week, the cheapest in the store and the first pair she’d ever owned. She had a big chin that worked only because her forehead and nose worked, too, and she had the kind of teeth that take over a face even when the mouth is closed. She had, most of all, a dark brown braid that hung down the center of her back, thick as a girl’s arm.

I danced with Martha Knox one night early in the season. It was a day off to go down the mountain, get drunk, make phone calls, do laundry, fight. Martha Knox was no dancer. She didn’t want to dance with me. She let me know this by saying a few times that she wasn’t going to dance with me, and then, when she finally agreed, she wouldn’t let go of her cigarette. She held it in one hand and let that hand fall and not be available. So I kept my beer bottle in one hand, to balance her out, and we held each other with one arm each. She was no dancer and she didn’t want to dance with me, but we found a good slow sway anyway, each of us with an arm hanging down, like a rodeo cowboy’s right arm, like the right arm of a bull rider, not reaching for anything. She wouldn’t look anywhere but over my left shoulder, like that part of her that was a good dancer with me was some part she had not ever met and didn’t feel like being introduced to.

My old man also said this about Martha Knox: “She’s not beautiful, but I think she knows how to sell it.”

Well, it’s true that I wanted to hold her braid. I always had wanted to from first seeing it and mostly I wanted to in that dance, but I didn’t reach for it and I didn’t set down my beer bottle. Martha Knox wasn’t selling anything.

We didn’t dance again that night or again at all, because it was a long season and my old man worked all of us too hard. There were no more full days off for dancing or fighting. And when we would sometimes get an afternoon off in the middle of a hard week, we would all go to the bunkhouse and sleep; fast, dead tired sleep, in our own bunks, in our own boots, like firemen or soldiers.

Martha Knox asked me about rodeo. “Crosby says it’s a good way to get made dead,” she said.

“It’s the best way I know.”

We were facing each other across the short pine fire, just us, drinking. In the tent behind Martha Knox were five hunters from Chicago, asleep or tired, mad at me for not being able to make them good enough shots to kill any of the elk we’d seen that week. In the tent behind me were the cook stoves and the food and two foam pads with a sleeping bag for each of us. She slept under horse blankets to be warmer, and we both slept on the jeans we’d be wearing the next day, to keep them from freezing. It was the middle of October, the last hunt of the season, and ice hung in long needles off the muzzles of the horses every morning when we saddled.

“Are you drunk?” I asked her.

“I’ll tell you something,” she said. “That’s a pretty damn good question.”

She was looking at her hands. They were clean, with all the expected cuts and burns, but they were clean hands.

“You rode rodeo, right?” she asked.

“One time too many,” I said.

“Bulls?”

“Broncs.”

“Is that why you get called Buck?”

“I get called Buck because I stabbed myself in the leg with my buck knife when I was a kid.”

“Ever get nailed in rodeo?”

“I got on this bronc one night and knew right away, right in the chute, that it wasn’t going to have me. It wanted me gone and dead for trying. Never was so scared on a horse as on that son of a bitch.”

“You think it knew?”

“Knew? How could it know?”

“Crosby says the first job of a horse is to figure out who’s riding it and who’s in charge.”

“That’s my old man’s line. He says it to scare dudes. If horses were that smart, they’d be riding us.”

“That’s Crosby’s line.”

“No.” I took another drink. “That’s my old man’s line, too.”

“So you got thrown.”

“But my wrist got caught in the rigging and I got dragged around the ring three times under the son of a bitch’s belly. Crowd loved it. Horse loved it. Put me in the hospital almost a year.”

“Give me that?” She reached for the bottle. “I want to ride broncs,” she said. “I want to ride rodeo.”

“That’s what I meant to do,” I said. “I meant to talk you into it with that story.”

“Was your dad mad?”

I didn’t answer that. I stood up and walked over to the tree where all the pack gear was hung up in the branches, like food hung away from bears. I unzipped my fly and said, “Shield your eyes, Martha Knox, I’m about to unleash the biggest thing in the Wyoming Rockies.”

She didn’t say anything while I pissed, but when I got back to the fire she said, “That’s Crosby’s line.”

I found a can of tobacco in my pocket. “No, it’s not,” I said. “That’s my old man’s line, too.”

I tapped the can against my leg to pack the chew, then took some. It was my last can of tobacco, almost empty.

“My old man bought that bronc,” I said. “He found the owner and gave him twice what the bastard was worth. Then he took it out back of the cook shack, shot it in the head, and buried it in the compost pile.”

“You’re kidding me,” Martha Knox said.

“Don’t bring it up with him.”

“Hell no. No way.”

“He came to see me every day in the hospital. We never even talked because he was so goddamn beat. He just smoked. He’d flick the cigarette butts over my head and they’d land in the toilet and hiss out. I was in a neck brace for a bunch of months and I couldn’t even turn my head and see him. So damn bored. Just about the only thing I lived for was seeing those butts go flying over my face to the toilet.”

“That’s bored,” Martha Knox said.

“My brother Crosby showed up sometimes, too, with pictures of girls.”

“Sure.”

“Well, that was okay to look at, too.”

“Sure. Everyone had a butt for you to look at.”

She drank. I took the bottle, passed it back, and she drank more. There was snow around us. There’d been hail on the day we rode in and snow almost every night. In the afternoons big patches of it would melt off in the meadow and leave small white piles like laundry, and the horses would walk through these. The grass was almost gone, and the horses had started leaving at night, looking for better food. We hung cowbells around their necks, and these rang flat and loud while they grazed. It was a good noise. I was used to it, and I only noticed it when it was gone. That quiet of no bells meant no horses, and it could wake me up in the middle of the night. We’d have to go out after the horses then, but I knew where they usually went, and we’d head that way. Martha Knox was figuring them out, too, and she didn’t complain about having to get dressed in the middle of the night in the cold and go listen for bells in the dark. She liked it. She was getting it.

“You know something about your brother Crosby?” Martha Knox asked. “He really thinks he knows his way around a girl.”

I didn’t say anything, and she went on. “Now how can that be, Buck, when there aren’t any girls around?”

“Crosby knows girls,” I said. “He lived in towns.”

“What towns? Casper? Cheyenne?”

“Denver. Crosby lived in Denver.”

“Okay, Denver.”

“Well, there’s a girl or two in Denver.”

“Sure.” She yawned.

“So he could have learned his way around girls in Denver.”

“I see that, Buck.”

“Girls love Crosby.”

“I bet.”

“They do. Me and Crosby are going down to Florida one of these winters and wreck every marriage we can. There’s a lot of rich women down there. A lot of rich, bored women.”

“They’d have to be pretty bored,” Martha Knox said, and laughed. “They’d have to be bored to goddamn tears.”

“You don’t like my brother Crosby?”

“I love your brother Crosby. Why wouldn’t I like Crosby? I think Crosby’s the greatest.”

“Good for you.”

“But he thinks he knows his way around a girl, and that’s a pain in the ass.”

“Girls love Crosby.”

“I showed him a picture of my sister one time. He told me she looked like she’d been on the wrong side of a lot of bad dick. What kind of a thing to say is that?”

“You have a sister?”

“Agnes. She works in Missoula.”

“On a ranch?”

“Not on a ranch, no. She’s a stripper, actually. She hates it because it’s a college town. She says college boys don’t tip, no matter what you stick in their faces.”

“Did you ever fool around with my brother Crosby?” I asked.

“Hey, Buck,” she said. “Don’t be shy. Ask whatever’s on your mind.”

“Oh, shit. Never mind.”

“You know what they called me in high school? Fort Knox. You know why? Because I wouldn’t let anyone in my pants.”

“Why not?”

“Why not?” Martha Knox poked at the fire with a twig, then threw the twig in. She moved the coffee pot away from the flames and tapped the side of it with a spoon to settle the grounds that were boiling. “Why not? Because I didn’t think it was a very good idea.”

“That’s a hell of a nickname.”

“Buck’s a better one.”

“Taken,” I said.

Martha Knox got up and went into the tent, and when she came out she had an armful of wood. I asked, “What are you doing?”

“The fire is almost dead.”

“So let it die. It’s late.”

She didn’t answer me.

“I have to get up at three-thirty tomorrow morning,” I said.

“So good night.”

“And so do you have to get up.”

Martha Knox put a stick on the fire and sat down. “Buck,” she said, “don’t be a baby.” She took a long drink and she sang, “Mama, don’t let your cowboys grow up to be babies . . .”

“That’s a Crosby line,” I said.

“Let me ask you something, Buck. When we’re done up here, let me go hunting with you and Crosby.”

“I don’t think my old man would be crazy about that.”

“I didn’t ask to go hunting with your old man.”

“He won’t like it.”

“Why?”

“You ever even shoot a gun?”

“Sure. When I was a little kid my parents sent me out to Montana to stay with my dad’s uncle for the summer. I called my folks after a few weeks and said, ‘Uncle Earl set up a coffee can on a log and let me shoot at it and I hit the goddamn thing six times.’ They made me come home early. Didn’t like the sound of that.”

“Doesn’t sound like your old man’s going to be too crazy about it either, then.”

“We do not not have to worry about my father,” she said. “Not anymore.”

“That so?”

She took her hat off and set it on her leg. It was an old hat. It belonged once to my cousin Rich. My old man gave it to Martha Knox. He steamed a new shape into it over a coffee pot one morning, put a neat crease in the top. The hat fit her. It suited her.

“Now listen, Buck,” she said. “This is a good story, and you’ll like it. My dad grew Christmas trees. Not a lot of them. He grew exactly fifty Christmas trees and he grew them for ten years. In our front yard. Trimmed them all the time with kitchen scissors, so they were pretty, but only about this tall.”

Martha Knox held her hand about three feet off the ground.

“Problem is we lived in the country,” she went on. “Everybody had woods in their back yards. Nobody ever bought a Christmas tree in that place. So this wasn’t a good business idea, fifty perfect trees. No big money there. But that’s what he did, and my mom worked.” She took her hat off her leg and put it back on. “Anyway. He opened up for business last December and nobody showed up and he thought that was pretty damn weird, because they were such nice trees. He went out drinking. Me and my sister, we cut down maybe twenty of the fuckers. Threw them in the station wagon. Drove an hour to the highway, started flagging down cars and giving trees away. Anyone who stops gets a free tree. It was like . . . Well, hell. It was like Christmas.”

Martha Knox found a cigarette in her coat pocket and lit it.

“Now,” she said. “We drive home. There’s my dad. He pushes Agnes down and hauls off and punches me in the face.”

“He ever hit you before?” I asked, and she shook her head.

“And he never will again, either.”

She looked at me, cool and even. I looked at her smoking her cigarette two thousand miles from home, and I thought about her shooting the goddamn coffee can six times, and we were quiet for a long time before I said, “You didn’t kill him, did you?”

She didn’t look away and she didn’t answer fast, but she said, “Yeah. I killed him.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said finally. “Jesus son-of-a-bitching Christ.”

Martha Knox handed the bottle to me, but I didn’t take it. She came over beside me and sat down. She put her hand on my leg.

“Jesus Christ,” I said again. “Jesus son-of-a-bitching Christ.”

She sighed. “Buck,” she said. “Honey.” She patted my leg and then she nudged me. “You are the most gullible man I know on this planet.”

“Fuck you.”

“I shot my dad and buried him in the compost pile. Don’t tell anyone, okay?”

“Fuck you, Martha Knox.”

She got up and sat down on the other side of the fire again. “It was a great night, though. Lying in the driveway on my back with a bloody nose. I knew I was out of there.”

She handed me the bottle again, and this time I drank. We did not talk for a long time, but we finished off the bottle, and when the fire got low, Martha Knox put more wood on it. I had my feet so close to the flames that the soles of my boots started to smoke, so I moved back, but not much. In October up there it isn’t easy to be warm and I would not pull away from that kind of heat too fast.

There were bells from the meadow of horses moving but not leaving, grazing bells ringing, good bells. I could have named every horse out there and guessed who every horse was standing next to because of the way they liked to pair, and I could have told how each horse rode and how its mother and father rode, too. There were elk out there, still, but they were moving lower, like the horses wanted to move, for better food. Bighorn sheep and bear and moose were out there, too, all of them moving down, and I was listening for all of them. This night was clear. No clouds, except the fast clouds of our own breath, gone by the next breath, and it was bright from an almost finished moon.

“Listen,” I said, “I was thinking of going for a ride.”

“Now?” Martha Knox asked, and I nodded, but she had already known that I meant now, yes, now. Before she’d even asked, she was already looking at me and weighing things, mostly the big rule of my old man, which was this: no joyriding during work, not ever. No play-riding, no night-riding, no dare-riding, no dumb-riding, no risk-riding, not ever, not, most of all, during hunting camp. Before she’d even asked, “Now?” she’d thought of that, and she’d thought also that we were tired and drunk. There were hunters asleep in the tent behind her, and she thought of that, too. And I had also thought of all that.

“Okay,” she said.

“Listen,” I said, and I leaned in closer to the fire which was between us. “I was thinking of going up Washakee Pass tonight.”

I watched her. I knew she’d never been out that far, but she knew what it was, because Washakee was the only way for miles in any direction to get over the Continental Divide and into the middle of the Rockies. My brother Crosby called it the Spine. It was narrow and iced, and it pushed thirteen thousand feet, but it went over and in, and Martha Knox had not ever gone that far.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”

“Well, listen. I was thinking of not stopping there.”

She didn’t stop looking at me, and she didn’t change her expression, which was the expression of a good hunter watching for a good shot coming. Then I told her.

“We take a pack horse each and whatever food and gear fits on them. I ride Stetson, you ride Jake, and we don’t come back.”

“I’ll ride Handy.”

“Not that spotted-ass cocksucker.”

“I’ll ride Handy,” she said again, and I had forgotten that she had talked my old man into selling her that crazy horse.

“Okay. But he’s all wrong for this.”

“What about the hunters?”

“They’ll be fine, if they don’t freak out.”

“They’ll freak out.”

“They’ll be fine.”

“Talk about a bunch of pilgrims, Buck,” she said. “These guys have never even been in a back yard.”

“If they’re smart, they’ll hike out tomorrow as soon as they figure we’re gone. The trail’s marked like a goddamn freeway. They’ll be fine. The soonest they’ll get to the ranch is tomorrow night, late. The soonest the forest service could come after us is the next day. If we ride straight, we could be ninety miles south by then.”

“Tell me you’re dead serious,” Martha Knox said. “Because I’ll do this.”

“I figure four or five days until we get to the Uinta range, and if they don’t catch us before then, they’ll never catch us.”

“Okay. Let’s do this.”

“Then we head south. And we’ll have to, because of winter. There’s no reason in the world we shouldn’t be in Mexico in a few months.”

“Let’s do it.”

“Jesus Christ. I’ve got it all figured out. Jesus son-of-a-bitching Christ. We’ll steal cattle and sheep and sell them at all those puny mountain outfits where nobody ever asks any questions.”

“Buck,” she said.

“And we’ll ride into all those puny foothill towns in Utah and Wyoming and we’ll hold up their banks. On horseback.”

“Buck,” she said again.

“It must be a hundred years since anyone held up a bank on goddamn horseback. They won’t know how to deal with us. They’ll be chasing us in cars, and there we go, over the guard-rails, back up the mountains with all that cash. Gone.”

“Buck,” she said, and I still didn’t answer, but this time I stopped talking.

“Buck,” she said. “You’re just full of shit, aren’t you?”

“I figure we can last four or five months before we finally get gunned down.”

“You’re just full of shit. You’re not going anywhere.”

“You think I wouldn’t do something like that?”

“I don’t even want to talk about it.”

“You think I wouldn’t do that?”

“You want to take off with some horses and see if we get made dead out there? Fine, I’m all for that. But don’t waste my time with this outlaw bullshit.”

“Come on,” I said. “Come on, Martha Knox.”

“You’re just limited. Limited.”

“You wouldn’t just take off like that anyway.”

She looked at me like she was going to say something mean and mad, but instead she got up and poured the coffee over what was left of the fire to put it out.

“Come on, Martha Knox,” I said.

She sat down again, but I couldn’t see her well in the new dark, over the wet ash.

“Don’t waste my time like that again,” she said.

“Come on. You can’t just take off like that.”

“The hell I can’t.”

“You would’ve just stolen my old man’s horses?”

“Handy is my goddamn horse.”

“Come on, Martha Knox,” I said, but she stood up and went into the tent behind me. Then the tent was lit from inside, the way it was on mornings before the sun was up, when she would make day packs for the hunt, and from the meadow where I was starting to saddle I would see the tent glowing, but barely, because it was just one lantern she used.

I waited, and she came out of the tent with that lantern. She also had a bridle, taken from the hook by the cook stoves where we hung all the bridles, so that the bits would not be frozen with dew, so the bits would not be ice in the horses’ mouths in the mornings. She walked past me toward the meadow. She walked fast like always, and, like always, she walked like a boy.

I went after her. I stumbled on a loose rock, and I caught her arm. “You’re not taking off by yourself,” I said.

“Yes, I am. I’m going to Mexico. In the middle of the night. Just me and this bridle.”

Then she said, “I’m kidding, Buck,” even though I hadn’t answered her.

I held her arm and we walked. The ground was rough, wet in some parts and in other parts covered with thin snow. We tripped ourselves up on rocks and fell into each other but didn’t fall over, and the lantern helped some. We followed bells until we were with the horses. Martha Knox set the lantern on a stump. We looked at the horses and they looked at us. Some of them moved away, moved sideways or back from us. But Stetson came over to me. I put my hand out and he sniffed at it and set his chin on it. He moved off and bent to graze again, and the bell around his neck rang like that move had been important, but the bells rang always, and it was nothing.

Martha Knox was in the horses, saying the things we always say to horses, saying, “Hey, there, steady now, easy buddy,” like the words get understood, when really it’s only the voice that matters, and the words could be any words.

She found Handy and I watched her bridle him. I watched him let her bridle him, and the spots over his back and rump in the almost dark were ugly, like accidental spots, like mistakes. I went over and she was talking to Handy and buckling the bridle by his ear.

I said, “You know my old man got this horse from its owner for a hundred dollars, the guy hated it so bad.”

“Handy’s the best. Look at those pretty legs.”

“My old man says they should’ve named him Handful.”

“Should’ve named him Handsome,” she said, and I laughed, but I laughed too loud, and Handy jerked his head back.

“Easy there,” she told him. “Steady now; easy boy.”

“You know why Indians rode appaloosas into battle?” I asked.

“Yes. I do.”

“So they’d be good and pissed off when they got there.”

Martha Knox said, “You want to take a guess how many times I’ve heard that joke this summer?”

“I hate an appaloosa. I hate them all.”

She stood next to Handy and ran her palm down his spine. She took the reins and a bunch of mane and pushed herself up on him, fast, just like I’d taught her in June. He danced back a few steps, but she reined him, she touched his neck, she stopped him.

“You coming or not?” she asked.

“You couldn’t pay me enough to ride that spotted-ass cocksucker.”

“Get up here.”

“He won’t take two bareback.”

“He’ll take two. Get up here.”

“Steady boy,” I said, and got myself up on him, behind Martha Knox. He danced sideways before I was settled, but this time she let him dance and then she kicked him and he was in a loose trot already while I was reaching around her waist with both arms, reaching for handfuls of mane. She let him trot and then he slowed and walked. She let him walk where he wanted to, and he circled the lantern twice and lazy. He sniffed at a mare, who moved fast from him. He walked to a tree and stood under it, still.

“Hell of a ride,” I said.

She kicked him, not a nudging kick this time, but a serious one, and he took off from the kick and in two more kicks was running wide open. We were too drunk for it, and it was too dark for it, and there were too many things in that meadow for a horse to trip over, but we were running wide open. His bell and hooves were loud, and they were a surprise to the other horses, who scattered behind us. I heard a few of them follow us, belled and fast.

Martha Knox had reins, but she wasn’t using them, and my hat was gone, and so was hers, blown off. Handy might have stumbled or he might have kicked funny the way horses who love to run sometimes kick, or we might have been settled wrong, but we fell. With my arms still around her, we went over together, so who could say who fell first, or whose fault? That meadow was the best place for horses on long trips, but by this hunt it was spent. The next spring it would be different, with new grass wet from runoff, but that night it was packed dirt and frozen, and we hit it hard. We took the same fall, both of us. We took the fall in our hips and our shoulders. I knew I wasn’t hurt and guessed she wasn’t, but before I could ask, she was laughing.

“Oh, man,” she said. “Goddamn.”

I pulled my arm out from under her and rolled off my hip onto my back, and she rolled onto her back, too. We were far from any lantern, but the moon was big and lit. I turned my head to see Martha Knox’s face by my face. Her hat was gone, and she was rubbing her arm, but she wasn’t looking anywhere but right up at the sky, the kind of sky we don’t see too much of, because of trees or bad weather, or because we sleep or stare at fires instead.

Handy came back—first his bell, then his huge face over our faces, hot and close. He smelled at us like we were plants or maybe something he would want.

“You’re a good horse, Handy,” Martha Knox said, not with the voice we always use for horses, but with her normal voice, and she meant it. I didn’t think she wanted me to kiss her, although it was true that I wanted to kiss her then. She looked great. On that frozen dead ground, she looked as good and important as new grass or berries.

“You’re a good horse,” she told Handy again, and she sounded very sure of that. He smelled her again, carefully.

I looked up, too, at the sky, and the stars were no stars I hadn’t seen before, but they seemed closer and unfamiliar. I watched long enough to see one of them drop above us, long and low. That’s common to see in a good sky out here. This one star, though, left a slow thin arc, like a cigarette still burning flung over our heads. If Martha Knox saw this, it was only as she was reaching up already with one hand for her horse’s reins, and it wasn’t something she mentioned.

Elk Talk

B ENNY had been living with Ed and Jean for over a year. His mother was Jean’s sister, and she was still in a hospital bed in Cheyenne, comatose, because she had driven her car into a snowplow on her way home from an art class one night. Jean had offered to take in her eight-year-old nephew as soon as she’d been told about the accident, and the whole family had agreed that such an arrangement would be best for Benny. When people asked Jean where Benny’s father was, she said simply, “He’s not available at this time,” as if he were a businessman unable to come to the telephone.

Ed and Jean had a daughter of their own, married and living in Ohio, and when they moved from town into the mountain cabin, they were not expecting to share it someday with a child. Yet Benny was there now, and every morning Jean drove five miles down the dirt road so that he could meet his school bus. Every afternoon she met him at the same place. It was more difficult in the winter, on account of the heavy, inevitable snow, but they’d managed.

Ed worked for the Fish and Game Department, and had a large green truck with the state emblem on its doors. He was semiretired, and in recent months had developed something of a belly, round and firm as a pregnant teenager’s. When he was home, he cut and stacked firewood or worked on the cabin. They were always insulating it more, always discovering and fixing flaws to make themselves more resistant to winter. Jean canned and froze vegetables from her garden in July and August, and when she went for walks she picked up small dry sticks along the path to bring home and save for kindling. The cabin was only a small place, with a short back porch facing the woods. Jean had converted the living room into a bedroom for Benny, and he slept on the couch under a down quilt.

It was the end of October, and Ed was gone for the weekend, giving a speech about poaching at some convention in Jackson. Jean was driving to pick up Benny at the bus stop when a station wagon approached her, speeding, pulling behind it a large camper. She swerved quickly, barely avoiding an accident, wincing as the side of her car scraped the underbrush to her right. Safely past, she glanced in the rearview mirror and tried to make out the receding tail end of the camper through the thick dust just lifted.

She couldn’t remember the last time she’d met a car on that road. Ed and Jean had the only house for miles, and traffic consisted of the occasional truckload of hunters, or perhaps a teenage couple looking for a secluded parking spot. There was no reason for a station wagon with a camper to come out here. She imagined that it was a vacationing family, lost on their way to Yellowstone, miserable children in the back and a father driving, refusing to stop for directions. At such a speed, he would kill them all.

Benny’s bus was early that day, and when Jean reached the highway, he was waiting for her, holding his lunch box close to his chest, standing scarcely taller than the mailbox beside him.

“I changed my mind,” he said when he got into the car. “I want to be a karate man.”

“But we already have your costume ready, Benny.”

“It’s not a real costume. It’s just my Little League uniform, that’s all.”

“Ben. You wanted to wear it. That’s what you told me you wanted to be for Halloween.”

“I want to be a karate man,” he repeated. He didn’t whine, but spoke slowly and loudly, the way he always did, as if everyone in his life was hard of hearing or a beginning student of the English language.

“Well, I’m sorry. You can’t be one,” Jean said. “It’s too late to make a new costume now.”

Benny looked out the window and crossed his arms. After a few minutes, he said, “I sure wish I could be a karate man.”

“Help me out, Ben? Don’t make things so hard, okay?”

He didn’t answer, but sighed resignedly, like somebody’s mother. Jean drove in silence, more slowly than usual, keeping the speeding station wagon in mind at each curve. About halfway home, she asked, “Did you have art class today, Benny?”

He shook his head.

“No? Did you have gym class, then?”

“No,” Benny said. “We had music.”

“Music? Did you learn any new songs?”

He shrugged.

“Why don’t you sing me what you learned today?”

Benny said nothing, and Jean repeated, “Why don’t you sing me what you learned today? I’d like to hear your new songs.”

After another silence, Benny pulled a blue-gray wad of chewing gum from his mouth and stuck it on the handle of his lunch box. Then, gazing solidly at the windshield, he recited in a low monotone, “There was a farmer had a dog and Bingo was his name oh. B-I-N-G-O,” he spelled, carefully enunciating each letter. “B-I-N-G-O. B-I-N-G-O. And Bingo,” Benny said, “was his name. Oh.”

He peeled the gum off his lunch box and returned it to its place in his mouth.

That night after dinner, Jean helped Benny into his Little League uniform and cut strips of reflecting tape to lay over the numbers on the back of his jersey.

“Do you have to do that?” he asked.

“I want cars to see you as well as you see them,” she said.

He accepted this without further protest. Having won an earlier dispute about the wearing of a hat and gloves, he let her have this one. Jean found the old Polaroid camera in her desk drawer and brought it into the living room.

“We’ll take a picture to show Uncle Ed when he gets home,” she said. “You look so nice. He’ll want to see.”

She found him in the tiny square of the viewfinder, and backed up until he was completely framed.

“Smile,” she said. “Here we go.”

He did not blink, not even during the flash, but stood in place and smiled at the last moment, as a favor to her. They both watched as the camera slowly pushed out the cloudy, damp photograph.

“Hold this by the edges carefully,” Jean instructed, handing it to Benny, “and see what turns up.”

There was a knock at the door. Jean stood up quickly, startled. She glanced at Benny, who was holding the developing picture between his thumb and forefinger, looking at her in anxious surprise.

“Stay there,” she told him, and walked to the window at the back of the cabin. It was dark already, and she had to press her face close against the cold glass to see the vague figures on the porch. There was another knock, and a high voice, muffled through the thick oak, called, “Trick or treat!”

Jean opened the door and saw two adults and a small child, all in brown snowsuits, all with long branches masking-taped to their stocking caps. The woman stepped forward and extended her hand. “We’re the Donaldsons,” she said. “We’re your neighbors.”

“We’re elks,” the child added, touching the two branches on her hat. “These are our horns.”

“They’re antlers, sweetie,” her mother corrected. “Bison and goats have horns. Elk have antlers.”

Jean looked from the girl to her mother to the man beside them, who was calmly taking off his gloves.

“You’re losing heat with the door open,” he said, in a voice that was not deep so much as low and even. “You should probably let us in.”

“Oh,” Jean said, and she stepped aside so that they could pass. Then she shut the door behind her and leaned her back flat against it, touching it with her palms.

“Well, what’s this?” the woman asked, kneeling next to Benny and picking up the photograph he’d dropped. “Is this a picture of you?”

“I’m sorry,” Jean interrupted. “I’m terribly sorry, but I don’t know who you are.” The family in her cabin turned as one and looked at her.

“We’re the Donaldsons,” the woman said, frowning slightly, as if Jean’s statement confused her. “We’re your neighbors.”

“We haven’t got any neighbors,” Jean said. “Not all the way out here.”

“We just moved here today.” The man spoke again in the odd low voice. The little girl was standing beside him, holding on to his leg, and he rested his hand on the top of her head, between her antlers.

“Moved where?” Jean asked.

“We bought an acre of land a half-mile from here.” His tone suggested that he found her rude for pursuing the issue. “We’re staying in our camper.”

“Your camper?” Jean repeated. “I saw you today, didn’t I? On the road?”

“Yes,” the man said.

“You were driving awfully fast, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” he said.

“We were in a hurry to get here before dark,” his wife added.

“You really have to be careful on these roads,” Jean said. “It was very dangerous of you to drive that way.”

There was no response; the three of them looked at Jean with politely empty faces, as if waiting for her to say something else, something perhaps more appropriate.

“I wasn’t aware that there was land for sale at the end of our road,” Jean said, and she was met with the same uniform expressions. Even Benny was watching her with a look of mild curiosity.

“We were not expecting to have neighbors,” Jean continued. “Not all the way out here.” Again, silence. There was nothing overtly unfriendly in their collective gaze, but it felt foreign to her, and she found it unsettling.

The little girl, who could not have been four years old, turned to Benny and asked, “What are you, anyway?”

He looked up quickly at Jean for an answer, and then back at the girl. Her mother smiled. “I think she wants to know what your costume is, dear.”

“I’m a baseball player,” Benny said.

“We’re elks,” the girl told him. “These are our antlers.” She pronounced it antlows.

The woman turned her smile on Jean. Her teeth were wide and even, set close to her gums, like the teeth of those old Eskimo women who spend their lives chewing on leather. “My name is Audrey,” she said. “This is my husband, Lance, but he’d prefer it if you called him L.D. He doesn’t like his real name. He thinks it sounds like a medical procedure. This is our daughter, Sophia. We threw these costumes together at the last minute, but she’s very excited about them. She insisted that we trick-or-treat when she saw your cabin this afternoon.”

“We were just on our way out,” Jean said. “I’m taking Benny to his school’s Halloween party.”

“Isn’t that fun?” Audrey beamed. “Are the little ones allowed to go?”

“No,” Jean answered quickly, although she had no idea what the rules actually were.

“This will be our only stop tonight, then,” Audrey said. “Though we may go for a walk later, to talk to the elk.”

“Have you heard them?” L.D. asked.

“Excuse me?” Jean frowned.

“I say, have you heard the elk?”

“We hear elk all the time. I guess I’m not really sure what you’re talking about.”

L.D. and Audrey exchanged a brief look of shared triumph.

“L.D. is a musician,” Audrey explained. “We vacationed here in Wyoming last summer, and he was very taken with the elk bugle. It’s a wonderful noise, really.”

Jean knew it well. Almost every night in the autumn, elk bugled across the woods to each other. It was impossible to tell how close they came to the cabin, but the sound was forceful and compelling: a long, almost primate screech, followed by a series of deep grunts. It was something she had known since childhood. She’d seen horses stop in the middle of a trail at the sound and stand there, heads pulled up high, breathing sharply out of their nostrils, ears tensed, listening, preparing to run.

“L.D. made several recordings. He found it very inspiring for his own music,” Audrey went on. “Have you ever lived in a city?”

“No,” Jean said.

“Well.” Audrey rolled her eyes. “Let me tell you, there’s a limit, an absolute limit, to what you can endure there. Just three months ago, I was getting ready to go out on some errands and I suddenly realized I’d taken all my credit cards out of my purse so that, if I was mugged, I wouldn’t have to go to the trouble of replacing them. Without even thinking, I’d done this, as if it was perfectly normal to live that way. And that night I told L.D., ‘We’re leaving; we have got to get out of this crazy city.’ Of course, he was more than happy to comply.”

Jean looked over to Benny, who had been standing quietly through all this, listening. She’d forgotten for a moment that he was there, and she felt the same quick guilt that came when, during dinner, she’d glance around the table and be surprised to see Benny eating with them, sitting between Ed and herself.

“Well.” Jean pushed her glasses back farther on her nose. “We’ve got to get going.”

“Listen,” L.D. said, and he took a flat black disk from his pocket. He slid it into his mouth and made the full screech of an elk bugle ring through the small, heavily insulated living room of Jean’s cabin. She saw Benny jump at the suddenness of the sound. L.D. took the disk out of his mouth and smiled.

“Oh, honey.” Audrey winced. “That’s so loud inside. You really shouldn’t bugle in people’s homes. Don’t be scared,” she told Benny. “It’s just his elk talker.”

Jean had heard one before. A friend of Ed’s was a hunting guide who used one to call in bull elk. He’d demonstrated it for Jean once, and she’d laughed at how fake it had sounded. “You might as well stand in a clearing and call, ‘Here elky, elky, elky,’” she’d said. L.D. had the same device, but his sound was full and alarmingly real.

Benny grinned at Jean. “Did you hear that?”

She nodded. “You do know that you can only hunt elk in season and with a license, don’t you?” she asked L.D.

“We don’t want to hunt them,” Audrey said. “We just want to talk to them.”

“Did it sound real to you?” L.D. asked. “I’ve been practicing.”

“How’d you do that?” Benny asked. L.D. handed him the disk.

“They call this a diaphragm,” L.D. explained, as Benny turned the object over in his hand and held it up to the light. “It’s made of rubber, and you put it in the back of your mouth and blow air through it. It’s not easy, and you have to be careful or you’ll swallow it. There’s different sizes for different sounds. This one is a mature bull, a mating call.”

“Can I try it?”

“No,” Jean said. “Don’t put that in your mouth. It doesn’t belong to you.”

Benny reluctantly handed it back to L.D., who said, “Get your dad to buy you one of your own.”

Jean cringed at the reference, but Benny only nodded, considering the suggestion. “Okay,” he said. “Sure.”

Jean took her coat off the hook by the door and put it on. “Come on, Ben,” she said. “Time to go.”

L.D. lifted Sophia from where she’d been sitting on his boots. One of her antlers had slipped from its masking-tape base and hung like a braid down her back.

“Doesn’t she look precious?” Audrey asked.

Jean opened the door and held it so the Donaldsons could file out onto the porch. Benny followed behind them, small, antlerless. She turned the lights off and left, closing the door. She pulled a skeleton key from the bottom of her pocketbook, and, for the first time since she’d lived in the cabin, locked up.

It was a clear night, with a nearly full moon. There had been no snow yet, none that had lasted, but Jean suspected from the sharp smell of the cold air that there might be some by the next day. She remembered reading that bears wait until the first drifting snowfall to hibernate so that the tracks to their winter dens will be covered immediately. It was getting late in the year, she thought, and the local bears must be getting tired of waiting around for proper snow.

The Donaldsons were standing on the porch, looking past Jean’s small back yard to the edge of the woods.

“Last summer I got the elk to answer,” L.D. said. “That was a wild experience, communicating like that.”

He slid the diaphragm into his mouth and called again, louder than he had in the cabin, a more powerful sound, Jean thought, than a human had a right to make around there, and disturbingly realistic.

Then there was silence, and they all stared across the yard, as if expecting the trees themselves to answer. Jean had forgotten her gloves. Her hands were cold, and she was anxious to get to the car, and warmth. She reached forward and touched Benny’s shoulder.

“Let’s go, honey,” she said, but he laid his hand over hers in a surprisingly adult manner and whispered, “Wait,” and then, “Listen.”

She heard nothing. L.D. had set Sophia down, and now the whole family stood on the edge of the porch, their antlers outlined against the night sky. They’d best not make their costumes too authentic, Jean thought, or they’d get themselves shot. She pushed her fists down into the pockets of her coat and shivered.

After some time, L.D. repeated the call, a long high squeal, followed by several grunts. They all listened in the ensuing quiet, leaning forward slightly, heads tilted, as if they were afraid the answer might be faint enough to miss, although it was unnecessary to listen so carefully: if a bull elk was going to bugle back, they wouldn’t have to strain to hear it.

L.D. sounded the call again, and immediately once more, and as the last grunt vanished into silence, Jean heard it. She heard it first. By the time the others tensed in realization, she’d already been thinking that it must be a bear making all that noise in the underbrush. And then she’d guessed what it was, just before the elk broke out of the woods. The ground was hard with cold, and his hooves beat in a light fast rhythm as he circled. He stopped in the black frozen soil of Jean’s garden.

