The Girl of the Lake Read online

  “Are we getting ahead of ourselves?”

  “ ‘Lovestruck Acres. More a state of being than a farm.’ Can’t you see it on the egg cartons?”

  “I can see it on the tax bill.”

  “I see a 503c.”

  Way ahead of me. But bless him. “Anyway, there’s a little college a couple towns north, this Christian outfit but pretty well respected.”

  “Alma College.”

  “Yes, exactly, Alma. Unh. And they have a farm program of some kind and the kids need to find internships and out of the blue this dork drives up and he can barely talk he’s so nervous and he needs to eat more he’s so skinny and someone needs to show him how to shave and his Adam’s apple is like a little fist in his throat and his first word and last word is ‘like.’ ‘Like, do you need, I mean, I’m out at Alma, and like.’ I knew what he meant, of course. So I said, ‘Like, sure.’ I happened to be planting onion sets that afternoon, two thousand of them, roughly, ten pounds of Georgian whites and it was wonderful to have him.”

  Kisses. Hmn. County Road 77, straight as a javelin. And P.G. and I are trying to pull back a little on the basically hand jobs going on—I’ve got several beds at home. We part slightly in deference to my story, not to our driver, who whistles Arabian scales, oblivious.

  I continue: “My husband, who’s at work in Grand Rapids and wants nothing to do with the work of the farm and who’s not interested in the idea of kids, has been coming home at eleven and midnight, one of these lawyers who works till all hours. Admirably, I mean. He just really loves the law and loves the clients he serves, don’t get me wrong, a good guy with a quarter of his accounts pro bono for good causes. One of them’s the Seed Project, always these lawsuits from Monsanto and the others, patents on the fucking building blocks of life, you know?”

  “And your intern?”

  “He’s like you, long legs and no butt to speak of and his pants are falling down and his glasses are falling off in the dirt and he’s got smudges on his face and he’s getting sunburned and I’m expecting him to, like, die of exhaustion at any moment, but he doesn’t, he just keeps plugging those onion sets in, a great eye for the bed, the onion bed, I mean, great sense of spacing, just a natural. You know onion sets? They’re just these, like, baby onions I’ve grown from seed the year before and brought to maybe marble size.”

  With his fingers he finds the marble of me, a little something I’ve been hiding. I wriggle by way of saying stop, and he does, man of intuition. More kisses, about three miles of kisses till Avon, which is not much more than a Tastee Freez and a gas pump. P.G. traces a couple of constellations in the freckles of my cleavage with his me-damp and fragrant fingers, not that he can see, but I know the constellations well and he traces them all before discretion kicks in. I’ve got all sorts of wine at home, also coffee, also food. I’m going to keep this guy awake all night.

  “To make a long story short,” I say.

  “I’m all for the idea of kids,” P.G. says. “I’ve longed for kids.”

  The conversation moves to three levels. Ignoring all that, I say, “We get the sets in, very tiring, and I’m happy with him, delighted with him. He’s gotten over his shyness and he’s been talking a blue streak about some invention he’s working on, and gradually I’m realizing he’s brilliant and kind of funny, too, and he’s got this idea for a squash-beetle trap that just listening you realize is going to work perfectly and that he’s going to be rich from it, everyone in the organic produce world sick and weary of squash beetles.” And P.G. is listening to me, listening very closely, deeply aware of both sides of my coin: true fascination with squash beetles; the fear that the idea out of nowhere of kids has wrought. But he’s an integrating force, our P.G., and my halves cross into one another at his touch, which resumes. What hands.

  “I’ve got dreams for my place,” I’m telling his ear, “A greenhouse there, an asparagus gully here.” And he’s listening, listening, clearly enjoying the music of the very instrument he’s playing. I say, “You’ll see the place in the light of the morning—it’s come such a long way. These interns, they have really helped me. I’ve got four this spring, it’s beautiful, all women, per my request.”

  His fingers find my hot center again.

