When I have dressed and gone downstairs, I find a small pitcher of milk in the refrigerator; on a shelf, nearby, an open jar of instant coffee, two-thirds empty, with a spoon still in it, clearly Celia’s. Everything else is clean, tidy, spankingly empty. In a small, damp pantry, not the one with the wall safe, I find a trash can, full of coffee grounds and egg shells. For the compost heap, I think. No eggs. On the counter, some stale bread. Though the kitchen is very well equipped, with pots, pans, stoves, refrigerators, small devices, even, come to think of it, elaborate hi-fi radio (Celia, I now recall, had, from the moment I met her, been playing loud, incongruous rock), I cannot, for some reason, find the toaster. I know there must be one. I try the oven. After several minutes of looking in vain for the pilot light, with matches, I give up. Fearing an explosion, I turn the oven off, and consider giving a toaster as a house present. I make coffee, with hot water from the tap and cold milk from the pitcher. I decide to try to use the telephone. Having turned the crank, and figured out the switches, I reach an operator, to whom I explain that, once my call has gone through to New York, he must under no circumstances interrupt the call, because to do so would be to disrupt, perhaps permanently, but at the very least for half an hour, my answering machine. Oh, he says, I would never interrupt; I only connect you with the international operator. Then, bypassing the international operator, he puts the call straight through, and abruptly cuts it off. When I try again, having waited the required half hour, I reach the international operator. In response to my explanation, she says, becoming very obdurate on this point, I would never cut into a line, certainly, never. As soon as the call goes through, she breaks in, to say, Go ahead please, your party is on the line. When another half hour has elapsed, I reach her again. I start to say, But this time, operator, please. And she says, with that edge of injury and contempt I am beginning to become accustomed to in all their voices: It was only a recording. The call goes through. No message there.
She was Goldilocks, really, with this exception: when the third bear left, he had taken with him his porridge, and his chair. And the bed? Well, the bed was there, and the prince came and he kissed her. Hey, wait. Look here, this is Medea. This is Eloise at the Plaza. This is Agatha Runcible. Here I am, for the first time, and yet again, alone at last on Orcas Island. You were, you know, you are the nearest thing to a real story to happen in my life, and you are gone.
I go into the study, light a peat fire, watch the dawn through the soft rain. From the bookshelves, I take down Samuel Pepys, abridged; I have somehow never read him. I put paper in the typewriter, and begin a friendly note to the ambassador. Shortly after ten, the front door opens. I hear voices in the kitchen. I find Celia, Kathleen, that overfed, moon-faced baby, all three eating fried eggs and ham. I mention that I have had coffee with milk. Was there enough for you? Celia says, perhaps with irony, certainly not in the slightest friendly. Or what would you like for breakfast now. I say I’d like a five-minute egg. And, when Kathleen brings it to me, at my place in the dining room, the egg really is five minutes. Celia had not mentioned toast, nor had I, so I’m startled when, as I eat in silence, toast pops up out of a toaster, which I had simply not noticed on the sideboard. I get up, take the toast and a banana. When I have finished eating, I return to the study. As I begin to type, Kathleen appears, says, Will you be wanting me for your phone calls? I say, Thank you, I think I can manage. About an hour later, a stocky man, in a woolen cap and jacket, comes in, says, How do you do, I’m Paddy. Is there anything I can do for you this morning? He seems marginally more friendly than the others. At the same time, something covertly appraisive in his manner, an almost lascivious shrewdness, makes me think, Is it just that they think I’m the ambassador’s mistress, and that there is something not quite proper in the arrangement; is it my clothes, the faded corduroy slacks, the tennis shoes, my down jacket; or, perhaps outdoors, the damaged fender? But I say, Well, yes, Paddy, could you tell me the best place to go for a walk. How long a walk were you thinking of? he says. I say, About an hour, and add that I don’t have much sense of direction. In some detail, then, he describes a walk. I ask where I would go if I wanted a two-hour walk. In reply, he describes what I realize is the exact same walk. While it’s true I’ve said that I can get lost virtually anywhere, on account of that sense of direction, it seems odd to me, not sinister but odd, that the one-hour walk and the two-hour walk should be the same. As I pass the kitchen, on my way to the front door, Celia asks what I would like for lunch. Remembering the ambassador’s words, I ask whether I might have a picnic. Celia, brightening, says, Now? I look at my watch. It is quarter past eleven. I say, No thank you, when I come back from this walk, I’ll just take another walk and have my picnic then. I set out down the driveway, toward a path along the sea verge and the rocks. When the path turns inland, uphill, the wind subsides, the rain slows to a fine mist, and I see, coming toward me, a small man of middle years, with one of the sad, poetic faces — wisdom there, humor and beauty. From some distance off, he says, Good morning, in such a friendly voice. I reply, Good morning. And, not wanting to lose contact, I go on, Nice day. A bit showery, he says, as he steps aside to let me pass. We continue on our separate ways.
In the matter of solipsism and prayer. It makes no sense, of course, to pray if you alone exist, and there is no world outside your consciousness, unless you think of prayer as just a kind of song. A lonely song. But if you pray to something, and for something, it is also, I think, a solipsistic thing to pray to affect an outcome which, though still unknown, is already quite set. If you are a determinist, of course, then everything is and forever has been set, and all your prayers are songs. Not lonely songs, perhaps, but songs. The sort of prayer I mean, though, is the more ordinary kind: the devout expression of a wish, with a real intent to influence an outcome of some sort. And such a prayer, to be reasonable in a world where there are others, must address consequences that are truly and altogether in the future. It would be solipsistic, for example, to pray that the outcome of a test already taken will be this or that, or to affect the set result of any act already past. Such a prayer, though it has the appearance of reasonable anticipation, is already somewhat retroactive, a prayer for a miraculous revision of the past. While there’s nothing wrong with the miraculous, it always requires an abrogation of the law in one’s own special case: when it is also retroactive, it has an additional, though perhaps unconscious, solipsism at its heart. The tense, the perfected future of it, is the clue. You can pray that things will be other than as they were, other than they are. The forbidden, the solipsistic tense is this: that things will have been other than they were. Prayer must be timely and it must be prompt. Not even in a world of miracles, and only if the world is yours alone, can you pray the past away.
And the virtuoso, and the pachysandra, and love long ago, and the awful night of Eva dancing? “The only invitation to leave a road,” Judge Holmes once said, in a famous court decision, “is at its end.” The case involved what is called in law an attractive nuisance, something hazardous, an uncovered blade or well, an unattended piece of machinery, which might tempt a child to stray and hurt himself. The children in the Holmes case were more than hurt, they fell into a lake of chemicals and were dissolved. But the more one looks at the great judge’s words, the more clearly they are an instance of the hollow, perfectly specious aphorism. The one place at which roads normally extend no invitation whatsoever is at their ends. Every road’s invitation seems to lie either on it, as a means to reach a destination, or alongside, where its own destinations, diners, shops, and houses, are. At the end of a road, there is usually, at best, an intersection with another road. More commonly, there is nothing. Or a quarry, or a reservoir.