I never thought I would end up pairing off so happily with a man whose livelihood is so unintriguing. I used to think that the man’s work has to be part of what seduces you. (You could see Hugh and Ray—a guy who taught high school history and, like me, loved art; and then a stuntman—as two ends of the curiosity spectrum.) But here’s the thing about Campbell: five years ago, on our first evening alone together (hard to call it a date at our stage in life), he told me he can take or leave what he does for a living. “You don’t need to ask polite questions about my job,” he said before we even ordered our meal. “I do it well, and I get a kick out of having this weird talent to which no kid would ever aspire; I mean, I wanted to be a movie critic! But I’m not sorry. It’s not my reason for being. It never has been.” He didn’t need to tell me his reason for being: by then I’d seen pictures of his sons, and I knew, all too well, the story of how he’d lost his wife. Yet even before she died, what mattered most to Campbell was family. Her death changed many things, but not that.
When you’re forty-four, childless, menopausal by way of chemotherapy, simply glad to be alive, how can you not fall madly in love with a man like that? Who cares what he does for a living? My cancer was, by then, seven years in the past. I couldn’t say I was cured, not quite, but I was beginning to think that my future might fit into something larger than a shoe box.
“Hungry?” I say to Henri, and he jumps up.
I place the bread in a basket. I put a platter of cheeses, grilled tomatoes, and olives on the table. Once we’re all seated, I serve the salad.
“This looks magnificent,” says Ralph. He thanks me effusively again. I repeat how glad I am to see him. I pour myself a glass of wine.
Henri is occupied with Darius, keeping him upright. “No tomatoes, we both do not eat tomatoes,” he says when he gets the bear settled. Darius belonged to Clem; he was the “love child,” she used to joke, of her first and longest relationship, with her boyfriend from college and beyond. After she died, I found Darius among her belongings, and I made a feeble attempt to track down the old boyfriend. This was well before Google was a household verb, but even so, I didn’t try as hard as I might have. I wanted custody of Darius myself. Not even Henri may take him out of the loft.
“Henri wants to hear about your work,” I say to Ralph, “and so do I.”
Ralph travels back and forth between Brazil and the Great Lakes. He is studying the effects of fertilizers and other waterborne chemical compounds, “industrial effluvia,” on bird populations in both areas. I remember now that when I met him he was writing a dissertation on basically the very same subject. It’s always amazing to me when people find the thing they were meant to do as soon as they grow up, they stick with it, and their passion never fades. I once believed my sister was one of these people.
As if reading my mind, Ralph says, “These plates are beautiful. They look handmade.”
“Yes,” I say. “By me. A long time ago. I used to be a potter.”
“That’s right!” he says. “Now I remember that! You lived in California, and you weren’t happy out there.”
I laugh. “No. I was a fairly miserable creature. I’m sorry you remember anything at all about me from back then.”
“I liked you, though. I did,” he says. “You and Clem both had the same … feistiness. I asked her about you later, how you were doing, and she said, ‘Oh, never worry about Louisa. She’ll figure things out. She always does.’ ”
“She talked about me?” I wonder if he’s making this up; Clem used to berate me for my lack of common sense.
“Sure. She talked about your parents, too. Not a lot, but she did.”
I hesitate. I don’t want to talk about my parents. In a way, they closed ranks after Clem’s death. They undertook home improvement projects they’d put off for years, took a cooking class in a foreign country, started going to black-tie benefits, installed an outdoor hot tub; behaved in ways that seemed inappropriately young to me yet struck the rest of the world as a huge relief, a sign of hope. Good for them, their friends would say. I understood later that what I really felt was a secret, shameful resentment, that they got to claim the lion’s share of all the sympathy and condolence. Even if it’s not their fault. Except for Campbell, no one ever asks me if I still miss my sister, if I’m angry or heartbroken, if the way she died—on purpose—still keeps me up at night.
