First image on the left-hand wall, just inside the door. That room's geometry has fused to the floor plan of my brain. I stood face to faces with three young men who were scrutinizing me. They'd waited two-thirds of a century for me to come along and swing into view, just past the photographer's shoulder.
The photo was itself a prediction of its own chance viewing. The three men prearranged the way I would someday see them. And now it seemed that every book I'd been dabbling in, all our random read-alouds, the long list of irrelevant classics I'd memorized for my master's, the swerves our narrative lives had taken all found their retroactive meaning in this one memory posted forward from the past.
The boys were C.'s grandfather and two great-uncles on their way to kermis, to one of those huwelijksfeesten she told me about. That was what the lens said. The caption said something altogether different.
German peasants on their way to a dance, 1914. The wrong celebration. The excluded guest list. But very much the same family album. I felt the shock of recognizing a thing I knew I had never seen before. Every text I'd ever read formed an infinite, convergent series calling out for the recursively called-for, the obvious next term. In that narrow space between what the picture handled and what the caption named, I had my story.
The following Monday, I went in to my tech editing job and gave my two weeks' notice. C. backed me every inch. "Buddy. When you have a calling, you don't worry about what it does to the résumé." Our nest egg had doubled during our year of work. We had a little time. We could buy a chance.
In fact, C. would have preferred a much deeper plunge into the precarious. Ours was always hedged. I had my programming skill to fall back on. When the account dipped into the danger zone, I freelanced. I worked the. smart-appliances gig. I wrote an options trading program for an exiled prince who needed several million dollars to return to his land and finance an election. As he explained, "These things can be very expensive, Rick."
Writing met all the expenses. At least, I meant it to. I must have written that book to gladden C. again. I say "again," but she may never have been. Perhaps to receive gladness you need a forwarding address. Maybe the Polish boy's death cheated her of that, long before her unborn soul stood in line for a residence.
Her transience made a pallet for my head. From the first, C.'s locus of non-time and un-place indexed my imagination's coordinate plane. That's why living with her completed me. Why being with her always felt like coming to rest, returning to some otherwise that no one else ever suspected.
She was my midmorning's hypothetical. The givens of my day revealed their thinnest convention, so long as I loved her. Here and now reversed in convex reflection, abidable, on the outside of her eyes.
All we can ever do is lay a word in the hands of those who have put one in ours. I thought I might write my way to a place where my friend C. could live.
I used all the material I had at hand: the vanished Limburg she told me so much about. Her synaptic map of the walled city of Maastricht. The endless cousins who infiltrated my brain like thieves on bicycles in the night. The anthology poured into me through every gate except experience. The disruption of the time line circling our room. The parents, the uncles, caught between nations. The invasion of Trois Vierges, escalating into permanent violence. Big reaching down and annihilating little. Total war, always the same war, placing its embargo on the free passage of lives over the border.
I already possessed all the components for a page-turner. The secret document linking the displaced life back into its continuous frame. The immigrants' island in Chicago. Our apartment in B., with its courtyard and seasick saxophone scales. A chance trip we made by train to Detroit, where her brother lived. Always, always, that invisible village, the one that time mortared to a stump. The white diffraction pattern of crosses, and the villagers who volunteered to tend them. And that glance back, over the shoulder. The triple stopped lives, lined up on the muddy road, waiting for someone to pick up their story and extend it.
I wrote of C.'s country without once having seen it. I used her language, fragments of it, helped only by C. herself, who had never spoken anything but the secret dialect of family.
I made the beginner's mistake, the one no first novelist can help but make. I knew, deep at heart, that I would never have another chance to write a book. I could never again ask C. for that luxury. This was a one-shot deal, and to redeem her faith in me, I had to pack my read-aloud with everything I knew. Everything she taught me. Her surrogate home would have to be as wide, as uncrossable as this Atlantic century. If we had just this one dance, our tune would have to be flat-out tutti.
I guess there are two kinds of love letters. If you don't get out after the first three words, you need to press on, forever. C. taught me that, too. Desperation is always more moving than discretion, or more recognizable, at least, to the person addressed.
C. earned the daily bread, while I sat alone with the swelling handwritten canary legal pads. As I completed each new chapter, I read it to her. She came home, ate the dinner I made her, then settled in expectantly. She sat close. C. was partially deaf; she always staked out the front seat in classes. Mine especially.
I don't know who was more nervous, performer or audience. Chapter One, I assured her. I outfit myself for a trip to St. Ives.
I knew that this book would never be published. My audience was never more than C. I wrote for the way her eyes would start to water by chapter's end. How she would nod her head yes, place her hand on her chest, rise from the bed to grab me in the chair where I sat reading to her.
Yet that spell would not have worked if her private code of survival hadn't been cast in a public key. The tale had to be open enough to appeal to the random gallery-browser, snared by the lens. C. alone knew where all the nested frames had started.
Those nights of first draft will not happen again. Never, anymore, that simple passion. We lost it the minute I handed the gift over, the instant I read aloud the epilogue. Years later, when I started getting invitations to read to rooms of perfect strangers, I never had the heart.
Sometimes after I read a chapter to C., we made love. We climbed over each other, brown, frighteningly young, vulnerable, exploring the sad distances, warming each other after the radiators packed it in. Once, as I kissed the birthmark that stained the small of her back, this seemed to me the point of literature. I could not think of a book that was not either by, for, or about this. The elaborate seduction of the already attained. Reforestation of the wilds of time, the one biome where love will not die from lack of cover. I can see that birthmark with my eyes wide open, clearer now at fifteen years' distance than it was when an inch from my eye.
Sex was her present for transcribing her. My feeble thank-you for her sources. And the sounds we listened to then, the calls we made to each other in the winter dark were the vowels that all stories tried to find their way back to.
Afterward, without fail, we fell asleep, her back to my front, two spoons put away in the kitchen drawer of an abandoned cabin. C. was a foot shorter than I was. But when we lay like that, trig turned us to the same length.
The book became a mystery. A foregone conclusion. The more C. felt its surprise inevitability, the keener she got for the next installment. Each narrative riddle, each mental raadsel was an awkward, tenderfoot bow I tied for her, for the pleasure of her untying.