  My single center, and I’m getting off in a wave that hits the shore and keeps on going, drowning the villages, uprooting the palm trees. I keep the story afloat by force: “I invite him in for, hmn, dinner and of course a shower and he says, ‘Lady, you should, hmn, go first,’ but the kid yanks open the curtain and, hmn, climbs in the shower with me halfway through, hmn, and he’s naked and, well, we were on the bathroom floor when my husband came home, hours later, beginning of the end.”

  THE RIDE IS ONE HOUR and twenty-five minutes, and after my story there is a feeling of the tide going out. Mudflats, earthy smells, tidal pools, breakers distant, islands out there, all beautiful in their own way, I suppose. My priest looking out his window at the night, I from mine, the driver’s whistling increasingly pleasant, those Arabic halftones, a studied oblivion. That starts a train of thought, and eventually out of nowhere, like Father Paul with the children thing, I say, “I mean, how can you believe in that church stuff? The Holy Trinity—that’s a big part of Episcopalianism, right? How can you believe in it? I mean faith, okay, that’s the easy answer, but believing in all this patently false and crazy church stuff, it just puzzles me.”

  And P.G. is very patient—this kind of thing he’s heard before. He wriggles away from me a touch and with a quick motion of his good, long hands zips his pants back up. Only then he says, “Well, this is a big topic. And I may actually agree with you. But as far as the Trinity goes—Father, Son, Holy Ghost being all one? It’s like water: you might see it in the form of steam, ice, or liquid, but it’s still water.”

  I’m not buying it. I straighten my own clothes, say, “That’s the best you can do? It’s like water? That old saw? I’m sorry, but it’s not like water. It’s nothing like water. Water you can drink, you can see. You can put it in an ice tray, you can boil it in the teapot, you can walk on it. And it keeps you alive literally.”

  “You don’t drink God? See God in everything? God doesn’t keep you alive? Literally inspire?”

  “I drink a collection of natural forces all acting upon one another in wonderful ways. And I keep myself alive, I keep a collection of molecules together in a certain shape and form, later to be some other form when my electrical impulses cease.”

  “A miracle in itself.”

  “Okay, sure.”

  “Call it God, then, why not?”

  “Because then the morons will pray to it?”

  “Your hostility is fascinating.”

  “I’m losing my buzz.”

  “What is your name really?”

  Something in me is anxious to change the subject and whispers, “I haven’t come that hard in like five years.” And P.G. likes that, big warm grin. We slide close again, watch the high prairie go by in half moonlight, really enormous farms planted in corn and soy and not much else, alfalfa, one small field of milo, maybe some potatoes across the tracks there.

  He says, “Your name.”

  “It’s Ellen.”

  “Ellen.”

  “Okay. Yes. I like it. My name. In your mouth.”

  He’s a little angry: “Your real name at last.”

  Several miles go by, the home territory, straightest possible road, a partial moon rising. I say, “So what ended up happening with you and that girl?”

  And a little angrier yet, he says, “Oh, I see. You’re jealous. And you were jealous of the bartender, too. Also the hostess. As for me, I don’t like your intern. And I don’t like your husband, I don’t care he’s your ex.” He’s not very scary.

  I give him a squeeze, and he’s still hard as a cross on a hill.

  That’s it for irritation. “Let’s save it for home,” he says softly.

  “You have not saved me for home.”

  �
�But you, unlike I, are a bottomless well.”

  He’s right about that.

  We sit up. Eyes front. The driver’s GPS glows, speaks directions in Arabic. I know exactly what it’s saying: my road is only two miles, a nice square intersection, turn right.

  P.G. says, “Okay. At her hearing I went back to chambers with the judge, my tennis friend, and I suggested that in some cases the best course of action might be pastoral counseling. Daily counseling. After school. At her home. I was willing to do it—to make a project of her, keep her off the streets, keep her in mind of morals, teach her those things she’d never been taught by her coarse parents, bless them, keep her away from the Aryan Nation, the methamphetamine nation, the cult nation, the inner Michigan, the weapons.”

  I say, “And the judge agreed, and then you fucked her every day.”

  “Yes. Every day for a year, which was her sentence. The year of pastoral counseling, I mean. Not the lovemaking. Which I would like to believe she enjoyed.”

  “And then you got caught.”