Impulsively, I say, “How’s Hector?” When I met Ralph, he had a partner, an equally charming man whose name I remember now only for its classical singularity. For an instant, I can’t help thinking of all the things that might so easily have separated them in unhappy ways—not just a breakup but AIDS. “Are you still … ? I realize …” What do I realize?
Ralph has to finish chewing his bread, but he’s nodding. “Hector’s good,” he says. “He lives in New Bedford for now, with his mother, who needs him. We haven’t been together like that for years, but we stay in touch. He runs the aquarium in Mystic.”
“Oh,” I say, relieved yet stuck. “The two of you were such good friends to Clem. She had a blast with you.”
“The party years,” says Ralph. “I suppose we’re lucky to have had them and to have survived them.” His smile fades slightly. He digs into a second helping of salad. I notice that he’s pushed the dried cherries to one side. I feel as if there’s no escaping the sadness, as if I’ve merely pulled all our separate sorrows into a common center, a whirlpool.
Ralph looks up at me abruptly, catching me off guard. He speaks softly. “She told me about your cancer. I guess you’re … You look great.” The end of this awkward remark sounds like a question. He blushes.
“I’m fine,” I say quickly. I knock on the table. “But listen. I didn’t invite you here to be so unrelentingly morbid. I’m sorry.”
“What’s morbid?” asks Henri. Our sober tone has distracted him from the whispered discourse he was conducting with Darius.
“It means thinking too much about dark things,” I say.
“What dark things?”
“Sad things.”
“What’s sad? Are you sad?” He stares at me, alarmed.
“Not now,” I say. “We’re not sad right now. But sometimes people can be happy and remember sad things at the same time. Or we talk about other people being sad.”
“Like my dad. Because Tati died.”
“Yes,” I say.
“She was very, very old.”
“That’s true. But it’s always sad to say good-bye, even when you know someone had a good long life.”
“I know that.”
Ralph leans across the table. “I love garlic bread, don’t you?” He’s offering a piece to Darius, which makes Henri laugh. Henri tells him that polar bears certainly wouldn’t like garlic bread, even if they did have stoves. Which they don’t. And you need a stove for garlic bread. Ralph is in the midst of telling Henri how he’s made garlic bread over a campfire when the front door opens wide and in barge my stepsons, shedding clods of dirt from their cleats, bringing with them the mingled smells of wet rubber, boyish sweat, and new grass—which tints their ruddy legs an unreal shade of green. They are snorting with laughter and, having raced up the stairs, breathless.
“Guys! Shoes off!” I shout above their clamorous talk.
They become still for a moment when they notice the stranger in their kitchen. “Hey,” says Luke, the older one speaking first. “Hey,” echoes Max. They stand there, two large damp boys with roughed-up hair and clothes. Though they share their mother’s pale, delicate coloring, it’s now obvious that they will both grow into their father’s extreme stature; Campbell is tall and bony in a way that makes him look impressive and graceful half the time—but then, just as often, so precarious that surely he must topple to the ground.
When the boys shake hands with Ralph—firmly, making steady eye contact, as their father has taught them—I see how dirty their hands are, how dirty they are from head to foot. But this kind of disorder pleases me; it’s a h
ealthy antidote to the sterile, sometimes monastic atmosphere in which I do business, where the one constant is a large, pure-white, resolutely spotless room through which various spectacles and spectators come and go, none leaving a permanent mark. In that world, the colors and shapes and attitudes ceaselessly change, but there is very little dirt. There’s not enough patience for dust.
“Are you the bird man?” asks Luke.
“In person,” says Ralph.
“Cool,” says Luke, simply, conclusively. He turns and lifts Henri onto his shoulders. “We’re ‘napping you, man.” Henri squeals as he is galloped across the loft and into the boys’ room.
