Perhaps it was because James’s body was unavailable, belonging to himself and no one else, or perhaps because, though I knew it, his body was still always unimaginable. Unimaginably that large, unimaginably refusing to stop, unimaginably killing him just with its growth.
I did not imagine.
I loved him in a way that I have never and will never love anyone ever again, in a way I suspect — Peggy, always greedy — few people love, or have been loved. I loved him because he was young and dying and needed me. I loved not only his height, but his careful way with any hobby, his earnestness, his strange sense of humor that always surprised me. I loved him because I wanted to save him, and because I could not. I loved him because I wanted to be enough for him, and I was not.
I loved him because I discovered that day, after years of practice, I had a talent for it.
Part Two
Careless Love
When I was in college in Philadelphia, I had my first job in a library. I sat behind the reference desk late nights, after the librarians had gone home, and tried to help students. I wasn’t good at it yet. A library is an exosomatic memory — what they nowadays call an out-of-the-body experience, though I believe most experiences are. Books remember all the things you cannot contain. I didn’t understand that at first. I wanted to remember only facts, not how to reach them; I was a tourist who hated travel.
Afternoons, I trailed the librarians, trying to pick up tips. Some casually listed off names of sources the second a question was asked; they might not even stand up to talk to the patron. If the student still looked confused, the librarian would say, curtly, index. Impossible to tell whether there was any pleasure to it. Others loved every query. They were the ones who knew the most: not just facts — though they did — but the organization of every book, where you’d find bibliographies, where you’d turn up empty. They knew the subtlest treasures of national biographies and climatological tables and censuses.
I stayed at the job when I went to get my master’s. My memories of library science school — and they are fading, thankfully — are of an alphabetized wilderness. Book leaves flapping in the afternoon, fine dusty mists rising from them. Equatorial heat. The toes of a dozen pairs of sensible shoes squeaking beneath desks. The teacher passing out the syllabus, the room filled with the soft click of handheld hole-punchers, a three-syllabled call, then the shush of hands over desks scooping up paper dots.
Our professors told us that order was important. This is true; I love order. But they never explained why. Order was for order’s sake, they said, and the other students nodded seriously: for them precision was a religion taken up at late age that would keep you from sin and keep you from Hell and everybody who didn’t understand this was damned. Presumably, two years of graduate study was far cheaper than the psychoanalysis it would have taken to get over whatever it was their mothers had done to them.
But a library is a gorgeous language that you will never speak fluently. You will try every day of your life. Order is a certain clumsy grammar, a mnemonic device. Order just means: try to use verbs. Consider the tense. The poetry will follow.
The school’s motto should have been, Neatness Counts.
I did well in library school. I am, in many ways, small-minded.
Still, behind the reference desk I frequently felt like an idiot. I didn’t recognize the names of certain cabinet members, or the currency of some unfamiliar country, or a great Scandinavian author. There were times I couldn’t even make sense of a problem, never mind find the solution. Some evenings I sat and thought up reference questions that only I could answer. Something about a newspaper article I’d read that afternoon, or all the known facts about one of my favorite painters. A student would approach me, shy and pessimistic, and when I gave them the exact answer, more information than they’d thought possible, when I said, “Rosa Bonheur …,” oh, they’d melt, they’d thank me and tell their friends: see that woman? She knows everything.
In my life I have spent hours constructing questions from just the right person, in just the right tone of voice: Have you ever known anyone who’s committed suicide? What celebrity would you marry if you could? Who was the first boy you ever kissed, and what do you remember about that boy?
And then the best part, the part where I answer, carefully, at length, because there’s someone who wants to know.
Truthfully, this is the fabric of all my fantasies: love shown not by a kiss or a wild look or a careful hand but by a willingness for research. I don’t dream of someone who understands me immediately, who seems to have known me my whole life, who says, I know, me too. I want someone keen to learn my own strange organization, amazed at what’s revealed; someone who asks, and then what, and then what?
But you can’t spend your life hoping that people will ask you the right questions. You must learn to love and answer the questions they already ask. Otherwise you’re dreaming of visiting Venice by driving to Boise, Idaho.
That year — the year that James turned seventeen, 1956—everything changed. Caroline had her baby, a girl, and they named her Alice Sweatt Strickland. I met her when she and Caroline came home from the hospital; I’d never known a baby so young. She was damp and stunned-looking, as if she couldn’t believe everyone had been expecting her to come ashore for months: she herself never imagined such things — February, Cape Cod, all these looming faces, and dry land — were even vaguely possible. Not really, her expression said, not this.
We started work on a cottage behind the Stricklands’ house for James, with funds raised through the town, my doing: jars by cash registers in stores, a pancake breakfast, collections at basketball games. I’d asked a contractor about building an addition to the house, but he said it wasn’t possible: too much weight on a not-too-sturdy building. Besides, he said, it would have looked terrible. Plenty of room behind the house, though, and I liked the idea, because I thought a cottage would belong absolutely to James, and therefore also to me.
We got businesses to donate furnishings, everything specially made: a huge armchair made by a man in Dennisport who just wanted the pleasure of building it; a bed from a mattress factory in Tiverton, in exchange for bragging rights. Their slogan was: for the longest night’s sleep you ever had.
My doing, my doing, my doing. Oscar and Caroline were alarmed, I think, slightly grateful, quite bewildered.
“Slow down!” Oscar said when I breathlessly listed the things I thought James would need in his cottage. I spoke more slowly.
“No,” said Oscar. “Slow down everything. You’ll wear yourself out.”
“I have plenty of energy,” I said.
“You’ll wear me out, then.”
But I couldn’t stop. I bought a hot plate, a little radio, a record player. I convinced a local carpenter to make a desk and end tables. I got the permits for building, painted the walls myself. Every night after work, I went to the cottage. At first just to walk around outside, and then, as it took shape, to sit inside on the floor and try to see what else it needed. In many ways it was not a proper house — no bathroom (we didn’t have the money; he’d have to go to the front house); no basement; no kitchen; no closet until I pointed out the lack. But there were high ceilings without eaves and a door that was wide and tall with a threshold plumb to the floor and no treacherous steps. Nothing for him to trip on. I’d thought at first that there’d be two rooms, because the idea of spending the whole day in one small place seemed depressing, but the contractor said that a single room allowed for the most space. Caroline sewed curtains to match those in the front house; Oscar painted the trim green, with a few trompe l’oeil jokes — ants on the sills, one long rose across the sash of each window. They wouldn’t have fooled anybody’s eye.