  “No. Nothing like that. Not at all. Just that we got to be very close. I would say we had fallen in love. She read the books I suggested. She was wise far beyond her peers. But before the year was even up she and I agreed there was no place for the relationship to go, a matter of our ages more than propriety. She’d gotten interested in college. In fact, she’d been accepted into the Residential College at the University of Michigan.”

  “Go Blue.”

  “It’s an elite admission, the RC. She’s done very well. Environmental studies. Also soccer, a big deal.”

  “Her parents must be glad.”

  “Her father is in jail. Financial fraud.”

  “Which is where you belong. Jail. I mean, she was underage, P.G. Or are you making all this up?”

  “No, sadly true. And note that seventeen is not underage in Michigan.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Ellen, you’re right. I’m skirting the issue.”

  “Which is: How can you stay in the church?”

  “In fact, I have resigned.”

  He’d been shown another path.

  THE TAXI DRIVER DROPPED us; we tipped him vastly. He was another of the angels that surrounded P.G., I thought, and realized the bartender had been one as well, certainly that teenage girl in the old-money house who went to college and became a success. And maybe me.

  I said, “Am I really your first Internet date?”

  “My first of any kind.”

  “Since . . .”

  “Well, that’s correct, exactly. Since . . .” Since his wife died.

  In the barn ewe and lamb were asleep together, nicely nestled.

  In the house I made P.G. put his little collar-tab thing in the woodstove, and we watched it burn, then built up the fire. We ate a plate of eggs and toast that we made together and then we drank more whiskey (you could about bite his breath, delicious) and the moon rose and our sexual tide came in high and we finished what we had started, made love while talking, just the two of us, only two of us, only him and me, these completed adults, and then we slept an indeterminate time and woke and slept and woke, very powerful, only partly alcoholic.

  AND THEN UNDER FAINT sun it was a tour of the farm and honestly several days of lovemaking and eating and talk and even some actual farmwork (more lambs, everyone dropping at once) and pretty serious discussions of what he could add to the mix (“Jism,” I said, and he knew what I meant, not the slightest backing away: “I’ve always wanted to be a father.” “I believe you, Father,” said I in the chicken house, always the clown, but deliquescing: kids were on my agenda, too.)

  He’d wanted to do more with his gardening as well, and that’s why he’d answered my ad. “I want to grow huge zucchini,” he said. “And eggplants and cucumbers and carrots and what are those things called? Butternut squash.”

  “We grow alliums here, not dildos.”

  “We can grow both.”

  Funny priest!

  Four days of this little honeymoon of an Internet date before we even got ourselves a ride into town to retrieve our two cars from the parking garage they both happened to be in (and more freakily, parked exactly next to each other—I mean, please) and then to the rectory at St. Marks to gather his things and leave the Prius, which was owned by the diocese. He owned practically nothing, in fact, one load in the Tundra, a big vehicle, granted—mostly books, one box of knickknacks, two suitcases of useless fine clothes alongside my bales of hay, the broken spreader—and home to the farm, happily ever after, ha.

  Dung Beetle

  MY FELLOWSHIP, FROM AN American foundation, included a modest stipend toward room and board. Word was that this was best spent on a flat rather than on university housing: in summer, every flat in Oxford was available on sublease for ha’pennies on the pound. That would leave some extra for my bad habits: cigarettes, ale, used books, and just maybe, if luck were with me, a girlfriend. This was 1975, remember, and England to me was all miniskirts and rock and roll and Bond, James Bond—Britt Ekland in her bikini, The Man with the Golden Gun.

  First hours in town, my brain boiling with excitement, also jet lag, I found the bulletin board my mentor in the Public Policy program at Georgetown had described: boarder wanted, flatmate wanted, sublease available. Holding sheaves of notes and tear-offs in my teeth, I struggled with an enormous red pay phone. In those days, long before answering machines, before e-anything, the first nine or eleven numbers I dialed only rang a double-toned foreign signal that made my heart sink. The tenth or twelfth was answered on a half ring: thickly accented English, neither British nor American, a man named Sileshi Silboumi. His offering was “near enough” the university, rent of “fourteen pounds the month.” We made an appointment for “an hour’s time hence.” He’d have to “hurtle homeward” from his office at the university to meet me.