“Oh my God,” she said under her breath, and quickly counted the points of his antlers, which spread in dark silhouette, blending with the branches and forms of the trees behind him. He had approached them fast and without warning, making himself fully visible to confront or to be confronted. Clearly, this elk did not want to talk to the Donaldsons. He wanted to know who was in his territory, calling for a mate. And now he stood, exposed, looking right at them. But the cabin was dark and shaded by the porch roof, so there was no way the elk could have picked out their figures. There was no breeze to carry a scent either, so he stared blindly at the precise spot from where the challenge had come.

Jean saw Sophia reach her hand up slowly and touch her father’s leg, but, aside from that, there was no movement. After a moment, the elk stepped slowly to his left. He stopped, paused, returned to where he’d been standing, and stepped a few feet to his right. He showed both his sides in the process, keeping himself in full view, his gaze fixed on the porch. He did not toss his head as a horse might, nor did he strike a more aggressive, intimidating stance. Again he paced, to one side and to the other, slowly, deliberately.

Jean saw L.D. raise his hand to his mouth and adjust the diaphragm. She leaned forward and placed her hand on his forearm. He turned to look at her, and she mouthed the word no.

He frowned and turned away. She saw him begin to inhale, and she tightened her hold on his arm and said, so softly that someone standing even three feet away would not have heard her, “Don’t.”

L.D. slipped the diaphragm out of his mouth. Jean relaxed. Out of the woods came two females, one fully mature, the other a lean yearling. They looked first at the male, then at the cabin, and slowly, almost self-consciously, walked the length of the yard to the garden. All three elk stood together for some time in what Jean felt was the most penetrating silence she had ever experienced. Under their sightless gaze, she felt as if she were involved in a séance that had been held in jest but had accidentally summoned a real ghost.

Eventually, the elk began their retreat. The older two appeared decisive, but the yearling twice looked back at the cabin, two long looks that Jean had no way of reading. The elk stepped into the woods and were immediately out of view. On the porch, no one moved until Sophia said very quietly, “Daddy.”

Audrey turned and smiled at Jean, shaking her head slowly. “Have you ever,” she asked, “in your entire life felt so incredibly privileged?”

Jean did not answer but took Benny by the hand and led him briskly to the car. She didn’t look at the Donaldsons standing at the threshold of her home, not even as she waited for some time in the driveway for the engine to warm up.

“Did you see that?” Benny asked, his voice tight with wonder, but Jean did not answer him either.

She drove with only the low beams of her headlights on, recklessly, veering to the other side of the road, heedless of the possibility of oncoming traffic or other obstacles. She drove the road faster than she ever had before, venting a fury that took her four dangerous miles to isolate, and she did not begin to slow down until she realized that not only had she been manipulated, but she had been a participant in a manipulation. They had no right, she thought over and over, they had no right to do such a thing simply because they could. She remembered, then, that Benny was still with her, beside her, that he was entirely her responsibility, and she eased her car into control again.

She wished, briefly, that her husband was with her, a thought she immediately dismissed on the grounds that there were already far too many people around.

Alice to the East

T HE DRIVE from Roy’s house to the center of Verona was twenty minutes through sunflower fields that stretched out on either side, flat and constant as a Midwestern accent. It was a good highway, well-paved and broken by nothing but the horizon and the tracks of the Northern Pacific Railroad. When Roy’s daughter Emma was young, he had taught her how to ride a bicycle on the yellow line that divided those who were going east from those headed west. It was safe enough; there was less traffic then, and the few cars that did pass could be seen coming from miles away. There was always plenty of time to make a decision, to move over, to be prepared.

About ten miles out of town the grain elevator could be seen, standing with all the arrogance one would expect from the only structure in the area over two stories tall. Roy had just passed that point when he noticed an unfamiliar object ahead which became, as he drove closer, a truck, a white truck, pulled off the road, hazards flashing. He slowed down, read the Montana license plate, and then eased his car so deliberately to a stop behind the pickup that it appeared as if he’d parked there every day of his life.

Roy stepped out of his car and walked a few feet before he saw them in the ditch. He stopped, and slowly reached out his hand until he was touching the hood over his warm, ticking engine. There were two of them, teenagers. The girl was standing. The boy knelt at her feet, slicing one leg of her jeans open at mid-thigh with a jackknife. Roy was startled and then embarrassed by the strange intimacy of the scene: the girl standing with her legs slightly spread, hands on her hips, the boy on his knees, the unexpected flash of the knife, the gradual revealing of more skin as a pair of jeans became shorts.

After a moment, the girl turned and looked at Roy with vague interest. Her hair, short and dark, was pressed damply against her head, as if she had just taken off a baseball hat. She wore a man’s white undershirt, a pair of sunglasses clinging to its V neck with one arm.

“Hi,” she said.

“I saw you were pulled over,” Roy said. “I thought you might need a hand.”

She gestured at the truck. “Yeah. It just quit on us all of a sudden.”

“Fuel pump,” the boy added. “Busted.”

“Want me to take a look at it?”

The girl shrugged. “Just a sec,” she said.

Roy waited while the boy cut through the last heavy inseam and the girl stepped out of the tube, with its hemmed bottom and frayed top. One leg bare, the other in long jeans, she walked to the pickup, opened the door, and released the hood. Roy came around to the front of the truck, noticing the dead butterflies and grasshoppers flattened against the radiator grill. He and the girl looked at the dusty engine block, and she pointed one thin hand through the network of tubes and hoses and said, “Pete thinks it’s this that’s broken. The fuel pump.”

“If it is, you’ll need a new one,” Roy said.

“That’s what Pete thinks, too.”

“What is this, a three-fifty?”

“It’s a Chevy,” she answered.

“I mean the engine. What is it?”

“Three-fifty,” the boy called from around the truck.

“I figured we’d have problems and everything,” the girl said, “but damn. I thought we’d at least get through North Dakota.”

“You’re from Montana?”

“Yeah. Right across the border. Are you from here?”

“Yes,” Roy answered. “I live just outside Verona.” He thought it strange that he said this the way other people said they lived just outside Chicago or ten minutes from Manhattan. Like it meant something. There wasn’t much inside Verona, and there was nothing just outside it, except sunflower fields and Roy’s house.

“We haven’t been on the road two days and now . . .” She left the thought unfinished and smiled at Roy. “I’m Alice,” she said. With the s sound, the tip of her tongue made a brief appearance between her teeth and then vanished.

“I’m Roy. I know someone in Verona who might have the part you need. I can give you a ride. If you want.”

“Let me ask Pete. My brother.”

She walked back to the ditch, and Roy stood at the corner of the truck, watching. He didn’t believe they were related. Something about the way she said “my brother” after Pete’s name. Something about the emphasis, the hesitation.

Pete had been lying on his back in the dead grass, and at Alice’s approach he sat up, wiped his forehead with the inside of his arm, and complained that it was hot.

“Finish making my shorts and he’ll give us a ride into town,” Alice said. “He told me some guy might have the part.”

Pete took the jackknife from his pocket, opened it, and began to cut into what remained of Alice’s jeans. Roy watched her stand there, still and relaxed, eyes forward. He saw that Pete, while bending his head in close concentration, did not touch Alice at all, not even brushing a knuckle against her skin. Only the frayed ends of her shorts grazed her thighs, and Roy found himself staring. He looked down at his own pants, studying the symmetrical cuffs that rested on the laces of his thick shoes.

When Pete finished, Alice stepped out of the second denim tube as she had the first, picked them both up, and draped them over her arm, like guest towels on a rack.

“Are you ready, Roy?” she asked, calling him easily by his first name.

“Sure.” He nodded.

Pete stood up stiffly and brushed the dirt off his knees. “Let’s go, then,” he said.

Carl was behind the bar drinking coffee when they walked in. Roy asked if he’d seen Artie around, almost hoping that Carl would say no. It was cool and dark in the bar, and Roy didn’t feel like hunting anyone down in the late-afternoon heat.

“His boys were just in for pops,” Carl said. “They told me he was out back of his place cleaning snapping turtles. You need something?” Carl was looking at Pete and Alice.

“These folks had a breakdown about ten miles back. I thought maybe Artie’d have a fuel pump might work for them.”

“Well, now, he might,” Carl said. “If anyone’d have it, that’d be Artie.” He glanced at Pete and Alice again. “You folks are lucky to break down here. Other places aren’t so helpful.”

“Well, then, how about a beer?” Pete said. “Alice? A beer?”

She shook her head.

“Just one, then. Whatever you got on tap.”

Carl raised an eyebrow, and Roy knew he was wondering if the boy was under age. Roy didn’t know how old Pete was and didn’t really care, although he did wonder briefly how long it was since Carl had served a customer who was a stranger.

“I’ll be back soon,” Roy said, and left for Artie’s.

There was one sidewalk in town, and he was halfway down it when Alice caught up to him.

“Hey,” she said. “Mind if I come?”

Roy shook his head.

“This Artie guy have a shop or something?” she asked. “A garage?”

“No. Just a yard full of engines.”

“What if he doesn’t have it? The fuel pump.”

“Then we’ll have to drive to La Moure.”

“Is that far?”

“Half-hour or so. Forty-five minutes, maybe.”

Roy found himself picking up his pace to match Alice’s, although it was too hot for anything faster than a stroll.

“That guy shouldn’t’ve given Pete a beer.”

“Carl? Why not?”

“Pete’s only seventeen.”

“Well. It’s his bar.”

“Still, he shouldn’t sell Pete beer. The last thing I need is Pete drinking at four o’clock.”

They walked, and Alice looked around, although there wasn’t much to see. There wasn’t a shop on the street that wasn’t boarded up or closed, with the exception of Carl’s bar and the post office. They didn’t have a bank in Verona anymore. They didn’t even have a grocery store.

When they reached Artie’s house and Roy saw the front door lying across the porch next to a random pile of hubcaps, he began to wish that Alice had stayed back at Carl’s with Pete. He didn’t want her to think that everyone in Verona kept their property like that. One of Artie’s boys ran out of the house and stopped when he saw Roy and Alice in the yard.

“Hi, Mr. Menning,” he said. Roy smiled, but couldn’t remember the child’s name. There were three of them, all about the same age, all with homemade crewcuts and the hard, round bellies of kids who eat a lot but run around more.

“Is your dad around? Cleaning turtles?”

“He finished that this morning,” the boy said. “Now he’s fixing a chain saw.”

Artie came from around the back, wiping his hands on his jeans, and, as if the front yard could only hold three at once, the boy vanished into the house. They were good kids, all three of them. Everyone said so. Terrified of their father, Roy had heard.

“I was wondering if you might have a fuel pump for a Chevy, a three-fifty,” Roy said. “Some folks broke down out of town.”

Artie was looking at Alice with interest. “What can I do for you?” he asked, as if Roy had not spoken. She seemed to understand the game, and asked for the fuel pump again. She didn’t appear to be put off by Artie’s long hair or by the tattoos that, like a lady’s gloves, covered him from his hands to his elbows. Artie had left town as a teenager and returned for his father’s funeral almost a decade later with the boys, the hair, the tattoos. Roy didn’t like him, but he was the closest thing to a mechanic in town, now that the gas station was gone.

“Only Chevy parts I have are for that thing.” Artie pointed at a small sedan without wheels resting on four pieces of firewood. The hood looked as if it hadn’t been closed for years.

“You sure?” Roy said, but Artie ignored him, instead asking Alice where she was from.

“Montana.”

“Where in Montana?”

“Fort Peck. Across the border.”

“I know it,” Artie said. “By the reservation.”

“Yes.”

“Shit. You’re no squaw, are you?”

“No.”

“I was gonna say. Better watch out for my scalp if you were, right?” Artie smiled, but it was an unnatural, almost painful, expression, as though he’d got a fishhook caught in one corner of his mouth, and someone was tugging at it.

“If you don’t have the part, we’re going to La Moure,” Alice said, and Roy admired her for expressing the idea as if it were her own. As if she had the slightest idea where or what La Moure was.

“Not today, you ain’t,” Artie said. “Everything’ll be closed by the time you get there.”

Alice glanced at Roy, seeming to weaken with that piece of information. He noticed that Pete had cut her jeans unevenly, and the dingy gray cotton of her right pocket was showing about an inch below her shorts. It hung heavily, as if she were carrying a lot of change. Roy didn’t like the idea of Artie being able to tell what was in Alice’s pockets. He didn’t like the way Artie watched Alice.

“We’ll go to La Moure tomorrow, then,” Roy said, and before Alice could answer, Artie said, “You look just like a girl I knew in Beaumont, Texas.”

She looked at him, silent.

“You don’t play the flute, do you?” he continued.

“No,” she said, “I don’t.”

“Because this girl from Beaumont played the flute, is why I ask. You could be sisters. I wondered. What’d you say your last name was?”

“Zysk.”

“Spelled?”

“Z-Y-S-K.”

“Zysk.” Artie whistled. “There’s a word that’d bring you about a thousand points in a Scrabble game.”

“Except it’s not a real word,” Alice said.

“Real enough for me,” Artie said, and Roy decided that it was time to go right then. He thanked Artie, who asked, as they were leaving the yard, “Y’all up at Carl’s?”

“We won’t be for much longer,” Roy answered.

“I’m gonna clean up and stop by.”

“Like I said, we’ll probably be gone by then.”

“I’ll see you there,” Artie said, and stepped over a hubcap to enter his house through the screen door that guarded it so feebly.

Pete cursed at the news and told Roy, “We’ll have to stay with you tonight.”

“Goddamn it, you’re rude,” Alice said, and Pete walked to the other end of the bar to read the song list on the jukebox, which hadn’t been plugged in since Carl bought the microwave.

“You’re welcome to stay with me, you know,” Roy said. “There’s plenty of room.”

“We’ll stay in the truck. He’s an idiot. He’s a rude idiot.”

Roy ordered a sandwich for Alice and a beer for himself. The bar was as quiet as a library.

“What do you do?” Alice asked.

“Me? I drive a snowplow in the winter and a combine in the summer.”

“You’re not a farmer?”

“Not anymore.”

Carl brought Roy his beer and waved away his dollar, but Roy folded the bill and slid it under the napkin dispenser when Carl turned his back.

“Do you like those jobs?” Alice asked.

“Sure. I’m always finding people broke down when I’m snowplowing.”

Alice laughed. “You rescue them, too?”

“What I do is keep a stack of magazines with me.”

“Why magazines?”

“I tell them to sit in their cars and read a magazine until help comes. Gives them something to do. Or else they get restless and decide to walk, and that’s when they die.”

“From walking.”

“In the snow.”

“From being bored. They die from being bored. Wow. If we’d started walking today, we just would’ve gotten hot.”

“You’re always better off staying with your car,” Roy said, and Alice nodded.

“Are you married?” she asked.

“My wife died of a heart attack two years ago this winter.”

Alice did not say that she was sorry, the way people usually did, so Roy did not have to say that it was okay, as he usually had to.

“I’m going to be a nurse,” Alice said. “Maybe.”

“That so?”

“Yeah. I’m going to Florida for nursing school. Pete’s coming along with me to make sure I’m all right, and to work if I need money.”

“That’s nice.”

“My mom made him go.”

“Oh.”

“You have kids?”

“One girl. She’s thirty-two.”

“She live around here?”

“She works in Minneapolis. She’s a model, for catalogues and newspapers.”

“She must be pretty.”

“Yes.”

“I’d like to do that, but my nose is too big.”

“I don’t know much about it.”

“She must make a lot of money.”

“Yes.”

“She visit you a lot?”

“Not so much,” Roy said. “Not since her mom died.”

“I’ll tell you what would be a great job,” Alice said. “Photographer.”

“I don’t know much about that.”

“Me neither.” Alice looked behind her, at Pete and the jukebox, at the tall wooden cash register. “That Artie guy’s a real piece of work,” she said.

“I knew his father.”

“He’s a screw-up, huh?”

“I don’t know.”

“He reminds me of my brother. My oldest brother. With the tattoos and everything. All of my brothers are dumb, but this oldest one, I tell you, he’s as good as retarded. Get this. When he was in the army in Germany, his girlfriend back home got pregnant. Here he’s been gone five months and she’s suddenly pregnant. So what she does is send him a letter saying, ‘I miss you so much, I want to have your baby.’ She says in the letter, ‘If I had your baby, it would remind me of you and I wouldn’t be so lonely.’ What you have to realize here, Roy, is that my brother’s wanted to marry this girl since forever. So she sends him a dirty magazine and an empty mustard jar and tells him to—I don’t know how to say this—to do it in the jar and send it back to her so she can get pregnant with it. Understand?”

“Yes,” Roy said.

“So my brother, a complete idiot, does this. And then he believes her when she writes to him and says she’s having their baby. Can you believe that?”

“This was your oldest brother?” Roy asked.

“Yes. A fool. Everyone in the world knew about this scam, and people even told him that it was a scam, but he still believes her. I even told him that it was a scam, and he still believes her. He still believes that it’s their kid. Like whatever he sent from Germany to Montana made that baby after however many days in the mail.”

Roy didn’t know what to say, so he nodded.

“I’m sorry,” Alice said. “That was gross.”

“That’s all right.”

“But it shows how stupid my family is. My brothers, anyway.”

“Well. That’s some story.”

“No kidding.”

Artie walked into the bar. He had pulled his hair into a ponytail and was wearing a baseball cap, green, with a configuration of initials on it. His shirt had white snaps, and as he passed through a ray of sun they shone like dim, symmetrical pearls.

“Looks like you got some new company,” he said to Carl as he sat down next to Alice. “Visitors from the distant land of Montana.”

“Your kids were in today,” Carl said.

“They causing trouble?”

“They told me you’d got yourself some snappers, is all.”

“If my boys cause any trouble, you tell me.”

“You better invite me over for soup,” Carl said, and Artie asked Alice, “You like snappers?”

“Turtles? Never had them.”

“Maybe I’ll invite you over. You might like it.”

Alice turned to Roy and said, “My next-to-oldest brother is Judd, and he’s no genius, either. He took off, and for three years we never heard from him at all. Thought he was dead. Then one afternoon my mother gets a phone call—”

“She telling you her life story already?” Artie asked Roy, but Alice went on.

“She gets a phone call and it’s from Judd. ‘Hi, Mom,’ he says, like he’s been gone for just the afternoon. ‘Hi, Mom. I’m in New Jersey at the recruitment center and the nice lady here says I can have three meals a day and new clothes if I sign up for the army. So, Mom,’ Judd says, ‘what’s my Social Security number?’”

“What was it?” Artie asked.

“So Judd enlisted,” Alice continued, ignoring him. “My mom says the army’s the only refuge for dumb people like my brothers. If Pete wasn’t going to Florida with me, he’d probably end up in the army, too.”

“I been to Florida,” Artie said. “I worked on a fishing boat there. I lived in a pink house. Right on the ocean.”

“Really,” Alice said.

Carl brought her a sandwich and she ate half of it before she spoke again. “My wisdom teeth are coming in. You ever get those?” she asked Roy.

“Yeah,” Artie said. “Hurts like a bitch, but there can be no wisdom without pain.” He laughed, one harsh burst, like an engine turning over in the cold, and then he asked Alice, “Why do you wear your hair short?”

“I like it this way,” she said.

“Girls should have long hair.”

“Boys should have short hair.” She gestured at his ponytail.

“You got salt on your tongue, don’t you?”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“You can be a wise-ass, is what it means,” Artie said, and Pete was at the bar so fast that Roy realized he must have been standing behind them the whole time, waiting.

“Don’t talk like that to my sister,” Pete said.

Artie laughed again, that single, mechanical emission. “Billy the Kid here,” he muttered. “Tough guy.”

“Fuck you, pal,” Pete said. “I said not to talk to my sister.”

Roy heard Alice say, “Jesus Christ.” She slid off her bar stool and edged out of the way, somehow anticipating what was coming. Roy’s reflexes were not as swift. When Pete threw his punch and connected, he pushed Artie into Roy’s shoulder, hard. Then Pete stood quiet and undefended while Artie got up, shook his head once, and squared his hat. With experienced precision, he swung and hit Pete in the center of his face and watched as he fell backward at a perfect diagonal, catching his head on the corner of the bar. The crack was louder than any noise heard in that room all afternoon, and then it was over.

To Roy’s surprise, Alice approached him first, actually stepping over her brother to touch the sore spot on his shoulder where Artie had fallen.

“Are you okay?” she asked. Roy nodded.

“I’m sorry,” she told him.

“Your brother should keep his mouth shut,” Artie said.

“I wish you wouldn’t talk to me.” Alice’s voice was low, and she wasn’t even looking at Artie. “I really wish you would just leave me alone.”

At this, Carl said, with no malice or heat, “You’ll want to get home now, Art.” He said it the way Roy’s doctor a year before had said, “You’ll want to stop eating salt soon.” He said it the way Roy’s wife used to tell Emma, “You’ll want to have a warm coat with you this morning.” A quiet command.

And Artie did leave, as if admonished by his own father, swearing under his breath but obedient.

Carl knelt by Pete and said, “He’ll be okay. Just a bad bump is all.”

“I’m really sorry,” Alice repeated, and then she asked, “Could we take him somewhere, do you think?”

“We’ll go to my house,” Roy said. When he got up, he was surprised to find that his legs were shaking so much that he had to lean against the bar for a few moments before he could walk. The three of them lifted Pete and half-carried him out the door, down the steps, to Roy’s car.

“Put him in the back seat,” Roy instructed, and Alice said, “His nose, though. He’ll get blood everywhere.”

“That’s okay.”

As they slid Pete into the car, he opened his eyes for a moment, focused with difficulty on Alice’s face, and said, “Mom told me—”

“Shut up, Pete. Will you please just shut your mouth?” Alice interrupted, and Roy thought that she might start crying, but she didn’t.

“Got more than you bargained for, Roy.” Carl laughed.

“I can’t tell you how sorry I am about all this,” Alice said again, but Roy only walked her to the passenger side and helped her into the car, as he had helped Pete.

They drove. West, out of Verona, the sun had just finished setting without ceremony, without color or effort. It was dusk, and still hot. Alice apologized again, and Roy told her that it wasn’t her fault.

“All my brothers are idiots, all of them. My mom said I’m the only one in the family who could think my way out of a used tissue.”

“How many brothers do you have?” Roy asked. The question sounded inane to him, considering the circumstances, but she answered immediately.

“Five,” she said. “Steven, Lenny, Judd, Pete, Eddie.”

“And you.”

“And me. All of them are in the army but Pete and Eddie, who are too young. Eddie’s only six. My brothers can’t do a thing right.”

They drove in silence through the sunflower fields. Roy thought to tell Alice that sunflowers always face east in the morning, west at dusk. He thought it might interest her, or even help her out, should she ever happen to get lost in North Dakota. She didn’t seem to want to talk, though, so he kept it to himself. They passed the white truck, parked in a ditch, without commenting, and Alice spoke again.

“My littlest brother, Eddie, almost died last year,” she said. “He almost died. He was staying at our neighbor’s house and it caught on fire. Everyone got out of the house but him, and when the fireman came into his room, Eddie hid under the bed. He got a glimpse of that oxygen mask and figured a monster was coming after him.”

“That’s too bad.”

“It turned out fine. They found him and everything, and he was okay. But when they told me what happened, the first thing I thought was what a stupid kid my brother was, already. He’s only six, I know, but to hide from a fireman in the middle of a fire . . . The thing is, if he’d died, I wouldn’t’ve thought that he was stupid. I just would’ve missed him. There’s a big difference, I guess, between almost dying and really dying.”

Roy nearly said, At your age you would think that, but it sounded bitter even to him, so he didn’t answer.

As he drove the familiar road, Roy thought about the empty, ruined homes of people he’d grown up with, people who were now gone: dead, or almost dead. Which Roy thought might very well be the same thing. Verona itself was almost dead, as well as countless other towns he’d known just like it. He thought about his wife, who had almost died twice before the final heart attack killed her. “I’m cold,” his wife had said, having walked without shoes or a coat through the January snow to the garage, where Roy was refinishing their dining room table. “I’m cold,” she said, and then she died, not almost, but really. Now Roy, with the bruised shoulder, with an unconscious boy in the back seat of the car he’d purchased for his wife, with a girl beside him half the age of his daughter, Roy felt as if he, too, were very close to death, almost dead.

As if she had been following his thoughts all along, Alice slid across the front seat and placed her hand over his. Her touch was at once that of a mother, a lover, a daughter, and it was so long since he’d known any of these things that Roy sighed, allowed his head to fall forward. He shut his eyes. Alice reached for the steering wheel, and he let her take it, knowing that the road was straight and safe, and that, for now, it would be better to let her steer.

“It’s okay,” she said, and reached under the wheel and turned on the headlights. It was not yet dark, but the lights would help them be seen by anyone driving east, or by anyone who might be watching their progress as they crossed the empty plains of North Dakota.

Bird Shot

G ASHOUSE JOHNSON came for Tanner Rogers just before noon. He knocked on the Rogerses’ door and then waited, pacing the porch and examining the carpentry. His dog, Snipe, followed, limping like a man with a bullet in his spine. Tanner’s mother, Diane, came to the door. She had all her pretty blond hair pulled back away from her face.

“Diane,” he said.

“Gashouse.”

“I want to take Tanner with me to the pigeon shoot today.”

Diane raised her eyebrows. Gashouse waited for an answer, but she didn’t give one.

“I think he’d like that,” Gashouse said. “I think he’d like to see a pigeon shoot.”

“He doesn’t go,” Diane said.

“I’d sure like to take him, though. On account of his father.”

“He never went. Not with his father, either.”

“What is that, Diane? A rule of your house or something?”

“It might be.”

“Come on, Diane.”

“I think it’s a sick thing. I really do. I think pigeon shoots are sicker than hell.”

“You used to love it.”

“I never loved it. I never once loved it.”

“You used to go.”

“I did used to go. But I never loved it.”

“Ed loved it.”

“Tanner doesn’t go,” Diane said again. “He’s not even interested in it.”

“There are people up there who love Ed. A boy should meet the people who love his father. It’s healthy for a boy to meet people like that.”

Diane said nothing.

“I’m shooting for Ed today,” Gashouse said. “Until they find someone else who can replace him permanently. Or until he gets better, I mean.”

“That’s very nice of you.”

“I’m a good shot, Diane. I used to be a hell of a good shot when we were kids.”

“Good.”

“Of course, I’m no Ed.”

“How many pigeons you plan on killing today?”

“Many.” Gashouse smiled. “I’m going to kill so many goddamn pigeons. I’ll see to it that Tanner kills a ton of pigeons, too.”

Diane nodded, tired.

“Hell, I’ll kill enough pigeons to make you a coat,” he said, and then Diane did smile. Gashouse Johnson’s smile widened. “How about it, Diane? Let me take your son up there and we’ll bring you back a hell of a nice pigeon-fur coat.”

Diane looked past Gashouse Johnson to Snipe, who was trying to lie down. “What happened to your dog?” she asked.

“He got old.”

“He looks like hell. He looks like he got run over.”

“He just got old.”

“It’s no place for dogs up there,” Diane said. “Not for dogs or kids, either. Dogs get shot up there.”

“No. Pigeons get shot up there. Nobody never shot a dog or a kid yet.”

“Ed shot a dog up there once for chasing dropped birds.”

“I don’t know anything about that.” Gashouse took out his handkerchief and blew his nose.

“Gashouse,” she said, “do you want to come inside?”

“No, I won’t bother you.”

Snipe was lying down by a pair of boots near the porch steps, chewing on his tail. His head was thick and brown as a boot itself, and while he chewed, he watched Diane. His dog face was void.

“How old is he?” Diane asked.

“Eleven.”

“Just the same age as my Tanner.”

“I hope your boy is holding up a little better than my dog.”

Diane smiled again. They looked at each other. After a moment, she asked, “Did you go see Ed in the hospital?”

“This morning.”

“Did he tell you to come here and check on me? Is that it?”

“No.”

“Did he tell you to spend some time with Tanner?”

“No.”

“What’d he say?”

“Ed? He said, ‘You think the first cigarette of the day tastes good? Wait ’til you try the first cigarette after a triple bypass.’”

This time Diane did not smile. “He told me that joke, too,” she said. “Except that I don’t smoke.”

“Me neither. I chew.”

“Well,” Diane said, “I drink.”

Gashouse looked down at his hands. Took a long look at his thumbnail. Diane said, “You’ve got something on your beard. A crumb or something.”

He wiped it off. He said, “Could’ve been toast.”

“It looked like a piece of fluff.”

“What’s Tanner doing right now, Diane? Come on, Diane. Why don’t you go ask your son if he wants to come along on a real live pigeon shoot?”

“You are an optimistic man, Gashouse. That’s what you are.”

“Come on, Diane. What’s he doing right now?”

“Hiding from you.”

“He’ll love it,” Gashouse said. “Unless he gets shot . . .”

“He might not even want to go, ” Diane said, and Gashouse replied, “Ask him. Just go ask him.”

Later, Tanner Rogers and Gashouse Johnson drove through town in Gashouse’s truck. The boy was dressed in a heavy winter coat, a red hunting cap, lace-up boots. He was shy, and it took him some time to ask Gashouse the question he had been privately nursing.

“Isn’t it against the law? To shoot pigeons?”

“Nah,” Gashouse said. “Shooting pigeons is not against the law. Betting on people who shoot pigeons is against the law.”

“What about my dad?”

“Your dad? Why, he doesn’t bet. He just shoots the pigeons. Everyone bets on the shooters. You see? Everyone bets on your father, to guess how many pigeons he can shoot. Your dad don’t need to bet.”

“What about you?”

“I bet like a son of a bitch. What about you?”

Tanner shrugged.

“How much money do you have on you, son?”

Tanner took a handful of linty change from his pocket. “Dollar eighteen.”

“Bet it all,” Gashouse said. Then he laughed and yelled, “Double it!” He slammed his hand on the steering wheel. “Double it! Triple it! Ha!”

Snipe barked once, a hound’s low woof. Gashouse spun his head and looked at Tanner, suddenly serious. “You say something, boy?”

“No,” Tanner said, “that was your dog.”

Gashouse leaned forward and wiped the inside of the windshield with his sleeve. “Son,” he said, “I was just kidding with you there. That was my dog barking. I knew that.”

“Sure,” Tanner said. “Me too.”

“Good boy. We all had a little joke, right?”

“Sure,” Tanner said. “Okay.”

On their way out of town, Gashouse stopped at Miles Spivak’s grocery store to buy shotgun shells. Miles himself was behind the counter, looking wintry and old. He found the shells that Gashouse asked for.

“Miles!” Gashouse shouted. “I’m shooting for Ed Rogers today. You should come on up there for once. You might have a good time, Miles! You might see some hell of a good shooting from me.”

Miles took a slow look around his store, as if expecting to see another person appear behind him. “Damn it, Gashouse. You know I’m the only one here. You know I can’t go.”

“But I’m shooting today, Miles! Worth closing early for. I used to be a hell of a good shot.”

Miles considered this.

“You know Ed’s boy?” Gashouse put a big hand on Tanner’s head.

“Have five boys myself. Just had the last one two months ago. By cesarean. You ever seen one of those?” Miles asked Tanner.

“For Christ sake, Miles,” Gashouse said. “He’s just a kid.”

“Tied her tubes right there. So we won’t have another kid. Now that’s something to see, to see your own wife laid open like that. Women got some pretty tiny equipment inside. Ever seen those little things? Ever seen those little tubes?”

“Jesus Christ, Miles,” Gashouse said. “Wouldn’t you be surprised if the kid said yes?”

“Damnedest things,” Miles said. “Tiniest, damnedest things you ever saw.”

“Let’s get out of here, Tanner,” Gashouse said. “We got a crazy man!” As they walked to the door, Miles called after them, “She’s a wonderful woman, my wife!”

“I’ll tell you something about that one,” Gashouse said when they were outside. “He’s too dumb to bat both his eyes at the same time.”

When they were back in the truck, Gashouse took the box of shotgun shells from his pocket and read the label carefully. “Hell,” he said, “I don’t know.” He turned the box over and read it again.

Tanner waited, then asked, “What kind of gun do you have?”

“Twelve gauge.” He looked over. “Does that mean anything to you?”

“My dad has a double-barreled eighteen gauge.”

“Sixteen gauge,” Gashouse corrected, putting the shell box back in his pocket. “Ed’s got a double-barreled sixteen gauge. It’s been a long time, son. I’ll tell you that right up front. It’s been a hell of a long time since I shot a gun.”

Gashouse sighed, then slammed the steering wheel again. “Hey! But come on! It’s not even my gun! It’s Dick Clay’s gun! Ha!”

Snipe woofed again from the floor.

“I didn’t say anything,” Tanner said.

“Ha!” Gashouse slapped his own knee. “Ha! You got the joke, son! You got it!”

Gashouse started up the truck and pulled out of the parking space. He said, “Good thing you like a joke, because we’re on the road to big fun today, that’s for sure. Any questions up there, you just ask me.”

“Why do they call you Gashouse?” Tanner asked.

“Farts,” he answered without hesitation. “Some real wood-chippers, too. Real ice-breakers. I’m better now, though, than I used to be. No more dairy.”

“Does my dad call you that?”

“Yes.”

“Does my mom call you that?”

“Tanner,” Gashouse said, “it was kind of a consensus. You know what a consensus is?”

“No.”

“Well,” Gashouse said, “that’s what it was.”

At the next stop sign, Gashouse rolled down his window and yelled to a red-haired woman on the sidewalk, “Hey there! Hey there, you little stack of pancakes!”

She smiled and tossed out a wave as if it were a candy wrapper.

“Hey there! Hey there, you little side of fries! Hey there, you little deep-dish apple pie!”

The woman blew him a kiss and kept on walking.

“We’ll see you later!” he yelled. “Cutie!”

Gashouse Johnson rolled up the window and said to Tanner, “There goes my girl. Can you believe she’s fifty? Who would guess?”

“I think I know her from school,” Tanner said, shyly.

“Possible,” Gashouse said. “It is possible, because she does teach there sometimes on a substitute basis. She looks great, don’t you think? A good-looking woman. You’d never guess her age, right? As long as she keeps her shirt on, right?”

Tanner flushed and leaned down to pat Snipe’s head. The dog woke up and panted gratefully, his breath hot and ripe.

The man and the boy drove on, quietly. They drove out of town and past the dump, past the cemetery, past the farms, past a cornfield with a fire engine parked beside it. The road became dirt, and they passed loudly over a cattle guard’s wide grate. Gashouse drove farther still, up the forlorn road. He took a sudden left onto a mining road, driving slowly on deep ruts that might have been dug by tires, but might, too, have been dug by water. Where the wood line stopped abruptly, they came out at the edge of a wide, flat dish of rock and mud, the rough grave of an abandoned strip mine.

A few trucks were there already, lined up neatly, like cars at a drive-in. Men were talking in a small group, kicking at rocks, their dogs milling around beside their muddy feet. Gashouse and Tanner got out of the truck. Snipe followed, painfully.

“Hey!” Gashouse said to Dick Clay. “Place your bets!”

“Can’t,” Dick said. “No birds. Willis got shut down.”

“By who? By the hell who?”

“By . . .” Dick hesitated. “By the authorities.”

“Well,” Gashouse said. “Don’t I just feel like a slapped butt?”

“Happens.” Dick shrugged.

“Not in twenty years, it hasn’t happened,” Gashouse said. “Willis got shut down by the authorities, did he? Son of a bitch. By what goddamn authorities?”

The other men looked at one another. One of them coughed and said, “Just some officers of the law doing their job.”

“Just some good old boys,” another man said. “Just some fellas enforcing the law, for once.”

“It’s not against the law to shoot pigeons,” Tanner said.

The men looked at him.

“Gashouse?” Dick Clay asked quietly. “Is that Ed Rogers’s boy?”

“Sure is.” Gashouse again put his big hand on Tanner’s head.

“Ed don’t want his boy up here, Gashouse,” Dick said.

“That’s not true, Dick. It’s Diane who don’t want the boy up here.”

“What’d you do? Kidnap him?”

“I invited him,” Gashouse said. “I invited him to come up here and watch me stand in for his old man. I invited him to come up here and watch me shoot some birds for his old man.”

The men looked at one another, looked at their boots, looked at their dogs.

“I came here to shoot some pigeons, and by Christ, I’ll shoot them,” Gashouse said. “I’m calling up Willis. I aim to find out what the hell’s going on. See what this is all about. Authorities shutting him down. See if I can’t do something about it.”

