Hey wait.
Well, love after all is a habit like any other.
A habit, maybe. Like any other, no.
Drivers of large cars drive extremely badly. So do old men; men wearing hats; men with thick necks and florid faces; hunters; drivers of cars with dented fenders, or with more than one generation in them, or with college stickers on their rearview windows, or with slogans on their bumpers, or with license plates of names or words instead of numbers, or with New Jersey license plates. I have left out matrons, nuns, dyed blondes, old women; their lapses tend to be blunt and unaggressive, like an inability to park or a wrong turn on a one-way street. That is all I know, categorically and without reservation, about drivers. Two other facts I think I know are these. Nobody ever confides a secret to one person only. No one destroys all copies of a document. Also, that it is children really, perhaps because so much is forbidden to them, who understand from within the nature of crime.
You are, you know, you were the nearest thing to a real story to happen in my life.
Yet here I am, for the first time and yet again, alone at last on Orcas Island.
Did I throw the most important thing perhaps, by accident, away?
Having read in the paper that a London society called Exit was about to publish a book of pharmacological instructions for terminally ill people who simply wanted to die, peacefully, in their sleep, I thought of Ed Rubin and old Bayard. Then, I misplaced the clipping and forgot. Months later, when I found the clipping and remembered, I wrote to London Exit. Nothing happened. No reply. Long after that, when I had again forgotten, I received a letter from a Los Angeles society called Hemlock, who said that, since I was an American, London Exit had forwarded my communication to them. I had a moment of hilarity about this. The clear sense of jurisdiction. Then, I read, in a newsletter enclosed by Hemlock, that London Exit had never published its instructions. They had been enjoined from publication, and suppressed. Exit’s officials, moreover, had been indicted under the English law of suicide, aiding and abetting. Los Angeles Hemlock, however, was going to go ahead and publish. I called and asked how they were going to keep from being suppressed under the California equivalent of the English statute. Their plan, they said, was to publish, not instructions, but short case histories: Harry, weighing this many pounds, took this many grams of this substance, and it wasn’t enough; Anna, who weighed less, took this many grams more, and it was. No law could prevent the publication of case histories. Not when we have the protection of the First Amendment. That was that. Hemlock published. There was, though, this improbable footnote from London: Exit, it seemed, may really have aided and abetted, even proselytized. Witnesses were coming forward to say that, in response to their phone calls of the most tentative inquiry, a voice would offer to come at once. Within hours, an elderly man would appear on their doorsteps, offering to help, urging them to be spared further misery, from their asthma, their sadness, their lower back pain. Another moment of hilarity. And yet. And then it passed.
The lines, as usual, were long and extremely slow going into the island’s airport. Immigration officials considered each passport with an impassive but somehow insulting deliberateness. It was also possible, given the quality of local schooling, that they found it difficult to read. Lines for departure from the island were also, equally, slow, but they had about them always something of the frantic. Reservations, clearly marked on tickets and many times confirmed, were somehow missing from passenger lists; or even if they appeared on the lists, where passengers, reading upside down, could clearly see them, the airline employee would look up, with that impassivity, that insulting deliberation, and repeat that there was no record of the passenger’s name, that the passenger could wait, if he liked, on standby, for this flight or for the next in six hours’ time. It hardly mattered which island it was. Barbados. St. Thomas. Tortola. Martinique. Visitors, particularly those who most deplored the quality of island food, liked to say the French islands were different. But they were not. With the exception of Jamaica and Grenada, where violence was overt, the islands were the same.
What you found in all these places was, of course, the clear, warm sea, the sun, the long white beaches; and, in the water, always in recent years, at least one young, possibly feeble-minded black person, smiling, playing with himself. Nearby, a large, loud transistor, a group of young blacks, some in bathing suits, a few in trousers, chattering in the island patois, moving gradually nearer a sunbathing young white woman, or a sunbathing white couple, until that woman or that couple, whose intention had evidently been to stay at some distance from the others, picked up their towels and moved toward the groups around the beach umbrellas, where the other white people were. Elsewhere on the beach, not all day but inevitably by noon, a second group of blacks, young, laughing, wading deep, splashing, shouting, embracing, taunting, concealing in a kind of ostentatious, faked exuberance, the fact, true of so many places with sought-after resorts, sought-after beaches, that no native islanders knew how to swim. These were the tensions of arriving, staying, leaving. On the heavily frequented islands, where people went for nightclubs, gambling, golf, hotels. And on the remote, secluded islands of rented and guarded houses. Where people came to be undisturbed. And then became restless after dinner.
Look here.
How could I know that every time you had a chance to choose you would choose the other thing?
Do you know, he said, I have not made love with anyone since I first made love with you. I said, Not anyone? He said no. I said, Neither have I. And there we were. And why is it not enough, for people of diffidence, hesitation and reserve, to let it go, to let it be now, this way, for the rest of our lives? Well, perhaps I am wrong now. But every once in a while since the year we met, no, not met, since we didn’t for so long even like each other, since the year, then, that we began to go to bed together, I said that someday, in spring or autumn, I’d like to go to New Orleans. I had never been there. And you said, each time you said, Why I’ll take you there, that’s easy. In the sixth year, in August, I went to New Orleans by myself. It was all right, though it was hot, since it was August. I just hadn’t thought it through. I invented errands, talked to those judges, spent a few days. It didn’t matter. Then, from time to time, I began to say, You know, someday we ought to go somewhere for a weekend. Not for work, as when we fly to Cleveland, Chicago, or Atlanta, and we have an early dinner there or else I wait at the motel while you have dinner with the local people, and the next day I read while you do the work you came for, and the next night, or two nights later, we fly back. But a weekend of calm, as though you were in your houses, on your islands, your long walks. Sometimes, you said, I will, we’ll do that. Once or twice, you said, We’ll see. It became a sort of joke between us, that weekend. Sometimes it was reduced to just dinner at a restaurant in Pennsylvania, not far from the place where you sometimes spend a few days fishing; but we never went there, either. Other dinners, not that one. And it began to matter. I don’t know why. A child’s thing. On the other hand, I’m not sure you can say, as a not inconsiderable man to a grown woman, We’ll see.