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"I'm enjoying The Wanderer—about halfway through — especially as it's turning out to be quite different than I expected. I wonder if later in life we'll be able to remember those qualities of adolescence — the crystal sharpness, the total rage of emotion, the significance in every triviality. Sometimes, even this close, I forget, and when I do remember it's only with gratitude that I am past it, have survived, moved on.

"I am no literary wiz, as you well know. I cannot read a work with my head but only in my ribs, where my first love for words began. And my ribs say yes to this book.

"Are you sure sure sure? Sure you know what we are doing? Sure you want me along on this exploration? Well, teacher knows best. .

"In the meantime, get out as often as you can, friend. See everything for me. I enclose, from U., a bit of early autumn to remember on.

"It's a leaf," I told Helen. I held the crumpled shred of ocher up to the digital camera. It looked like nothing at all.

The pile gave me temporal vertigo. Aerograms, postcards, stationery of all races colors and creeds, handmades proclaiming "Hartelijk Gefeliciteerd" or "Happy Sinterklaas." Reading the letters to Helen took longer than the dozen years their writing had taken.

'This one was from her folks' place, before they left Chicago. She must have been on vacation.

"Today, inspired, I finally picked up a pen and started working on the piece I've been mulling over since school. A day in the life of a young woman (surprise) frustrated by her existence, art, MEN, people, work. You heard this one before? It's a search for control and a study of how difficult that is for a woman of her (my) age. I have a wonderful first sentence where I compare morning light to a cup of cold coffee. Yech!"

"She did that stuff, too?" Lentz interrupted.

"For a while.

"I'm enjoying, though. You really shook me out of my lethargy over the phone yesterday. I even wandered over to the pianny today and tried out a few tunes. .

"Ugh — my stomach has decided, since it's midnight, that now is a good time to rebel against everything I shoved in it earlier. Hang on, folks— I've got to be more careful of what I eat.

"I think I will retire now. I kiss you in my thoughts, love. Ik houd van jou. See if you can translate."

"Tell me the strange words," Helen demanded. Funny. "Strange" and "foreign" were the same word in Dutch.

"They mean, 'I hold of you.' "

"They mean, 'I love you,' " Lentz corrected. I suppose the guess didn't require too much inspiration. His tone, informative. Empiricism at its gentlest. "Give us more of yours."

I picked at random one I wrote from U. while she was in Limburg alone, on her private scouting mission.

"Today, Thanksgiving, although flat on my back in bed nursing my first bad cold in years, I'm struck with amazing gratitude, knocked out by my good fortune at having had a few moments to know you. C., without the place you make, without your ratifying vantage, life's whole, fluke, majestic, thermodynamic-cheating trick would beat like an ornate, functionless Victorian cast-iron engine. .

"You feel like the seasons to me: fixed, monumental, periodic, but forever surprising in particulars. I think of how, in the spring, you insist that the buds need kissing before they will come out. ."

"Didn't you ever write her any news, Marcel?" Forgiving. Curious.

"I wish I had." She might have been able to live with news. "The ending is nice, though: 'Until I can tell you in person, this is my thanks, for everything.' "

I read her reply from E., beginning,

"Beau, you won't believe our luck. I've found a place for us! People told me I'd be on the list forever, but by total accident, the perfect apartment just fell into my lap. It's a free-gazelle flat, as they call bachelorette pads. It will be even cozier with two. It's all skylit, the kitchen is small but lovely, and there's even a nook where you can put your feet up and finish that endless story of yours. ."

I opened the next one. "I'm sorry," I apologized to both Lentz and Helen. "I can't read any more."

Then my eyes fell on the first line of the sheet I was holding. From E., to my mother's address. During my trip back for the publication of that novel I'd written in that Limburg free-gazelle's flat. I read on, unable not to. Read, to see what happened.

"Beau, I'm afraid this letter is all bad news. My cousin G. died yesterday. You know how sick he was, but the whole family is reeling from how fast things went. N. and the kids were with him throughout. She says that, given his disease, the end was peaceful and almost happy when it came.

"N. was amazing. G. went into a panic brought on by combined suffocation and heart failure. N. kept telling him, just picture yourself on a train heading south, to your favorite café in Italy. Imagine yourself seated out in the sun, doing the things you love most in this life. Drinking a pils, reading a defektive, ogling the pretty women.

"N. stepped out for a minute, to catch her breath. When she came back, G. was dead. The kids were upset because just before he died, their dad kept making this hooking gesture with his hand, and they couldn't tell what he wanted. N. explained that he was pulling a train whistle, and that everything was okay. ."

I stopped and raised my head. "I'd forgotten," I pleaded with Lentz. "I have no memory of this. Not even now. Not even rereading." "Forgotten what, Marcel? What are you talking about?" I couldn't take it in. Half a year, trying to make a novel out of a story that already lived to fruition in three paragraphs. Three paragraphs that I had not just let fall but had annihilated.

"The woman loves, now? Loves Beau?" Helen called me by a name. Whether she knew the name to be another word for "you" or even me was another matter. The question bayed over me, one of those alpine dogs trained to nuzzle up to avalanched corpses.

I debated telling Helen about the one postcard from C. I no longer had. In the months following our split, in one of several vacillations, she sent me a picture of Brueghel's Harvesters. For a message, she quoted the line I had written her, from the book she had seen me through.

If by some accident we get separated, meet me back here.

I wanted to hurt C., hurt her as badly as I could without her knowing I meant to. I wanted to tear the picture up. Then I asked: What would hurt more? I waited a month. Then I packed up various legal papers she had stored in the States — old tax returns, medical records — and sent them to her without a note. In the packet, I returned the wheat fields.

She wrote back just once more, to say she was getting married at the end of the month. She wouldn't mind if we made a financial settlement.

And thanks for the postcard, Beau. Yes, that's the place.

Saying everything but the definitive. I'll be there. In my mind.

I chose not to tell Helen this ending. Instead, I answered, "She says she still does, sometimes. In my sleep."

Helen would have fidgeted if she had digits. "Who can love who? Can any thing love any thing?" Could you love me, Richard? For example.

"It's hard to say what will or will not turn a person's head." I evaded what she did not ask outright.