“Actually,” Dick said, “actually, it doesn’t really matter. Nobody’s planning on showing up anyhow. On account of Ed being in the hospital. The pigeon shoots are pretty much canceled for now.”

“But I’m shooting for Ed,” Gashouse said, and smiled, as if he’d solved something. “I’m shooting for Ed, and any folks who normally bet on Ed Rogers, why, they can bet on me.”

Dick said nothing.

“For Christ sake, Dick. You know I’m shooting today. You lent me your goddamn gun, Dick.”

“I got to tell you something,” Dick said, “because you’re my good friend. The truth is, Gashouse, the authorities didn’t shut down Willis. That’s the truth, Gashouse.”

A few of the men started heading back to their trucks, in a sort of casual way.

“Dick?” Gashouse said. “Where the hell are people going?”

“Gashouse,” Dick said, “I will say this. And I’m only telling you what I’ve been hearing. This is not me talking. This is what the guys are saying. I told some guys that you wanted to shoot for Ed, and some guys said they would rather cancel the shoot. Some guys don’t think that a bet on you is much of a bet. Some guys think they might just want to stay home until we find someone else.”

The men stood quietly then, like mourners or surveyors.

“Well,” Gashouse said finally. “Well, well, well. We won’t fault anyone for that. Will we, Tanner? Will we, son?”

In Willis Lister’s barn, there were dozens of pigeons. The pigeons were caged, sitting in the dust of old feathers and shit. The sound of all those birds was a collective gurgle, like something thick about to come to a boil.

“Dick Clay told me not to show up,” Willis Lister was explaining to Gashouse Johnson. “On account of Ed. He told me they were canceling the pigeon shoots for a while.”

“See, now,” Gashouse said, “I realize that. But I thought Tanner here might want to see me shoot for his dad. Tanner’s dad is in the hospital, you know.”

“I know that.”

“And I thought it might be a special thing for the kid to see a pigeon shoot. On account of the high esteem that all the guys have for his old man. I thought he might want to see me shoot some birds for his old man. On account of the high esteem I have for his dad. And the high esteem that I have for his mother.”

The pigeon man squatted down and looked at Tanner. “I’m sorry,” he said, “about your father.” Willis was an old man. Still, his face was smooth and unmarked, except for a small scar the shape of a sickle, pink against his cheek and shiny as a fleck of mica.

“Thank the man.” Gashouse nudged Tanner.

“Thank you,” Tanner said.

Willis stayed squatting. “Son,” he said, “your hair is really kicking today.” He took a comb from the bib pocket of his coveralls and offered it.

“I’m okay,” Tanner said.

Willis kept looking at him, waiting.

Tanner said, “I already combed it today.”

“It’s really kicking, though. A boy should try to keep himself neat.”

“I went to sleep on it last night and it was wet. I can’t fix it.”

But Willis still held out the comb. Gashouse nudged Tanner once again. “Why don’t you use the man’s comb, son?”

Tanner took the comb from Willis Lister’s hand and ran it through his hair once. Then he handed it back.

Gashouse said, “Why don’t you thank the man for his offer of a comb?”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You’re welcome, son,” Willis said. “Don’t you look neater now?”

Willis stood up and faced Gashouse. “What do you need here?”

“Birds.”

“Nobody’s up there to bet, Gashouse. There ain’t gonna be no shooting today.”

“Don’t need betters,” Gashouse said, grinning. “I just need birds. I’ll shoot them right here.”

Willis didn’t answer, and Gashouse stamped his foot and laughed loud enough to send the pigeons into a boil of talk. “Hey! I mean—not here! I’m not going to shoot your pigeons here in their damn cages. The boy didn’t come here to see me shoot birds in a cage! I’ll shoot a few of them in your yard. Just so the boy gets an idea.” He stopped laughing, found the handkerchief in his pocket, and blew his nose. Willis looked at him and also at Tanner, who was patting down his hair with both hands. Willis looked at Snipe, who was licking the wire door of an empty birdcage.

“How many?” Willis asked. “How many birds for your little venture?”

Gashouse returned the handkerchief to his pocket and pulled out a wallet, from which he took a twenty-dollar bill. “Can you give me four birds for twenty dollars? Can you do that, Willis?”

Willis looked pained. “Four birds? What’s four birds? I lose more birds than that to rats in a week.” He turned to Tanner. “How many pigeons you want to kill, son?”

“Me?” Tanner looked nervously to Gashouse.

“I’m shooting, Willis,” Gashouse said. “I’ll explain it to you again. Point is, I want the boy to see how his dad does it. Want the boy to see how his dad got so famous.”

“How many birds?” Willis asked.

“I only need to kill one, I guess.”

“Hell, Gashouse, you can have one bird. What the hell is one bird to me?”

Gashouse looked at his thumbnail carefully. “Problem is, it might take me a few birds to kill one . . .”

“Christ, man.”

“Come on now, Willis. It’s been a long damn time. I might miss the first bird or so.” He paused. “You know, I used to be a hell of a good damn shot when—”

“You can have three birds,” Willis interrupted.

“I used to be a hell of a shot.”

“You can hit one bird in three, can’t you?”

“My God,” Gashouse said. “We’d all better hope the hell so.”

Willis went to the nearest cage, stepping over Snipe, who was still licking at a wire door as if it were gravy. He opened the trap and pulled out the birds one at a time—by a foot, by a wing—with a frown at the dust and down raised from the panic. He tucked a pigeon under each arm like a schoolbook and handed a third to Tanner. “Tuck his wings down,” Willis instructed, “so he don’t beat the hell out of himself.”

Tanner followed the men out of the barn, carefully carrying the bird away from his body, as though it were something that might spill on him. He waited in the field with Willis while Gashouse went to the truck for his shotgun. Snipe sat in front of Willis Lister, looking hopefully at his pigeons.

“What do you think, dog?” Willis said. “You think I got a biscuit for you?”

Then they were quiet. Tanner was miserably uneasy to be alone with Willis Lister. The grass in the yard was high, thick to the middle of Tanner’s shins, and damp. There was the kind of gray sky that can mean rain any minute or no rain for months. Tanner’s pigeon was hot and thick, bigger than the cradle of his two hands. Beside him, Willis breathed heavily from his mouth, like a deep sleeper, and after a long time said, in a low voice, “You think I got a biscuit for you, dog? That what you think?”

Gashouse Johnson came back with the shotgun and shells. He knelt in the grass to load, and Willis said, “What the hell kind of shells you using? You planning on shooting bear out here?”

Gashouse looked at the box and did not answer.

“That’s not bird shot, man. You hit a bird with that stuff, you’ll be lucky to find the goddamn thing. You’ll blow the thing all to bits.”

Gashouse loaded the shotgun and stood up.

“You really planning on shooting those hand grenades?” Willis asked.

“You know,” Gashouse said, “I honestly don’t care what kind of shells these are. I think I’d just like to kill these birds and go on home.” He held the gun to his shoulder, waiting.

“You know what boys like you do up at the pigeon shoots?” Willis said to Tanner. “There’s always a job up there for a boy your age. You think you can do a boy’s job?”

“Sure,” Tanner guessed.

“This is the boy’s job. You wait for the shooter to drop the bird out of the sky. Then you chase that bird down, and if it ain’t dead, you kill it off. Just a neck-wring’ll do it. You think you can do that easy job?”

Tanner looked at the fat bird in his hands.

“That’s a boy’s job,” Willis said. “Okay. Get behind the man, son, lest he blows your goddamn head off with his lousy shooting.”

Tanner backed up.

“Okay,” Willis said, “let’s go.”

Willis pulled one of the pigeons from under his arm and tossed it into the air. It fluttered low, over their heads.

“Wait, now,” Willis told Gashouse. “Let her get some height.”

The bird flew. It flew out and away from them, straight toward the trees at the end of the field. Gashouse shot once, a tremendous blast that knocked him over backward, almost into Tanner. The bird flew on, into the trees. Willis, still holding the second pigeon in his hands, looked at Gashouse, who was sitting in the tall wet grass, rubbing his shoulder.

“Okay,” Willis said. “Ready?”

“That gun’s a kicker,” Gashouse said. “Knock a guy right on his ass.”

“It’s the shells,” Willis said. “Plant yourself better. Ready?”

Gashouse stood and raised his gun. Willis tossed the second bird up, and it flew in the same line as the first had.

“Now!” Willis shouted.

Gashouse shot, missed, shot again, missed again. They watched the pigeon make it to the line of trees and vanish. Snipe lay at Tanner’s feet, groaning unhappily from the blasts of noise. Willis Lister stared out toward the end of the field.

“Let me ask you something,” Gashouse said. “Now, will those birds of yours eventually come back to your barn? Eventually? I don’t want you to lose two good birds for nothing.”

Willis turned to Tanner. “When I tell you, I want you to toss that pigeon of yours up in the air. Not too hard. Ready? Now! Now!”

Tanner opened his hands and raised them. The bird shifted slightly but stayed put.

“Go,” he whispered.

Tanner jerked his hands, and the pigeon tumbled forward and out of his palms. It flew briefly, then settled on a rock in front of Willis Lister.

“Shoo!” Willis waved his hat at the bird. “Shoo!”

The bird flew a few feet and landed in the grass. Willis swore and picked it up. “Sick bird,” he said, and handed it to Tanner. “Go get another one. Leave this one in an empty cage.”

Tanner walked back to the barn with the wet, heavy bird. He found an empty cage. The bird, when dropped inside, stayed where it fell, facing away from Tanner. He shut the wire door, which was still damp from Snipe’s mouth. In the other cages, the pigeons moved around, stepping and nudging one another for better positions. He found the cage with the fewest birds and, reaching in slowly, caught one by the foot. It fluttered horribly, and he dropped it. He shut his eyes, reached in again, grabbed a wing, and pulled the pigeon out. He ran with the flapping body tucked under his jacket, as if he had stolen it and was being chased.

Gashouse Johnson and Willis Lister watched him coming, and when he was before them, Gashouse said, “Good boy,” and Willis took the bird.

“Ready?” Willis said, and tossed the pigeon up and away from them. It circled, then flew.

“Now,” Willis said. “Now!”

Gashouse shot once, and the bird dropped. Straight to the grass. Snipe took off after the bird and found it more or less accidentally, by running over it. The pigeon was still alive. It had not fallen far from them. They walked over to it, quickly. It had lost a wing.

“Get it,” Willis Lister said. Not to Gashouse. Not to Snipe. But to Tanner.

“Go on, get it,” he said. “Just a neck-wring’ll take care of it.”

Tanner did not answer or move.

Gashouse said, “Now your father, he could drop twenty birds in a row, just like that. How about that, son?”

“Jesus Christ,” Willis Lister said, and squatted beside the bird. He lifted it just enough to get his hands around its neck and twist, and as he was doing this, the bird made one twist of its own—a small adjustment toward comfort or resistance—and died. Willis dropped the bird on the ground.

“Stay the hell off that thing,” he said to Snipe, and wiped his hands on his coveralls.

They walked back to the truck.

Gashouse said, “If I’d have missed that last bird, I was going to start aiming at the side of the damn barn. See if I could hit the side of a goddamn barn! Ha!”

“Careful of the gun,” Willis said sharply to Gashouse. “Don’t go blowing your goddamn leg off like an idiot.”

“Time was, I used to be a hell of a good shot.” Gashouse laughed. “Of course, that was twenty-odd years ago. Could be I might’ve been piss awful then, too, and just forgot about it. Ha!”

Willis Lister spoke to Tanner without looking at him. “At a pigeon shoot,” he said evenly, “when a man brings a bird down, it is always a boy who wrings the neck.”

Tanner nodded.

“That’s a boy’s job,” Willis said. “Always has been a boy’s job.”

“You want to go for a beer?” Gashouse Johnson asked Willis.

“No.”

“What about you, Tanner? You want a soda pop?”

“Take the boy home,” Willis said. “Nobody wants any soda pop neither.”

The dress that Diane Rogers had been wearing that morning was hanging over the kitchen sink, just washed, when Gashouse Johnson returned with Tanner. It was a thick cotton dress and it dripped steadily onto the dishes below, like something melting. She had changed into slacks. She watched as Gashouse sat at the table, Snipe at his feet.

“Tell your mother what a crack shot I am,” Gashouse said to Tanner.

“Crack pot,” Diane corrected.

“Come on, Diane. It was something to see.”

“Did you win any money?”

“I wasn’t betting. I was shooting.”

“I was asking Tanner.”

“I wasn’t betting,” Tanner said.

“Good for you.”

“Nobody was betting,” Gashouse said. “Nobody was even there. On account of respect for Ed.” Gashouse leaned forward and pointed at Diane. “Out of respect. They canceled it out of respect for the man.”

They looked at each other gravely. Then Diane laughed. She went to the refrigerator and got beers for herself and Gashouse. She got a glass of juice for Tanner.

“How bad a shot are you, anyhow?” she asked.

“I’m a fine shot. We got our shots in.”

“Where?”

“Willis Lister gave us three birds.”

“Four,” Tanner said.

“Okay.” Gashouse shrugged. “We shot at four birds.”

“Three,” Tanner said. “One was too sick.”

“Just for kicks, you were shooting?” Diane asked.

“So that your son could see what his father does.”

“One bird died,” Tanner said.

Gashouse opened his beer, twisting the cap off with a corner of his shirt over his palm. He put the cap in his pocket.

“Diane? You ever tell Tanner that Willis Lister is your cousin?”

“No,” she said. “When I was little, my mother used to say, ‘Don’t let your cousin Willis kiss you. You tell me if he tries to touch you.’”

“That’s not true.”

“Honey,” Diane said, “you were absolutely not there.”

“Could have been.”

“I don’t want to talk about Willis Lister.”

“Tanner?” Gashouse said. “Did I ever tell you that your mother was the first girl I ever kissed?”

“No,” Diane said. “And don’t tell him that again, either.”

“Ha!” Gashouse laughed, and slammed the table so hard that Tanner’s juice quivered in its glass.

“You have a girlfriend these days?” Diane asked. “Some poor little thing?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Blond?”

“Brown.”

“Brown?”

“Brown hair.”

“Blue eyes?”

“Brown.”

“Well. That’s not your normal taste, Gashouse.”

“Brown skin, too.”

“How about that?”

“She’s pretty much brown.”

“Well.” Diane took a long drink of beer. “Sounds beautiful.”

They both laughed.

“She’s okay,” Gashouse said. “She’s no you.”

“Neither am I, anymore. Not these days. I’m too old.”

“That’s not true. That’s a damn lie. It’s always nice to sit with you, Diane. It always has been nice to sit with you.”

“Hm,” Diane said. “Saved up any money?”

“Five thousand bucks in the bank.”

“As we speak?”

“Just sitting there.”

“You owed Ed about that much just last winter.”

“Yes, I did.”

“I don’t know. Seems to me, a man who owes five thousand dollars one minute and has five thousand dollars the next minute hasn’t really saved that money. He just hasn’t spent it yet.”

“Maybe,” Gashouse said.

“Don’t spend it all on that girl.”

“Come on, Diane.”

“I know you.”

“I should hope the hell so.”

“She call you Gashouse?”

“She calls me Leonard. Lee-oh-nard . . .” Gashouse drawled in three long syllables.

“How old is she?”

“Twenty,” Gashouse said without blinking. When Diane didn’t answer, he added, “Turning twenty-one next week.”

Gashouse waited, then said, “Next Thursday, as a matter of fact. Yes, sir. The big two-one.”

Diane tucked one of her feet under her body and asked, “What’s her name, Gashouse?”

There was a beat.

“Donna,” he said.

Diane did not respond.

“Having a big party for her, actually,” Gashouse went on. “For her and her friends. Her little school friends. Hell, you know how girls are.”

“Gashouse,” Diane said kindly. “All your lies are safe with me.”

“Diane—” he said, but she cut him off with a slight and elegant wave. An authority of silence.

They did not speak. Young Tanner Rogers had been sitting with one foot on his chair all this time, and he had untied the lace of his wet boot. He was practicing knots with the short length of damp rawhide lace. It was too short a lace for complicated knots, but he was repeating smoothly a simple knot of three steps—a rabbit around a tree and down a hole, a quick, snug pull. Diane looked at her son’s hands, working. She got up for a paring knife, and when she sat down, she laid her own hand on the table, palm up.

“Give me that dirty paw,” she said.

Tanner gave his right hand to his mother. She gripped it in all confidence. With her paring knife, she dug under his thumbnail just firmly enough (shy of the pink bed of skin) to pull up a thin, crumbling line of brown dirt. She wiped the knife on her knee, then cleaned the next nail and the next and the next. Gashouse Johnson watched. And Tanner watched, too, sitting still, with his left hand hovering over the knot he had made—a sportsman’s knot, a modest knot—that will hold and hold, but can release, too, with a quick tug, in emergencies or at the end of its usefulness.

Tall Folks

I N THE GOOD, good days when the Ruddy Nut Hut was across the street from the Tall Folks Tavern, there was a steady passage of drunks from one place to the other, every night. It was as if the two bars were one bar, weirdly split by the four fast lanes of First Avenue.

Ellen owned the Tall Folks Tavern, and the Ruddy Nut Hut was her husband Tommy’s. They had been married for fifteen years, separated for thirteen, hadn’t slept together in two, and held no particular interest in the politics of divorce. Tommy was a fabulous drunk. It was impossible to get kicked out of his bar—not for fighting or falling down, not for being broke or under age. Tommy delivered every possible permission. Ellen delivered famous bartenders. Not all of her bartenders were great beauties, but several were. The others had their own specialized appeal, such as immediate sympathy, great wit, or reassuring alcoholism. Ellen always kept one bartender who was good with names, as a guarantor of hospitality, and she always kept one mean bartender, because there are people who crave that, too. There are people who crave a mean girl who calls fat guys “slim” and throws ugly drunks out by hand. If it was not somehow possible to fall in love with a girl in five minutes, Ellen would not hire her. She had done very well this way, brokering these particular and necessary loves. And Tommy, too, had done very well.

The Ruddy Nut Hut had pinball and darts. The Tall Folks Tavern had a pool table. Some nights, one place had toilet paper or cigarettes when the other did not. And in the hot summers, the drunks crossed that stretch of First Avenue as if it was someone’s back yard, as if the moving cars were harmless as swing sets or sandboxes, as if the twin bars were just neighbors’ picnics, welcome as any suburb.

Then Tommy didn’t pay his rent for eight months, and the Ruddy Nut Hut closed. All that autumn, Ellen’s customers left their drinks and stepped out of the bar for air, paced, stepped back inside again quickly, restless and irritated.

In December, the Ruddy Nut reopened with a hand-lettered banner that said WALTER’S TOPLESS. The front window had been painted black, and a sign hanging in it said, “The most beautiful ladies in the world.” On the door was a smaller sign that said, “The world’s most beautiful ladies,” and the final, smallest sign, which was really just a note, explained that Walter’s Topless would be open every day of the week. At noon.

Ellen had a nephew named Al. She had hired him to be her plumber, which meant that he was in charge of digging rotting lemon wedges out of the sink drains, and replacing the toilets that the young men sometimes tore out of the bathroom walls to commemorate great moments at the pool table. Al was nice to look at and easy to talk with. If he had been a girl, he would have been a perfect Tall Folks Tavern bartender. He would have been the kind of pretty that union guys are crazy for, and Ellen would have given him the Thursday evening happy hour shift. If Al had been a girl working Thursday happy hours, the carpenters and teamsters would have come in every week and tipped the hell out of him for being so pretty. After Tommy left, Ellen spent most of her time with Al, and it was Al who went with her when she finally crossed the street to check out Walter’s Topless.

Ellen knew everyone drinking at the bar when she walked in that night.

“These are all my people,” she said to Al.

“And Tommy’s.”

“Tommy can’t really claim any of these people anymore, can he?”

It still looked like the Ruddy Nut Hut, except that the pinball machines were gone, replaced by a small stage with a wide mirror behind it and a long rail in front. There was one stripper dancing—a skinny girl with knees wider than thighs and a druggie rock star’s tiny hips. Ellen knew her, too.

“That’s Amber the junkie,” she said.

Amber smiled over at Al, and shook her chest at him. Her breasts were just nipples on a rib cage. Al smiled back.

“She’s terrifying,” he said.

“She used to come into my bar and drink rum and Coke all day,” Ellen said. “I used to try to catch her shooting up in the bathroom, but every time I’d go in there she’d just be brushing her teeth.”

“That’s almost grosser.”

“Almost.”

“You should put blue lights in the bathrooms. That’s what they do in fast food places. Then the junkies can’t see their veins and they can’t shoot up.”

“That’s a little bit mean, I think.”

“I like blue lights,” Al said. “In a blue-lit room I can’t see my balls.”

“Stop that,” Ellen said. “That’s not true.”

There was a girl behind the bar in a dark bathing suit. Ellen didn’t know her. She had black hair with a serious center part, and the bathing suit was a practical one-piece, faded, with tired elastic and wide straps.

“She looks like she should be wearing flip-flops,” Al said.

There was a man behind the bar with her, and when he turned to face them, Ellen said, “Walter?”

He was carrying a case of beer, which he brought over and set on the bar in front of Al. He had a long beard, seedy and gray, like the beards of prophets or the homeless.

“Hello, Helen,” he said.

“Ellen,” she corrected. Walter said nothing.

“Don’t even tell me this is your bar now, Walter.”

Walter still said nothing.

“What the hell are you doing with a place like this? Nobody told me this was your place.”

“Sign tells it.”

“I didn’t know you were the Walter.”

“What else Walter is there?”

“I’m Al,” Al introduced himself. “I’m Ellen’s nephew.”

The two men shook hands over the case of beer between them.

“Walter?” Ellen said. “I’m not sure about the name of this place. You should at least call it Walter’s Topless Bar. Walter’s Topless sounds like an announcement. It sounds like you’re the one that’s topless.”

“It is an announcement.”

“I guess so.” Ellen looked around. “Tommy didn’t tell me he’d sold it to you.”

“It’s me.”

“I’m just surprised.”

“I don’t know how come. Sign says it plain enough.”

“Walter?” Ellen said. “Secretly, I always thought you were Amish.”

Al laughed, and Ellen laughed, too.

“I’ll buy you a drink on the house,” Walter said. “And one for your nephew.”

“Thank you, sir,” Al said.

“We’ll take two beers and some good Scotch,” Ellen said. “Thanks.”

Walter took two bottles from the case and pulled an opener out from inside his shirt, where it hung on a chain, like a heavy crucifix. He opened the beers, which were just short of cold, and put them in front of Al and Ellen.

Walter went to the end of the bar for the Scotch and Al said, “I haven’t called anyone ‘sir’ since I was twelve.”

“Walter can’t run a strip joint,” Ellen hissed. “He hates women. He never even used to come to my bar, because he hated women bartending. Jesus Christ, what a lousy joke.”

Walter came back with two shots of Scotch. Ellen drank hers and left the glass upside down on the bar. Al smelled his and set it in front of him carefully.

“Who’s your bartender?” Ellen asked.

“Rose,” Walter said. “My daughter.”

Walter and Ellen stared at each other in silence.

“Wow,” Al said. “I was thinking of asking for a job, but she’s probably staying, I guess.”

“I have three daughters,” Walter said, still looking at Ellen. “They all work here.”

“Are you going to drink that?” She asked Al, and when he shook his head, she put back his Scotch, too, and set the glass next to her own. “This is the funniest thing, Walter,” she said. “It’s so funny that Tommy didn’t tell me it was you. But good luck and everything, right?” Ellen took a twenty-dollar bill out of her pocket and slid it under her beer bottle. “Make sure Rose keeps us happy down here,” she said, and Walter walked away.

On the stage, Amber the junkie was finished. She was sitting on the floor, buttoning up a man’s long-sleeved shirt. She looked as tiny as a third-grader. Walter changed the tape and adjusted the volume, and another girl came up out of the basement and onto the stage. She had red hair in a braid from the top of her head, and without a lot of performance, she took off her bra and started bobbing lightly on her toes, as if warming up for a jog.

“We can’t compete with all this tit,” Ellen said.

“Sure we can.”

“This is such dumb stuff. Why should anyone cross the street for this stuff?”

“They won’t,” Al said.

“But if it’s just plain old tit they want, we can’t compete with that.”

“Polly takes her shirt off sometimes,” Al said.

“Yeah, but only when she’s really drunk. Then she cries and everyone feels bad. It’s not the same thing as this. Plus, Polly only works on Monday nights.”

“You’re right.”

“What if Walter tries to hire my bartenders to dance here?”

“They won’t.”

“If someone could get Polly to take off her shirt and look like she was enjoying it . . . that would be something, wouldn’t it?”

“A guy would pay for that,” Al said.

Ellen waved to a huge man as he walked in, and he came over and sat beside her.

“Wide Dennis,” she said. “Good to see you.”

Wide Dennis kissed Ellen and ordered a beer for himself and a Scotch for her. She patted his head and smiled. Wide Dennis had a head thick and faded as an old buoy. He had far-apart eyes that tended to lean randomly and outward, as if he were watching every corner at every time. He smelled like baby powder and spit, but he was smart enough to do something with computers that perhaps only two other people in the world could do, and he was paid well for this.

“Did you know this was Walter’s place now?” Ellen asked him.

“Just found out.”

“I always thought he was Amish,” Ellen said.

“I always thought he had a friend in Jesus,” Wide Dennis said.

Ellen laughed. “Remember Willy? Walter’s brother?”

Wide Dennis rolled his eyes.

Ellen said, “Willy could put his whole fist in his mouth, remember?”

“He put his whole damn near fist in my mouth a few times.”

“I don’t know that guy,” Al said.

“You’d know him if you saw him,” Wide Dennis said. “He’ll be the guy banging someone’s head against a Dumpster. Talking real loud.”

“He was a hell of a talker,” Ellen said. “Listening to Willy tell a story was like getting stuck behind the school bus. If anyone was going to open a damn strip joint in that family, it would be that bastard Willy, not Walter.”

Wide Dennis took a dollar bill from his pile of change and went up to the stage. He handed the dollar to the redheaded dancer. He said something to her as she took it, and she laughed. Ellen ordered two more beers, and when Rose brought the bottles over, Ellen asked, “What do they say to those girls, usually, when they give them money like that?”

Rose shrugged and walked away.

“Can’t shut that girl up,” Ellen said. “Just like her Uncle Willy.”

“Usually they tell her she’s beautiful,” Al said. “They tell her she’s a great dancer or something.”

“That’s sweet.”

“You used to strip. You remember how it is.”

“Not in a place like this,” Ellen said. “Not professionally. Just in the beginning, at Tall Folks. Just to get people in there.” Ellen drank her Scotch. “It worked; that’s the truth. Some of those people still haven’t left. Actually, some of those people are in here right now. Can’t remember anyone ever handing me any money for it, though.”

“How’s my boy Tommy been doing?” someone behind Al asked. Ellen looked around her nephew and smiled.

“Hello, James.”

“Hello, Ellie.”

“Where’ve you been, James? We miss you.”

James waved at the stage. There was another dancer up there now, a tall black girl who was swaying, with her eyes shut. They all watched her for a while. She swayed and swayed, slowly, as if she’d forgotten where she was, as if she thought maybe she was alone. They watched her for some time and she didn’t do anything more than sway, but nobody was in any hurry to look at anything else. The redheaded girl gathered up her things and crossed the stage behind the swayer.

“Oh, my,” James said. “Will you look at that?”

“Which one?” Al asked.

“All of them! Everywhere!” James smiled. He had a front tooth missing, from where Tommy had fallen down on him one night and James had hit the floor with his mouth.

“Do they let you sing here?” Ellen asked.

James shook his head. He used to come to the Tall Folks Tavern and stand under the light by the cigarette machine to sing. Ellen would turn down the jukebox and threaten the circus into some kind of silence, and they would all listen to James. He used to dress for it, too, in a found suit, dress socks, and sandals. He looked like Nat King Cole but sang better. The light above the cigarette machine shadowed his face just right. People used to cry. Even sober people used to cry.

“How’s my Tommy doing?” James asked again.

“He’s so fat now you wouldn’t believe it.”

“Always was a big man.”

“Now he looks like a monk. Drinks like a fish, still.”

“Like a monkfish,” Al said, and James laughed and hugged him. James was wearing a leatherish coat that looked as if it had been made out of pieces of car seats. Patches of brown and gray and darker brown.

“I do miss Tommy,” James said.

“And we miss you,” Ellen said. “Stop over. Make the time.”

James nodded toward the swayer on the stage.

“We’ve still got girls across the street, honey,” Ellen said.

James did not even nod this time, and Ellen whispered into Al’s ear, “I want my people back.” He squeezed her hand.

Ellen got up and went to the bathroom, which looked the same as it always had. Above the urinal, it still said, “I fucked your mother,” and in a different pen below it said, “Go home, Dad. You’re drunk.”

Ellen put on lipstick and washed her hands without soap or paper towels, which she was used to. Under the mirror was the oldest piece of graffiti in the place, a decade-long joke. “Top Three Things We Like Most About Tommy,” it said. “#1) He’s not here.” There were no listings under numbers two and three.

“Ha,” Ellen said out loud.

She stayed in the bathroom a long time, ignoring a few quiet knocks and one quick pounding at the door. When she finally came out, the dark-haired girl with the serious center part was standing there. They smiled at each other.

“Rose,” Ellen said.

“I’m Sandy. Rose is my sister.”

“You look like sisters.”

“We all work here.”

“I heard that. It’s like a cottage industry. It’s like a bodega,” Ellen said, and when Sandy did not answer, she added, “I’m Ellen.”

“I know.”

The two women looked at each other. Sandy was wearing a bathing suit like Rose’s, but she had shorts on.

“How’s business?”

“Great,” Sandy said. “And you?”

“Great,” Ellen lied.

“Good.” Sandy smiled. “That’s real good.”

“Are you waiting for the bathroom?”

“I’m just sort of standing here.”

“Do you know my nephew Al?” Ellen pointed down the bar. “He’s the cutest boy here.”

“He sure is,” Sandy said.

“He told me the other day that he’s been in love with me since I used to push him around in his baby carriage.”

“Wow.”

“Do people fall in love with the girls in this bar?”

“I don’t know. Probably.”

“I don’t think they do,” Ellen said. “I think they just like to watch.”

“I don’t guess it matters,” Sandy said.

“Your dad doesn’t even like girls. Excuse me for saying it.”

“He likes us.”

“You and your sisters?”

“Yes.”

“Does he like Amber the junkie?”

Sandy laughed.

“Don’t laugh at Amber. She’s a sweetheart. She’s from Florida, poor kid . . . It’s hard to say,” Ellen said. “I used to have this bartender, Catherine, who had this walk. People used to come to my bar on her shifts just to watch her walk back and forth. Not your father. He never liked my bar.”

“Do you like his bar?” Sandy asked, and she smiled as she asked this.

“See, Sandy. It’s like this,” Ellen said. “Not really. You know?”

“Sure,” Sandy said. “I think I’ll go in there now.” She pointed to the bathroom, and Ellen moved out of her way.

“Sure,” Ellen said.

Ellen made her way back to Al and ordered more Scotch for both of them. Wide Dennis was still there, and James in his car-seat coat was there, too, talking to Amber the junkie.

“I don’t like this place,” Ellen said to Al. “Who’s going to come to a place like this?”

“Me, neither,” Amber said. She was eating a sandwich out of one of those small coolers people use for carrying around six-packs or organs fresh for transplants. She was drinking what could have been a rum and Coke. “This place is the worst.”

“Nobody loves anyone here,” Ellen said, and Al took her hand and squeezed it. She kissed his neck.

“He’s the sweetest boy,” Amber said.

“Remember that bartender you used to have over there? Victoria?” James asked Ellen. “She was a sassy thing, that girl.”

“She worked Wednesday nights,” Al said.

“She worked Tuesday nights, baby,” James said. “Trust me please on this one.”

“You’re right.” Al nodded. “It was Tuesday.”

“My God, I do miss that girl.”

“She was a good bartender,” Ellen said.

“Those were good, good times. We used to call that the Victorian Era, didn’t we? When Victoria was still working.”

“That’s right, James.”

“Get that girl back again. That’s what we all need.”

“Can’t do it.”

“Tall Folks was holy back then. We used to drink out of that damn girl’s hands.”

“She has kids in grammar school now,” Ellen said.

“They don’t make girls like that anymore. That’s the truth.”

“They’re always making girls like that,” Ellen said. “They just keep on making them, and there’s one of them across the street at my bar right now, if you’re craving a great girl.”

“Who?” Al asked. “Maddy? Not Maddy. Hardly.”

“I don’t drink like this all the time,” Amber the junkie said suddenly. “You know that? Some days I don’t drink for two weeks.”

Then they were all quiet, looking at Amber.

“Okay, sweetie,” Ellen said. “That’s great. Good girl.”

“Sure,” Amber said. “No problem.”

Behind the bar, Walter was changing the cassette again, and a new dancer stepped up onto the stage.

“Wow,” Al said.

“I know, baby,” James said. “You don’t have to tell me.”

She was blond but not a born blond, with dark eyebrows and short hair, combed down straight against a round, round face. She wore fishnet stockings and garters, big clunky 1940s high heels, and a short antique pink dressing gown that tied in the front. She was chewing gum, and as the music started, she looked down at Al and blew a bubble.

“Jesus Christ,” he said.

“That girl is a pin-up,” Wide Dennis said.

She danced for a while with her robe on, then slid it off and coyly folded it at her feet. She stood up to face the bar with naked breasts, and her nipples were perfect and tiny, like some kind of cake decoration.

“She’s beautiful,” Ellen whispered to Al.

“Ellen,” he said, “I would eat that girl up with a spoon. I really would.”

“She’s a steamed dumpling, isn’t she?” Ellen said.

The dumpling had an actual act. She worked the bubble gum and the stockings and her flushed little arms. She worked the big clunky shoes and the belly and thighs. She held every available attention.

“You know what I feel like?” Ellen asked Al. “I feel like I’m looking at a pastry, you know? In a bakery window?”

“Yum,” Al said gravely. “Yum.”

“You could melt cheese on that girl.”

“You know those tubes of biscuit dough you can buy in the dairy case?” Al asked. “You know how you smack them on the counter and they go pop and all the dough pops out?”

“Yeah.”

“She came out of one of those tubes.”

The dumpling was dancing in front of the mirror, looking at herself. She put her hands against the reflection of her own hands and kissed the reflection of her own mouth.

“That’s what strip joints are all about,” Wide Dennis said. “Greasy mirrors.”

“You know what she’s leaving on that mirror?” Al said. “Butter.”

“That’s not lipstick she has on,” Ellen said. “That’s frosting.”

Al laughed and pulled Ellen tight, and she put her arm around his shoulders.

“You should give her some money,” he said.

“No way.”

“It’ll be cute. I’ll go with you. She’ll like it. She’ll think we’re a married couple and our therapist told us to come here so we could have better sex.”

“She’ll wonder how I tricked a twenty-year-old into marrying me.”

Ellen put her face against Al’s neck, which was warm and salty. Wide Dennis went up to the stage and leaned his huge self against the rail, as if he were on a veranda or a cruise ship, as if the scenery were delightful and vast, as if he were a man of great leisure. He pulled dollar bills out of his pocket one at a time and held them up suavely between his second and third fingers. The dumpling accepted the money somehow within her choreography, and managed to tuck each dollar bill into her garter as though it were a slip of paper with a phone number on it that she thoroughly intended to call later. Against Wide Dennis, she looked slightly miniaturized, a perfect scale model of herself.

“He’ll stand there as long as he has money, won’t he?” Ellen asked.

“She’s the sweetest girl,” Amber the junkie said. “I love her.”

The dumpling leaned down and took Wide Dennis’s huge head in her hands. She kissed him once over each eyebrow.

“I love that girl,” James said.

“Me, too,” Al said.

“I love her,” Ellen said. “I love her, too.”

Ellen drank the last of her Scotch and said, “This is bad news for me. This place is really bad news, isn’t it?” She smiled at Al, and he kissed her with his boozy, pretty mouth. It was more of a kiss than aunts usually get. He kissed her as if he had been planning the kiss for some time, and Ellen called up all of the lessons of her considerable history to accept and return it with grace. She let him hold the back of her head in one reassuring hand, as if she were a weak-necked baby, feeding. To Ellen, his mouth tasted like her own fine Scotch, nicely warmed.