“Nice to meet you,” says Max, and then he shouts out that he gets the bathroom first, and they vanish, all three boys, behind a pair of loudly closed doors. I hear the shower running, I hear muffled synthetic electric guitar; behind me, a soccer ball drops from the hallway bench and rolls past the table to rest at the edge of the carpet that marks the divide between kitchen and living room.
“Boy Heaven,” I say.
“Boy Jungle,” says Ralph, eyeing a clump of grass on the tile floor.
We stare at each other, first happily, then tenderly, then sadly.
Quietly, Ralph says, “Can we get back to morbid? Because I want to tell you how incredibly sorry I am about your sister.”
“I know, and I appreciate it. A lot of time’s gone by, and I hope you don’t feel—”
“No,” he says forcefully. “What I want to say is that I’m sorry I never wrote or called you when it happened. Because I meant to, and I should have. We were good friends. Even though we hardly ever saw each other. When I got my first big grant, I tried to get her to work for me, but she’d made up her mind to stick with mammals. She liked writing letters, and sometimes she’d call. I was so ashamed—I mean, that I hadn’t taken some things about her seriously, so it … so by the time I screwed up any kind of nerve to get in touch with you, I figured it was too late.”
“It’s never too late.”
“Can I tell you, that makes me feel even worse? Because now it’s you who found me. I would never have been in touch. That’s the truth.”
“And I’d never have been the wiser. Or stirred this up again.”
“I’m glad you spotted me. I’m glad to be here.” His right hand rests on my left arm. I cover it with my own right hand. I can see the feet of the blue cormorant below the edge of his T-shirt sleeve. I’ve lost my sister’s laugh, but across twenty-five years I’ve held on to the image of this fairly plain tattoo: on the subway, that’s what I recognized, not Ralph’s face. He was standing across from me, facing away, just your typical stranger on a crowded train, but his right arm was raised to hold the steel bar. The short sleeve had pulled back toward his shoulder, and there it was, upside down but distinct, the blue cormorant flying across his biceps. I still can’t believe I had the courage to tap him on the shoulder.
I give him another beer and pour myself a second glass of wine. “I made brownies. Would you like a brownie?”
“Good lord, yes! Who says no to brownies?”
“Leave it,” I say when Ralph begins to clear the table. I hand him a plate with a brownie and lead him back to the living room.
I see him eyeing the ceiling, the inverted parachute of feathers. I say, “It’s called Host. I hope it doesn’t seem cruel or thoughtless to you.”
“Let’s stop acting like I’m a saint, okay? I am anything but.”
I sit on the couch and begin to eat my brownie. It’s undercooked in the middle, too dense, but it fills the need for something solid and rich, something to weigh me down. I say, “No matter how many things Clem did to shock me—the guys she shafted, the crude way she talked about people she’d written off—I thought of her that way a lot of the time, as a saint. Because of her work, I guess. How important she thought it was. How other things mattered less. But maybe all the good work … maybe it felt … I think she worried it was pointless. A kind of hubris. Though she would have made fun of my using such a big word.”
Every so often Ralph’s gaze shifts to the sky outside the window, over my head, but I know he is also intent on our conversation. “All ‘good work,’ ” he says, “feels foolish at times. Naïve and stupid. That’s part of the territory. She knew that.”
And how about work that really is foolish? I think. How about parsing and praising the glories of art? Isn’t art, strictly speaking, just another form of human excess, even waste? Shouldn’t it seem pointless once you think your whole world’s been changed by (for example) cancer, then by your only sibling’s death, then by a terrorist act? Is it “good” to go on doing the same old oblivious thing, to still enjoy it no matter what? Does perseverance steady the world?
“I don’t know what she knew, if you want to know the truth,” I say. “I want it not to matter, but it does.”
“Of course it matters.”
Max bursts out of the bathroom and makes for the bedroom, wrapped in a towel, trailing water across the floor. He trades off with Luke; both doors close again. I hear Henri exclaim “Dude!” in his high-pitched voice. When he’s around Max and Luke, he seems to drink the very air around them.
