I used to believe that it was Hugh who pursued me, but the truth is that even his Cambridge pursuit was incurably diffident. Hugh sought me out after I published a story in a local lit. magazine called “Birth Pains.” The magazine was printed in blue ink on yellow paper and my contribution was so arch and pretentious—the usual twaddle about a me-ish young woman dying from her own cultivation and refinement—that I stayed out of sight for a week afterwards. But Hugh managed to find my piece enchanting and tracked me down. A stranger, he wrote me a formal note and asked to meet me for a daiquiri—in my story, the heroine drinks dozens and dozens of daiquiries—at the Parker House. The idea of meeting this well-mannered and apparently well-meaning stranger was too seductive to resist and I appeared at the Parker House wearing a black dress and a string of lilac-tinted glass beads. Hugh was in a double-breasted wheat-colored suit, holding a copy of “Birth Pains,” and drawling to beat the band. (He sensed I would respond to the cliché of the Southern Gentleman.) He advised me as to the extent of his admiration for my story, asked me how I had achieved my anemic, third-hand effects, and, on the whole, interviewed me rather as you yourself did many years later when you came home with those photocopies of my New Yorker stories. Except then I was a young, ornery girl in a hotel with a stranger, and a half hour into our conversation (and halfway through my second daiquiri—a perfectly horrid drink, of course) I was hoping that Hugh would make his praise complete by suggesting we take a room.
If I’d known then what I soon enough learned, it wouldn’t have been any more complicated than my saying, “Oh Hugh, I need to be with you”—Hugh would have been at the front desk in an instant, gulping so hard that his Adam’s apple would be leaping forth like a cuckoo clock. I had no idea of the depths of his shyness and susceptibility: in matters of the flesh, Hugh has always needed permission. The permission granted, he can be the goat of all goats, but before then he is withdrawn, or so tepidly flirtatious that it becomes inconceivable that a real libido lurks beneath. If it hadn’t been for his great good looks, Hugh would have been miserable: all he could do was make himself available; he could not reach out and take. But how was I to know? It took weeks of thought and frustration before I realized that if I was going to have Hugh, then I must initiate it. Thus the famous dinner party in which I announced as I lit the candles: “Abandon all hope of leaving, ye who enter here.”
God, I must be just a little bit lonelier than I thought. Going on about Hugh like this. It’s near the first anniversary of our divorce. That must be it. We sold the house, sold the ten scabby acres in Mississippi that Hugh’s father gave us on our wedding, and stood like waifs in a divorce court in Chicago, lying through our straight white teeth to the judge so our story would be less complicated and unseemly. Hugh’s girl waited outside, double-parked in her infernal van, and I splurged on a taxi to O’Hare so I could get the hell out as quickly as possible.
The divorce was inevitable once the house was gone, just as precious papers get tattered and lost if you don’t have anyplace to store them. That big house on Dorchester had a domestic magnetism at its core that could keep us together—and even in a kind of ramshackle balance. It was our homeland, our space station—well, you remember the magic of that house. We were so lucky to find it and losing it was terrible for us—especially coming at a time in our lives when we needed walls more than ever before, needed the feel of familiar wood, the low comforting groans of our old house’s cellar, the mélange of sky and branch that hung so peacefully before our front window. The house was a touchstone, the progenitor of memory; it had a quality of preservation, of preserving us, our lives, our promises. Driving us out of there was like driving a tribe from its ancestral home: the rituals of community dried up like empty pods. Without the familiar doors to walk through and slam, quarrels went on and on, deepened in import and acrimoniousness. Ah, the arguments in hotels, with the maids in the next room and the Kiwanis Club in the hall. The late-night whispers in my brother’s house in Maine—even with my brother and his family in Boston and we Butterfields on our own for a few days, we tiptoed and mumbled, washing our cups as soon as we used them. We were refugees without a cause, more interested in blame than in bonds.
It’s our link, you know, mine and yours. The blame. I suppose that’s why you feel so free to contact me and why, to me, speaking to you again seems so natural and inevitable. We are, I would suppose, karmic twins. It was you—and you alone—who set the fire, but we’ll never know what could have been saved if it hadn’t been for my cousin’s Care Package from California. When my cousin’s package arrived with ten trips, ten 250-microgram doses of pharmaceutically pure LSD…Well, as I remember it, we all felt excited and privileged. We had all been curious—no, more than that: we all were committed to taking it. The only trouble had been our fear of buying it from some lunatic on the street, some flaky teen just as liable to sell us strychnine or horse tranquilizer. But with the genuine article at hand—and the weird blessing of having it come from a lab—we were set. It was my cousin, my letter, and the package had been addressed to me. But we all discussed it, all decided it would work best—be less divisive, less strange and exclusive—if we took it as a family. We were all prepared to learn something miraculous and transforming, and it was a measure, I thought, of our enduring commitment to remain a family that we wanted to take the journey together.
Yet, as it happened, we were as helpless as rabbits on a highway when the time came for us to act swiftly and well. We turned this way and that and learned something that turned out to be impossible to absorb: with life seeming to totter on the edge of oblivion, we were not a family at all—it was each for himself, in a state of panic, fear, and terrible isolation. We were not any of us really capable of holding a thought, but I’m sure all of us felt, to one degree or another, that we were being punished for our transgression against the brain’s holy chemistry, that the fire was a foretaste of the hell we had condemned ourselves to. I’ve often wondered (and lamented) why we were so godawful bloody helpless to get ourselves out of the house in good order and I keep coming back to the emotional memory of deserving the worst.
Speaking of blame. I think I’d like to defend myself against your accusation. I quote: “…when I began spending nights at your house you decided that Jade wasn’t getting enough sleep and your solution was to get us a double bed, a used bed from the Salvation Army which we sprayed for bugs and drenched in Chanel No.5.”
My idea? Perhaps the Chanel No. 5 was my idea—it was certainly my Chanel. But the bed was Jade’s idea—and, I daresay, yours. Does it seem at all likely to you that it was me who dreamed up the idea of getting a double bed? Do you have any memory of my proposing it to you? Or are you calling my lack of objection to the idea a form of advocacy? You don’t understand. I realized you two were hardly sleeping—but that seemed connected to the bizarre power of your love for each other. You made me crave sleeplessness because I recognized what it was in you two—a refusal to be separated. It was the privacy of sleep that horrified you. You didn’t want to sleep. Those long late-night walks. We thought you were trying to tire yourselves out but now I realize the purpose of those two- mile strolls. You were reviving yourselves, probably stopping at the Medici for a cup of espresso before coming home.