When Ellen and Al finally crossed back over to the Tall Folks Tavern, it was closing time, and Maddy the mean bartender was kicking out her last drunks.

“Go home!” she was yelling. “Go home and apologize to your wives!”

Ellen did not ask Maddy how the night had been and she did not greet any of her customers, but walked behind the bar and picked up the lost-and-found box. Then she and Al went together to the back room. Ellen spread the lost-and-found coats over the pool table. Al turned off the low overhead light, and the two of them climbed up onto the pool table, with its thin mattress of other people’s clothes. Ellen stretched out on her back with a damp jacket pillow and Al settled his head on her chest. She kissed his smoky hair. In the dark of the back room, without a window or a fan, the air smelled like cigarette ashes and the dust of chalk. It smelled something like a school.

Much later, more than an hour later, Al did roll carefully on top of Ellen, and she did lace her fingers snugly against his back, but before this they rested for a long time, still in the dark, holding hands like old people. They listened to Maddy the mean bartender throw the last drunks out of the Tall Folks Tavern, and they listened to her clean up and shut down the bar. On the best nights, Ellen used to dance on that same bar with her arms spread open wide, saying, “My people! My people!” while the men crowded at her feet like dogs or students. They used to beg her not to close. It would be daylight and they would still be coming in from across the street, begging her not to close. She told this to Al, and he nodded. In the dark of that big back room, she felt his little nod.

Landing

I LIVED in San Francisco for three months and only slept with one person, a redneck from Tennessee. I could have done that back home and saved myself a lot of rent money. A city full of educated, successful men, and I went after the first guy I saw wearing a John Deere hat.

I noticed him at the bar because he looked out of context among all the businessmen, sitting there in his plaid shirt and white socks. He was drinking a beer and I saw a can of chewing tobacco beside the bottle. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s a man who chews tobacco. I sat down next to him.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“You sure made a beeline for me,” he said.

“That’s a hell of a long name,” I said. I ordered a beer and settled onto the bar stool. He told me that he was Dean.

“I’m Julie,” I said. “What are you doing in San Francisco, Dean?”

“Uncle Sam stationed me here.”

I thought, I didn’t come all the way to California to pick up some enlisted guy in a bar. I thought, I didn’t come all the way out to California to pick up some good old boy with a cheap watch and a crewcut, some yokel from a town probably smaller than my own.

“So, what is it exactly that you do in the army, Dean?”

“I jump out of airplanes.” Something about his drawl made the comment sound drenched with innuendo. He looked at me appraisingly; there was a long pause.

“Well,” I said, finally. “That must be fun.”

Dean kept his eyes on mine for a moment. He unfolded the paper napkin in front of me, held it over my head, and let it go: a tiny parachute with “Pierce Street Bar” printed on a corner. The napkin fluttered down and settled on my pack of cigarettes.

“You fall and fall,” he said. “And then you land.”

I took a long drink and put the bottle down evenly on its own damp ring. I had started feeling that magnet pull at the back of my knees and the gentle tug just under my stomach.

“Do you have cowboy boots?” I asked him.

“Why?”

“Because I’m not crazy about those shoes you’re wearing. You look stupid with white socks and dress shoes. I think you’d look a whole lot better with cowboy boots coming out from those jeans.”

Dean laughed. “Sure, I got cowboy boots. Come back to the Presidio with me tonight, I’ll put them on for you.”

“You don’t throw away much time buttering up a girl with conversation, do you?” I asked, and wrapped my hand around my beer bottle. Dean covered my hand with his.

“You sure got nice hands,” he said.

“I was just going to take a drink,” I said, and I thought my voice sounded a little bit too low and shaky. I cleared my throat.

We looked at his hand on mine and at my hand on the bottle, and I said, “You’ve got nice hands, too. Big, but nice.” I could feel his calluses against my knuckles. “You know what they say about men with big hands,” I continued, and Dean grinned.

“What’s that?”

“Big gloves.”

It was easy to find Dean’s truck. It was the only pickup with Tennessee plates on Pierce Street, and it was right across from the bar.

“You drove this thing all the way to California?”

“Yup. Only took me two days.”

There was an empty doughnut box on the front seat, and the passenger side window was stuck at half-mast. Plastic six-pack rings, fast food bags, and empty cassette boxes covered the floor, and I felt something crack under my foot as I got in.

“What was that?” Dean asked, and I read the label on the box.

“Hank Williams Junior’s Greatest Hits Volume Two. You’re kidding me.”

“What’s the matter, never heard country music before?”

“I wish.”

Dean started up the truck and pulled off Pierce Street.

“Where’d you say you were from, Julie?”

“Main Street,” I said. “USA.”

“You got some South in your voice.”

“Maybe.”

“Scoot over here,” Dean said, patting a spot next to him. I slid over, close as I could get. “I want to put my arm around you,” he said, “but I have to shift.”

I took his hand off the chipped black ball on top of the gear shift and put his arm around me.

“We driving all the way to the army base in second?” he asked.

“I’ll shift,” I said, and that’s how we drove: me shifting, my other hand on his left thigh so I could tell when he was pushing the clutch, my face near his chest so I could feel him breathing and see the snaps on his shirt. Dean drove with his hand on my shoulder and then under my arm against my ribs, and finally at my breast.

We were quiet for some time, and then Dean said, “Talk to me. Tell me something.”

I put my mouth against his ear and slid my hand up his thigh. He shut his eyes.

“Keep your eyes on the road,” I whispered, and he smiled and opened them. I could see the pulse in his neck.

“Your bed narrow or wide?” I asked, and, quietly, Dean said, “Narrow.”

“I think that I want to see you in these jeans, all faded, with cowboy boots coming out from the bottom of them,” I said. “I want to lie on your bed and see you standing there with no shirt, just those jeans down low on your hips and cowboy boots. Just looking at me. Okay?”

Eyes forward, Dean swallowed and nodded. I kissed his ear.

“I think you’d look great like that,” I said.

I woke up the next morning to see a guy with white-blond hair and camouflage pants walking around, stepping over the tangled pile of my shirt, bra, and skirt. He had a mole on his left cheek the size and color of a BB.

Dean and I had fallen asleep back to front, my spine cushioned against his chest and stomach, my hair in his face and mouth.

“Dean?” the stranger called, looking at me. “You up?”

“Hey, Hunt,” Dean said into the back of my neck.

“Who’s the girl?”

“This is Julie. Julie, this is Hunt. My roommate.”

“Hey,” I said.

Hunt the roommate didn’t answer, so we looked at each other some more. He had a long cleft in the middle of his chin, another miniature cleft at the tip of his nose, and a deep furrow between his eyes. It looked like someone had made markings in preparation to cleave his face in half, but had never got around to finishing up.

Under the scratchy green army blanket, Dean slid his hand flat between my thighs. He let it rest there, cool and immobile but full of possibilities.

“Where’d you sleep last night, Hunt?” he asked.

“TV lounge.”

“No way.”

“Way.”

“You didn’t have to do that, man.” Dean moved his hand up higher between my legs.

Hunt grinned, but only on one side of his face, like a stroke victim. “I came by ’round three this morning,” he said, “and I heard you two rockin’, so I didn’t come knockin’.”

Dean laughed. I turned over in the bed, careful to keep myself covered, and faced him.

“I’m not crazy about your roommate,” I whispered in his ear, and he laughed harder.

“Julie don’t like you, Hunt,” he said.

“I just seen that Madonna video,” Hunt said, unmoved by Dean’s remark. “You know that one where she’s in that man’s suit, grabbing her twat like Michael Jackson does?”

“Yeah, I know it,” Dean said.

“She’s hot, huh?”

“Uh-huh.”

I tried to get my head comfortable on Dean’s chest, somewhere away from his collarbone, and traced the silky thin track of hair under his belly button with my finger.

“I’m gone watch some more TV,” Hunt told us. “Maybe they’ll show it again. They been playing it a lot.”

“Uh-huh,” Dean said.

“If I come back, y’all want me to knock?”

“Up to you, man.”

As soon as Hunt was out the door, Dean was on top of me, pulling my thighs up around his hips. I locked my fingers behind his head.

“Oh, baby,” Dean said, “I’m so glad we’re awake again.”

“So, you don’t like my roommate?” Dean asked. We were parked in his truck at the far end of Baker’s Beach, drinking beer, watching the only two people in the water toss a Frisbee back and forth.

“When they drown, we can have the beach to ourselves,” I said.

Dean’s truck smelled like the burgers we’d just finished.

“They can have the beach,” Dean said. “Too damn cold to swim, anyhow. I’m happy we got the parking lot.” He stuck his little finger into the neck of his beer bottle and swung it slowly in front of his face, as if trying to hypnotize himself. “I got my finger stuck one time doing this.”

“That’s a pretty smart thing to do, then, isn’t it?”

He pulled his finger out with a pop and held it up. I leaned over and bit it.

“Taste like beer?” he asked.

“Not really.”

Dean pulled me close and ran his tongue across my lips, lightly. “I like the way you taste.”

I kissed him, then sat back against the seat. “No, I don’t like your roommate,” I said. I put my feet up on the dashboard and looked between them at the swimmers. “Where’s he from, anyhow? Alabama?”

“West Virginia.”

“Yeah? Well, I don’t like him. He reminds me of guys from my town. I know what he’s all about.”

“That right?”

“Uh-huh.” I combed the hairs on Dean’s leg back the wrong way with my fingertips and smoothed them down again. He was wearing shorts, no shirt. Cowboy boots. “Hunt’s got a truck with six-foot wheels, I bet,” I said. “Got a belt buckle that says ‘The South Will Rise Again.’ Someday he’ll get a girl pregnant, maybe his cousin, and they’ll have more kids just like him. Bunch of kids running around with ringworm, eating mud pies.”

Dean laughed. “So what kind of guy do you like?” He balanced his beer bottle on the palm of his hand.

“College boys,” I said. “Lawyers. You know.”

Dean nodded, interested. “Let me ask you something. You hooked up with a lot of guys like that since you left home?”

I looked at him evenly. “All I said is that’s the kind of guy I’m attracted to.”

He nodded again. “So you aren’t attracted to guys like me?”

“No, I’m not.”

Dean set his bottle on the dashboard and gently pushed me down so that I was lying on my back, flat on the seat.

“I didn’t think so,” he said, and slid my underwear out from under my skirt, past my ankles, off. He pushed my skirt up around my waist, put his head between my legs, and started to kiss the insides of my thighs.

“I really fucking love that,” I said after a few minutes, and Dean looked up.

“You got some mouth for a girl supposed to be from the country.”

“You’ve got some mouth yourself,” I said.

It was midnight at the International House of Pancakes.

“Happy anniversary,” Dean said, and toasted me with his milk shake. “We been together a whole day.”

“These waitresses aren’t so great,” I said, and lifted my water glass, not for a toast, but for a refill. “I’ve been sucking on this ice for a half-hour now.”

“Ten minutes,” Dean corrected me.

“Well, anyhow. A waitress should look after stuff like that. A good waitress.”

“When you smile, the bottom part of your eyes look like this.” Dean dipped his finger into his milk shake and drew a half-moon shape on the tabletop. “I like that.”

The skin around my mouth felt sore and raw from Dean’s stubble, and it hurt to sit down from all the sex. Dean leaned his head against the turquoise vinyl seat and shut his eyes.

“You worn out yet?” I asked, and he smiled and shook his head without opening his eyes to the fluorescent lights.

“No, sir. I’m all set for another round.”

“Liar. I saw you walking like a cowboy before.”

“It’s the cowboy boots make me walk like that.”

The waitress filled my water glass and we didn’t speak for a while. Then I drank the water in one swallow, cleared my throat, and said, “Well . . . it’s sure been nice knowing you, Dean.”

He lifted his head from the back of the seat and looked at me with eyes the amber color of whiskey aging at the bottom of a barrel.

“You going somewhere?” he asked.

“Not really. Or, maybe yes. I may stay in San Francisco, but I could leave soon, too. I don’t like staying anywhere too long, you know?”

Dean didn’t answer, waited.

“Or maybe I’ll head down to L.A.,” I continued, shifting my eyes from Dean’s face to study first the dessert case, then the restroom doors. “I’ve also been thinking about going up to Seattle, or maybe Portland.”

“You planning on leaving tomorrow or something?” Dean looked puzzled. I rolled my eyes.

“Look, I don’t want to fight about this.”

“Nobody’s fighting nobody. I just wondered what you meant about ‘nice knowing you.’”

“Dean, you’re a nice guy and everything, okay? But I’m not looking for any kind of relationship. I don’t want to see you getting attached to me or anything.”

“What?”

“That’s not what I came all the way out here for.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

I reached for a bottle of maple syrup. I turned it upside down and watched the brown fluid move inside, slow as lava.

“You and me don’t have anything in common, Dean. You’re going to finish with the army, then head back to Tennessee, probably. That’s fine; that’s great for you. But that’s not for me. I’m not going to end up married in Tennessee.”

“I don’t remember asking.”

“You know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t.”

I reached across the table for his hand, and he let me take it, the way you let a waitress take an empty plate.

“Dean,” I said, “listen. Two thousand miles is a long way to go for something you can get next door. Okay?”

He didn’t answer right away. His voice was not accusing when he finally said, “Plenty of guys at the Pierce Street Bar got what you’re looking for, Julie. If that’s what you want, what’d you sit next to me for?”

I took my hand off his and put it in my lap. I looked down at my sleeve, dirty from the floor of Dean’s room.

“I know what you’re all about . . .” I started to say, wanting to sound as level as Dean, but trailing off.

“No, you don’t, Julie. You don’t half know me.”

“Well. I think I do.”

“You’re making a mistake to think that,” he said. “You don’t know me at all, hardly, and you’re making a mistake to think otherwise.”

We looked at each other across the table. Dean’s face was even and open. I didn’t come all the way out to California for this, I thought, but I didn’t say anything.

I watched as a waitress at the dessert case sliced a tall white cake and slid a wedge carefully onto a plate. She glanced behind her, then licked a smear of frosting off her thumb. Another waitress was scrubbing the inside of the large coffee urn with what appeared to be a toilet brush.

“What’re you doing?” Dean asked after some time.

“Nothing,” I answered. “Watching.”

He smiled slightly.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing.” Dean’s smile widened. “It’s just that I don’t see you jumping up and running off.”

“You think I won’t?”

Dean shrugged. “I’m just waiting, is all.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

The waitresses moved through the restaurant, seating customers, serving food, sliding tips into their apron pockets. Someone came out of the kitchen with a mop to clean up a spill. The manager worked on a crossword puzzle and sipped from a tall glass of milk. I watched them, and Dean sat quietly across the table, waiting.

I thought, How long is this guy going to sit here?

But Dean did not get up to leave, and neither did I.

Come and Fetch These Stupid Kids

M ARGIE AND PEG were arrested after they got drunk on the chef’s cooking wine and went into the parking lot and rubbed butter on the windshield of every car parked there. It was late at night. It was also late in September, and long past the end of the tourist season. There had been very few customers that evening, in the restaurant where Margie and Peg worked, and there were very few cars in the parking lot. As it happened, though, one of the cars that Margie and Peg buttered turned out to be the police car of a Delaware state patrolman. They hadn’t noticed that it was a police car. They hadn’t really been paying attention. The Delaware state patrolman came out of the restaurant and into the parking lot, where he handily caught the girls in the act of vandalism.

Peg started to run when she saw him, but Margie shouted, “Don’t run, Peg! He’ll gun you down like a dog!”

Which Peg believed, although the Delaware state patrolman had done nothing more threatening than bark, “Hey!”

The patrolman held Peg and Margie in the parking lot and radioed for a town cop to come and deal with the situation. “Come and fetch these stupid kids,” he told the town cop over the radio.

The Delaware state patrolman stood in the parking lot with Margie and Peg, waiting for the town cop. It rained and rained on them. The patrolman was wearing a practical raincoat, but the girls were soaked in their waitress uniforms.

“I wonder if we might be allowed to go inside the restaurant while waiting for the other policeman to arrive,” Margie requested. “I wonder if it might not be more pleasant not to stand in the rain as we await the arrival of that gentleman. No?”

Margie had a habit (newly developed that summer) of speaking in such an aristocratic and refined manner. A very new habit. A very new affectation, which was not enjoyed by every individual she encountered. On this night in particular, Margie sounded as if she were coming very close to calling the Delaware state patrolman “my good fellow.” The Delaware state patrolman looked at Margie, in her wet waitress uniform, talking so archly. Margie was clearly drunk. Margie had one eyebrow raised inquisitively. She had one finger pressed coyly against her chin.

“You can stand outside in the rain all night, for all I care, Little Miss Du Pont,” the Delaware state patrolman said.

“That’s very funny,” Peg told him.

“Thank you,” he said.

The town cop showed up. He looked bored. He was so bored, in fact, that he charged Margie and Peg with public drunkenness, disturbing the peace, and vandalism.

“Gracious!” Margie said. “That is quite a lot of serious charges for a harmless little prank such as our own.”

The girls were loaded into the town cop’s car and taken to the local jail, where they were fingerprinted and booked.

Peg’s boyfriend, a handsome guy named J.J., eventually arrived to bail out Peg and Margie, but not before the two girls had spent a few hours in the tidy jail cell.

“Take a look around you, ladies,” the bored town cop had said when he was locking them up. “Get a feel for it. Remember what it feels like to be behind bars. Not so nice, is it? Remember that feeling, next time you decide to commit a crime.”

Margie and Peg took a look around. They got a feel for it. They chewed some gum that Margie had, and then fell asleep. When Peg’s boyfriend J.J. finally showed up to spring them out of jail, it was already three o’clock in the morning.

“You two are turkeys,” J.J. said, and he brought the car around to the front of the station so the girls wouldn’t get any wetter.

They drove home. The rain was hitting the car hard, hail-like. Each drop of rain had the weight, it seemed, of an uncooked bean. The Delaware shore was getting just a small piece of some hurricane farther out in the Atlantic, but it was a dramatic piece.

J.J. drove with his chin almost touching the steering wheel, trying to see the road. Peg slept in the back seat. Margie found some gum that was stuck in her hair and worked it out.

“The cop told me you two were supposed to spend the whole night in jail, but I talked him out of it,” J.J. told Margie.

“How did you manage to accomplish that, you clever darling?” Margie asked.

“I told him that the road to our house might be washed out by morning from all this rain, and I might not be able to come and get you. He was nice about it.”

“Men certainly do like to talk about manly things like roads being washed out, don’t they?”

“That’s right,” said J.J.

“Did you give him a firm and manly handshake, J.J.?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Did you call him sir?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good for you, J.J.,” said Margie. “Thank you so very much for releasing us from that dreadful prison.”

When they got back to the house, Margie’s spoiled and foolish boyfriend John was awake.

“I demand to have a drink with the criminal masterminds,” John said.

John had the same habit that Margie had, of speaking in a refined and aristocratic manner. Actually, Margie had inherited her speech pattern directly from John. John had invented it.

“Do you think we are loathsome, John?” Margie asked, and kissed him on the cheek.

John said, “I have a demand! I demand that we sit outside in this magnificent rain and hear chilling tales about life in the big house.”

Margie said, “Foolish John. Silly John. Don’t you realize that this is the big house?”

Margie was absolutely right. It was a very big house, indeed. It was John’s house. He was only twenty-one years old, but he owned this big house right on the Delaware shore. His parents had given it to him as a graduation present. Margie’s parents, by contrast, had given her a bracelet. Peg’s parents had taken her out to dinner for a graduation present, and J.J.’s parents had sent him a graduation card, signed by all his aunts and uncles.

John was rich. His father was a producer who lived in Hollywood and was very rich. As for John’s mother, she was a former Miss Delaware. She was divorced from John’s father and lived in a mansion on Chesapeake Bay. She had driven down only once that summer to visit her son at his new beach house. She had arrived in a Mercedes, and that car had looked as black and hard as a wet rock.

John planned to live in his graduation gift house on the beach forever, and he had invited his friends from college to live with him just as long as they wanted. Originally, there had been five young people living there, in John’s house. They’d had only two names between them. There had been three Margarets and two Johns. Some had nicknames, and some did not. They were John, J.J., Margie, Mags, and Peg.

“Gracious!” John had observed with delight. “We are a full house. We consist of a pair and three of a kind. Isn’t that lucky? Isn’t that a marvelous hand to be dealt?”

But Mags left the beach house at the end of August and moved to Florida.

Mags secretly said to Peg, “I’ll tell you something, Peg. The fact is, I’m beginning to hate John.”

John said about Mags, after she had gone, “She was welcome to leave at any time. Nobody has to stay in this house simply to please me. Although she might have thought to replace herself with another Margaret, just to keep up our lucky hand of cards, no? Alas! Now we are merely two pairs. But you will all stay, won’t you?”

“We will all stay!” Peg had said, and hugged her handsome boyfriend J.J.

“Is the house even winterized?” J.J. had asked John.

“Oh, mercy! I don’t know,” said the spoiled and foolish John. “Couldn’t you winterize it, J.J.? You’re so clever. No? How hard could that be, to winterize my house?”

In fact, the house was not winterized, as its four occupants were beginning to realize by the end of September. They did not have any realistic way of staying warm. What’s more, by the night of Margie’s and Peg’s arrest, it did not even appear that any of the four young people had a job. J.J.’s job as a lifeguard had ended right after Labor Day, when the tourists left. It certainly seemed that Margie and Peg would be fired from their waitressing jobs, after their drunken butter prank in the parking lot of the restaurant. As for spoiled and foolish John, he’d never had any sort of job whatsoever. John had passed his summer growing his hair and writing sequels to movies that already had sequels.

“Well, my resplendent jailbirds,” said John. “Let us commence to the roof. Let us sit upon the widow’s walk and drink some alcohol while enjoying this magnificent rain.”

So it passed that the four friends climbed up onto the roof of John’s big beach house to drink some beer and watch the weather. They were just a dune away from the sea, and the beach was having a difficult time holding on to itself against the beating waves and rain. The four friends sat, exposed to the rain, on four saturated lawn chairs. The cold water puddled at their feet and pelted their backs.

John proclaimed, “This storm shall bring the cold water in. We shall not be able to go swimming anymore. My friends, I am sorry to report it. This storm marks the end of our happy summer.”

“No swimming!” Margie said, horrified.

“No swimming,” said John. “Yes! Sadly, this tempest brings our sweet summer to a close.”

Margie seemed devastated. It appeared to be the first time that she had ever considered the concept of seasonal change.

“No more swimming?” she said again. She was shocked, really. “Can it be true?”

“September is the cruelest month,” John said.

There was a bag of potato chips open on John’s lap, and the rain had made it into a soggy, salty feed bag. He fished some of the damp potato chips out and tossed them over the edge of the house.

“What a storm,” observed Peg. “Gosh.”

J.J. said reassuringly, “This is nothing, Peg. This isn’t even the real storm. The real storm is too busy tearing the shit out of some other place to worry about us.”

“J.J. is correct,” John announced. “Why, this is just the afterthought of a real storm.”

“My goodness,” said Margie. “It is raining very hard nonetheless.” Then she said, “Peg, sweetheart?”

“Yes,” said Peg.

“Is it terribly difficult to get a job if one has a police record?”

“We don’t have a police record, Margie.”

“Do we not? Did we not just get arrested, this very night?”

“Yeah, but a police record is different. A police record is something you have if you’re a career criminal. You can’t get a police record until you’ve committed a string of crimes.”

“Peg sounds very confident about this,” Margie said.

“For someone who has no idea what the devil she’s talking about,” said John, “Peg sounds like a veritable attorney general.”

“I happen to believe that it is impossible to get a job with a police record,” Margie said. “I shall never be able to get another job, and neither shall Peg. We are doomed! John, sweetheart? Will you always take care of me?”

“Naturally,” said John.

“But what shall become of Peg? She will have to become a plaything of a rich old man. John, love? Do you know any rich old men who need young playthings?”

John replied, “Only my father. And I imagine that he already has a plaything.”

There was an impressive flash of lightning.

“Oh, baby,” said J.J.

John stood up. He took his ponytail over one shoulder and wrung it out. He announced, “I have a demand. We shall go swimming. This is our last chance. Let us not hesitate, for tomorrow the water shall be too cold.”

“That’s funny,” J.J. said. “I’m not going swimming.”

“That’s funny,” Peg said. “I’m damn sure not going swimming, either.”

“You are both exquisitely funny,” John said, “because we actually are going swimming indeed. I demand it.”

“Nobody’s going swimming tonight, buster,” said Peg.

John thrust his fist in the air and shouted, “To the sea! We shall go to the sea with zeal! I demand zeal.”

Margie said, “My sweet John has taken leave of his senses.”

“The storm will be gone by tomorrow, my friends,” John said. “The sun will come out, but the water will already be cold. And you shall be very sorry indeed that you missed your last chance to swim.”

“John’s senses have simply left him,” Margie said.

“This is not even the real storm,” John said. “Is that not exactly what J.J. said? No? And J.J. is a sensible man. This is merely the afterthought of a storm. I would be embarrassed to call this a storm.”

“I’ll go swimming,” J.J. said. “What the hell.”

Margie looked from Peg to John and then to J.J., who was, in fact, known among the friends as a sensible man. J.J. was slouching with his beer on his stomach. His handsome body was slunk down, low and wet, in the chair, in a terrible posture, like someone’s drunken uncle.

“Sure. I’ll go swimming,” J.J. said. And he added, as an explanation, “We couldn’t get much wetter, could we?”

“You got it,” said Peg. “That makes sense, I guess.”

At that point, it was as though an official decision had been made. It was as if the four friends were a conference of businessmen in strong agreement. It was as if the four friends were four CEOs in consensus, the way they stood up and headed down the stairs, over the dune, and to the beach. When they passed through the front porch, Margie picked up her Dumbo inflatable inner tube and slipped it over her head and around her waist. It was a child’s toy, but it amused her. She had taken it swimming all summer. She held Dumbo’s plastic gray trunk in her hand, as though it were a divining rod, and followed the head straight ahead to water.

Down at the beach, the spoiled, foolish John and the handsome J.J. took off their shoes and headed into the water, fully dressed. They pushed their way through the rough surf, which was sometimes waist high, sometimes chest high. They pulled their legs up and over and through the water, struggling as though passing through dense, fast-moving mud. John got knocked over immediately by the first wave, but J.J. dived right into it and came out on top of another. John surfaced and cheered and was knocked over again.

Margie stripped to her underwear, but Peg took off only her skirt. Margie ran in after John and J.J., holding the Dumbo tube around her waist and screaming.

Peg stood in the surf for some time and let the tide bury her feet. Two waves was all it took to sink her over her ankles. There was enough dark and rain that she could not see very far past the three heads of her friends out there. She pulled her feet out of the sand and made her way to the surf, right into the face of a wave that stood for a moment above her as high as a chain link fence. The wave fell, and she relaxed and let it roll her. When Peg came up, she was on top of another wave. She saw John and J.J. and Margie in a valley below her, their mouths open. The trunk of Margie’s Dumbo tube stuck out of the water like a periscope. A bigger wave came down on Peg, and on her friends, too.

When Peg surfaced again, she could not see her friends. She treaded water and ducked under three waves before she got high enough on a swell to see that they had gone farther out into the ocean. Her boyfriend and her two friends were out to where the waves were rising but not breaking. J.J. was separated from John and Margie, and he was floating on his back. Margie saw Peg and beckoned to her. In ten minutes of swimming, Peg made it over to them. John had lost his ponytail holder, and his hair was floating all around him, like seaweed.

“Isn’t it loud?” Margie shouted. “No?”

Peg was out of breath, so she nodded. A long strand of Margie’s hair was stuck from the corner of her mouth to her ear, making a black slash across her face, like a wound from a knife fight. They were all treading water gracelessly, spitting seawater and stretching their necks to stay above the rough surface. Except for J.J., who was never graceless. J.J. swam around easily, his stroke as even and strong as though he were doing casual laps in a YMCA, instead of struggling with a storming ocean.

“How deep do you suppose it is, sir?” John shouted.

J.J. laughed, riding on a swell.

“Twenty feet!” J.J. shouted. Then the swell dipped, and he shouted, “No! I take it back. It’s ten feet!” A new swell rose, and J.J. said, “No! It’s eighteen feet!”

Peg held her nose and went under, pushing herself down and seeking bottom. When she did touch, her foot first hit stones, then something soft. She panicked and kicked until she was at the surface. She tried to wipe the seawater from her eyes, but the rain pushed it back again.

“This would be easier if we were a species that didn’t have to breathe,” Margie said. Margie, with her Dumbo inner tube supporting her slightly, was less tired than her friends. She was the most cheerful, the least out of breath.

“John, honey?” Margie asked. “How long can you go without breathing?”

“Last time it was three hours,” John shouted back.

“Goodness!” Margie said.

John laughed and got a mouthful of water, which gagged him. He coughed wetly. Peg looked around and saw that they had been pulled out far past the jetties, a great distance down from the house. Without saying that they were doing so, the four friends began swimming toward the beach. They were trying in a casual way to head home. They were all getting tired, but nobody wanted to speak about it. For some time, they tried to swim toward shore but did not seem to make any progress. They stopped joking with each other and then even stopped speaking.

After a long while, J.J. said, “Oh, fuck.”

“What?” Peg asked her boyfriend; she was breathless. “What is it?”

“Jellyfish.”

Another considerable silence. By this point they had stopped pretending that they weren’t aiming for shore.

Then John shouted out, “J.J.! My friend!”

“Yeah,” said J.J.

“I’m getting . . . um . . . rather tired.”

“Okay,” said J.J. “We’ll go in, then.”

John rolled his eyes, almost with annoyance. “My legs are killing me,” he said.

“We’ll go in now,” J.J. said. “I’ll help you.”

“My legs are very . . . um . . . heavy,” said John.

“You’ve got to take off your jeans, John,” said J.J. “Can you do that?”

The rain was cold right through the scalps of the friends, and their breathing was wet and sloppy.

John grimaced, trying to get his jeans off. He was going under, coming back up, going under again. J.J. swam behind him and held him up by sticking his arms under John’s armpits. John squirmed around more, and then his jeans popped up to the surface, where they floated for a moment, dark, like the hide of a shark, and then sank.

“We’re going in,” J.J. shouted. “If you girls can make it in, then go. If you can’t make it in, don’t get tired. Just stay out here.”

Peg and Margie did not have the breath to answer.

The boys swam away, and a wave immediately separated them from their girlfriends. The girls watched them for a while. It looked as though the boys couldn’t make it past the jetties.

Margie’s teeth chattered. Peg swam over to her and grabbed Dumbo’s inflatable head.

“No,” Margie said. “Mine.”

“I have to,” Peg said. Her legs ached from the cold water. When she kicked hard to warm them, she kicked Margie. Margie started crying. Margie and Peg were pulled up on a wave, and they could see then that John and J.J. were not much closer to the beach. Peg held her breath and shut her eyes. A wave slapped her. She opened her eyes into water and breathed water and swallowed it.

“We won’t make it back,” Margie said.

Peg kicked her.

“Shut up!” Margie shouted, although Peg had not spoken.

Peg kicked Margie again. The girls treaded water and tried to see the progress of John and J.J. toward the beach. Which, after a great passage of time, the boys did reach. John and J.J. did eventually reach the beach, and when Peg saw this, she said to Margie, “Look!”

“Shut up!” Margie said, and kicked Peg.

Peg could see J.J. pulling John out of the water. J.J. was in fact dragging John from the sea by his hair. A caveman and his wife. J.J. lugged John up the beach and dropped down beside him.

Margie did not look. Her eyes were closed and her mouth was open. Then Peg did not look anymore, either. She could imagine J.J. slouched over John, who may or may not have been breathing. She could imagine J.J. taking some time to throw up the seawater from his gut, lean his forehead against the sand, retch a little.

Then J.J. would stand on his strong and handsome legs, a little shaky. Peg could imagine it. J.J. would look out at the water to where Margie and Peg should be. He would probably not be able to spot them. His ragged breathing would continue, and he would stand, hands on his hips, slightly hunched over. He would look very much like an exhausted and heroic star soccer player, after a remarkable save.

J.J. would stand there. He would have to decide whether to come out after Margie and Peg or telephone the coast guard and wait for help. It didn’t matter what he decided, because he would hate Margie and Peg either way. Whatever he decided, he would certainly hate them for it. Peg was sure of that, as she was treading water with her eyes closed. Peg did not have to watch more of this scene unfolding. No, she did not. Peg did not have to see it happen to know what would happen.

J.J. would hate Peg and Margie for demanding that difficult decision from him, just as Peg now hated Margie for crying in the water beside her. Just as Peg now hated spoiled and foolish John for taking his friends out there in the rough ocean. Just as (most of all) Peg now hated her handsome boyfriend J.J. Peg hated J.J. for standing on the beach while she herself got dragged out deeper to sea. She hated him for being a strong swimmer. She hated him for wondering what to decide and for catching his breath, and she hated him (most of all) for hating her.

The Many Things That Denny Brown Did Not Know (Age Fifteen)

N O FAULT of his own, but Denny Brown did not know very much about his parents and their work. Denny’s parents were both nurses. His mother was a nurse in the burn unit at Monroe Memorial Hospital, and his father was a private duty nurse, also known as a visiting nurse. Denny was aware of these facts, naturally, but he did not know much past that.

Denny Brown did not know the extent of horrors that his mother encountered daily in her work at the burn unit. He did not know, for instance, that his mother sometimes cared for patients whose skin was essentially gone. He did not know that his mother was considered an exceptional nurse, who was famous for never losing her stomach and for keeping the other nurses from losing theirs. He did not know that his mother spoke to every burned patient, even the doomed ones, in cool and reassuring tones of conversation, never hinting at the agony of their prospects.

Denny Brown knew even less about his father’s nursing career, other than that it was unusual and embarrassing to have a father who was a nurse. Mr. Brown sensed his son’s shame, which was but one of the many reasons he did not talk about any aspect of his work in the home. There was no way, therefore, that Denny could have known that his father secretly would have preferred to have been a psychiatric nurse rather than a private duty nurse. Back in nursing school, Mr. Brown had trained at a large mental hospital, in the men’s ward. He had loved it there, and his patients had adored him. If he’d not actually felt that he could cure his patients, he’d certainly believed himself capable of bettering their lives.

However, there was no mental hospital in Monroe County. Therefore, Denny Brown’s father had spent his married life working as a private duty nurse instead of the psychiatric nurse he ought to have been. He worked purely out of economic necessity and did not enjoy his assignments. His talents were unrecognized. His patients were old, dying people. They did not even notice him, except in spare moments, when they came out of their death marches only long enough to be suspicious of him. The patients’ families were suspicious as well, always accusing private duty nurses of stealing. Society as a whole, in fact, was suspicious of male nurses. So Mr. Brown was met with skepticism in every new job, in every new home, as though he were something perverse.

What’s more, Denny Brown’s father believed that private duty nursing was not nursing at all, but merely tending. It frustrated him that he did more bathing and wiping than he did nursing. Year after year, Denny Brown’s father sat in home after home, watching over the slow and expensive deaths of one wealthy, aged cancer patient after another.

Denny Brown did not know anything about any of this.

Denny Brown (at age fifteen) did not know that his mother regretted the rough things that she often said. She’d had a wise mouth as a little girl, and she had a wise mouth as a grown woman. She also had a dirty mouth. The wise mouth had always been with her. The dirty mouth came from her year of nursing in Korea during the war. In any case, she often said things that she didn’t mean or later was privately sorry for. Very privately sorry.

For instance, there was a young nurse named Beth in the burn unit where Denny’s mother worked. Beth had a drinking problem. One day, Beth confessed to Denny’s mother that she was pregnant. Beth didn’t want to have an abortion but couldn’t imagine keeping a child on her own.

Beth said desperately, “I was thinking of selling my baby to a nice, childless couple.”

And Denny Brown’s mother said, “The way you drink, you could sell that baby to the fucking circus.”

Mrs. Brown was instantly mortified at herself. She avoided Beth for days, secretly asking herself, as she often did, Why am I such a horrible human being?