  The image of a perfect dwelling with a perfect flatmate named Sileshi Silboumi overtook me, and I walked a crooked couple of miles to the address he’d given me in Motherly Street. There was no ringer. “One must bellow up,” he’d instructed.

  I did, and shortly his broad black face appeared over the balustrade four floors up. He sang down: “Will it do?”

  I shouted back, “So far!”

  Upstairs (many stairs), the flimsy door to the flat opened directly into a bedroom. Puffing, I attempted to shake his hand, but Sileshi wouldn’t take mine, only half-bowed and tilted his head, frank gaze, no words between us. His cheeks and forehead were decorated with a star-shaped cicatrix. He was a small man, short and thin, with large front teeth, something athletic expressed in his broad-striped rugby shirt. His face was wide open, beautiful really, cheerful, accepting, intelligent. His skin was very dark, truly black. Mine was truly white, pink when drinking, freckles either way. His hair was buzzed off close. Mine was long, in proto-hippie curls.

  At last Sileshi tilted his head almost to his shoulder. He said, “You are most agreeable.”

  I tilted my head the same and said, “Could you show me around?”

  He straightened. “I have subleased this citadel from a graduate student in physics.” All his accents were original and landed on last syllables: citadel, student, physics. “It has a mathematical air, don’t you agree?”

  That was a joke and I laughed. The place had a drooping air, nothing mathematical about it, and a moldy air, and was fiercely hot that late afternoon. We could “scarce breathe,” as Sileshi put it. We kept laughing, though, and suddenly he pulled me to him, hugged me sweatily, comradely, sweet smell of incense behind his ear.

  “All right, then, mate,” he said too loudly. “We have found each other.”

  I wanted to say, Not so fast, but his enthusiasm charmed me to silence.

  I followed him through the flat, which was a simple dumbbell, rudimentary kitchen lined up in the center. My prospective room was at the far end, piled tidily with books, a thin mattress on the floor, no door of its own. The toilet, said he, was on the fir
st floor, two floors down, “actually.” I asked after the shower, drew a blank look, described the concept with hand gestures over my head.

  “Ah, the bath,” Sileshi said, with his own gesture, that of turning a low knob. I think it was then I first saw that he was missing fingers on his left hand, all but thumb and pinkie. And he saw that I noticed, opened the hand sub rosa to show me, even as his face continued the conversation. “No bath for the filthy. We use the public baths—a pleasant walk.”

  “All this for fourteen pounds monthly,” I said, hard to believe my luck.

  “Yes. Seven pounds in division.”

  Even better.

  MOVING IN WAS A MATTER of retrieving my suitcase, canceling my horrid hotel, and returning to Sileshi’s that very afternoon. I handed over seven pounds in coins and notes, accepted yet more kisses on both cheeks. My new flatmate and I gazed upon one another at length, contemplated the summer ahead. A ray of late-afternoon light pierced the motes of the kitchen, was as quickly gone: sunset in Oxford.

  “Settle in,” Sileshi said, pointing me at my room. Then he excused himself with a bow and a flourish. Soon—there were no doors to close—I heard him drumming at the floor and muttering. Prayer of some kind, I surmised.

  Nonplussed, exhausted, I lay on the narrow mattress that would be my bed, closed my eyes, and prayed, too, via profound sleep, my only religion even then.

  In darkness I awoke to Sileshi serving a meal on the floor of my room. At first I tried to beg off, embarrassed by his largesse, his intimate presence, also befuddled from the snooze. But he took no notice, handed me a napkin of rough linen. I struggled up, and the two of us sat cross-legged in silence and ate a kind of meat stew, using torn pieces of gummy flatbread as our only implements, sharing the bowl. The spice in the food burned my mouth pleasantly. After, we ate strange fruits and talked, leaning at one another. Sileshi was finishing his PhD dissertation in economics, meanwhile teaching two classes in the summer session. His father was an important king or chieftain in an area of central Africa he refused to call a country, an area upon which the Belgians and several other European powers had long imposed borders and were now instituting “native” parliaments before departing per treaty after generations of brutal occupation.