Amherst (8 page)

Make this Bed with Awe—

In it wait till Judgment break

Excellent and fair.

Be its Mattress straight—

Be its Pillow round—

Let no Sunrise’ yellow noise

Interrupt this Ground—

Alice feels half ashamed of how intensely she responds to Emily’s death poems. She senses the longing for escape in them, escape from the unmeetable demands of life, that she be successful and beautiful and loved. In this surely Mabel stands as Emily’s opposite. She was one who sought out the yellow noise and, bathed in its flattering glow, demanded and received attention.

My story, Alice tells herself, is about Mabel, who chose life in all its mess and hurt, not Emily, who withdrew into the sepulchre of her own room. And yet in every picture she forms of Mabel, Emily is near, the listener behind the closed door. She’s near even now. The words on her gravestone come from Emily herself, from almost the last letter she ever wrote:
Little Cousins. Called back. Emily.

She leaves the cemetery by the old entrance, which comes out into a parking lot, and walks up the road beside the Mobil
gas station onto Pleasant Street. She’s beginning to get her bearings in the town. Left onto Main, past the Evergreens and the Homestead, the very walk taken so many times by Mabel and Austin, and so to the unlikely mansion where she now has her lodgings.

Her guest suite awes her. She has a bedroom with a wide bed and a television, a bathroom where toiletries have been supplied as in a hotel, and a further room furnished with a writing desk, two armchairs, and a second television. She wants to tell someone about it and realizes that someone is Jack. After all, he’s responsible, indirectly, for her presence in Nick Crocker’s house. So she takes a photograph on her phone of the suite’s sitting room, with a glimpse through the open door of the bedroom, and sends it to Jack with the message:
Not exactly roughing it. My guest suite chez Crocker, thanks to you
.

She wonders for a moment what he’s doing. It’ll be late evening in England. Is he sitting at a kitchen table marking essays, dreaming of pretty girls in head scarves?

She hears a car pull up outside and goes to her window, which overlooks the entrance drive. Nick’s wife, Peggy, is due back from Boston anytime. Alice is curious to meet her. But it’s Nick himself, returning home in an old red truck. An odd vehicle for him to drive, as if he’s pretending to be a builder. She watches him get out of the cab and cross to the back door of the house. Then he looks up and sees her, and she retreats from the window.

She sits down to work at last, at the writing desk, with her laptop before her and her books by her side:
Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
, and
Austin and Mabel, the Love Letters
. She opens up the document in which she has begun to write the first experimental draft of her screenplay and reads through the notes
she’s made so far. But she finds it hard to concentrate. All she wants to do is go to sleep.

After half an hour or so she gives up and goes down to the kitchen to make herself coffee. Nick hears her and comes in, spectacles on his nose, book in his hand.

“I can’t seem to keep awake,” she says.

“Why not have a swim?” he says. “That’s what I do to wake myself up in the mornings.”

“You have a pool?”

Alice has seen nothing as vulgar as a swimming pool in this part of historic Amherst.

“It’s hidden away in the stable block. Come, I’ll show you.”

She follows him across the backyard to the stable block. From the outside it’s a handsome white-painted, twin-gabled building, with two large doors painted russet brown. Inside, through a small lobby, an inner door opens onto a long shadowy space. A dark glistening pool fills almost the entire area. It’s lined in black marble and lit by shafts of daylight falling through glazed panels in the roof.

“Are you shocked?” says Nick.

“Why would I be shocked?”

“Well, conspicuous consumption and all that.”

“I think it’s beautiful.”

“All yours, if you feel like it. Heated to eighty degrees.”

“I haven’t brought any swimming things,” Alice says. “I never thought I might be going for a swim.”

“So what? Swim naked. There’s no one to see you.”

He waves towards a cubicle to one side.

“Plenty of towels in there.”

He leaves her alone in the great space. The heat from the water
warms the air. She walks slowly down the side of the pool towards the changing cubicle. At first she has no intention of swimming. She kneels down and dips a finger in the water. It’s pleasantly warm. As she stands up again she feels a little dizzy, no doubt the effect of jet lag. She looks round the long dark space and sees that she’s all alone. Why not?