At the end of Denny Brown’s sophomore year, he was invited to the Monroe High School Academic Awards Banquet. Denny’s father had to work, but Mrs. Brown attended. Denny got a handful of awards that night. He was a very good, though not exceptional, student. He was a smart kid, but he did not excel in any particular subject, as he did not know yet whether he was very good at any particular thing. So Denny received a small handful of awards, including a certificate of merit, honoring his participation in something called Youth Art Month.

“Youth Art Month,” his mother said on the ride home. “Youth Art Month.”

She pronounced it slowly: “Youth . . . Art . . . Month . . .”

She pronounced it quickly: “YouthArtMonth.”

She laughed and said, “There’s just no right way to say that, is there? That’s just an ugly goddamn phrase, isn’t it?”

And then Denny Brown’s mother recognized her son’s silence. And she too was silent for the rest of the drive.

She drove on. She did not speak, but she was thinking of Denny. She was thinking, He does not know how sorry I am.

Denny Brown did not know, at the beginning of his sixteenth summer, what he was going to do for a job. He did not know what he was interested in. He did not know what was out there for work.

After a few weeks of looking, he ended up taking a part-time job at the Monroe Country Club. He worked in the men’s locker room. It was a fancy, carpeted locker room, fragrant with hidden deodorizing agents. The distinguished men of Monroe Township would use the locker room to dress for the golf course. They would put on their cleated golf shoes, leaving their dress shoes on the floor in front of their lockers. Denny Brown did not know anything about golf, but this was not required for his work. It was Denny’s job to polish the men’s dress shoes while the men themselves golfed. He shared this job with a sixteen-year-old boy from his neighborhood named Abraham Ryan. There was no apparent reason that two people were needed for the job. Denny did not know why these men needed their shoes polished every day, in the first place. Denny did not know why he had been hired.

Some days, Denny and Abraham would have to polish no more than three pairs of shoes during the entire course of their shift. They took turns. When they weren’t working, they were instructed to stay in the corner of the locker room, next to the electric shoe-polishing machine. There was only one stool in the locker room, and Denny and Abraham took turns sitting on it. While one sat, the other would lean against the wall.

Denny and Abraham were supervised by the Monroe Country Club sports and recreation manager, a serious older man named Mr. Deering. Mr. Deering would look in on them every hour or so, and say, “Look sharp, boys. The best men in Monroe come through this door.”

There was one more component to their job besides polishing shoes. Denny Brown and Abraham Ryan were also in charge of emptying a small tin ashtray that was kept on a wooden table in one corner of the locker room. Nobody ever sat at this table. Denny did not know why the table was there at all, other than to hold the tin ashtray. An average of four cigarette butts a day collected in that ashtray. Still, since the table was just out of their line of vision, Denny and Abraham sometimes forgot to empty it. Mr. Deering would look in on them and scold them.

“Look sharp now,” Mr. Deering would say. “It’s your job to keep this place looking sharp, boys.”

When Denny described his work at the Monroe Country Club to his mother, she shook her head. She said, “That is exactly the kind of job that people in communist countries have.”

Then she laughed. Denny laughed, too.

Although he did not really know what she meant.

Denny Brown (at age fifteen) did not know how he had suddenly come to be Russell Kalesky’s best friend. He did not know how he had suddenly come to be Paulette Kalesky’s boyfriend. Both events had occurred within a month of graduation from tenth grade.

Russell Kalesky and Paulette Kalesky were brother and sister, and they were neighbors of Denny’s. As a little kid, Denny Brown had been bullied senseless by Russell Kalesky. Russell was a year older than Denny. Not a big child, but a mean one. These were some of Russell’s favorite games—playing with fire in Denny’s house, throwing eggs at Denny, treating Denny’s pets roughly, and stealing Denny’s toys to tuck behind the wheels of parked cars. Also, Russell Kalesky passionately enjoyed punching Denny in the stomach.

However, during Denny Brown’s sixteenth summer, he suddenly became Russell Kalesky’s best friend. He did not know how this had happened. He knew when it happened, though. It happened the day after Russell Kalesky bought himself a car, which cost $150. The car was a huge black eight-cylinder Ford sedan, which actually did not run at all. The previous owner of the Ford—an amateur stock car mechanic—happily towed the car over to the Kaleskys’ driveway and dropped it there for Russell “to work on.” Denny Brown happened to be walking past the Kalesky house on the morning when Russell began working on the Ford, and Russell said, “Hey, man. Check it out.”

Russell had the hood up and was polishing the engine with a rag. Denny Brown came over nervously, but trying not to look nervous. He watched for a while. Russell finally said, “There’s another rag, man. You want to help?”

So Denny Brown took up a rag and started polishing Russell Kalesky’s car engine. It was an enormous engine. Big enough for two polishers.

“Excellent, right?” Russell Kalesky said.

“Excellent,” Denny Brown agreed.

After that, Russell started coming around to the Browns’ place every morning, asking for Denny.

“Hey, man,” he’d say, “want to work on the car today?”

“Excellent,” Denny would say.

Denny Brown did not know a single thing about cars. To be honest, neither did Russell. Together, they would unscrew parts and peer at them. They would crawl underneath the car and tap on things with wrenches. They could pass hours this way. Denny would try to start the engine while Russell leaned over the hood, head cocked, listening. Listening hard. They never had the first idea what they were looking at or listening for.

During rest breaks, they would sit in the front seat of the Ford with the doors open, one foot inside and one foot flat on the driveway. Heads back, eyes half shut. The only part of the Ford that actually worked was the radio, and Russell would find a station and turn it up. They would relax. The other guys in the neighborhood would come around, riding their bikes up to the Kaleskys’ house and dropping their bikes into the Kaleskys’ yard. Then the neighborhood guys would lean against Russell Kalesky’s Ford, arms folded, listening to the radio. Just hanging out.

Occasionally, Russell would say, “Excellent, right?”

“Excellent,” the guys would all agree.

They would listen to the radio like that until Russell said, “That’s it. Back to work.”

Then all the guys in the neighborhood would have to get on their bikes and ride away.

“Stick around, Dennis,” Russell would say.

Denny Brown did not know how he had suddenly come to be Russell Kalesky’s best friend. He did not know how common it is, in fact, for bullies to eventually befriend their victims. He was not yet completely sure that he would never be punched in the stomach again. Denny simply had no idea how happy it made Russell to have him come over in the mornings and work on the Ford. Denny did not know that this was the happiest thing in Russell’s life.

Denny Brown also did not know that Russell Kalesky’s older brother, Peter Kalesky, made fun of Russell’s car every single time he came home for dinner. Peter Kalesky owned a handsome Chevrolet truck. Peter was twenty years old and lived in his own apartment on the other side of Monroe. Unfortunately, Peter came home for dinner often. Denny Brown did not know anything about Peter’s attacks on Russell.

“You know what Ford stands for?” Peter would say. “It stands for ‘Fix or Repair Daily.’

“You know what Ford stands for?” Peter would say. “It stands for ‘Found on Road Dead.’

“You know what Ford stands for?” Peter would say. “It stands for ‘Found Out Russell’s Dumb.’

“You know why they have rear-window defrost features in Fords?” Peter would say. “To keep your hands warm while you’re pushing your car up a fucking hill.”

Russell Kalesky put himself to sleep every night with dreams of running his brother Peter over with his shiny Ford. Nobody knew about this. It was Russell’s secret comfort. He would dream of driving over Peter, dropping the transmission into reverse, and driving over Peter again. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. In his dreams, the car made a gentle thud every time it ran over Peter’s body. And it was that sweet thud thud thud sound that would finally send Russell off to sleep.

In the morning, Russell Kalesky would wake up and go over to Denny Brown’s house.

“Want to work on the car, man?” he’d ask.

“Excellent,” Denny Brown would say. (Still not knowing—never knowing—why he had been asked.)

As for Paulette Kalesky, she was Russell’s older sister. She was eighteen years old. She was the best baby sitter in Monroe County, and she worked constantly, tending to the children of a dozen different families in the neighborhood. Paulette was short, brunette, with large breasts and a careful, neat mouth. She had lovely skin. She walked up and down the streets of the neighborhood, pushing other people’s children in carriages, with more children following her on tricycles. She gave piggyback rides and supervised ice cream cones. She carried Band-Aids and Kleenex in her purse, just like a real mother. The Kaleskys were not the best family in Monroe County, but people liked and trusted Paulette. She was very much in demand as a baby sitter.

At the end of June, Denny Brown was invited over to the Kaleskys’ house for dinner. It was Russell Kalesky’s birthday. Mrs. Kalesky made spaghetti. Everybody was there. Peter Kalesky had driven over from his apartment across town, and Paulette Kalesky had taken a rare night off from baby-sitting. Denny Brown was the only nonfamily member at the party. He was seated across the table from Russell, wedged between Paulette Kalesky and Mr. Kalesky. Russell started to open his birthday gifts and Paulette just went ahead and put her hand on Denny’s leg, hidden under the table. Denny and Paulette had only spoken to each other once before this incident. The hand on the leg made no sense. Nevertheless, Denny Brown (age fifteen) slid his hand under the table and put it on top of the hand of Paulette Kalesky (age eighteen). He squeezed her hand. He did not know where he had learned to do that.

Over the course of that summer, Paulette Kalesky and Denny Brown developed a system. She would let him know where she was baby-sitting that night, and he would ride his bicycle over and visit her after eight o’clock, once she had efficiently put the children to bed. Alone together, Denny Brown and Paulette Kalesky had hot, hot sex. Incredible sex. He did not know how or why this system had been established, but there it was. They were terrifically secretive. Nobody knew anything about Denny and Paulette. But there it was. Hot sex. Out of nowhere.

At age fifteen, there was so much that Denny Brown did not know about Paulette Kalesky. She had great big breasts. He knew that, but he only knew it by discreet observation. Hot sex notwithstanding, Paulette would never let him see or touch her chest. She kept her shirt on all the time. Denny did not know why. The fact was, Paulette had gotten her breasts in fifth grade. Way too early, way too big. Her brothers, Peter and Russell, had obviously made huge fun of her about it, as did her schoolmates. There was a period during sixth grade when she was getting so regularly mocked that she would cry every morning and beg her parents not to make her go to school.

Paulette’s father had told her, “Big breasts are nice, and someday you will be happy to have them. In the meantime, you’ll just have to be ridiculed.”

Paulette continued to get ridiculed throughout high school, with a new twist: some girls in her class were now jealous of her. There was one group, in particular, who called her Paulette the Toilet or Paulette the Slut. But it was not that she was taking anybody’s boyfriends. Not by any measure. Denny Brown was her first boyfriend, her first kiss. By that time, she was already finished with high school.

Denny did not know why Paulette Kalesky suddenly liked him any more than he knew why Russell Kalesky suddenly liked him. He had no idea what this was all about.

There was, in truth, a very good explanation for Paulette’s attraction to Denny, but it was a secret. Denny Brown would never know about it. Denny Brown would never know that Paulette Kalesky had been a baby sitter for several months in a home where Denny’s own father was a visiting nurse. It was in the home of an affluent local family named Hart. Mrs. Hart had a new baby in the very same year that Mr. Hart’s father was dying of cancer. In the same house, therefore, the Harts had to tend to a colicky baby girl and an eighty-year-old senile man with a rotting liver. Paulette Kalesky was hired to care for the baby. Mr. Brown was hired to care for the old man. Paulette and Mr. Brown did not spend a lot of personal time together during these months, but their paths did cross in the Harts’ house, usually in the kitchen, where Paulette would be making up a bottle while Mr. Brown would be puréeing carrots.

“Do you want a cup of tea?” Mr. Brown would ask Paulette. “Maybe a glass of water? You look tired.”

“No, thank you,” Paulette would say, who was shy of an adult treating her as if she herself were an adult.

“You’re doing a very good job,” Mr. Brown once told Paulette. “Mrs. Hart would be lost without you.”

Paulette thought that Mr. Brown did a good job, too, the way he nursed old Mr. Hart. She’d seen how he’d brightened and cleaned the sickroom since taking over the role of the primary visiting nurse. Mr. Brown had brought a large, cheerful calendar into the sickroom, which he hung right across from Mr. Hart’s bed. He’d also brought in a clock with bright hands, which he propped where the patient could see it. He spoke to old Mr. Hart in the most clear and specific ways, using direct references to time and location. He gave out every possible piece of information, always trying to keep the vanishing Mr. Hart alerted to the world.

“My name is Fred Brown,” Mr. Brown would say, at the beginning of every shift. “I am the nurse who takes care of you. I’m going to be here with you for eight hours. Your oldest son, Anthony, hired me. You are staying in Anthony’s house.”

Throughout the day, Mr. Brown would explain his every move this clearly. And at the end of a typical day, he would say, “Good night, Mr. Hart. It is seven in the evening, and time for me to go home. I will come by to help you again on Wednesday, October fourteenth, at eleven in the morning.”

Paulette Kalesky thought that Mr. Brown was a wonderful person and a wonderful nurse. She thought he was the nicest man she had ever met, and she secretly fell in love with him. Eventually old Mr. Hart died of liver cancer, of course. Mr. Brown moved on to another case, so Paulette Kalesky did not see him anymore, except in brief glimpses around the neighborhood. But then, suddenly, Denny Brown started hanging around her house, working on her little brother Russell’s Ford.

“Your dad is Fred Brown, isn’t he?” Paulette asked Denny, way back in June. It was the first time they had ever spoken. In fact, it would be the only time they spoke before the night that Paulette put her hand on Denny’s leg. Denny would never know why she had asked this particular question.

“Sure,” said Denny. “He’s my dad.”

Paulette did not think that Denny looked like his father at all. Nonetheless, she very much hoped that he might grow up to be like his father. Somehow, in some manner. So she secretly fell in love with Denny Brown, for that reason. With that hope.

Naturally, Denny Brown did not know anything about any of this.

As an adult, Denny Brown would look back on his sixteenth summer and think that it was a wonder he was even allowed to leave the house. He would realize how woefully uninformed he was, how woefully unprepared. There was so much information that Denny Brown was missing at age fifteen. Any of it would have helped him. No matter how minor. Later in life, Denny would believe that he had been sent out there knowing nothing. Nobody ever told him anything about anything. He did not know what people did with their lives or what they wanted or regretted. He did not know why people got married or chose jobs or chose friends or hid their breasts. He did not know whether he was good at anything or how to find out. Everybody just let him walk around without knowing a thing.

His education was so incomplete. Denny Brown (at age fifteen) did not know the meaning of any of these words: ethereal, prosaic, fluvial, paucity, gregarious, vitriol, umbrage, nihilism, or coup d’état. These were among a list of words that he (and every other high school junior in the region) would be taught by the end of the following school year. But he would have to go through his sixteenth summer without having the use of any of those words.

Denny Brown did not know about Euclid or mitosis or Beethoven’s deafness, either, but the Monroe County Board of Education was all geared up to teach him those things as well, come September.

And another thing Denny Brown knew nothing about was the very name of his town. What did “Monroe” even mean? He had somehow been allowed to pass through ten grades of Monroe County public schools without ever having learned that his town was named after an American president, James Monroe. Denny Brown thought that “Monroe” was just a word. Denny did not know, therefore, what “Monroe” was referring to, when used in the very central contexts of his life, like Monroe Memorial Hospital or Monroe High School or Monroe Country Club. Denny Brown did not know that James Monroe was a wounded Revolutionary War veteran and a two-term president. Denny certainly did not know that, during his 1820 re-election bid, James Monroe had received every single vote in the electoral college except one—that of a New Hampshire delegate named William Plumber. William Plumber had withheld his vote intentionally, taking it on himself to ensure that no man would ever share with George Washington the honor of a unanimous election to the United States presidency. William Plumber (who was notable in his life for nothing else) believed that stripping George Washington of that singular achievement would have been a national shame, remembered and regretted by every citizen throughout American history.

And yet Denny Brown (at age fifteen) did not even know that the word “Monroe” was a person’s name.

Denny Brown knew nothing about where he lived. He did not know that his water came from a reservoir twenty-five miles north of Monroe, or that his electricity came from one of the state’s first nuclear plants. He’d spent his life in a suburban housing development called Greenwood Fields, never knowing that the area had once been a dairy farm. He did not know that the land had once belonged to a family of Swedish immigrants named Martinsson, whose only son died in 1917, killed in the trenches of France. Actually, Denny Brown did not yet know what trenches were. That was eleventh-grade history. He did not yet know very much about World War I. He knew nothing (and would never really learn) about more obscure wars, like the Spanish-American War and the Korean War. He did not know that his mother had served for a year as a nurse in the Korean War. She’d never mentioned it.

Denny Brown did not know that his parents had fallen in love literally at first sight, or that his mother was pregnant on her wedding day. He did not know that his Grandmother Brown had objected strongly to the marriage because Denny’s mother was older than his father and had a wise mouth. Grandmother Brown thought that Denny’s mother was a “whore,” and said as much to her son. (That would be her only use of dirty language in ninety years on earth, and Denny’s father wept at the word.)

Denny Brown did not know that his mother had wept only once in her married life. He could not imagine her ever crying. It was over Denny himself, actually. It happened when Denny was two years old. He had reached up to the stove and pulled a frying pan full of simmering gravy down on top of him. His mother was right there. She grabbed him and threw him into the bathtub, where she ran cold water over him. She tore off his clothing. His mother (the burn unit nurse, the war hospital nurse) became hysterical, screaming for her husband. The baby screamed; the mother screamed. She would not let Denny out from under the stream of cold water, even when he was shivering and his lips were turning blue.

“He’s burned!” she screamed. “He’s burned! He’s burned!”

In fact, Denny turned out to be fine. Mrs. Brown had acted quickly enough, and Denny had received only first-degree burns on his face and hands. But his mother cried for a full day. She thought, “I am not worthy to be a mother.”

What’s more, up until the day that Denny was burned, his mother had wanted to have a second child, but she did not ever consider this again. Never again. Denny Brown did not know that he had ever been burned or that his mother had ever cried or that his mother had ever wanted another baby. He did not know anything about any of this.

He did know, however, where babies came from. At age fifteen, he did know that. His mother had taught him that, at the proper age and in the proper manner.

But there was so much else that he did not yet know. He was ignorant on so very many subjects. At age fifteen, for instance, Denny Brown still happened to believe that the Twin Towers were located in the Twin Cities.

On the morning of August 17, during Denny Brown’s sixteenth summer, Russell Kalesky came over to the Browns’ house, asking for Denny. As usual. Everything that morning was just as usual.

“Want to work on the car today, man?” Russell asked.

“Excellent,” Denny said.

But Russell looked different. His face and arms were covered with ugly red spots.

“Are you okay?” Denny asked.

“Check it out,” Russell said. “I got the chicken pox, man.”

Denny Brown did not know that anybody except little kids could get the chicken pox.

“Mom!” Denny cried, laughing. “Mom! Help!”

Denny’s mother, the nurse, came to the door and looked at Russell. She made him lift up his shirt so that she could examine the spots on his chest. This made Russell Kalesky laugh so hard out of embarrassment that a bubble of snot popped out of his nostril, and that made Denny laugh so hard that he had to sit down on the front step. Denny and Russell were both laughing like fools.

“You definitely have the chicken pox, Russell,” Denny’s mother diagnosed.

For some reason, this made Russell and Denny laugh so hard that they had to fall into each other’s arms and then hold on to their stomachs and stamp their feet.

“Although it doesn’t seem to be interfering with morale . . .” Denny’s mother observed.

Because he had already had the chicken pox, Denny was allowed to go over to the Kaleskys’ house. Russell and Denny worked on the Ford for a while. Their job for the day was to take the mirrors off the sides of the car, soak them in a bucket of soapy water, then polish them and return them to their places. Russell kept stepping out of the driveway and into the garage because he said the sun hurt his chicken pox. Every time Russell mentioned the words chicken pox, Denny would start laughing again.

“Who gets the chicken pox, man?” Denny asked. “That’s crazy, getting the chicken pox.”

“My whole goddamn family got it, man,” Russell said. “Nobody ever had it before, and the whole family got it. Even my mom got it, man.”

Denny laughed. Then he stopped laughing.

“Even Paulette?” he asked. “Did Paulette get it?”

It was the first time Denny Brown had ever said the name Paulette around her brother Russell Kalesky.

“Paulette?” Russell said. “Paulette? Paulette’s the one that brought it home, man. Shit! She got it the worst. She got it from one of her stupid kids, man.”

“Is she . . . um . . . okay?”

Russell was not hearing or recognizing Denny’s tone. Russell was not asking himself why Denny Brown would care about his sister, Paulette.

Russell said, “Paulette’s a freak, man. She won’t come out of her room, man. She’s just up there crying all day. ‘Wahhh! It itches! Help me!’”

Denny stood there in the Kaleskys’ driveway. He stood there in the sun, holding a sideview mirror. Stood there and stood there.

“Hey, man,” Russell said.

“Hey, man,” Russell said again.

Denny Brown looked up at him.

“Hey, man,” Russell said.

“I have to go inside now,” Denny said.

Denny set the sideview mirror down on the driveway and went into the Kaleskys’ house. Mrs. Kalesky was lying on the couch. The shades were drawn in the living room, and the television was on. Mrs. Kalesky was pink with calomine lotion.

“Are you okay?” Denny asked her.

She was smoking a cigarette, and she looked up at him. She was usually a friendly lady, but she didn’t smile. She shook her head, in fact, and looked miserable. Her face was covered with lumps and swellings, worse than Russell’s.

“I’ll be back, Mrs. Kalesky,” Denny said. “I’m just going upstairs. I’m just going upstairs for a minute.”

Denny went up the stairs of the Kaleskys’ house and down the hall to the room he knew was Paulette’s. He knocked on the door.

“It’s Denny,” he said. “It’s me.”

He went inside. Paulette was on her bed, lying on top of her sheets and blankets. She saw Denny and started to cry. She was worse than Russell and worse than her mother. She put her hands over her face.

“It itches,” she said. “It itches so much.”

“Okay,” Denny said. “Hold on, okay?”

The thing was, Denny had indeed had the chicken pox before. He wasn’t that young when he’d had it, either. Almost eleven years old. His mother had been working a lot during that time, and Denny’s father had nursed him. Denny’s father had done a very good job nursing him, Denny remembered.

Denny went downstairs and into the Kaleskys’ kitchen. Russell was inside now, too.

“What the fuck, man?” Russell asked.

“Russell,” Mrs. Kalesky said. “No.” She was too weak to protest the dirty mouth further.

“Russell,” Denny said, “I just need to get some oatmeal.”

Denny started looking through the kitchen cabinets.

“What the fuck, man?” Russell demanded. No protest this time from Mrs. Kalesky. She was really sick.

Denny found a large container of oatmeal, and said to Russell, “It’s for the itching. Paulette needs it, okay?”

He went back upstairs. Russell followed him, silent. Denny ran some water in the upstairs bathtub of the Kaleskys’ house. He poured the full container of oatmeal into the bath and tested the water temperature, rolling one sleeve up and dipping his arm into the tub. He swirled the oatmeal around and left the water running.

Denny went back into Paulette’s bedroom. He passed Russell without speaking.

“Paulette,” Denny said, “you’re going to sit in the bathtub for a little while, okay? That helps. It helps the itching. I’m going to sit with you, okay?”

He helped her sit up in bed, and then he led her into the bathroom. She was still crying, although not as much. He was holding her hand as they passed by the astonished former bully, Russell Kalesky, who was still standing in the hallway.

“Excuse me,” Denny said politely to Russell. “Sorry.”

Denny took Paulette into the bathroom and shut and locked the door behind them.

“Okay,” he said to her. “Here we go, okay?”

Paulette was wearing her pajamas. They were damp with perspiration. She was very, very sick.

“Okay,” Denny said. “You’re going to have to get undressed, okay?”

Paulette put her hand on the sink, to steady herself. She took off her socks, one at a time. She stepped out of her pajama bottoms. Then she stepped out of her underwear. She stood there.

“Okay,” Denny said. “I’m going to help you out of this shirt, and then we’re going to put you in the bathtub, okay? You’re going to feel a lot better, okay? Okay? Lift up your arms, Paulette.”

Paulette stood there.

“Here we go,” Denny said. “Lift up your arms.”

Paulette lifted her arms up, like a little girl who needs help getting out of a nightgown. Denny pulled her pajama top over her head.

“Okay,” Denny said. “Looks like you have the worst of it on your stomach.”

“Look at my skin!” Paulette said, and started to cry again.

“Your skin is going to be fine, okay?” Denny said.

He tested the water again, which was lukewarm. Cool and reassuring tones of water temperature. He swirled the oatmeal once more in the bath and helped Paulette step in.

“That feels better, right?” Denny Brown (age fifteen) said. “That helps, doesn’t it?”

She sat in the bath, knees up to her chest. She put her head on her knees, still crying.

“Here we go,” Denny Brown said. He scooped up handfuls of wet, cool oatmeal and pressed them on her back, against the patches of mean, swollen pox. “Here we go. Here we go.”

Denny packed the cool oatmeal against her neck and shoulders and arms. He took a cup from the sink and ran water over her head to calm the itching under her hair. He ran warmer water into the tub when its temperature began to drop.

Denny Brown knelt on the floor beside Paulette. Downstairs on the couch, Mrs. Kalesky wondered what was going on up there. Upstairs in the hallway, the former bully Russell Kalesky sat down on the floor, directly across from the locked bathroom door. Russell stared at the door. He tried to hear what was going on in there, but he could hear nothing.

Inside the bathroom, Denny was tending Paulette. “You can lean back now,” he told her.

He helped ease her from the sitting position until she lay back in the bathtub. He put a folded towel under her head as a pillow. The water was cool and high all around her, reaching just below her chin. Her breasts floated up. They were lightened by the water.

“You’re going to feel better in exactly five minutes,” Denny Brown said, and smiled at her. Then he said, “Do you want a glass of water?”

“No, thank you,” Paulette said.

Maybe five minutes passed. Five minutes probably did pass. Mrs. Kalesky waited downstairs, still wondering what was going on. A few houses away, Denny Brown’s mother got ready to go to work at the burn unit. Denny Brown’s father helped a dying patient across town eat some lunch. Monroe High School sat empty. Russell Kalesky’s Ford sat in the driveway, still as ever. It was August. All things were as they always are in August.

And then Paulette Kalesky said to Denny Brown, “You’re doing a good job.”

Just outside the bathroom, Russell Kalesky sat very still indeed. He did not know what his friend was doing in there. He did not know what his sister was doing in there. Russell did not know what he was watching for, but he watched that bathroom door as closely as any person can watch anything. He did not know what he was listening for, either. But Russell Kalesky listened, and his head was cocked sharply.

The Names of Flowers and Girls

A T THE TIME of Babette, my grandfather was not yet twenty. Although today, and perhaps even then, such youth is not necessarily married to innocence, in his case it was. There were boys his age who had already served in the war and returned, but he was not among them, for the unromantic reason that one of his feet was several sizes larger than the other. Outfitting him with boots would have inconvenienced the United States Army enough that he was not selected, and he passed the war years, as before, in the company of his elderly great-aunt.

On this particular Wednesday night, he chose not to tell his aunt where he was going. This was not out of deviousness, for he was not by nature a liar. Rather, he believed that she would not have understood or even heard him in the advanced stage of her senility. He did ask the neighbor, a widow with bad knees, to look in on his aunt throughout the evening, and she agreed to. He had already been to a boxing match the month before, and had briefly, late one Saturday, stood in the doorway of a loud and dangerous local bar, so this was not his first attempt to observe a seediness he had never known. He learned little out of those first two experiences, however, except that the smell of tobacco smoke clings stubbornly to hair and clothing. He had higher hopes for this evening.

The nightclub he found was considerably darker inside than the street outside had been. It was an early show, a weekday show, but the place had already filled with a shifting, smoking audience of men. The few lights around the orchestra dimmed just as he entered, and he was forced to feel his way to a seat, stepping over feet and knees in the aisle. He tried not to touch people, but brushed nonetheless against wool and skin with every move until he found an empty seat and took it.

“Time?” a voice beside him demanded. My grandfather tensed, but did not answer.

“The time?” the voice questioned again. My grandfather asked quietly, “Are you talking to me?”

There was a sudden spotlight on the stage, and the question was forgotten. Babette began to sing, although at that time, of course, he did not know her name. When his eyes adjusted to the glaring white light, it was only the color of her dress that he saw—a vivid green that today we call lime. It is a color decidedly not found in nature but is now manufactured artificially for the dying of paint, clothing, and food. It cannot shock us anymore; we are too familiar with it. In 1919, however, there were not yet cars to be found in that shade, or small houses in the suburbs, or, one would suspect, fabric.

Nonetheless, Babette wore it, sleeveless and short. My grandfather did not at first even notice that she was singing, on account of that vivid lime-green dress. She was not a gifted singer, but it is almost petty to say so, as musical ability was clearly not required for her job. What she did, and did well, was move in swaying, dancing steps on very pleasant legs. Novelists writing only a decade before that night still referred to beautiful women as having “rounded, well-shaped arms.” By the end of World War I, however, fashion had changed such that other features were now visible, and arms got considerably less attention than they once had. This was unfortunate, for Babette’s arms were lovely, perhaps even her best feature. My grandfather, however, was not very modern, even as a young man, and he noticed Babette’s arms appreciatively.

The lights at the back of the stage had risen, and there were several dancing couples now behind Babette. They were adequate, efficient dancers—the men slender and dark, the women in short swinging dresses. The nature of the lighting muted the shades of their clothing into uniform browns and grays, and my grandfather could do little more than note their presence and then resume staring at Babette.

He was not familiar enough with show business to know that what he was watching was the insignificant opening act of what would be a long bawdy night of performance. This particular number was no more than an excuse to open the curtain on something other than an empty stage, to warm up the small orchestra, and to alert the audience that the evening was commencing. There was nothing risqué about Babette except the length of her hemline, and it is likely that my grandfather was the only member of the audience who felt any excitement at what he was watching. It is almost certain that none of the other men around him were clutching at their trousers with damp hands or moving their lips, silently searching for words to describe that dress, those arms, that startling red hair and lipstick. Most of the audience had already heard the song on a recording made by a prettier, more talented girl than Babette, but my grandfather knew very little of popular music or of pretty girls.

When the performers bowed and the lights dimmed, he jumped from his seat and moved quickly back over the men in his row, stepping on feet, stumbling, apologizing for his clumsiness in a low murmur. He felt his way up the center aisle and to the heavy doors, which threw quick triangles of light on the floor behind him as he pushed them open. He ran into the lobby and caught an usher by the arm.

“I need to speak with the singer,” he said.

The usher, my grandfather’s age but a veteran of the war, asked, “Who?”

“The singer. The one with the red, the red—” He pulled at his own hair in frustration.

“The redhead,” the usher finished.

“Yes.”

“She’s with the visiting troupe.”

“Yes, good, good,” my grandfather said, nodding foolishly. “Wonderful!”

“What do you need with her?”

“I need to speak with her,” he repeated.

Perhaps the usher, seeing that my grandfather was sober and young, thought that he was a messenger boy, or perhaps he only wanted to be left alone. In any case, he led him to Babette’s room, which was under the stage in a dark, door-lined hall.

“Someone here to see you, miss,” he said, knocking twice and leaving before she answered.

Babette opened the door and looked down the hall at the departing usher, and then at my grandfather. She wore a slip and had a large pink towel wrapped around her shoulders like a shawl.

“Yes?” she asked, lifting her high, arched eyebrows even higher.

“I need to speak with you,” my grandfather said.

She looked him over. He was tall and pale, in a clean, inexpensive suit, and he carried his folded overcoat under one arm as if it were a football. He had a bad habit of stooping, but now, out of nervousness, was standing perfectly straight. This posture helped his appearance somewhat, forcing his chin out and lending his shoulders a width they did not generally seem to have. There was nothing about him that would have compelled Babette to shut the door in his face, so she remained there before him in her slip and towel.

“Yes?” she asked again.

“I want to paint you,” he said, and she frowned and took a step back. My grandfather thought with alarm that she had misunderstood him to mean that he wanted to apply paint to her body, as one would paint a wall, and, horrified, he explained, “I meant that I would like to paint a picture of you, a portrait of you!”

“Right now?” she asked, and he answered quickly, “No, no, not now. But I would like to, you see. I would love to.”

“You’re a painter?” she asked.

“Oh, I’m terrible,” my grandfather said. “I’m a terrible painter, I’m ghastly.”

She laughed at him. “I’ve already had my picture painted by several artists,” she lied.

“Certainly you have,” he said.

“You saw me sing?” she asked, and he said that he had indeed.

“You aren’t staying for the rest of the show?” she asked, and he paused before answering, realizing only then that there was a show other than what he had seen.

“No,” he said. “I didn’t want to miss you. I was afraid you might leave right away.”

She shrugged. “I don’t let men into my dressing room.”

“Of course you don’t!” he said, hoping he had not insinuated that he expected an invitation. “I had no intention of that.”

“But I’m not going to stand in this hallway and talk to you,” she continued.

My grandfather said, “I’m sorry that I disturbed you,” and unfolded his overcoat to put it on.

“What I mean is that if you want to talk to me, you’re just going to have to come inside,” Babette explained.

“I couldn’t; I didn’t mean to—”

But she had already stepped back into the small, poorly lit room and was holding the door open for him. He followed her in, and when she shut the door, he leaned against it, anxious to intrude as little as possible. Babette pulled an old piano stool over to the sink and looked at herself in a silver hand mirror. She ran the water until it was hot, dampened two fingers, and pressed a curl just behind her ear back into shape. Then she looked at my grandfather over her shoulder.

“Now why don’t you tell me just what it was that you wanted.”

“I wanted to draw you, to paint you.”

“But you say you’re no good.”

“Yes.”

“You shouldn’t say that,” Babette said. “If you’re going to be something, if you’re going to be someone, you’ve got to start telling people that you’re good.”

“I can’t,” he said. “I’m not.”

“Well, it’s easy enough to say that you are. Go on, say it. Say, ‘I am a good artist.’ Go on.”

“I can’t,” he repeated. “I’m not one.”

She picked up an eyebrow pencil off the edge of the sink and tossed it to him.

“Draw something,” she said.

“Where?”

“Anywhere. On this wall, on that wall, anywhere. Doesn’t matter to me.”

He hesitated.

“Go on,” she said. “It’s not as if you could make this room look any worse, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

He found a spot next to the sink where the paint wasn’t too badly chipped or marked with graffiti. Slowly, he began to draw a hand holding a fork. Babette stood behind him, leaning forward, watching over his shoulder.

“It’s not a good angle for me,” he said, but she did not answer, so he continued. He added a man’s forearm and wristwatch.

“It’s smudging like that because the pencil is so soft,” he apologized, and she said, “Stop talking about it. Just finish it.”

“It is finished.” He stepped back. “It’s already finished.”

She looked at him, and then at the sketch. “But that’s just a hand. There’s no person, no face.”

“See, I’m no good. I told you I was no good.”

“No.” Babette said. “I think you’re very good. I think this is an excellent hand and fork. From just this I’d let you paint my portrait. It’s just that it’s a queer thing to draw on a wall, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I never drew on a wall before.”

“Well, it’s a nice drawing,” Babette decided. “I think you’re a good artist.”

“Thank you.”

“You should tell me that I’m a good singer now.”

“But you are!” he said. “You’re wonderful.”

“Aren’t you sweet to say so.” Babette smiled graciously. “But I’m really not. There are no good singers in places like this. There are some fine dancers, and I’m not a bad dancer, but I’m a terrible singer.”

He didn’t know what to say to this, but she was looking at him as if it was his turn to speak, so he asked, “What’s your name?”

“Babette,” she said. “And when a girl criticizes herself, you really should crawl to the ends of the earth to contradict her, you know.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know.”

She looked at herself in the mirror again. “So do you want to only paint my hand?” she asked. “I haven’t got a fork with me.”

“No,” he said. “I want to paint you, all of you, surrounded by black, surrounded by a whole crowd of black. But there will be a white light, and you in the center”—he lifted his hands to show placement in an imaginary frame—“in the center in green and red.” He dropped his hands. “You should’ve seen that green and that red.”

“Well, it’s just the dress you like, then,” she said. “Just the dress and the hair.”

And your arms, he thought, but only nodded.

“None of that is really me, though,” Babette said. “Even my hair is fake.”

“Fake?”

“Yes. Fake. Dyed. Please don’t look so shocked. Really, you can’t have ever seen this color hair before.”