Ralph stands up, and I panic at the thought that he will leave. But he says, “I brought you something.” He goes through the kitchen and gets his backpack, from which he pulls a manila envelope. “I found a few of your sister’s letters in my office. The others are probably gone—I’m a nomad—but you can keep these.”
The envelope yields a sheaf of paper, a dozen sheets torn from spiral notebooks, blue lines covered with row after row of my sister’s oddly ingenuous printing: self-consciously neat, each letter distinct, the handiwork of a pupil eager to please. I close my eyes for a moment and hold them in my lap, both hands flat on the surface of the first letter. I look down. May 15, 1981.
“The year after we met,” says Ralph. “After I met you, too, I guess.”
“Alaska.”
“She wrote me from so many places.”
“Amazing places.” I start reading; I can’t help it. She was twenty-one, a year of college left to go. She’d won a summer internship with a government agency that monitored the whaling in northern Alaska; Clem had explained that the native people of the region were still allowed to make a living this way. I remember when she set out for that adventure, all the gear she had to buy, the winter-worthy hats and boots and underwear, though it was nearly summer. The whales were moving north across the Arctic Circle, through the fracturing pack ice. She’d be part of the team counting the whales, judging their numbers more by the sounds they made underwater than by their appearance on the surface.
Clem wrote me, too, from all her amazing places, but when I looked for those letters after her death, I found only recent ones, the ones from Wyoming, the ones where she admitted to feeling isolated in many ways yet never sounded desperate. (Such interesting work, I’d think; how lucky she was.) I could not believe I had thrown away all those earlier letters, and sometimes even now—when I visit my parents in Rhode Island—I go through the same closets, the same boxes in the attic and the hayloft, sure that I will find them yet.
Second day and here I am making tea from a snowbank on Point Barrow. I’m in the sled shed, monitoring array B broadcast from Tovak Perch Lead. My 6 hr. watch ends at 1800 and I’m listening to underwater sounds: bearded seals (oogruks—isn’t that a great word?), ring seals, belugas, bowheads. Screeching, whistling, clicking, warbling—it sounds like the tropics, like birds and monkeys and cats, insects buzzing, vines dripping, rivers flowing. What is so weird is how totally silent it is UP HERE, except the breaking ice now & then, the crunching of your feet in the snow or the loud eerie blow of a whale when it comes up for air. Long flocks of king eiders mutter past in the sky. It’s like all the life’s above or below, while the “earth,” this narrow plane, is just so incredibly still. At the tiny drugstore, this older lady asked me what I was doing here—not hostile, just curious. I felt myself so
rt of apologizing for the intrusion, how I know we’re from outside this world (like WAY outside!), and she said, “God put you down there with all those trees and oranges and flowers and mountains, and you have a great time. He put us up here and all we have is the animals. That’s what we live on. You can just look at the animals, but we have to eat them. We count on them for that.” She wasn’t complaining, just saying how it is.
I force myself to look up. Ralph is staring out the window. I suppose people who study birds must keep an eye on the sky as often as they can, no matter where they are. I think about the woman in Clem’s letter and then about Ralph, how completely different their lives are, how they were both connected to Clem, connected to each other through the letter itself.
Ralph says, “You need a telescope. There’s probably much more to see out there than you realize.”
“I’m sure. Afternoon liaisons and domestic fights.”
“Oh, much more than that, I promise you.” He’s reaching into his backpack again. He pulls out a pair of large, serious-looking binoculars.
I set aside Clem’s letters. The three boys emerge from their lair. They stand at the edge of the living room, staring at the two grown-ups as if they’ve caught us doing something peculiar. Henri is jumping up and down, leaking absentminded joy. I have a vision of them as two young horses and a monkey, creatures who’ve ventured into this room from another, more natural world.
“Can we have ice cream? We’re like famished,” says Luke.
“There are brownies,” I offer.