She strips in the cubicle. There’s a tall mirror there in which she sees her naked body reflected. She feels a delicious surge of wildness possess her. She stands for a moment looking at herself in the flattering half-light. She may not be a beauty but she has a good body. She examines herself, twisting this way and that, trying to catch a reflection of her behind. Not a bad bum, all things considered.

She runs out of the cubicle and dives straight into the water, a clumsy dive that half winds her and makes a great splash. Then she drives down to the shallow end with a powerful crawl, and back again. She loves being naked in the water, she feels like a wild animal. Her sleepiness has vanished. She resolves to do fifty lengths. Somewhere after twenty she runs out of energy and turns onto her back to paddle lazily up and down. She closes her eyes and lets herself drift in and out of the shafts of light.

She becomes aware of a tapping sound. She curls her body round and opens her eyes. Nick has come back in and is standing at the far end.

“Sorry,” he says. “I need to know if you’re in for dinner.”

Slowly she lets her body sink below the surface of the water.

“Can I be?”

“Yes, of course. See you later.”

He goes. Slowly, like a sleepwalker, she emerges from the pool. She finds a towel and dries herself and dresses.

So he saw me naked. So what? He’s seen naked women before. Did he enter silently, secretly, so he could see me? No, he announced his coming. He knocked on the door. Did I hear his knock? All she remembers is the sensation of floating on her back in water, the luxury of it, and the sweet relief of letting go.

And if he did see me, did he admire? Did he desire?

•  •  •

The dinner they share turns out to have been cooked by Nick himself. This takes Alice by surprise. Somehow she assumed there’d be a servant in this grand house. But no, they’re alone.

He’s made a stir-fry. Noodles, sugar snap peas, finely cut strips of rare beef.

“You like wine?”

“Yes, I like wine.”

“This is a Syrah from the Walla Walla Valley, Washington state.”

The food and wine are both sublime. Alice feels intensely aware of taste and smell and touch. They eat in the kitchen, facing each other across the narrow Formica-covered breakfast bar. Nick’s eyes remain on her with gratifying attention.

“So no Peggy?” she says.

“Maybe tomorrow. What are your plans for tomorrow?”

“Look around town. Get a feel for the geography. And I have to make contact with the library at Yale. I want to see some of the original letters and diaries.”

“I thought the archive was in Harvard.”

“That’s Emily’s poems. All Mabel’s papers are at Yale.”

“You’ve done your homework.”

“A little. There’s so much more to do.”

“Well, if you need any help, just ask.”

“Where I really need help,” says Alice, “is in working out how
to tell the story. I mean, the biographical facts are all there. We know pretty much who did what and when. What we don’t know is why.”

“And that matters?”

“Totally. If Mabel was just a social climber, and all she wanted from Austin was status and attention, then why should we care about her?”

“Do you have to care about someone to write their story?”

Alice thinks about that.

“Yes, I think so. If I don’t care about my heroine, why should anyone else?”

“She could be fascinatingly bad. Like Becky Sharp in
Vanity Fair
.”

“Yes . . .” Alice considers this too. “But Becky Sharp always knew she was looking after herself. Mabel wasn’t like that. She really did fall in love.”

“Whatever that means.”

“You don’t believe people can fall in love?”

“Oh, you don’t need my views on the subject,” says Nick with a laugh. “But you, I take it, do believe in love?”

“Yes,” says Alice. “Of course I believe in love. Not to believe in love is second-rate cynicism. It’s just silly. Everyone experiences love. Even you.”

She stares at him fiercely, daring him not to agree.

“Then why not believe in Mabel’s love?”

“I do, I do,” says Alice. “And I don’t, I don’t. I don’t know. I’m in a muddle. Can I read you some of the things she writes?”

“By all means.”

Alice runs up to her rooms to fetch the book of letters. Returning down the long stairs she feels a little giddy and realizes she must have drunk more red wine than she thought.