“No!” my grandfather almost shouted. “I never had. I think that’s exciting, that you can make it that way if you like. I wondered about it, but I didn’t think, of course, that it had been dyed. I think that there are so many colors I’ve never seen—could I touch it?”

“No,” Babette said. She reached for a comb from the sink and pulled a single red hair from its teeth. She handed it to him. “You can have this one piece. I’m sure that I don’t know you well enough to let you drag your hands all over my head.”

He carried the strand to the lamp and stretched it taut under the bulb, frowning in concentration.

“It’s brown at one end,” he said.

“That’s the new growth,” she explained.

“Your real hair?”

“The whole thing is my real hair. That brown is my real color.”

“Just like mine,” he said in surprise. “But you’d never know it to see you onstage. I tell you, you’d never imagine we two would have the same sort of hair. Isn’t that remarkable?”

Babette shrugged. “I wouldn’t say it was remarkable. But I suppose I’m used to my hair.”

“Yes, I suppose you are.”

“You’re not from New York City, are you?” she asked.

“Yes, I am. I’ve always lived here.”

“Well, you don’t act like it. You act just like a little boy from the country. Don’t be put off by that, now. It’s not a bad thing.”

“I think it is. I think it’s awful. It comes of not talking to enough people.”

“What do you do all day, then?”

“I work in the back of a print shop sometimes. And I live with my great-aunt.”

“And she’s very old,” Babette said.

“Yes. And senile. All she can remember anymore are the names of flowers and girls.”

“What?”

“The names of flowers and girls. I don’t know why, but that’s how it’s become. If I ask her a question, she thinks and thinks, but then finally she’ll say something like, ‘Queen Anne’s Lace, Daisy, Emily, Iris, Violet . . .’”

“No!” Babette said. “I think that’s remarkable. She must be very pretty to listen to.”

“Sometimes. Sometimes it’s just sad, because I can see how frustrated she is. Other times she just lets herself talk and strings them all together: ‘Ivy-Buttercup-Catherine-Pearl-Poppy-Lily-Rose.’ Then it’s pretty to listen to.”

“I’m sure that it is,” Babette said. “You forget how many flowers’ names are girls’ names, too.”

“Yes.” My grandfather nodded. “I’ve noticed that.”

“She used to take care of you, didn’t she?”

“Yes,” he said. “When I was young.”

“You still are young.” Babette laughed. “I’m even young, and I think I’m much older than you.”

“I couldn’t imagine how old you are. I hadn’t even thought about it.”

“I can see why you wouldn’t.” Babette lifted her mirror again and looked at herself. “All this makeup covers everything. It’s hard to tell what I look like at all. I think I’m pretty, anyway, but I only realized this week that I’m not going to age well. Some women I know look like girls their whole lives, and I suspect that it’s on account of their skin. From a distance I still look fine, and onstage I’ll look wonderful for years, but if you come close to me, you’ll see the change already.”

She jumped up and ran in two steps to the opposite corner of the room from my grandfather.

“You see, I’m just heavenly from here,” she said, and then leaped right up to him so that their noses almost touched. “But now look at me. See the little lines here and here?” She pointed to the outer corner of each eye. My grandfather saw nothing like lines, only quickly blinking lashes and makeup. He noticed that her breath smelled of cigarettes and oranges, and then he stopped breathing, afraid that he might touch her somehow, or do something wrong. She took a step back, and he exhaled.

“But it’s like that with everything you look at too closely,” Babette continued. The green dress that she had worn earlier was hanging over a low ceiling pipe. She pulled the dress down and backed into the far corner again, holding it up against herself. “Just look at this lovely green thing,” she said. “Onstage it’ll turn a man’s head, won’t it? And I looked so swish in it, didn’t you think?”

My grandfather said that he had thought just that. She approached him again, although, to his relief, she did not stand so close this time.

“But you can see what a cheap thing it really is,” she said, turning the dress inside out. “It looks just like a child sewed those seams, and it’s all kept together with pins. And feel it. Go on.”

My grandfather lifted a bit of the skirt in one hand, although he did not really feel the material as he had been told to.

“You can tell right away that it’s not really silk, that there isn’t actually anything nice about it at all. If I wore this to someone’s home, I would look just like some kind of street girl. It’s pathetic.” She turned from him, and, over her shoulder, she added, “I will spare you the smell of the thing. I’m certain that you can imagine it.”

Actually, he couldn’t begin to imagine what it smelled like. Cigarettes and oranges, he suspected, but he had no way of knowing. Babette let her pink towel slide to the floor, and then turned and faced my grandfather in only her slip and stockings.

“I would guess that I look very nice this way,” she said, “although I don’t have a large mirror, so I’m not sure. But if I were to take this slip off, and if you were to come over here next to me, you’d see that I have all sorts of bumps and hairs and freckles, and you might be very disappointed. You’ve never seen a naked woman, have you?”

“Yes, I have,” he said, and Babette looked at him in quick surprise.

“You have never,” she said sharply. “You have never in your life.”

“I have. It’s been three years now that my aunt can’t care for herself. I keep her clean, change her clothes, give her baths.”

Babette winced. “I think that must be disgusting.” She picked up the towel from the floor and wrapped it around her shoulders again. “She probably can’t even control herself anymore. She’s probably all covered with nasty messes.”

“I keep her very clean,” he said. “I make sure that she—”

“No.” Babette held up her hands. “I can’t listen to that, any of that. I’ll be sick, really I will.”

“I’m sorry,” my grandfather said. “I didn’t mean—”

“That doesn’t disgust you? To do those things?” she interrupted.

“No,” he said honestly. “I think it must be just like taking care of a baby, don’t you?”

“No. Absolutely not. Isn’t that funny, though, that I would be so disgusted by what you just told me? I’m sure there are things in my life that would shock you, but I didn’t think that you could shock me.”

“I didn’t mean to shock you,” he apologized. “I was only answering your question.”

“Now I’ll tell you something shocking,” she said. “When I was a little girl in Elmira, we lived next to a very old man, a Civil War veteran. He’d had his arm amputated during a battle, but he wouldn’t let the surgeon throw it away. Instead, he kept it, let all the skin rot off, dried it in the sun, and took it home. A souvenir. He kept it until he died. He used to chase his grandchildren around the yard with it, and then beat them with his own arm bone. And one time he sat me down and showed me the tiny crack from where he’d broken it when he was a boy. So do you think that’s disgusting?”

“No,” my grandfather said. “It’s interesting. I never met anyone from the Civil War.”

“Now that’s funny,” Babette said, “because everyone I ever told that to was shocked, but it never shocked me. So why can’t I listen to you talk about cleaning up your old aunt?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Except that your story was a lot more interesting.”

“I didn’t think I still could be disgusted,” she said. “I’ll tell you another story. The church in my hometown used to have ice cream socials for the children, and we would eat so much that we would get sick. But it was such a treat that we wanted more, so we used to go outside, vomit what we’d eaten, and run back in for more. Pretty soon all the dogs in town would be at the church, eating up that melting ice cream as fast as we could throw it up. Do you think that’s disgusting?”

“No,” my grandfather said. “I think that’s funny.”

“So do I. I did then, and I still do.” She was quiet for a moment. “Still, there are things that I’ve seen in the last few years that would make you sick to hear. I could shock you. I’ve done things that are so awful, I wouldn’t tell you about them if you begged me to.”

“I wouldn’t do that. I don’t want to know,” he said, although when he had left his home that evening, he had wanted just that sort of information, desperately.

“It’s not important, anyhow. We won’t talk about it at all. You’re a funny one, though, aren’t you? I feel just like an old whore saying that. There are so many old whores in this business, and they all look at young men and say, ‘You’re a funny one, aren’t you?’ It’s true, though, with you. Most men get a sniff of a girl’s past and want to know every single thing she’s ever done. And you keep looking at me, but not like I’m used to.”

My grandfather blushed. “I’m sorry if I stared,” he said.

“But not just at me! You’ve been staring at the whole room. I’ll bet you’ve memorized every crack on these walls, the rungs on the bed frame, and what I’ve got in the bottom of my suitcases, too.”

“No.”

“Yes, you have. And you’ve been memorizing me. I’m sure of it.”

He did not answer her, because, of course, she was absolutely right. Instead, he nervously shifted his weight back and forth, suddenly acutely aware of the different sizes of his feet. Not for the first time in his life, he felt unbalanced from the ground up because of this deformity, almost dizzy from it.

“Now I’ve made you flustered,” Babette said. “I think that’s easy enough to do, so I won’t be proud.” After a pause, she added, “I believe you really are an artist because of how you’ve been staring. You’re a watcher, not a listener. Am I right?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

“Hum me a bar from my song tonight, or even tell me a line from the chorus. Go on.”

He thought back quickly, and at first could only come up with the sound of the faceless man beside him demanding the time. Then he said, “You sang something about being blue because someone left, a man, I think . . .” He trailed off, then added weakly, “It was a pretty song. You sang it well.”

She laughed. “It’s just as well that you didn’t listen. It’s a stupid song. But tell me, how many couples were dancing behind me?”

“Four,” he answered without hesitation.

“And who was the smallest girl onstage?”

“You were.”

“And how big was the orchestra?”

“I couldn’t see, except the conductor, and the bass player, of course, because he was standing.”

“Yes, of course.” Babette walked to the sink, and spent a few moments doing something with the toiletries there. Then she turned and approached him with one arm outstretched. She had striped the white underside of her forearm with five short strokes of lipstick, each shade only slightly different from the one beside it. She covered her mouth with her other hand and asked, “Which color do I have on my lips right now?”

My grandfather looked down at her arm, unexpectedly alarmed at the slashes of red across the white skin. He paused before answering, because something else had caught his eye, a faint, bluish vein that ran diagonally across the inside bend of her elbow. Then he pointed to the second lipstick stripe from her wrist and said assuredly, almost absently, “This one.”

He looked up at her face only after she had let her arm drop, and the intriguing blue vein vanished from view. She was still holding her other hand to her mouth and staring at him with eyes so wide and spooked that it seemed as if her hand belonged to a stranger, an attacker. He slowly pulled her arm down away from her face and looked at her in silence. He looked at her lips and confirmed that he had chosen correctly. Without thinking about what he was beginning to do, he lifted her chin so that her face was out of shadow and studied the shape of her forehead, nose, and jaw. Babette watched him.

“Look,” she said. “If you’re going to kiss me, just—”

She stopped talking as he released her chin and took hold of her wrist, turning it over and exposing where she had marked herself with the lipsticks. He stared for a long while, and she finally began to rub at the smearing red lines with the corner of her towel, as if embarrassed now by what she had done. But my grandfather wasn’t looking at that. He was studying that faint blue vein again, examining its short path across its cradle, the soft fold of her arm. After some time, he lifted her other arm and compared the twin vein there, holding her wrists gently, but with a thorough self-absorption that negated the lightness of his touch. She pulled away, and he released his hold without speaking.

He crossed the room and looked once more at the dress, carefully noting the alarming green again, frowning. Then he returned to Babette to confirm the color of her hair. He reached up to touch it, but she caught his arm.

“Please,” she said. “That’s enough.”

My grandfather blinked as if she had just woken him from a nap or delivered a piece of unexpected bad news. He glanced around the room as though searching for someone else, someone more familiar, and then frowned and looked back at Babette.

“You should know that there are ways to act,” she said evenly. “There are things to say so that a girl doesn’t have to feel used.” Her face was empty of expression, but she had lifted the hand mirror and was holding it tightly, as one might hold a tennis racket or a weapon.

He blushed. “I’m sorry,” he stammered. “I didn’t mean . . . I get that way sometimes, looking, staring like that—”

Babette cut him off with a sharp, irritated glance that crossed her face as fast and dark as a shadow.

“You can’t do that to people,” she said. He started to apologize again, but she shook her head. Finally she continued, “It’s going to be a very good painting, but not very flattering to me. Which is fine,” she added, shrugging cavalierly, “because I’ll never see it.”

“I’m sorry,” he repeated, feeling and sounding like a stranger, as if he was once more standing outside her door in the dark cobwebbed hall beneath the stage.

She shrugged one shoulder and lifted a hand to touch a red curl that was already in place. My grandfather watched, silent.

“Don’t you think you should leave now?” Babette asked at last.

He nodded, disgusted by the futility of apology, and left. He found his way through the dark hall and out of the nightclub alone, not needing, or even remembering, the young usher who had led him to Babette. Outside it had stopped raining. His overcoat had dried in her room, and he had already forgotten that it had ever been wet.

The widow with the bad knees was waiting for him when he got home. She did not question where he had been, but said only that his aunt was asleep in her chair and had been quiet all night.

“I gave her some soup,” she whispered as he unlocked the door.

“Thank you,” he said. “You’re very kind.”

My grandfather closed the door quietly behind him and took off his shoes so that he wouldn’t wake his aunt when he passed through the sitting room. In his own bedroom, he began working on what would be the first important painting of his career. He filled several pages with the charcoal-smudged, faceless crowd of the nightclub audience, leaving an empty white space in each sketch, always in the same spot. After several hours, he examined his work, irritated to see that all the pictures were identical: uniformly solid and dark, with a gaping opening in the center for a singer he didn’t know how to begin to draw.

He laid his head down on his sleeve and shut his eyes. He breathed in the tobacco smell of his shirt, at first inadvertently and then with great purpose, as if his skill would be enhanced if he deeply inhaled that dank odor. After some time, he opened his small box of oil paints and began trying to mix the green of Babette’s dress.

Although later in his life his mastery of color would be considered unrivaled, that night, as a young man with a limited collection of oils, he was overwhelmed by the task of recalling the shade. He worked carefully and several times felt that he was close to success, but found that, as the paint dried, the effect was lost, the color dulled. He was struck by the inevitability of his own limitations.

His desk was covered already with torn pieces of paper and patches of sticky, inadequate green. He looked at the charcoal sketches again and thought about what Babette had said. She was correct to say that it would be a good painting, but wrong to think that it would not flatter her. My grandfather visualized the figure that he knew would eventually fill the empty white space, and he was certain that it would be a very appealing character. Nonetheless, the painting was destined, in his mind, to remain a clumsy rendition of a transient, fantastic moment. It was he, ultimately, who would not be flattered by this work. It was his misfortune to realize this so young.

He heard a sound and set his sketchbook down on the floor. His aunt was talking, and he wondered how long she had been awake. He went into the sitting room, where he turned on a small reading lamp. She was rocking slowly, and he listened for a while to her mumbling.

“Black-eyed Susan,” she said, “Grace, Anna, Marigold, Pansy, Sarah . . .”

She had become smaller with age. In this lighting, however, with dark blankets over her legs and embroidered pillows around her, she appeared stately if not strong. My grandfather sat at her feet like a child waiting for a story.

“Lady’s slipper, Rosehip, Faith, Zinnia, Cowbell,” she said.

He rested his head on her knee, and she stopped talking. She laid her hand on his head and kept it there, where it trembled with the constant palsy of old age. He began to fall asleep and, in fact, had dozed off when she woke him by saying, “Baby.” He half-opened his eyes without lifting his head, not sure what he had heard.

She repeated the word, again and again, in the same low tone as her strange, rambling lists.

“Baby, baby, baby,” she said, and in his distracted exhaustion, he misunderstood her. He believed that she was saying “Babette,” over and over. Of all the flowers and girls, he thought, it was this rich, painful name that she had finally settled on to repeat and repeat and repeat.

He closed his eyes. Even shut, they ached, as if somehow they had been forced to look on himself in sixty years: elderly and dying, calling to his daughters and his granddaughters, calling them all to him, calling them all Babette.

At the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market

J IMMY MORAN was still very young—barely over forty—when he started having serious back pains. His family doctor told him that he probably needed an operation on a disc, and a second doctor (an expensive specialist) confirmed it. Both doctors agreed that Jimmy would need to take six months off from work. He would need to lie on his back and do absolutely nothing at all for six months, and only then would he have a chance at complete recovery.

“Six months!” Jimmy told the doctors. “I’m in the produce business, buddies! Are you kidding me?”

Six months! He made his doctors an offer of four months, which was still much more time than he could afford to lose. They finally came down to five months, but only grudgingly and with obvious disapproval. Even five months off was ridiculous. He’d never taken as much as a week away from the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market since he’d started working there as a loading porter, in the summer of 1970. Five months! He had a wife to support and so many kids at home that it was almost embarrassing to say the full number. But there was no getting around any of this. His back was injured and he needed the surgery, so he went ahead with it. And here’s how they survived: his wife, Gina, took extra hours at her job; they emptied their small savings account; his brother Patrick gave them some money. Things were not as bad as they might have been.

As it turned out, Jimmy Moran ended up accomplishing two important things during his time away from the market. First of all, he bought a gorgeous 1956 blue Chrysler sedan, which was in great shape and drove like a luxury ocean liner. Gina didn’t agree with the investment, but they needed another car, and the Chrysler was a lot cheaper than anything new. Besides, he bought it off an old man in Pelham Bay who hadn’t taken the thing out of the garage for decades and had no idea what it was worth. Honestly, the car was a steal. It really was. Jimmy had always wanted a beautiful old car. He’d always felt that he deserved a beautiful old car, because he would appreciate it and take good care of it and when he drove around town he would wear a good-looking, old-fashioned kind of brimmed hat, just like his dad used to wear.

His second accomplishment was that he decided to run for president of his union local.

The current president of the Teamsters Local 418 was a guy named Joseph D. DiCello, who had the obvious advantage of being an incumbent and an Italian. Most of the union members at the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market were Italian, and if even half the Italians voted for DiCello, Jimmy Moran would get whipped like a bad dog, and he realized that completely. Jimmy, however, still believed that he had a chance to win. Reason being, Joseph D. DiCello was basically an idiot and a corrupted, useless fuck.

DiCello drove a big Bonneville and hadn’t successfully defended a worker’s grievance in six years. He barely even showed up at the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market at all anymore, and when he did show up, he’d always be sure to bring some prostitute with him, picked up from around the gates outside. A Chinese prostitute, usually. DiCello would ask some tired, overworked porter, “Hey, kid? You like my wife? You like my new wife, kid?”

And the porter, naturally, would say something like “Sure, boss.”

Then DiCello would laugh at the poor guy, and even the Chinese prostitute would laugh at the poor guy. Therefore, and for numerous other reasons, people were basically getting sick of Joseph D. DiCello.

Jimmy Moran, on the other hand, was a well-liked person. The few Irish workers left at the market would vote for him out of instinct, and Jimmy got along with most of the Italians just fine. Why, he’d even married an Italian. His own kids were half Italian. He had no problems with Italians. He had no problems with the Portuguese, either, and did not think in any way that they were thieves by nature. He also had no problems with the blacks (unlike that sick bigot DiCello), and he was actually quite popular with the Hispanics. Jimmy had held many different jobs over the years at the market, but he’d recently been hired once again as a loading porter, which meant that he worked mostly with Dominicans and Puerto Ricans. Who were all very decent and fun-loving individuals, as far as Jimmy Moran could see.

When it came to the Mexican vote, this would also be no problem. The older Mexicans would remember that, years and years ago, Jimmy Moran had worked at the typically Mexican job of handling and packaging peppers. (And not those sweet Italian bell peppers, either, but pitiless Spanish peppers—jalapeños, poblanos, cayennes, chilies, Jamaican hots—fierce peppers that only Mexicans usually handled, because if a person didn’t know what he was doing, he could really get hurt. When a person got the oil from one of those peppers in his eye, it honestly felt just like getting punched in the eye.) Although pepper-handling was easy on the back, it was no job for a white man, and Jimmy had quit doing it years and years ago. But he still got along fine with all the older Mexicans, and with most of the younger ones, too.

As for the Koreans, Jimmy had no experience with them. Neither did anybody else, though, so it really didn’t matter. It wasn’t like Joseph D. DiCello was best friend to the Koreans or anything. The Koreans were strange people, and you could just forget about the Koreans. The Koreans had their own market within the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market, and they only sold to each other. They talked to each other in Korean, and besides, they weren’t even in the union.

There was another thing that Jimmy Moran had in his favor. He was actually a true union man, and not some phony local gangster’s kid like DiCello. He wasn’t even from the city. He was born in Virginia, and his people were real coal-mining people and honest-to-Christ workingmen. Back in Virginia, when Jimmy was only ten years old, he’d watched his grandfather overturn a company coal truck and empty a shotgun into the engine block during a workers’ strike. His uncle was murdered by company detectives, his other uncle died of black lung, his ancestors organized against U.S. Steel, and Jimmy Moran was a true workingman in a way that an affluent cheat like Joseph D. DiCello, for instance, could never be true in a thousand corrupted lifetimes.

Jimmy Moran gave his potential candidacy one evening’s thought. This was four months into his recovery from back surgery. He considered all the advantages and disadvantages of staging a campaign, which would be his first. Gina wouldn’t be nuts about the idea, but Jimmy’s back didn’t hurt anymore, he was the owner of a beautiful 1956 Chrysler, and he felt really, really capable. He couldn’t think of any reason that he—with his good labor background, his decent personality, and all the different jobs he’d held at the market over the years—should not be the president of the union.

Yes, he gave his candidacy that one evening’s thought, and when he woke up the next morning, he was decided. Convicted, even. It was a great feeling. It was like waking up in love.

And so Jimmy Moran returned to the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market after only four months of recovery. His plan was to campaign for a few nights, and then come back to work officially. He arrived well after midnight, as the delivery trucks were pulling in to load up. When he came through the entrance gate, he stopped to talk with Bahiz, the Arab woman who checked identification cards. She was a fairly attractive woman, so everybody flirted with her. Also, she was the only woman who worked at the entire market, or at least as far as Jimmy Moran had ever noticed in nearly twenty-five years.

“Bahiz!” he said. “Who let you out of the harem?”

“Oh, Jeez. Jimmy’s back,” she said. She was chewing gum.

“‘Jimmy’s back!’” Jimmy repeated. “‘Jimmy’s back!’ Hey, don’t say anything about Jimmy’s back, sweetheart. You should say, ‘Jimmy Moran has returned.’ Jesus, I don’t want to talk about Jimmy’s back. You like my new car?”

“Very nice.”

“Guess what year it is.”

“I don’t know.”

“Just give it a guess.”

“I don’t know. Nineteen sixty-eight?”

“Are you kidding me?”

“What is it, ’sixty-six? How should I know?”

“Bahiz! It’s a ’fifty-six! It’s a ’fifty-six, Bahiz!”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Use your eyeballs for once, Bahiz.”

“How should I know? I can barely see it.”

“The ladies love it, sweetheart. I’ll take you for a drive sometime. You never would’ve refused me all these years if I was driving a car this nice. Isn’t that right, Bahiz?”

“Oh, Jimmy. Just go to hell.”

“You got a dirty mouth, Bahiz. Listen. How about some figs?”

Sometimes Bahiz had the greatest figs with her. The dried figs that were widely available at the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market were mostly mission figs, from California. And after eating Bahiz’s figs, Jimmy Moran was certainly never going to eat any dried California mission figs again. Some of the better houses at the market carried imported Spanish figs, which were pretty nice, but they were expensive. Also, Spanish figs were kept packaged in plastic-wrapped crates, so it was almost impossible to steal just a handful for free sampling.

Bahiz, however, sometimes had the most incredible Israeli figs, and she would always give a few to Jimmy. Bahiz’s mother shipped the figs to her by air mail all the way from the Middle East, which was very expensive but worth it. It was a well-known fact that, throughout all of the entire history of mankind, Israeli figs have always been considered the most valuable figs in the world. Israeli figs taste like granulated honey. They have skins like thin caramels.

But Bahiz didn’t have any figs that night.

“Forget about you, Bahiz,” Jimmy Moran said. “You worthless old bat.”

“I hope somebody hits your dumb-ass car!” she said, and they both smiled at each other and waved good-bye.

Jimmy parked his car in front of Grafton Brothers, which was his most recent employer, one of the biggest wholesale houses in the market and a good place to start his campaign. Grafton Brothers was a very profitable house, and here was why: Salvi and John Grafton bought overripe produce with no shelf life for the lowest, giveaway prices. Then they hired porters to pick through the produce—most of which was rotten—toss out the rotten stuff, and repack the rest of it. Grafton’s could triple its investment on a cheap shipment of vegetables while still underselling the rest of the market. It was practically a hoax.

Salvi and John Grafton might have gotten to be rich men this way, with big horse-racing farms down in Florida, but their wholesale empire still smelled like compost from all the ripe food they threw out, and there were more rats at Grafton’s than at any other house in the market. Grafton’s produce was garbage.

There were specialty houses at the market that took produce very seriously and sold only beautiful fruits and vegetables. There was a Russian Jew in the north docks who flew endive in every day from a small family farm in the middle of Belgium, and that was the finest endive in the world. There was a Filipino who sold blackberries in February for five dollars a pint wholesale, and buyers were happy to pay, because the blackberries were fantastic and it was worth it. Grafton’s was not such a house.

Jimmy Moran had worked for Grafton’s off and on over twenty-five years as a porter, a driver, a vegetable sorter, and in practically every other kind of job. The only thing was, he’d never been able to get any kind of desk job inside the barracks of Grafton’s offices. Office jobs at the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market were always a little harder to come by. There was a lot of competition and a lot of pressure, and it helped, apparently, to be good at math. In any case, Grafton Brothers had hundreds of dock employees, and Jimmy knew nearly all of them.

Jimmy Moran walked along the Grafton Brothers docks, carrying on his back a heavy burlap sack filled with the campaign buttons he’d had made up the day before. The buttons said: DICELLO’S NOT ON OUR SIDE, SO LET’S PUT HIM ON THE OUTSIDE. VOTE FOR JIMMY MORAN, PRESIDENT. They were huge buttons, each approximately the diameter of a grapefruit, with black lettering on a yellow background. He moved around the stacks of crates and the vegetable displays and the tractors, and he gave buttons to everybody and talked to everybody. He tried to speak as personally as possible.

He’d say, “Hey, Sammy! Your wife still cooking you those dinners?”

He’d say, “Hey, Len! You still taking all those naps?”

He’d say, “Hey, Sonny! You still work with that other crazy bastard?”

Passing out buttons, shaking hands, passing out buttons, shaking hands, passing out more buttons. Jimmy Moran felt really good. His back wasn’t bothering him at all. He felt rested and capable, and it took him several hours to get through Grafton’s.

He saw his old friend Herb talking to a young porter, and he said, “Hey, Herb! Who’s that, your new boyfriend?”

He saw a porter, not much older than his own son Danny, smoking marijuana behind a melon display, and he said, “Police! You’re under arrest, you dope!”

He saw his old friend Angelo playing cards on the back of a crate with some other guys and he said, “What is this, Angelo, a casino?”

Angelo and the others laughed. Everyone asked after his back and hoped he was feeling better. Jimmy Moran had always been popular at Grafton’s, and everyone was happy to see him back. He used to do a funny trick when he was working in the cucumber cooler there. He’d pretend to be a blind man. He would stare off into space and put his arms straight out and stumble around, bumping into everybody. He’d say, “I’m the blind vegetable man . . . Excuse me, sir, could you tell me where the cucumbers are?”

There was only one guy who never laughed at that trick, and that was a quiet and serious Haitian porter named Hector. Jimmy got to the point where he would do the blind-vegetable-man trick only if Hector was around, trying to get Hector to laugh even once. Jimmy would stumble over Hector’s feet and feel up Hector’s face, and Hector would just stand there, with his arms crossed, not smiling. Eventually, Jimmy would quit it and say, “What is it with you, Hector? Maybe you’re the one that’s blind.”

“Where’s that Haitian guy Hector?” Jimmy asked his old friend Angelo. Jimmy’s sack of campaign buttons was already half empty. He felt the campaign was going well.

“Hector?” Angelo said. “Hector’s a distributor now.”

“Get out of here! Hector’s a distributor?”

“He’s in broccoli.”

“I go away for a few months and Hector’s suddenly a distributor?”

Jimmy headed down the Grafton docks to the huge warehouse coolers of broccoli, and, sure enough, there was Hector, in the distributor’s shack. Every individual cooler was as big as a furniture warehouse, so every cooler needed a distributor. The distributor’s job was to handle the charts and lists showing how much produce was in each cooler and how much produce was going out with each order. It was a pretty good job. If you were good at math, of course, it was a lot easier. Jimmy Moran had actually been hired as a carrot distributor for a few months once, but his friends the dockworkers were always joking around with him and distracting him from doing the job right, so that job didn’t work out for Jimmy, and he ended up having to find a porter’s job on the docks again.

Of course, the distributors worked on the docks, too. The only thing was, they got to work in little plywood shacks that looked like ice-fishing houses. The shacks had space heaters to fight the cold, and sometimes even had carpeting on the floor.

Hector was in the shack studying his charts, and there was another guy beside him, eating a hamburger.

“Hector!” Jimmy said. “Look at Señor Hector the distributor!”

Hector shook Jimmy’s hand through the window of the distributor’s shack. Centerfolds of nude black women hung on the wall behind him. Hector wasn’t even wearing a jacket in there, just a thin, cotton button-down shirt. A person could really stay warm in a distributor’s shack.

“How are things?” Jimmy asked.

“Not bad.”

“Who’s your friend?”

“This is Ed. He’s from the office.”

Ed and Jimmy shook hands.

“So, what are you fellas doing over here?” Jimmy asked. “Putting broccoli in small boxes and labeling it twenty-five pounds? What is this, some kind of hoax?”

Hector did not smile. Neither did Ed.

“Listen, Hector, I’m kidding! Listen, I’m running for president of the local.”

Jimmy slid two of his campaign buttons over to Hector. “There’s one button for each of you,” he said.

Hector read his button aloud with his funny accent: “DICELLO’S NOT ON OUR SIDE, SO LET’S PUT HIM ON THE OUTSIDE. VOTE FOR JIMMY MORAN, PRESIDENT.”

“You running against DiCello?” said the guy from the office named Ed.

“That’s right.”

Ed stared at Jimmy Moran for a long, long while. He chewed his hamburger in no particular hurry, swallowed, and said finally, “What are you trying to do?”

“What’s that?”

“Seriously. What are you trying to do? Get yourself killed?”

“Oh, come on now.”

“What do want? You want to wake up in the trunk of a car? Seriously.”

Jimmy Moran looked at Hector and shrugged comically. Hector didn’t smile, and Ed kept talking.

“What do you want?” he said. “You want to have your legs cut off?”

“I’m not afraid of Joey DiCello,” Jimmy said. “And I sure hope you two old boys aren’t afraid of him.”

“I sure the fuck am afraid of him,” Ed said.

“Joey DiCello has no reason to pick on a good guy like me. What do you think—he’ll kill me and leave all my kids with no dad? Forget about it.”

Ed slid the campaign button back through the window to Jimmy. “You can keep your button, friend.”

“Vote for me, and things will really change around here.”

Hector still said nothing, but Ed asked, “You got a wife?”

“Yes, I do.”

“You hate her so much you want to make her a widow? Seriously. Is that it?”

“Well, I’m not fighting with y’all about it,” Jimmy said. “I don’t fight with people who don’t know what’s good for them.”

Jimmy threw his sack of campaign buttons up over his shoulder and walked on down the docks.

“We vote for DiCello here!” Hector called after him. “We’re not stupid!”

“The hell with you, then!” Jimmy called back cheerfully.

Then Jimmy Moran stole a few beautiful Haitian mangos from a fruit display and dropped them into his jacket pocket. Jimmy had learned from Hispanics that Haitian mangos are the best for eating by hand, because their flesh is not stringy. Grafton’s didn’t usually have good fruit, but these were exceptional, gorgeous mangos, with minty green skins just turning a soft banana yellow. There were guys who had worked in the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market for years and never tasted a fresh vegetable or fruit in their lives. It was sad, really. These were guys who would all die of heart attacks at fifty because they ate beef and bacon every day instead of the fruits and vegetables that were all over the place. Consider Hector’s friend Ed, for example, sitting in front of a warehouse full of broccoli, eating hamburgers. A heart attack waiting to happen.

Jimmy Moran, on the other hand, ate everything, because he was in love with vegetables. His mother had always raised beautiful vegetables, and he would eat anything. He used to work as a crate stacker in a big cooler full of fresh herbs, and he would even eat parsley in bunches. He ate radishes and cauliflowers like they were apples. He would even take a small artichoke, peel off the tough outer leaves, and eat the rest of the artichoke whole and raw. He ate more vegetables than a hippie. People thought he was crazy.

On this night, he walked out of Grafton Brothers, eating Haitian mangos the Puerto Rican way. First, he massaged and squeezed the mango with his thumbs until the flesh was soft and pulpy beneath the skin. He worked the fruit with his thumbs until it had the consistency of jelly. Then he bit a small hole in the top and sucked out the insides. Sweet like coconut. Foreign-tasting, but nice.

In the next hours, Jimmy Moran campaigned through the wholesale houses of Dulrooney’s, Evangelisti & Sons, DeRosa Importers, and E & M Wholesalers. He introduced himself to all the workers and made small talk with them. He talked to one poor fool who’d just spent his whole life’s savings on a greyhound dog, and to another guy whose teenage daughter had cancer, and to a lucky son of a gun who was going on vacation to Bermuda. He talked to a whole lot of guys who told him he must be crazy to run for president against a mobbed-up animal like Joseph D. DiCello.

As he walked, he ate a handful of baby zucchini he’d stolen off a display at Evangelisti & Sons. Each zucchini was no longer than his littlest finger and tenderly flavorful in the sort of salty way that a big squash would never be. These were delicious raw, and the only kind of squash that didn’t need any dip or sauce to have a flavor. Baby zucchinis were rare for the season, and expensive. He’d filled his pockets over at Evangelisti & Sons. A delicacy. He ate through them like they were peanuts.

At 4 A.M., he reached the bottom of his sack of campaign buttons. He was at a small, brand-new specialty gourmet house called Bella Foods, a place known to be very exclusive, which sold to the best restaurants in New York. He didn’t think he would know anybody there at all, until he saw his old friend Casper Denni. They talked for a while about Jimmy’s campaign and about their families. Casper also had a whole bunch of kids and an Italian wife. Casper had also been a porter for many years.

“Now, what happened? You had some kind of accident, I heard?” Casper said.

“The whole town’s talkin’,” Jimmy said. “Back surgery, buddy. What are you, a distributor now or something?”

Casper was sitting in a neat little white-painted booth, drinking a cup of coffee.

“No way,” Casper said. “I got me a little business, selling coffee and replacement wheels for hand trucks.”

“What?” Jimmy laughed.

“I’m serious, Jimmy. It’s great.”

“Get out of here.”

“Check it out. Here’s the idea. There are how many hand trucks at the market?”

“Hundreds. Millions.”

“Thousands, Jimmy. Thousands. And every one of them a cheap piece of shit, as everybody knows. But every porter needs a hand truck, right? Because how many crates can one man carry alone?”

“Get out of here, Casper.”

“One crate, right? Even a big monster like you, in your prime, you could only carry two crates, right? But with a hand truck, you can carry—what?—ten crates? Twelve crates, maybe? A hand truck is a very important tool, Mr. Moran, for the economic success of the individual.”

“Excuse me, Casper? Excuse me, buddy, but who are you talking to here?”

“So, Mr. Moran, it’s the middle of the night and your shitty hand truck pops a wheel. What do you do?”

“Find some other fool’s hand truck and steal it.”

“And get your head beat in? That’s the old-fashioned way. Now you can just come to me. For five dollars, I sell you a new wheel. You give me another five dollars for a deposit on a hammer and wrench, which you get back when I get the tools back. Then I sell you a ten-cent cup of coffee for a buck, and I make six bucks out of the deal, and you have your hand truck fixed.”

“Who would do that?”

“Everybody, Jimmy. Everybody comes to me now.”

“In the last four months this happened?”

“I’m telling you, Jimmy. It’s great. Tax-free. No union.”

“You’re something else, Casper. I tell you. You’re really something else.”

“You get to be old fucks like us, you need a new idea.”

“I got an idea,” Jimmy said, laughing. “I got a new idea. You make me your partner, buddy.”

Casper laughed, too, and punched Jimmy in the arm.

“Listen,” he said, “you ever work around this outfit before?”

“Around this place? No.”

“You ever seen the mushroom man?”

“Casper,” Jimmy said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, buddy.”

“You never saw the mushroom man? Oh, that’s great. Oh, you gotta check this out, Jimmy. I can’t believe you never heard about this guy. You want crazy? You want to see crazy? You just gotta check this guy out.”

Casper came out from his neat little booth and led Jimmy into a huge refrigerated cooler warehouse.

“You’re gonna love this guy, Jimmy.”

They walked back to the end of the warehouse, and Casper stopped at a wide doorway, covered with the thick strips of plastic that keep temperatures even. A small refrigerated room. Casper pulled back a few of the plastic strips and stepped inside. He waved Jimmy to follow him, grinning like it would be a bordello in there.

Once inside, Jimmy Moran was faced with simply the finest mushroom produce he had ever seen in his life.

“Look at this booty, Jimmy,” said Casper. “Have a look at this produce.”

The crates were piled neatly, no higher than five to a stack, and the top crate of each stack was open for display. Right by the door was an open crate of snowy white button mushrooms, bigger than plums. There were crates of glossy shitake mushrooms, crates of shiny yellow straw mushrooms, and fresh porcini mushrooms that looked valuable enough to serve at God’s table. Jimmy saw crates of portobellos as fleshy and thick as sirloin fillets. He saw a crate of wild black mushrooms, tiny and feathery like gills. He saw a crate of the kind of woody mushrooms his mother used to call toadstools, and also a crate of mushrooms that looked exactly like cauliflower heads. There were morels in the shapes and shades of coral. He saw a crate full of the tan, shelf-shaped mushrooms that grow out of rotting tree stumps. There were crates filled with Chinese mushrooms he could not name and other crates were filled with red- and blue-spotted mushrooms that may have been poisonous. The entire room smelled like damp manure, like the soil in a root cellar under a barn.

Jimmy Moran reached for a portobello mushroom, the biggest one he’d ever seen. He wanted it so much, but just as his hand touched it he heard a growl like an animal’s. A huge and ugly man in overalls and a brown wool stocking cap was coming at him, exactly like a big dog.

Jimmy jumped back, startled, and Casper shoved him hard and shouted, “Get out! Get out!” Jimmy stumbled and fell backward out of the room, panicked. He fell through the plastic sheeting and landed hard on the concrete floor of the warehouse. Casper jumped out of the room after him, laughing and laughing.

Jimmy lay on his back on the cold floor and Casper said, “You’re safe out here, Jimmy boy. Old mushroom man never comes out of there. Christ, what a crazy fucker. Don’t touch the mushrooms, Jimmy. I should’ve told you don’t touch the goddamn mushrooms unless you have permission.”

On the floor, Jimmy tried to sit up, but his back spasmed, so he lay there for some time, willing his back to relax. Casper offered him a hand and Jimmy shook his head to refuse it.

“You okay, friend?” Casper said.

Jimmy nodded.

“Shit, you probably hurt your back. I forgot about your goddamn back. Jesus, I’m sorry.”

Jimmy nodded again.

“That’s a crazy fucker in there,” Casper said, and again offered Jimmy his hand. Jimmy took it this time and very gingerly stood up. Casper parted the plastic strips and said, “Just look in there at that fucker.”

Jimmy shook his head. He found that he was breathing very carefully.

“Come on. You don’t have to go in there. Just look at that huge guy. He won’t touch you if you leave the mushrooms alone. You got to take a good look at that guy.”

Casper continued to insist, so Jimmy finally did poke his head into the refrigerated mushroom room cautiously. The man in the room was indeed huge, and he stood quietly in the center. He was wearing brown overalls and he had a long brown beard. His feet were placed apart and his hands hung loosely fisted. Jimmy Moran and the mushroom man looked at each other. And while the man did not growl again, and while the man did not make any kind of a move forward, Jimmy Moran withdrew his head very slowly and stepped away from the door. He and Casper walked back to Casper’s booth in the hallway.

Once they were out, Casper said, “The best mushrooms in the whole goddamn market.”

Jimmy sat down on a crate next to Casper’s booth and shut his eyes. His back was stiff. Sitting didn’t help, so he stood again.

“The owner hired that crazy fucker a few months ago,” Casper explained. “The guy used to be a trucker. He’s from somewhere like Texas, or nobody knows where. They’ve got some kind of an arrangement, him and the owners. The guy never leaves the room. I sit here night after night, Jimmy, and I’m telling you, that crazy fucker never leaves the room. Those mushrooms, Jimmy, are honestly the best goddamn mushrooms you will ever see. The owners used to have a problem with people stealing the mushrooms, see.”

“Jesus.”

“No more problems with stealing anymore. I’ll tell you that goddamn much. You plan on stealing these mushrooms, you gotta wrestle the big fella first.”

“You have aspirin?” Jimmy asked.

“No, but I’ll give you a cup of coffee, you pathetic bastard. Now get out of here, Jimmy. Feel better. Good luck on your election, even though I think you’re a crazy bastard for running and I think somebody’s probably going to put a bullet in your neck for you pretty soon. Now take your coffee and get out of here. Hurry up, or everyone will think I’m giving the stuff away for free. Everyone will think I can’t even run my own goddamn business.”

Jimmy Moran walked slowly through the complicated and connecting parking lots to find his car. He swung his arms as he walked, trying to take the stiffness out of his back. He thought that he probably looked like an idiot doing this, but he didn’t care. As it turned out, he was walking along the back parking lot of the Korean market most of the time anyway, and he didn’t care what Koreans thought of how he looked. The Korean market was huge now. Jimmy Moran thought that someday the Koreans might take over the entire Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market, an idea he wasn’t crazy about in any way. The Koreans worked ridiculous hours and didn’t even have a union. They sold vegetables nobody had ever even heard of.

He was tired. During his four months off, he’d been keeping human hours for the first time in his adult life—asleep during the darkness and awake during the day—and he was not yet readjusted to being up in the middle of the night. It was nearly dawn. It took him almost an hour to get back to where he had parked, under a strong streetlight. His car did look beautiful. He loved his car. On this cloudy and damp night, under this big artificial beam of light, it looked like some kind of a sea animal—watery blue and powerful, with shimmering fins. The taillights looked like reflective decoy eyes.

He had a second sack of campaign buttons in the trunk of his car. His plan was to drive to the north side of the market and hand out buttons at some of the bigger commercial houses over there before everyone left for the day. He drove toward the north, passing the lines and lines of freight trucks all backed up against dark loading docks. The cabs of the trucks were dim and closed. The drivers, mostly Southerners like himself, slept inside on hidden mattresses while the porters loaded the freight. Men pushed hand trucks loaded with crates and maneuvered along the narrow alleys between the big trucks. Sometimes the men would pause and give Jimmy Moran a thumbs-up gesture for his beautiful car. Sometimes they would come jogging across his path, concentrating on their destination, and he would nearly hit them.

Jimmy came upon a security guard he knew, patrolling a parking lot on foot. Low, thick diesel fumes reached up past the man’s knees, making it look like he was wading in mist. Jimmy stopped to talk. The guard was a friendly Polack from Jimmy’s own neighborhood named Paul Gadomski. Jimmy rolled down his window and Paul leaned against the Chrysler and lit a cigarette.

“What is this, a ’fifty-eight?” Paul asked.

“It’s a ’fifty-six, Pauly.”

“She’s a sweetheart.”

“Thanks. Have a button,” Jimmy said, and handed a campaign button out of the window.

“What’s this? You’re not running against DiCello?”

“I am,” Jimmy said. Christ, he was tired. “And I’d like to think I can count on your vote, Paul.”

“Hell, I’m not voting in your union, Jim. Get serious. I’m no teamster. I’m a cop.”

“You get serious, Pauly. You’re no cop, buddy.”

“Same thing.”

“Security guard?”

“Well, I’m damn sure no teamster.”

“I’d sure like it if you’d wear the button anyhow.”

“Hell, Jim. I can’t wear no teamster’s campaign button on my uniform.”

“Well, think it over, Pauly.”

“I’ll bring it home for my kid to play with,” Paul said. He put the button in his jacket pocket.

The two men, alone in a back parking lot, talked about business. Paul said that when Jimmy was out for back surgery, there was a trucker who got his neck slit one night. Nobody had been arrested for it yet. Jimmy said he hadn’t heard about that. Paul said the corpse had been found underneath some other driver’s truck. That driver, some guy who was hauling bananas all the way up from Florida, claimed he didn’t know anything about any murder, so the police let him go. Paul couldn’t believe how gullible the cops were. Paul said the cops didn’t seem too interested in finding out what really happened that night. Jimmy said that it was almost always that way, because the cops were usually mobbed-up and corrupt like everyone else. Paul said he knew for a fact that the murdered guy had hit the Trifecta that very afternoon and had been bragging all night about making something like twenty grand. Paul said there was crazy bullshit all over the market for about a week, what with the cops sealing off areas and asking all the wrong questions. Jimmy said it sounded to him like the murder had been a fight over a parking spot, and he would be suspicious of the banana-truck driver from Florida. Jimmy recalled that the first year he’d ever worked at the market, he’d seen a guy beaten to death with a tire iron over a parking spot dispute. Jimmy had seen lots of parking spot disputes turn violent.

Paul said that it was just a bunch of fucking animals working at this place. Jimmy agreed, and the two men said good night.

Jimmy Moran drove on. He passed a handsome fleet of refrigerated supermarket trucks, loading in at Bennetti & Perke, the major corporate wholesaler that distributed to all the big Eastern seaboard supermarket chains. Jimmy didn’t know who owned Bennetti & Perke, but it was definitely a very, very rich man, who was probably asleep somewhere in a big house right on the ocean.

There was so much fortune being shuffled around every night here at the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market, it was almost unbelievable. It would be unbelievable and unimaginable to those who had not seen the place at work. The hurricane fences and razor-wire coils and security floodlights gave the market the look of a prison, but it was certainly no prison, as Jimmy and everyone who had ever worked there knew. It was no prison. It was, actually, a bank.

When Jimmy Moran was just a young porter, he and his buddies had wasted a lot of time trying to figure out how to skim off some of that fortune. They’d wasted a lot of time trying to imagine how much money was passed around every night at the market. That was a young man’s game, of course. It was the old men who understood there was never a way to steal any real money unless you were already rich.

The summer earlier, Jimmy’s oldest son, Danny, had worked part-time at Grafton Brothers as a porter. Danny had tried in the same lazy way to figure out how much money was contained in the market and how to get his hands on it. Jimmy was aware of this. Danny also wanted to know how to steal it, how to hoist it, how to skim it. On their drive home together in the early morning, Danny would speculate aimlessly about money. Wouldn’t it be fantastic, Danny would say, to skim even one lousy cent off every pound of produce sold at the market in one night? How much money would that be a week? A month? A year? Wouldn’t it even be fair to be able to skim a little off the top? Considering how hard porters worked, and for such a shitty pay?

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jimmy would tell his son. “Just forget about it.”

“What about the Korean market?” Danny asked. “All their deals are in cash. You could just mug one of those guys and get a fortune. All those Korean guys are carrying around at least five grand all the time.”

“No, Danny. Nobody carries that kind of cash.”

“Koreans do. Koreans are scared of banks.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“That’s what the truckers say.”

“Then you can be damn sure you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Of course it was ridiculous to think about stealing money from anybody here, because a lot of people carried guns and knives. People were always killing each other over nothing, just to pass the time. It was ridiculous to think about all the money other people made here. It would give you chest pains, just thinking about it.

Jimmy had meant to park at Bennetti & Perke. He’d thought it was a good place to hand out his second bag of campaign buttons, but now he wasn’t so sure. His back was really bothering him, and he wasn’t sure how he was supposed to carry the heavy sack. For that matter, he wasn’t sure how he was supposed to go back to work as a porter in just two days, as he was scheduled to. How was he supposed to haul crates of fruits and vegetables around? How was he supposed to do that? Honestly, how?

So Jimmy Moran drove on. It was after 5:30 A.M., and his back was seriously hurting. He circled around Bennetti & Perke and then headed out of the market altogether. He would just go home. He would just forget about campaigning. As he drove, he thought for the first time in ages about his old friend Martin O’Ryan.

From March of 1981 to January of 1982, Jimmy had worked as a buyer on a trial basis for a discount greengrocery chain called Apple Paradise. It was a big opportunity for advancement, and his old friend Martin O’Ryan had gotten him the job. It was quite a promotion, to be taken off the docks and made a buyer. Buyers got to work in offices up above the actual market, and buyers could really prosper.

Jimmy’s friend Martin O’Ryan had actually been very good at buying. He was a maniac at telephone deals, really fierce at negotiating with truckers, farmers, importers, and distributors for the best price. Martin made a lot of money for Apple Paradise and for himself that year.

“Whaddaya got?!” Martin would shout into the phone. “I need iceberg! . . . Twenty-five dollars? Fuck you, twenty-five dollars! I’ll take it for eighteen! . . . Give me eighteen or I’ll come over and burn down your motherfucking house! . . . Give me eighteen or I’ll rip your motherfucking lungs out! . . . Give me eighteen or I’ll blind you and I’ll personally come to your house myself and I will blind your—okay, I’ll take it for twenty.”

Then Martin would hang up the phone and start with someone else.

Martin O’Ryan and Jimmy Moran were put in the same office, at desks across from each other. They were best friends. Martin was the first friend Jimmy ever made when he came up from Virginia with his mom as a twelve-year-old hillbilly kid. Jimmy and Martin had started off as porters together and joined the union together and been to each other’s weddings. He loved Martin, but he couldn’t concentrate on his own telephone deals with Martin shouting across the room from him. (“Get me that truck of potatoes, you worthless fuck, you worthless, lying cocksucker fuckhole, or I’ll rape you personally myself!”)

Martin was the nicest guy in the world, but it was distracting. At the end of the year, Martin got a huge bonus and an official job for the company, and Jimmy did not. It worked out fine, in the end. Jimmy found another job quickly enough, working on the loading docks as a porter again.

Martin was honestly one of the nicest guys in the world, and Martin and Jimmy loved each other, but they hadn’t seen each other for quite a while.

Jimmy needed to gas up the Chrysler and he knew that the small gas station in his neighborhood wouldn’t be open yet, so he didn’t take his usual exit toward home. Instead, he kept on driving around, looking for a twenty-four-hour service station, and that is how he eventually ended up on Route 95.

He was familiar with that highway. Back in the middle of the 1980s, he’d worked for a while as a delivery driver for a small gourmet vegetable wholesale company called Parthenon Produce, run by two Greeks. This was the nicest job he’d ever had. He used to deliver quality greens—mostly arugula and watercress—from the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market, up Route 95, to all the fancy stores along Long Island Sound and up into Connecticut as far as Ridgefield. It was a long drive but pleasant, and he used to get into Ridgefield (a place he and Gina used to call “Rich-field”) around eight or nine in the morning, when the wealthy men were just heading off to their jobs.

He had liked that delivery job. He had been happy with that job, but the two Greeks had sold their business in 1985. They’d offered him a chance to buy that particular delivery route as his own, but Jimmy Moran just didn’t have that kind of money at the time.

Jimmy Moran drove past New Rochelle and Mount Vernon and into Connecticut. It was very early in the morning, and a clear day. As he drove, Jimmy thought that if he could have made more money at the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market, he would have moved his wife and all his kids up to Connecticut long ago. They still talked about it all the time: the broad lawns, the quiet schools, the tall wives. Jimmy Moran’s brother Patrick, ironically enough, had married Gina’s sister Louisa, and those two had moved to Connecticut right away. But Patrick and Louisa, of course, didn’t have any kids, and it was easier for them to move. They had moved to Danbury, and they had a pretty nice little place, with a patio.

Gina’s sister Louisa used to be a genuinely sexy girl when she was a teenager. She was famous around the neighborhood for being no good in a very fun way, and Jimmy Moran’s brother Patrick had always been crazy about Louisa Lisante. But Jimmy had always preferred Gina. In the summer of 1970, when Jimmy had his first job as a porter at the market, he would see Gina and Louisa Lisante waiting for the bus together every morning when he got home from work. They always wore shorts and sandals. They were setting off for their summer jobs as waitresses near the beach. Jimmy used to steal beautiful ripe Holland tomatoes from the market and leave them on the Lisantes’ doorstep as paperweights for little love notes to Gina: I love Gina . . . Gina is pretty . . . Gina has pretty legs . . . I wish Gina would marry me.

Jimmy thought about Gina and Patrick and Louisa as he drove all the way into Ridgefield, Connecticut. Although he had not planned it this way, his timing on this particular morning was the same as his timing with the Parthenon Produce delivery route, and he arrived in Ridgefield just as the men of the town were leaving for work. It was nearly ten years since he had been to Ridgefield. In the old days, when he was finished with his route, he used to drive around the most affluent neighborhoods, studying the houses. These homes had all seemed so confidently undefended to him, and he had felt traces of a young man’s desire to rob them. Of course, it was not the contents of the houses he had wanted but the houses themselves. Particularly the large stone houses.

The house that Jimmy Moran had always particularly really wanted was absolutely huge. It was a half-mile from the center of Ridgefield—a great slate-roof manor on top of a steep hill, with a circular driveway and white columns. He used to drive up to this exact house some early mornings when the gourmet greens were all delivered. His three-ton Parthenon Produce delivery truck would rumble obnoxiously up the grade each time he downshifted. In all those mornings, he never once saw anybody, or any car, anywhere near that house. It always seemed like such a crime to have such a huge house sitting there empty. It was such a well-kept empty house, and Jimmy used to consider simply moving in. What if he could do that? What if he could simply take it over? He would think: Imagine what all my kids could do with all the room in that big house.

On this morning, he parked his Chrysler across the road from the house, which had not changed as far as he could see. He had stopped in Stamford to fill the tank with gas and had purchased a bottle of aspirin at a convenience store there. Christ, his back hurt! How was he supposed to go back to the docks in only two days? Honestly, how?

Jimmy opened the bottle and ate a handful of aspirins—chewed and swallowed without water. It was a well-known fact that a chewed aspirin, while disgusting to the taste, would act faster than a whole aspirin, which would sit intact and useless for some time in a person’s stomach acid. He ate several aspirins and he thought about his wedding night. He was just nineteen years old then, and Gina was even younger.

She had asked him on their wedding night, “How many kids do you want to have, Jimmy?”

He’d said, “Your boobs will get bigger whenever you’re pregnant, right?”

“I think so.”

“Then I’ll take ten or eleven kids, Gina,” he had said.

In fact, they ended up having six, which was ridiculous enough. Six kids! And Jimmy in the produce business! What had they been thinking? They’d had three boys and three girls. The girls had Italian names and the boys had Irish names, a cornball little gimmick that was Jimmy’s idea. Six kids!

The pain in Jimmy’s back, which had started as stiffness and turned to cramps, was stoked up even higher now. It was a terrible pain, localized at the point of his recent surgery, emphasized periodically by a hot pulse that shook his body like a sob. He emptied some more of the aspirins from the bottle into his palm and he looked at the big house. He thought about his grandfather who had shot through the engine of a company coal truck, and he thought about his uncle who’d got assassinated by company detectives for organizing, and he thought about the black lung. He thought about his doctors and about Joseph D. DiCello and about the mushroom man and about Hector the Haitian distributor and about his brother Patrick, who he rarely saw anymore at all because Connecticut was so far.

He chewed the aspirins and counted the windows of the great house across the road. Jimmy Moran had never thought to count the windows before. He worked the bits of aspirin out of his teeth with his tongue and counted thirty-two windows. Thirty-two windows that he could see, just from the road! He thought and thought and then he spoke.

“Even for me, with six kids and a wife . . .” Jimmy supposed aloud. “Even for me, with six kids and a wife, it must be a sin to have such a house. That must be it.”

Jimmy Moran thought and thought, but this was the best he could figure. This was all he could come up with.

“Even for me,” he said again, “it must be a sin.”

The Famous Torn and Restored Lit Cigarette Trick

I N HUNGARY, Richard Hoffman’s family had been the manufacturers of Hoffman’s Rose Water, a product which was used at the time for both cosmetic and medicinal purposes. Hoffman’s mother drank the rose water for her indigestion, and his father used it to scent and cool his groin after exercise. The servants rinsed the Hoffmans’ table linens in a cold bath infused with rose water such that even the kitchen would be perfumed. The cook mixed a dash of it into her sweetbread batter. For evening events, Budapest ladies wore expensive imported colognes, but Hoffman’s Rose Water was a staple product of daytime hygiene for all women, as requisite as soap. Hungarian men could be married for decades without ever realizing that the natural smell of their wives’ skin was not, in fact, a refined scent of blooming roses.

Richard Hoffman’s father was a perfect gentleman, but his mother slapped the servants. His paternal grandfather had been a drunk and a brawler, and his maternal grandfather had been a Bavarian boar hunter, trampled to death at the age of ninety by his own horses. After her husband died of consumption, Hoffman’s mother transferred the entirety of the family’s fortune into the hands of a handsome Russian charlatan named Katanovsky, a common conjurer and a necromancer who promised Madame Hoffman audiences with the dead. As for Richard Hoffman himself, he moved to America, where he murdered two people.

Hoffman immigrated to Pittsburgh during World War II and worked as a busboy for over a decade. He had a terrible, humiliating way of speaking with customers.

“I am from Hungary!” he would bark. “Are you Hungary, too? If you Hungary, you in the right place!”

For years he spoke such garbage, even after he had learned excellent English, and could be mistaken for a native-born steelworker. With this ritual degradation he was tipped generously, and saved enough money to buy a supper club called the Pharaoh’s Palace, featuring a nightly magic act, a comic, and some showgirls. It was very popular with gamblers and the newly rich.

When Hoffman was in his late forties, he permitted a young man named Ace Douglas to audition for a role as a supporting magician. Ace had no nightclub experience, no professional photos or references, but he had a beautiful voice over the telephone, and Hoffman granted him an audience.

On the afternoon of the audition, Ace arrived in a tuxedo. His shoes had a wealthy gleam, and he took his cigarettes from a silver case, etched with his clean initials. He was a slim, attractive man with fair brown hair. When he was not smiling, he looked like a matinee idol, and when he was smiling, he looked like a friendly lifeguard. Either way, he seemed altogether too affable to perform good magic (Hoffman’s other magicians cultivated an intentional menace), but his act was wonderful and entertaining, and he was unsullied by the often stupid fashions of magic at the time. (Ace didn’t claim to be descended from a vampire, for instance, or empowered with secrets from the tomb of Ramses, or to have been kidnaped by Gypsies as a child, or raised by missionaries in the mysterious Orient.) He didn’t even have a female assistant, unlike Hoffman’s other magicians, who knew that some bounce in fishnets could save any sloppy act. What’s more, Ace had the good sense and class not to call himself the Great anything or the Magnificent anybody.

Onstage, with his smooth hair and white gloves, Ace Douglas had the sexual ease of Sinatra.

There was an older waitress known as Big Sandra at the Pharaoh’s Palace on the afternoon of Ace Douglas’s audition, setting up the cocktail bar. She watched the act for a few minutes, then approached Hoffman, and whispered in his ear, “At night, when I’m all alone in my bed, I sometimes think about men.”

“I bet you do, Sandra,” said Hoffman.

She was always talking like this. She was a fantastic, dirty woman, and he had actually had sex with her a few times.

She whispered, “And when I get to thinking about men, Hoffman, I think about a man exactly like that.”

“You like him?” Hoffman asked.

“Oh, my.”

“You think the ladies will like him?”

“Oh, my,” said Big Sandra, fanning herself daintily. “Heavens, yes.”

Hoffman fired his other two magicians within the hour.

After that, Ace Douglas worked every night that the Pharaoh’s Palace was open. He was the highest paid performer in Pittsburgh. This was not during a decade when nice young women generally came to bars unescorted, but the Pharaoh’s Palace became a place where nice women—extremely attractive young single nice women—would come with their best girlfriends and their best dresses to watch the Ace Douglas magic show. And men would come to the Pharaoh’s Palace to watch the nice young women and to buy them expensive cocktails.

Hoffman had his own table at the back of the restaurant, and after the magic show was over, he and Ace Douglas would entertain young ladies there. The girls would blindfold Ace, and Hoffman would choose an object on the table for him to identify.

“It’s a fork,” Ace would say. “It’s a gold cigarette lighter.”

The more suspicious girls would open their purses and seek unusual objects—family photographs, prescription medicine, a traffic ticket—all of which Ace would describe easily. The girls would laugh, and doubt his blindfold, and cover his eyes with their damp hands. They had names like Lettie and Pearl and Siggie and Donna. They all loved dancing, and they all tended to keep their nice fur wraps with them at the table, out of pride. Hoffman would introduce them to eligible or otherwise interested businessmen. Ace Douglas would escort the nice young ladies to the parking lot late at night, listening politely as they spoke up to him, resting his hand reassuringly on the small of their backs if they wavered.

At the end of every evening, Hoffman would say sadly, “Me and Ace, we see so many girls come and go . . .”

Ace Douglas could turn a pearl necklace into a white glove and a cigarette lighter into a candle. He could produce a silk scarf from a lady’s hairpin. But his finest trick was in 1959, when he produced his little sister from a convent school and offered her to Richard Hoffman in marriage.

Her name was Angela. She had been a volleyball champion in the convent school, and she had legs like a movie star’s legs, and a very pretty laugh. She was ten days pregnant on her wedding day, although she and Hoffman had known each other for only two weeks. Shortly thereafter, Angela had a daughter, and they named her Esther. Throughout the early 1960s, they all prospered happily.

Esther turned eight years old, and the Hoffmans celebrated her birthday with a special party at the Pharaoh’s Palace. That night, there was a thief sitting in the cocktail lounge.

He didn’t look like a thief. He was dressed well enough, and he was served without any trouble. The thief drank a few martinis. Then, in the middle of the magic show, he leaped over the bar, kicked the bartender away, punched the cash register open, and ran out of the Pharaoh’s Palace with his hands full of tens and twenties.

The customers were screaming, and Hoffman heard it from the kitchen. He chased the thief into the parking lot and caught him by the hair.

“You steal from me?” he yelled. “You fucking steal from me?”

“Back off, pal,” the thief said. The thief ’s name was George Purcell, and he was drunk.

“You fucking steal from me?” Hoffman yelled.

He shoved George Purcell into the side of a yellow Buick. Some of the customers had come outside, and were watching from the doorway of the restaurant. Ace Douglas came out, too. He walked past the customers, into the parking lot, and lit a cigarette. Ace Douglas watched as Hoffman lifted the thief by his shirt and threw him against the hood of a Cadillac.

“Back off me!” Purcell said.

“You fucking steal from me?”

“You ripped my shirt!” Purcell cried, aghast. He was looking down at his ripped shirt when Hoffman shoved him into the side of the yellow Buick again.

Ace Douglas said, “Richard? Could you take it easy?” (The Buick was his, and it was new. Hoffman was steadily pounding George Purcell’s head into the door.) “Richard? Excuse me? Excuse me, Richard. Please don’t damage my car, Richard.”

Hoffman dropped the thief to the ground and sat on his chest. He caught his breath and smiled. “Don’t ever,” he explained, “ever. Don’t ever steal from me.”

Still sitting on Purcell’s chest, he calmly picked up the tens and twenties that had fallen on the asphalt and handed them to Ace Douglas. Then he slid his hand into Purcell’s back pocket and pulled out a wallet, which he opened. He took nine dollars from the wallet, because that was all the money he found there. Purcell was indignant.

“That’s my money!” he shouted. “You can’t take my money!”

“Your money?” Hoffman slapped Purcell’s head. “Your money? Your fucking money?”

Ace Douglas tapped Hoffman’s shoulder lightly and said, “Richard? Excuse me? Let’s just wait for the police, okay? How about it, Richard?”

“Your money?” Hoffman was slapping Purcell in the face now with the wallet. “You fucking steal from me, you have no money! You fucking steal from me, I own all your money!”

“Aw, Jesus,” Purcell said. “Quit it, will ya? Leave me alone, will ya?”

“Let him be,” Ace Douglas said.

“Your money? I own all your money!” Hoffman bellowed. “I own you! You fucking steal from me, I own your fucking shoes!”

Hoffman lifted Purcell’s leg and pulled off one of his shoes. It was a nice brown leather wingtip. He hit Purcell with it once in the face and tore off the other shoe. He beat on Purcell a few times with that shoe until he lost his appetite for it. Then he just sat on Purcell’s chest for a while, catching his breath, hugging the shoes and rocking in a sad way.

“Aw, Jesus,” Purcell groaned. His lip was bleeding.

“Let’s get up now, Richard,” Ace suggested.

After some time, Hoffman jumped off Purcell and walked back into the Pharaoh’s Palace, carrying the thief ’s shoes. His tuxedo was torn in one knee, and his shirt was hanging loose. The customers backed against the walls of the restaurant and let him pass. He went into the kitchen and threw Purcell’s shoes into one of the big garbage cans next to the potwashing sinks. He went into his office and shut the door.

The potwasher was a young Cuban fellow named Manuel. He picked George Purcell’s brown wingtips out of the garbage can and held one of them up against the bottom of his own foot. It seemed to be a good match, so he took off his own shoes and put on Purcell’s. Manuel’s shoes were plastic sandals, and these he threw away. A little later, Manuel watched with satisfaction as the chef dumped a vat of cold gravy on top of the sandals, and when he went back to washing pots, he whistled to himself a little song of good luck.

A policeman arrived. He handcuffed George Purcell and brought him into Hoffman’s office. Ace Douglas followed them.

“You want to press charges?” the cop asked.

“No,” Hoffman said. “Forget about it.”

“You don’t press charges, I have to let him go.”

“Let him go.”

“This man says you took his shoes.”

“He’s a criminal. He came in my restaurant with no shoes.”

“He took my shoes,” Purcell said. His shirt collar was soaked with blood.

“He never had no shoes on. Look at him. No shoes on his feet.”

“You took my money and my goddamn shoes, you animal. Twenty-dollar shoes!”

“Get this stealing man out of my restaurant, please,” Hoffman said.

“Officer?” Ace Douglas said. “Excuse me, but I was here the whole time, and this man never did have any shoes on. He’s a derelict, sir.”

“But I’m wearing dress socks!” Purcell shouted. “Look at me! Look at me!”

Hoffman stood up and walked out of his office. The cop followed Hoffman, leading George Purcell. Ace Douglas trailed behind. On his way through the restaurant, Hoffman stopped to pick up his daughter, Esther, from her birthday party. He carried her out to the parking lot.

“Listen to me now,” he told Purcell. “You ever steal from me again, I’ll kill you.”

“Take it easy,” the cop said.

“If I even see you on the street, I’ll fucking kill you.”

The cop said, “You want to press charges, pal, you press charges. Otherwise, you take it easy.”

“He doesn’t like to be robbed,” Ace Douglas explained.

“Animal,” Purcell muttered.

“You see this little girl?” Hoffman asked. “My little girl is eight years old today. If I’m walking on the street with my little girl and I see you, I will leave her on one side of the street and I will cross the street and I will kill you in front of my little girl.”

“That’s enough,” the cop said. He led George Purcell out of the parking lot and took off his handcuffs.

The cop and the thief walked away together. Hoffman stood on the steps of the Pharaoh’s Palace, holding Esther and shouting. “Right in front of my little girl, you make me kill you? What kind of man are you? Crazy man! You ruin a little girl’s life! Terrible man!”

Esther was crying. Ace Douglas took her from Hoffman’s arms.

The next week, the thief George Purcell came back to the Pharaoh’s Palace. It was noon, and very quiet. The prep cook was making chicken stock, and Manuel the potwasher was cleaning out the dry goods storage area. Hoffman was in his office, ordering vegetables from his wholesaler. Purcell came straight back into the kitchen, sober.

“I want my goddamn shoes!” he yelled, pounding on the office door. “Twenty-dollar shoes!”

Then Richard Hoffman came out of his office and beat George Purcell to death with a meat mallet. Manuel the potwasher tried to hold him back, and Hoffman beat him to death with the meat mallet, too.

Esther Hoffman did not grow up to be a natural magician. Her hands were dull. It was no fault of her own, just an unfortunate birth flaw. Otherwise, she was a bright girl.

Her uncle, Ace Douglas, had been the American champion close-up magician for three years running. He’d won his titles using no props or tools at all, except a single silver dollar coin. During one competition, he’d vanished and produced the coin for fifteen dizzying minutes without the expert panel of judges ever noticing that the coin spent a lot of time resting openly on Ace Douglas’s knee. He would put it there, where it lay gleaming to be seen if one of the judges had only glanced away for a moment from Ace’s hands. But they would never glance away, convinced that he still held a coin before them in his fingers. They were not fools, but they were dupes for his fake takes, his fake drops, his mock passes, and a larger cast of impossible moves so deceptive they went entirely unnoticed. Ace Douglas had motions he himself had never even named. He was a scholar of misdirection. He proscribed skepticism. His fingers were as loose and quick as thoughts.

But Esther Hoffman’s magic was sadly pedestrian. She did the Famous Dancing Cane trick, the Famous Vanishing Milk trick, and the Famous Interlocking Chinese Rings trick. She produced parakeets from light bulbs and pulled a dove from a burning pan. She performed at birthday parties and could float a child. She performed at grammar schools and could cut and restore the neckties of principals. If the principal was a lady, Esther could borrow a ring from the principal’s finger, lose it, and then find it in a child’s pocket. If the lady principal wore no jewelry, Esther could simply run a sword through the woman’s neck while the children in the audience screamed in spasms of rapture.

Simple, artless tricks.

“You’re young,” Ace told her. “You’ll improve.”

But she did not. Esther made more money giving flute lessons to little girls than performing magic. She was a fine flutist, and this was maddening to her. Why all this worthless musical skill?

“Your fingers are very quick,” Ace told her. “There’s nothing wrong with your fingers. But it’s not about quickness, Esther. You don’t have to speed through coins.”

“I hate coins.”

“You should handle coins as if they amuse you, Esther. Not as if they frighten you.”

“With coins, it’s like I’m wearing oven mitts.”

“Coins are not always easy.”

“I never fool anybody. I can’t misdirect.”

“It’s not about misdirection, Esther. It’s about direction.”

“I don’t have hands,” Esther complained. “I have paws.”

It was true that Esther could only fumble coins and cards, and she would never be a deft magician. She had no gift. Also, she hadn’t the poise. Esther had seen photographs of her uncle when he was young at the Pharaoh’s Palace, leaning against patrician pillars of marble in his tuxedo and cufflinks. No form of magic existed that was close-up enough for him. He could sit on a chair surrounded on all sides by the biggest goons of spectators—people who challenged him or grabbed his arm in mid-pass—and he would borrow from a goon some common object and absolutely vanish it. Some goon’s car keys in Ace’s hand would turn into absolutely nothing. Absolutely gone.

Ace’s nightclub act at the Pharaoh’s Palace had been a tribute to the elegant vices: coins, cards, dice, champagne flutes, and cigarettes. Everything was to suggest and encourage drinking, sin, gamesmanship, and money. The fluidity of fortune. He could do a whole act of cigarette effects alone, starting with a single cigarette borrowed from a lady in the audience. He would pass it through a coin and give the coin to the lady. He would tear the cigarette in half and restore it, swallow it, cough it back up along with six more, duplicate them, and duplicate them again until he ended up with lit cigarettes smoking hot between all his fingers and in his mouth, behind his ears, emerging from every pocket—surprised? he was terrified!—and then, with a nod, all the lit cigarettes would vanish except the original. That one he would smoke luxuriously during the applause.

Also, Esther had pictures of her father during the same period, when he owned the Pharaoh’s Palace. He was handsome in his tuxedo, but with a heavy posture. She had inherited his thick wrists.

When Richard Hoffman got out of prison, he moved in with Ace and Esther. Ace had a tremendous home in the country by then, a tall yellow Victorian house with a mile of woods behind it and a lawn like a baron’s. Ace Douglas had made a tidy fortune from magic. He had operated the Pharaoh’s Palace from the time that Hoffman was arrested, and, with Hoffman’s permission, had eventually sold it at great profit to a gourmet restaurateur. Esther had been living with Ace since she’d finished high school, and she had a whole floor to herself. Ace’s little sister Angela had divorced Hoffman, also with his permission, and had moved to Florida to live with her new husband. What Hoffman had never permitted was for Esther to visit him in prison, and so it had been fourteen years since they’d seen each other. In prison he had grown even sturdier. He seemed shorter than Ace and Esther remembered, and some weight gained had made him more broad. He had also grown a thick beard, with handsome red tones. He was easily moved to tears, or, at least, seemed to be always on the verge of being moved to tears. The first few weeks of living together again were not altogether comfortable for Esther and Hoffman. They had only the briefest conversations, such as this one:

Hoffman asked Esther, “How old are you now?”