Why did I go for Nick like that?

In the kitchen, she reads aloud to him.

“Oh! beloved! Are not our lives inextricably interwoven? And is it not bliss unutterable?”

“This is June 1885, Mabel to Austin.”

“Ah! dear, we did not know that it was God who led us by that gate, that rainy night! What else could make heaven to us but each other? Oh! darling. I am proud of our love—it is so great and strong and pure, so satisfying and so holy!”

“Strong stuff,” says Nick.

“They go on like that for pages, both of them.”

“What’s this gate that God led them by?”

“The gate to Austin’s house. They were going to a party there, but they walked on past. They called it ‘going by the gate.’ Austin wrote in his diary that night:
Rubicon
. Don’t you love that? They realized their love was shared by that one simple action—not turning in at a gate.”

“Yes, that is good. I like that.”

She can feel his interest growing. In her story? In her?

“But what I can’t work out,” she says, “is why they felt so strongly about each other. I can see it from his point of view. She was young and pretty, and she knew all about sex. I expect he thought Christmas had come. But what was in it for her?”

“Now who’s the cynic?”

“You think it’s natural for a twenty-four-year-old to fall for a man in his fifties?”

“Very natural,” he says, keeping a straight face.

It’s Alice who cracks.

“Sorry,” she says, laughing. “I shouldn’t get at you. You’re being so kind to me.”

“Oh, I see. You’re getting at me. I wonder why.” He pretends not to know, and then to remember. “The girl in Rao’s?”

“You do have something of a reputation.”

“Do I?”

His eyes are on her and she doesn’t want to meet them but she does. She’s filled with this absurd conviction that he knows exactly what she’s thinking, and what she’s going to say next, and none of it makes any difference, because the end is ordained. What end?

“You’re supposed to be the Amherst Casanova.”

“Who told you that?”

“Isn’t it true, then?”

“Does it matter?” He seems entirely unperturbed. “No one’s writing a screenplay about me.”

“No, it doesn’t matter,” Alice says, “and it’s none of my business anyway. I’m a guest in your house. Sorry. Sorry.”

“That’s a lot of sorry.”

“Well, I am sorry. You seem to me to be a nice man.”

“Oh, no, Alice.” He shakes his head, speaks gravely. “Whatever else I am, I’m not a nice man.”

“Okay.” She feels patronized. “No need to be so proud of it.”

“I’m not proud.”

“Yes, you are. You think you’re cool but really you’re—” She puts one hand over her mouth, appalled at her bad manners, and shakes her head from side to side. “Nothing. Nothing. It’s the wine. It’s the jet lag. Don’t listen to me.”

“But really I’m what?”

“Nothing. Sorry.”

“A pathetic old lecher trying to reclaim his youth?”

“No, no.”

She groans and shakes her head. And the truth is, this is not how she sees him at all. So why is she attacking him?

“Don’t pay any attention to me. What do I know about anything?”

Then he does something that changes everything. Without preamble, and from memory, he recites an Emily Dickinson poem.

I shall know why—when time is over—

And I have ceased to wonder why—

Christ will explain each separate anguish

In the fair schoolroom of the sky—

He will tell me what Peter promised—

And I—for wonder at his woe—

I shall forget the drop of anguish

That scalds me now—that scalds me now!

A silence follows. He refills their wineglasses. Alice feels overwhelmed by a confusion of feelings.

“What was that for?”

“Do I have to tell you?”

“No.”

Emily Dickinson has said it, on his behalf. He’s telling her that he too knows what it is to suffer pain, even if he doesn’t understand the reason for the pain. And if he knows pain, he must know love. Or is that just sentimentality?

“We know so little of each other, don’t we?” His brown eyes
on her, smiling. “Not just because we’ve only just met. It’s the way we live our lives. We all live our lives in hiding.”

“Oh, Nick.”

“I’m sorry. I’m getting too serious, I know.”

She wants to say to him, Don’t be too wise, don’t be too understanding. Don’t make me love you. It would be too ridiculous if that were to happen. It would be too commonplace.