“Twenty-two.”

“I’ve got undershirts older than you.”

Or, in another conversation, Hoffman said, “The fellows I met in prison are the nicest fellows in the world.”

And Esther said, “Actually, Dad, they probably aren’t.”

And so on.

In December of that year, Hoffman attended a magic show of Esther’s, performed at a local elementary school.

“She’s really not very good,” he reported later to Ace.

“I think she’s fine,” Ace said. “She’s fine for the kids, and she enjoys herself.”

“She’s pretty terrible. Too dramatic.”

“Perhaps.”

“She says, BEHOLD! It’s terrible. BEHOLD this! BEHOLD that!”

“But they’re children.” Ace said. “With children, you need to explain when you’re about to do a trick and when you just did one, because they’re so excited they don’t realize what’s going on. They don’t even know what a magician is. They can’t tell the difference between when you’re doing magic and when you’re just standing there.”

“I think she’s very nervous.”

“Could be.”

“She says, BEHOLD THE PARAKEET!”

“Her parakeet tricks are not bad.”

“It’s not dignified,” Hoffman said. “She convinces nobody.”

“It’s not meant to be dignified, Richard. It’s for the children.”

The next week, Hoffman bought Esther a large white rabbit.

“If you do the tricks for the children, you should have a rabbit,” he told her.

Esther hugged him. She said, “I’ve never had a rabbit.”

Hoffman lifted the rabbit from the cage. It was an unnaturally enormous rabbit.

“Is it pregnant?” Esther asked.

“No, she is not. She is only large.”

“That’s an extremely large rabbit for any magic trick,” Ace observed.

Esther said, “They haven’t invented the hat big enough to pull that rabbit out of.”

“She actually folds up to a small size,” Hoffman said. He held the rabbit between his hands as if she were an accordion and squeezed her into a great white ball.

“She seems to like that,” Ace said, and Esther laughed.

“She doesn’t mind it. Her name is Bonnie.” Hoffman held the rabbit forward by the nape of her neck, as though she were a massive kitten. Dangling fully stretched like that, she was bigger than a big raccoon.

“Where’d you get her?” Esther asked.

“From the newspaper!” Hoffman announced, beaming.

Esther liked Bonnie the rabbit more than she liked her trick doves and parakeets, who were attractive enough but were essentially only pigeons that had been lucky with their looks. Ace liked Bonnie, too. He allowed Bonnie to enjoy the entirety of his large Victorian home, with little regard for her pellets, which were small, rocky, and inoffensive. She particularly enjoyed sitting in the center of the kitchen table, and from that spot would regard Ace, Esther, and Hoffman gravely. In this manner, Bonnie was very feline.

“Will she always be this judgmental?” Esther asked.

Bonnie became more canine when she was allowed outdoors. She would sleep on the porch, lying on her side in a patch of sun, and if anyone approached the porch she would look up at that person lazily, in the manner of a bored and trustful dog. At night, she slept with Hoffman. He tended to sleep on his side, curled like a child, and Bonnie would sleep upon him, perched on his highest point, which was generally his hip.

As a performer, however, Bonnie was useless. She was far too large to be handled gracefully onstage, and on the one occasion that Esther did try to produce her from a hat, she hung in the air so sluggishly that the children in the back rows were sure that she was a fake. She appeared to be a huge toy, as store-bought as their own stuffed animals.

“Bonnie will never be a star,” Hoffman said.

Ace said, “You spoiled her, Richard, the way the magicians have been spoiling their lovely assistants for decades. You spoiled Bonnie by sleeping with her.”

That spring, a young lawyer and his wife (who was also a young lawyer) moved into the large Victorian house next door to Ace Douglas’s large Victorian house. It all happened very swiftly. The widow who had lived there for decades died in her sleep, and the place was sold within a few weeks. The new neighbors had great ambitions. The husband, whose name was Ronald Wilson, telephoned Ace and asked whether there were any problems he should know about in the area, regarding water-drainage patterns or frost heaves. Ronald had plans for a garden and was interested in building an arbor to extend from the back of the house. His wife, whose name was Ruth-Ann, was running for probate judge of the county. Ronald and Ruth-Ann were tall and had perfect manners. They had no children.

Three days after the Wilsons moved in next door, Bonnie the rabbit disappeared. She was on the porch, and then she was not.

Hoffman searched all afternoon for Bonnie. On Esther’s recommendation, he spent that evening walking up and down the road with a flashlight, looking to see if Bonnie had been hit by a car. The next day, he walked through the woods behind the house, calling the rabbit for hours. He left a bowl of cut vegetables on the porch, with some fresh water. Several times during the night, Hoffman got up to see whether Bonnie was on the porch, eating the food. Eventually, he just wrapped himself in blankets and lay down on the porch swing, keeping a vigil beside the vegetables. He slept out there for a week, changing the food every morning and evening, to keep the scent fresh.

Esther made a poster with a drawing of Bonnie (which looked very much like a spaniel in her rendering) and a caption reading: large rabbit missing. She stapled copies of the poster on telephone poles throughout town and placed a notice in the newspaper. Hoffman wrote a letter to the neighbors, Ronald and Ruth-Ann Wilson, and slid it under their door. The letter described Bonnie’s color and weight, gave the date and time of her disappearance, and requested any information on the subject at all. The Wilsons did not call with news, so the next day Hoffman went over to their house and rang the doorbell. Ronald Wilson answered.

“Did you get my letter?” Hoffman asked.

“About the rabbit?” Ronald said. “Have you found him?”

“The rabbit is a girl. And the rabbit belongs to my daughter. She was a gift. Have you seen her?”

“She didn’t get in the road, did she?”

“Is Bonnie in your house, Mr. Wilson?”

“Is Bonnie the rabbit’s name?”

“Yes.”

“How would Bonnie get in our house?”

“Perhaps you have some broken window in the basement?”

“You think she’s in our basement?”

“Have you looked for her in your basement?”

“No.”

“Can I look for her?”

“You want to look for a rabbit in our basement?”

The two men stared at each other for some time. Ronald Wilson was wearing a baseball cap, and he took it off and rubbed the top of his head, which was balding. He put the baseball cap back on.

“Your rabbit is not in our house, Mr. Hoffman,” Wilson said.

“Okay,” Hoffman said. “Okay. Sure.”

Hoffman walked back home. He sat at the kitchen table and waited until Ace and Esther were both in the room to make his announcement.

“They took her,” he said. “The Wilsons took Bonnie.”

Hoffman started to build the tower in July. There was a row of oak trees between Ace Douglas’s house and the Wilsons’ house, and the leaves from these trees blocked Hoffman’s view into their home. For several months, he’d been spending his nights watching the Wilson house from the attic window with binoculars, looking for Bonnie inside, but he could not see into the lower floor rooms for the trees, and was frustrated. Ace reassured him that the leaves would be gone by autumn, but Hoffman was afraid that Bonnie would be dead by autumn. This was difficult for him to take. He was no longer allowed to go over to the Wilsons’ property and look into the basement windows, since Ruth-Ann Wilson had called the police. He was no longer allowed to write threatening letters. He was no longer allowed to call the Wilsons on the telephone. He had promised Ace and Esther all of these things.

“He’s really harmless,” Esther told Ruth-Ann Wilson, although she herself was not sure this was the case.

Ronald Wilson found out somehow that Hoffman had been in prison, and he’d contacted the parole officer, who contacted Hoffman and suggested that he leave the Wilsons alone.

“If you would only let him search your home for the rabbit,” Ace Douglas had suggested gently to the Wilsons, “this would be over very quickly. Just give him a half-hour to look around. It’s just that he’s concerned that Bonnie is trapped in your basement.”

“We did not move here to let murderers into our home,” Ronald Wilson said.

“He’s not a murderer,” Esther protested, somewhat lamely.

“He scares my wife.”

“I don’t want to scare your wife,” Hoffman said.

“He’s really harmless,” Esther insisted. “Maybe you could buy him a new rabbit.”

“I don’t want any new rabbit.”

“You scare my wife,” Ronald repeated. “We don’t owe you any rabbit at all.”

In late spring, Hoffman cut down the smallest oak tree between the two houses. He did it on a Monday afternoon, when the Wilsons were at work and Esther was performing magic for a Girl Scouts’ party and Ace was shopping. Hoffman had purchased a chain saw weeks earlier and had been hiding it. The tree wasn’t very big, but it fell at a sharp diagonal across the Wilsons’ back yard, narrowly missing their arbor and destroying a substantial corner of the garden.

The police came. After a great deal of negotiating, Ace Douglas was able to prove that the oak tree, while between the two houses, was actually on his property, and it was his right to have it cut down. He offered to pay generously for the damages. Ronald Wilson came over to the house again that night, but he would not speak until Ace sent Hoffman from the room.

“Do you understand our situation?” he asked.

“I do,” Ace said. “I honestly do.”

The two men sat at the kitchen table across from each other for some time. Ace offered to get Ronald some coffee, which he refused.

“How can you live with him?” Ronald asked.

Ace did not answer this but got himself some coffee. He opened the refrigerator and pulled out a carton of milk, which he smelled and then poured down the sink. After this, he smelled his cup of coffee, which he poured down the sink, as well.

“Is he your boyfriend?” Ronald asked.

“Is Richard my boyfriend? No. He’s my very good friend. And he’s my brother-in-law.”

“Really,” Ronald said. He was working his wedding band around his finger, as though he were screwing it on tight.

“You thought it was a dream come true to buy that nice old house, didn’t you?” Ace Douglas asked. He managed to say this in a friendly, sympathetic way.

“Yes, we did.”

“But it’s a nightmare, isn’t it? Living next to us?”

“Yes, it is.”

Ace Douglas laughed, and Ronald Wilson laughed, too.

“It’s a complete fucking nightmare, actually.”

“I’m very sorry that your wife is afraid of us, Ronald.”

“Well.”

“I truly am.”

“Thank you. It’s difficult. She’s a bit paranoid sometimes.”

“Well,” Ace said, again in a friendly and sympathetic way. “Imagine that. Paranoid! In this neighborhood?”

The two men laughed again. Meanwhile, in the other room, Esther was talking to her father.

“Why’d you do it, Dad?” she asked. “Such a pretty tree.”

He had been weeping.

“Because I am so sad,” he said, finally. “I wanted them to feel it.”

“To feel how sad you were?” she said.

“To feel how sad I am,” he told her. “How sad I am.”

Anyway, in July he started to build the tower.

Ace had an old pickup truck, and Hoffman drove it to the municipal dump every afternoon so that he could look for wood and scrap materials. He built the base of the tower out of pine reinforced with parts of an old steel bed frame. By the end of July, the tower was over ten feet high. He wasn’t planning on building a staircase inside, so it was a solid cube.

The Wilsons called the zoning board, which fined Ace Douglas for erecting an unauthorized structure on his property, and insisted that the work stop immediately.

“It’s only a tree house,” Esther lied to the zoning officer.

“It’s a watchtower,” Hoffman corrected. “So that I can see into the neighbors’ house.”

The zoning officer gave Hoffman a long, empty look.

“Yes,” Hoffman said. “This truly is a watchtower.”

“Take it down,” said the zoning officer to Esther. “Take it down immediately.”

Ace Douglas owned a significant library of antique magic books, including several volumes that Hoffman himself had brought over from Hungary during the Second World War, and which had been old and valuable even then. Hoffman had purchased these rare books from Gypsies and dealers across Europe with the last of his family’s money. Some volumes were written in German, some in Russian, some in English.

The collection revealed the secrets of parlor magic, or drawing room magic, a popular pursuit of educated gentlemen at the turn of the century. The books spoke not of tricks, but of “diversions,” which were sometimes magical maneuvers but were just as often simple scientific experiments. Often, these diversions involved hypnosis, or the appearance of hypnosis, or would not be successful without a trained conspirator among the otherwise susceptible guests. A gentleman might literally use smoke and a mirror to evoke a ghost within the parlor. A gentleman might read a palm or levitate a tea tray. A gentleman might simply demonstrate that an egg could stand on its end, or that magnets could react against one another, or that an electric current could turn a small motorized contrivance.

The books were exquisitely illustrated. Hoffman had given them to Ace Douglas back in the 1950s, because he had hoped for some time to re-create this lost European conjury in Pittsburgh. He had hoped to decorate a small area within the Pharaoh’s Palace in the manner of a formal upper-middle-class Hungarian drawing room, and to dress Ace in spats and kid gloves. Ace did study the books. But he found that there was no way to accurately replicate most of the diversions. The old tricks all called for common household items which were simply not common anymore: a box of paraffin, a pinch of snuff, a dab of beeswax, a spittoon, a watch fob, a ball of cork, a sliver of saddle soap. Even if such ingredients could be gathered, they would have no meaning to modern spectators. It would be museum magic. It would move nobody.

To Hoffman, this was a considerable disappointment. As a very young man he had watched the Russian charlatan and swindler necromancer Katanovsky perform such diversions in his mother’s drawing room. His mother, recently widowed, wore dark gowns decorated with china-blue silk ribbons precisely the same shade as the famous blue vials of Hoffman’s Rose Water. Her face was that of a determined regent. His sisters, in childish pinafores, regarded Katanovsky in a pretty stupor of wonder. Gathered in the drawing room as a family, they had all heard it. Hoffman himself—his eyes stinging from phosphorous smoke—had heard it: the unmistakable voice of his recently dead father speaking through Katanovsky’s own dark mouth. A father’s message (in perfectly accentless Hungarian!) of reassurement. A thrilling, intimate call to faith.

And so it was unfortunate for Hoffman that Ace Douglas could not replicate this diversion. He would’ve liked to see it tried again. It must have been a very simple swindle, although an antique one. Hoffman would have liked to hear the hoax voice of his dead father repeated and explained to him fully and—if necessary—repeated again.

On the first day of September, Hoffman woke at dawn and began preparing his truck. Months later, during the court proceedings, the Wilsons’ attorney would attempt to show that Hoffman had stockpiled weapons in the bed of the truck, an allegation that Esther and Ace would contest heatedly. Certainly there were tools in the truck—a few shovels, a sledgehammer, and an ax—but if these were threatening, they were not so intentionally.

Hoffman had recently purchased several dozen rolls of black electrical duct tape, and at dawn he began winding the tape around the body of the truck. He wound the tape, and then more tape over the existing tape, and he did this again and again, as armor.

Esther had an early-morning flute class to teach, and she got up to eat her cereal. From the kitchen window, she saw her father taping his pickup. The headlights and taillights were already covered and the doors were sealed shut. She went outside.

“Dad?” she said.

And Hoffman said, almost apologetically, “I’m going over there.”

“Not to the Wilsons’?”

“I’m going in after Bonnie,” he said.

Esther walked back to the house, feeling somewhat shaky. She woke Ace Douglas, who looked from his bedroom window down at Hoffman in the driveway and called the police.

“Oh, not the police,” Esther said. “Not the police . . .”

Ace held her in a hug for some time.

“Are you crying?” he asked.

“No,” she lied.

“You’re not crying?”

“No. I’m just sad.”

When the duct tape ran out, Hoffman circled the truck and noticed that he had no way to enter it now. He took the sledgehammer from the flatbed and lightly tapped the passenger-side window with it, until the glass was evenly spider-webbed. He gently pushed the window in. The glass crystals landed silently on the seat. He climbed inside but noticed that he had no keys, so he climbed out of the broken window again and walked into the house, where he found his keys on the kitchen table. Esther wanted to go downstairs to try to talk to him, but Ace Douglas would not let her go. He went down himself and said, “I’m sorry, Richard. But I’ve called the police.”

“The police?” Hoffman repeated, wounded. “Not the police, Ace.”

“I’m sorry.”

Hoffman was silent for a long time. Staring at Ace. “But I’m going in there after Bonnie,” he said, finally.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that.”

“But they have her,” Hoffman said, and he was weeping.

“I don’t believe that they do have her, Richard.”

“But they stole her!”

Hoffman snatched up his keys and climbed back into his taped-up truck, still weeping. He drove over to the Wilsons’ home, and he circled it several times. He drove through the corn in the garden. Ruth-Ann Wilson came running out, and she pulled up some bricks that were lining her footpath, and she chased after Hoffman, throwing the bricks at his truck and screaming.

Hoffman pulled the truck up to the slanting metal basement doors of the Wilsons’ house. He tried to drive right up on them, but his truck didn’t have the power, and the wheels sank into the wet lawn. He honked in long, forlorn foghorn blasts.

When the police arrived, Hoffman would not come out. He would, however, put his hands on the steering wheel to show that he was not armed.

“He doesn’t have a gun,” Esther shouted from within Ace Douglas’s house.

Two officers circled the truck and examined it. The younger officer tapped on Hoffman’s window and asked him to roll it down, but he refused.

“Tell them to bring her outside!” he shouted. “Bring the rabbit and I will come out of the truck! Terrible people!”

The older officer cut through the duct tape on the passenger-side door with a utility knife. He was able, finally, to open the door, and when he did that, he reached in and dragged Hoffman out, cutting both of their arms on the sparkling glass of the broken window. Outside the truck, Hoffman lay on the grass in a limp sprawl, facedown. He was handcuffed and taken away in a squad car.

Ace and Esther followed the police to the station, where the officers took Hoffman’s belt and his fingerprints. Hoffman was wearing only an undershirt, and his cell was small, empty, and chilly.

Esther asked the older police officer, “May I go home and bring my father back a jacket? Or a blanket?”

“You may,” said the older police officer, and he patted her arm with a sort of sympathetic authority. “You may, indeed.”

Back home, Esther washed her face and took some aspirins. She called the mother of her flute student and canceled that morning’s class. The mother wanted to reschedule, but Esther could only promise to call later. She noticed the milk on the kitchen counter and returned it to the refrigerator. She brushed her teeth. She changed into warmer autumn boots, and she went to the living room closet and found a light wool blanket for her father. She heard a noise.

Esther followed the noise, which was that of a running auto-mobile engine. She went to the window of the living room and parted the curtain. In the Wilsons’ driveway was a van with markings on the side indicating that it belonged to the ASPCA. There were grills on the windows of this vehicle. Esther said aloud, “Oh, my.”

A man in white coveralls came out of the Wilsons’ front door, carrying a large wire cage. Inside the cage was Bonnie.

Esther had never been inside the local ASPCA building, and she did not go inside it that day. She parked near the van, which she had followed, and watched as the man in the coveralls opened the back doors and pulled out a cage. This cage held three gray kittens, which he carried into the building, leaving the van doors open.

When the man was safely inside, Esther got out of her car and walked quickly to the back of the van. She found the cage with Bonnie, opened it easily, and pulled out the rabbit. Bonnie was much thinner than last time Esther had seen her, and the rabbit eyed her with an absolutely expressionless gaze of non-recognition. Esther carried Bonnie to her car and drove back to the police station.

Once in that parking lot, she tucked the rabbit under her left arm. She got out of the car and wrapped the light wool blanket she’d brought for her father completely around herself. Esther walked briskly into the police station. She passed the older police officer, who was talking to Ace Douglas and Ronald Wilson. She raised her right hand as she walked near the men and said solemnly, “How, palefaces.”

Ace smiled at her, and the older police officer waved her by.

Hoffman’s jail cell was at the end of a hallway, and it was poorly lit. Hoffman had not been sleeping well for several weeks, and he was cold and cut. The frame of his glasses was cracked, and he had been weeping since that morning. He saw Esther approaching, wrapped in the light gray wool blanket, and he saw in her the figure of his mother, who had worn cloaks against the Budapest winters and had also walked with a particular dignity.

Esther approached the cell, and she reached her hand between the bars toward her father, who rose with a limp to meet that hand. In a half-mad moment, he half-imagined her to be a warm apparition of his mother, and, as he reached for her, she smiled.

Her smile directed his gaze from her hand to her face, and in that instant, Esther pulled her arm back out of the cell, reached into the folds of the blanket around her, and gracefully produced the rabbit. She slid Bonnie—slimmer now, of course—through the iron bars and held the rabbit aloft in the cell, exactly where her empty hand had been only a moment before. Such that Hoffman, when he glanced down from Esther’s smile, saw a rabbit where before there had been no rabbit at all. Like a true enchantment, something appeared from the common air.

“Behold,” suggested Esther.

Richard Hoffman beheld the silken rabbit and recognized her as his Bonnie. He collected her into his square hands. And then, after that, he did behold his own daughter Esther.

A most gifted young woman.

The Finest Wife

W HEN ROSE was sixteen years old and five months pregnant, she won a beauty pageant in South Texas, based on her fine walk up a runway in a sweet navy-blue bathing suit. This was shortly before the war. She had been a skinny, knee-scratching kid only the summer earlier, but her pregnancy had just delivered her this sudden prize of a body. It was as though life was gestating in her thighs and ass and breasts, not in her belly. It might have seemed that she was carrying all the soft weights of motherhood spread evenly and perfect across her whole frame. Those parts of herself that she could not quite pack into the blue bathing suit spilled over it exactly enough to emotionally disturb several of the judges and spectators. She was an uncontested champion beauty.

Rose’s father, too, saw the pin-up shape that his daughter had taken, and, five months too late, he started worrying about the maintenance of her graces. Soon after the pageant, her condition became obvious. Her father sent her to a facility in Oklahoma, where she stayed until she experienced four days of labor and the delivery of a stillborn son. Rose could not actually have any more children after that, but the lovely figure was hers to keep, and she ended up eventually married, once again on the basis of a fine walk in a sweet bathing suit.

But she didn’t meet her husband until the war was over. In the meantime, she stayed in Oklahoma. She had developed a bit of a taste for certain types of tall, smiling local men in dark hats. Also, she had developed a taste for certain types of churchgoing men and also for left-handed men, and for servicemen, fishermen, postmen, assemblymen, firemen, highwaymen, elevator repairmen, and the Mexican busboys at the restaurant where she worked (who reverently called her La Rubia—the Blond—as if she were a notorious bandit or a cardsharp).

She married her husband because she loved him best. He was kind to waitresses and dogs, and was not in any way curious about her famous tastes. He was a big man himself, with a rump like the rump of a huge animal—muscled and hairy. He dialed telephones with pencil stubs because his fingers didn’t fit the rotary holes. He smoked cigarettes that looked like shreds of toothpicks against the size of his mouth. He couldn’t fall asleep without feeling Rose’s bottom pressed up warm against his belly. He held her as if she were a puppy. In the years after they got a television, they would watch evening game shows together on the couch, and he would genuinely applaud the contestants who had won cars and boats. He was happy for them. He would clap for them with his big arms stretched out stiffly, the way a trained seal claps.

They moved to Minnesota, eventually. Rose’s husband bought a musky flock of sheep and a small, tight house. She was married to him for forty-three years, and then he died of a heart attack. He was quite a bit older than she was, and he had lived a long time. Rose thought that he had passed the kind of life after which you should say, “Yes! That was a good one!” Her mourning was appreciative and fond.

When he was gone, the sheep became too much work, and she sold them off, a few at a time. And when the sheep were all gone—spread across several states as pets, yarn, dog food, and mint-jellied chops—Rose became the driver of the local kindergarten school bus. She was damn near seventy years old.

Rose was no longer easy with names, but her eyes were good, and she was a careful driver, as she always had been. They gave her an excellent route of kindergartners. First, she would pick up the bus itself, at the station behind the gravel pits, over the double paths of train tracks. Then she would pick up the neighbor boy, who lived by the gas station near Rose’s own house. Then she’d pick up the crying boy. Then she’d pick up the girl whose mother always dressed her in corduroy vests, then the boy who looked like Orson Welles, then the disgusted girl, then the humming boy, then the girl with all the Band-Aids. At the bridge by the Band-Aid girl’s house, she would cross the river to the hill road. There, she’d pick up the black girl, the grateful-looking boy, the shoving boy, the other black girl, and the out-of-breath girl. Last stop was the absent boy.

Thirteen passengers. Twelve, if you didn’t count the absent boy, as Rose tended not to.

But on the particular morning that makes this story, the neighbor boy, the crying boy, and the corduroy vest girl were all absent. Rose thought, Flu? She kept on driving and found the Orson Welles boy and the disgusted girl and the humming boy absent also, and she wondered, Chicken pox? After the bridge passed with no girl on it, and the whole hill road passed with no children near it, she thought, with some humiliation, Could today be Sunday? She recalled, then, having seen no other bus drivers at the gravel pit station, nor any other school bus crossing the double paths of railroad tracks. She had not, in fact, noticed any other cars on the roads at all. Not that these were fast highways, but they were certainly driven roads. They were always used roads. And Rose thought lightly, Armageddon?

But she rode her route out to the end. It was a fine choice that she did, too, because there was someone at the bottom of the absent boy’s driveway, after all. Two people, in fact, waiting for her. She stopped the bus, demonstrated the proper and legal flashing lights, cranked the door open, and let them in. They were two very old men, one short, one tall. It took them some trouble to get up the stairs.

“A ride for you gentlemen today?” she asked.

They sat in the seat just behind her own.

“It smells clean and decent in here, thank God,” one of them said.

“I use a tub and tile cleaner,” Rose answered. “Weekly.”

The taller man said, “My sweet Rosie. You look terrific.”

As a matter of fact, she did. She wore a hat and white gloves to work every day, as if she were driving those school children to church or to some important picnic.

“You could be a first lady,” the tall one went on. “You could have married a president.”

She looked at him in the wide, easy reflection of her rearview mirror, and then gave a pretty little expression of surprise and recognition. She looked at the shorter man and made the expression again. And this is who they were: Tate Palinkus and Dane Ladd. Tate was the man who had knocked her up back in South Texas before the war. Dane had been an orderly whom she had often kissed and fondled during her recovery from childbirth, at the Oklahoma Institution for Unwed Mothers. Which was also before the war.

“Won’t I be damned?” she said. “I sure never thought I’d see either of you two again. And right here in Minnesota. How nice.”

Dane said, “Ain’t this Tate Palinkus nothing but a Christless old bastard? He’s just been telling me about getting you pregnant.”

Tate said, “Rose. I did not know that you were pregnant at the time. I did not even hear about that until many years later, when I came around asking for you. That is the truth, Rose.”

“Tate Palinkus,” she said. “You big bugger.”

Dane said, “Foolin’ around on a fifteen-year-old girl. I guess that’s about the worst thing I ever heard of.”

“Dane Ladd.” Rose smiled. “You big stinker.”

“She was a hell of a pretty girl,” Tate said, and Dane said, “You barely have to remind me of that.”

Rose shifted her bus and turned it around.

She said, “You two have surprised my face just about off my body.”

“Don’t lose that sweet face,” Dane said. “Don’t lose that sweet body.”

They drove on. And, as it turned out, there was someone waiting at the end of the out-of-breath girl’s driveway, leaning on the mailbox. Another very old man. Rose stopped and let him on.

“Precious,” he called her, and he touched the brim of his hat. He was Jack Lance-Hainey, a deacon of the Presbyterian church. He had once run an Oklahoma senatorial campaign. He used to take Rose out for picnics during the 1940s, with baskets full of his wife’s real china and real silver. He had taught Rose how to climb on top of a man during sex, and how to pick up phones in hotel rooms and say, “This is Mrs. Lance-Hainey. Might you send me up a bottle of tonic for my terrible, terrible headache?”

Jack sat on the seat across the aisle from the other men, and set his hat beside him.

“Mr. Ladd.” He nodded. “It’s a beautiful morning.”

“It is,” Dane agreed. “What a fine country we live in.”

“It is a fine country,” Jack Lance-Hainey said, and added, “And good morning to you, Tate Palinkus, you fertile and lecherous old son of a snake.”

“I did not know she was pregnant at the time, Jack,” Tate explained. “Not until years later. I would have happily married her.”

And Rose said, under her breath, “Well, well, well . . . That is news, Mr. Palinkus.”

Now she rode her abandoned bus route backward, and found it fully packed with all her old lovers. She picked up every single one of them. At the house of the black girl, she picked up her Mississippi cousin Carl, who she had once met on an aunt’s bed during a Thanksgiving gathering. By the shoving boy’s mailbox, she found a small crowd of old men, waiting together. They were all of her postmen, out of uniform. They had all once driven airy trucks and kept stacks of extra canvas bags in the back for her to lie down on. She couldn’t remember their names, but the other men on the bus seemed to know them well, and they greeted one another with professional politeness.

At the other black girl’s house, she picked up two elderly veterans, who she remembered as enlisted men, their young scalps pink and shaved, their big ears tempting handles for tugging and guiding. The veterans sat behind Lane and Tate and talked about the economy. One of them was missing an arm and one was missing a leg. The armless one punched Tate with his good arm suddenly and said, “You’re just a lousy, no-good, knock-’em-up-and-leave-’em old prick, aren’t you?”

“He claims he didn’t know that she was pregnant,” Jack Lance-Hainey said, and the postmen all laughed in disbelief.

“I did not know she was pregnant at the time,” Tate said patiently. “Not until years later.”

“My God,” Rose said, “I barely knew it myself.”

“That baby got you that nice figure,” Tate offered, and a shared murmur of endorsement at this thought passed throughout the bus.

At the grateful girl’s house, she picked up a man so fat he had to reintroduce himself. He was her sister’s first husband, he said, and Rose said, “Coach! You troublemaker!” He had been an elevator mechanic, who used to meet Rose in the shop at night to teach her how to trick-shuffle a deck of cards and how to kiss with her eyes open.

“Those steps are lethal,” he said, red-faced from the climb, and the one-legged veteran said, “Who you tellin’, Coach?”

At the Band-Aid girl’s house, she picked up the bartenders from three states who she had fallen for, and at the humming boy’s house, she picked up a highway patrolman she’d spent a night with in Oklahoma City, back when they were both young. He was with a shrimp fisherman and a man who used to drive fire engines. They let him on the bus first, because they thought he had rank.

“Ma’am,” the highway patrolman called her, and smiled wide. Then he called Tate Palinkus a bad egg, a bad seed, a lowlife, a ruffian, and a dirt bag for getting her pregnant, back when she was just a kid who didn’t know a worthless son of a bitch from a fruit bowl.

There was an Arizona circuit court judge waiting for her at the end of the disgusted girl’s driveway, and he sat down, with Jack Lance-Hainey, in the front of the bus. He told Rose she still looked good enough to crawl up under his robe any day of the week.

She said, “Your Honor, we are old people now.”

He said, “You’re a daisy, Rose.”

She found Hank Spellman kicking rocks around the road in front of the Orson Welles boy’s house. He got on the bus, and the other men cheered, “Hank!” as if they were truly pleased to see him. Hank once sold and installed furnaces, and he had always been a popular man. He used to dance with Rose in her cellar, keeping time by tapping his hand on her hip. He used to slide his hands over her as they danced. He used to take big handfuls of her bottom and whisper to her, “If I’m ever missing and you need to find me, you can start looking for me right here on this ass.”

Where the girl who always wore a corduroy vest usually waited for the bus, there was a tall old man in a dark hat. He had once been Rose’s dentist. He’d had an indoor swimming pool and a maid, who would bring them towels and cocktails all night without comment. He had to use a cane to get on the bus, and his glasses were as thick as slices of bread. He told Rose that she was beautiful and that her figure was still a wonder.

Rose said, “Thank you very much. I’ve been lucky with my looks. The women in my family tend to age in one of two ways. Most of them either look like they smoked too many cigarettes or like they ate too many doughnuts.”

“You look like you kissed too many boys,” the elevator mechanic said.

“You could have been a first lady,” Lane said again, and Tate said thoughtfully, “You were my lady first.”

There were four former Mexican busboys standing by the picket fence of the crying boy’s house. They were old now, and identical, each one of them in a pressed white suit with handsome white hair and a white mustache.

“La Rubia,” they called her in turn. Their English was no better than it had ever been, but the armless veteran had fought Fascists in Spain, and he translated quite well.

This was the most crowded that her bus had ever been. It was not a very large bus. It was just for kindergartners, and, to be honest, it was just for the morning class of kindergartners. Naturally, the bus company had given Rose an excellent route, but it was not such a strenuous one. She was generally finished by noon. She was damn near seventy, of course, and although she was certainly not a weak woman, not a senile woman, she did get tired. So they had given her only those thirteen children so close to her own house. She was doing a wonderful job, a truly excellent job. Everyone agreed. She was a careful and polite driver. One of the better ones.

She rode her whole route backward that day, with all of the old men lovers on her kindergarten bus with her. She drove all the way without seeing one of her children and without passing another car. She had decided, with some shame, that it might very well be Sunday. She had never made such a mistake before, and would not consider mentioning it to her old lovers, or they might think she was getting dim. So she rode the whole route right back to the very first stop, which was the house of the neighbor boy, who lived by the gas station near her own home. There was an old man waiting there, too, and he was a rather large man. He was actually her husband. The old men lovers on the bus, who seemed to know each other so beautifully, did not know Rose’s husband at all. They were quiet and respectful as he got on the bus, and Rose cranked the door shut behind him and said, “Gentlemen? I’d like to you meet my husband.”

And the look on her husband’s face was the look of a man at a welcome surprise party. He leaned down to kiss her on the forehead, and he was the first of the men who had touched her that day. He said, “My sweet little puppy of a Rose.” She kissed his cheek, which was musky, sheepy, and familiar.

She drove on. He stepped down the aisle of the bus, which rocked like a boat, and he was the guest of honor. The old men lovers introduced themselves, and after each introduction, Rose’s husband said, “Ah, yes, of course, how nice to meet you,” keeping his left hand on his heart in wonder and pleasure. She watched, in the wide, easy reflection of her rearview mirror, as they patted his back and grinned. The veterans saluted him, and the highway patrolman saluted him, and Jack Lance-Hainey kissed his hand. Tate Palinkus apologized for getting Rose pregnant when she was just a South Texas kid, and the white-haired Mexican busboys struggled with their English greetings. The circuit court judge said that he did not mind speaking for everyone by saying how simply delighted he was to congratulate Rose and her husband on their long and honest marriage.

Rose kept on driving. Soon, she was at the double paths of railroad tracks that came right before the gravel pit bus station. Her little bus fit exactly between those two sets of tracks, and she stopped in that narrow space because she noticed that trains were coming from both directions. Her husband and her old men lovers pulled down the windows of the bus and leaned out like kindergartners, watching. The trains were painted bright like wooden children’s toys, and stenciled on the sides of each boxcar in block letters were the freight contents: APPLES, BLANKETS, CANDY, DIAMONDS, EXPLOSIVES, FABRIC, GRAVY, HAIRCUTS—a continuing, alphabetical account of all a life’s ingredients.

They watched this for a long time. But those boxcars were moving slowly, and repeating themselves in new, foreign alphabets. So the old men lovers became bored, finally, and pulled up the windows of Rose’s bus for some quietness. They rested and waited, stuck as they were between those two lazy trains. And Rose, who had been up early that morning, took the key out of the ignition, took off her hat and her gloves, and went to sleep. The old men lovers talked about her husband among themselves, fascinated. They whispered low to each other, but she could hear some pieces of words. “Hush,” she kept hearing them say, and “shh” and “she” and “and.” And, murmured together, those pieces of words made a sound just like the whole word “husband.” That’s the word she was hearing, in any case, as she dozed on the bus, with all of her old men together and behind her and so pleased just to see her again.

Note on the Author

Elizabeth Gilbert is an award-winning writer of both fiction and non-fiction. Her short story collection Pilgrims was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award, and her novel Stern Men was a New York Times notable book. In 2002, she published The Last American Man, which was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics' Circle Award. She is best known for her 2006 memoir Eat, Pray, Love, which was published in over thirty languages and sold more than ten million copies worldwide. The film, released in 2010, stars Julia Roberts and Javier Bardem. Her most recent book is the sequel, Committed. Elizabeth Gilbert lives in New Jersey, USA.

Eat, Pray, Love first published in Great Britain 2006

The Last American Man first published in Great Britain 2009

Stern Men first published by Bloomsbury 2009

Pilgrims first published by Bloomsbury 2009

Committed first published in Great Britain 2010

Copyright © Elizabeth Gilbert

This electronic edition published 2010 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

The right of Elizabeth Gilbert to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 36 Soho Square, London W1D 3QY

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781408817902

www.bloomsbury.com/elizabethgilbert

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