Chapter Thirty-Five The Castle
Thirty-Five
The Castle
Outside the window was a Scottish forest battered by pelting rain and howling wind. Inside, a small bedroom with a dark green carpet and heavy wood and brass furniture, the cold and damp sneaking in around the window frame and under the door. The sun rose straight into my eyes each morning as I sat at my desk, a blanket over my shoulders and my legs as close to the space heater as they could get without burning my skin.
After years of people needing things from me, of duty and service, I suddenly had no responsibility at all, nothing but quiet and time to think. There was no wi-fi and barely any cell service. My lunch—a thermos of soup, a little circle of cheese, a sandwich on brown bread—was delivered to me in a basket outside my door at noon.
Silence was observed from breakfast until dinner, which I ate with my four fellow fellows and the administrator. We chatted and traded books and sipped sherry out of shot glasses or whiskey out of tumblers or red wine out of long-stemmed glasses. We praised the cook and thanked her as we set our napkins on our plates and left the dining room, engaging in a live-action role-play of the nineteenth-century aristocracy.
“Have you ever been alone?” the dramatic Dutch poet asked me as we had a nightcap after dinner in the drawing room. On the wall hung portraits of the former castle inhabitant’s friends Jean Cocteau, Truman Capote, and Aldous Huxley.
“I’m alone all day now,” I said. “I’ve never been so alone.”
I gestured to my room, where for all but a couple of hours in the evening I sat with my notebooks and occasionally lay down on the green carpet and sobbed. Sinking into the terror of loneliness felt like lowering myself into a hot bath. From a little patch of gravel by the library I’d tried making regular calls the first few days, but after eking out only enough 3G to talk to Nate or David for a staticky and disappointing few minutes I’d mostly given up.
This was my dream—full days on my own and a private space to work, no meals to make, and no one Duolingo-ing within earshot. So why was I so miserable? Why had I started maniacally talking to myself? Why had I come to think of the residency as writer jail, only instead of gruel there was dry sherry?
I missed Nate. I missed David. I missed Veronica. No one in the castle even touched an arm or hugged; I recalled the phrase “skin hunger.” I began having nightmares every night in which I was flying a prop plane over the Atlantic and ran out of fuel.
I started to fear that, now that I was finally free to be with David in a real way, I was going to lose him. He’d given no indication that he wasn’t all in. I was the one who’d flown to a foreign country for a month. But I also found myself ruminating on the contrast between how asexual he’d been when we met and how passionate he’d been since. We’d unlocked something in each other; could I really expect to be the sole beneficiary of his erotic awakening? On one of our scratchy calls, I danced around my paranoid imaginings by joking weakly.
“I bet all your female colleagues have your photo pinned up in their lockers,” I said.
“You can’t be jealous of night-lights when you are the sun,” he said.
“Sun or not, I’ve never been this lonely,” I said.
I said I wanted him to come right that minute to Scotland to hold me. I knew it wasn’t rational. No visitors were allowed at the castle. It was a busy week for him. He was on a professor’s salary, and he couldn’t afford to fly internationally at the last minute for a conjugal visit. And yet, that is what I wanted, and that is what I asked for.
He suggested that instead we should wait for our next visit constructively.
“I know!” he said. “Let’s do another advent calendar.”
They say the things we fall in love with in others are the things that later drive us crazy. I’d fallen in love with David’s endless faith in us, his tireless patience, and his reliance on books for wisdom and solace. But as I listened to him through the static of our poor phone connection, I thought of the phrase “philosophy robot.” When he started talking about—oh Jesus, not again— amor fati , I began to shake. His philosophical approach had returned me to myself. Now it made me want to hurl my phone into a loch.
“In other words, hope and fear are condemned,” he said cheerfully, oblivious to my growing horror.
“I’m going to go now,” I said with a coldness I’d never felt toward him before.
“Oh,” he said, sounding startled. “Do you have to?”
“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
After hanging up, I walked through the forest around the castle and wondered what had just happened and what it might mean.
I texted Veronica, who said that this reflected my own internal struggles and that I was expecting too much from other people. “You caught a unicorn in David. A kind, smart man who loves you. You don’t need a rainbow-colored unicorn, who is also never annoying.”
But I was rattled. For the first time, I’d felt something for David other than pure adoration. Once fear crept in, it reduced the stores of love like an object placed in a beaker displaces water. I wasn’t sure if my new anger at him meant we’d broken up or that we were doomed. I imagined that when this time at the castle was over I would return home to an apartment full of ghosts, to no husband, no father, and no soulmate either. The recent series of events—that morning in California, the separation from Paul, the death of my father—had been cutting a mooring rope strand by strand. But what was I being liberated from? And what for?
Reentering the castle after my call and long walk, I kicked off my boots. Sitting at the table in front of me was Martin, one of the other fellows. I hadn’t noticed it before, but he looked and talked eerily like my friend Ryan, who I hadn’t seen since London. They both had eyes that crinkled when they smiled; both had a dry wit and a tendency to say “darlin’?” when they were teasing me.
“You need a hot drink!” Martin said. “You look windswept and mournful.”
He threw a blanket over my shoulders. “I’ll be right back. Don’t move.”
He returned with tea and a cookie.
“Thank you,” I said. I dutifully sipped and ate.
“Hmm,” he said, assessing me. “Amazingly, that tea has not completely restored you. I propose we go into town tonight and get obscenely drunk.”
“Yes, doctor,” I said.
That night he, the other journalist at the castle, and I called a cab. We left the poet fellows behind reading Hungarian novels and hurried down the castle walk, clacking along in our city shoes. Giddy with our sense of freedom, Amy, Martin, and I were acting like kids running away from boarding school rather than respectable professionals just out for dinner.
Amy ordered for us in Chinese while Martin negotiated for spicier and more unusual dishes; she let him pick one, spongy latticework tripe with chilis. They talked about their reporting. She was banned from China because of her work. In Africa he’d been thrown in jail and beaten with pistols.
I gazed at them in wonder—my radiant new friends, both with PhDs, crucial reports to file, passports with extra pages. We drank wine with dinner and then we went to a bar, where we had whiskey. Then we went to another bar, where we had beer. When that bar closed, we went to a third bar where we had more beer and perhaps more whiskey and bags of salt-and-pepper potato chips, to which I would have given all the Michelin stars. Martin and I carried on a whole conversation in what I believed at the time to be—but later suspected was not—impeccable French.
In the back seat of the cab back to the castle I was seated in the middle. The three of us merrily chatted away. We recalled how earlier that week, when one of our poet colleagues had said, “I need to practice radical honesty,” we all experienced a fight-or-flight reaction. Do you? we’d each thought. Or might radical discretion be more appropriate? Radical flattery? Mitigated honesty? Riffing on the many options superior to radical honesty, we laughed so hard tears ran down our faces. As we got close to the castle at the end of the half-hour trip I noticed that Martin and I were holding hands.
Once back, we woke up the beleaguered castle administrator, his two-toned beard warped by sleep, and then tromped up the stairs to our floor. Amy went into her room first. Before adjourning to ours, Martin and I stood alone beneath the hall light. I had been in this play before, knew my lines by heart. He looked so much like Ryan had in the London bar light—trustful, happy, expectant. Aside from my hand being held in the cab I hadn’t been touched in weeks.
What was David doing back home? Why didn’t he miss me enough to fly to Scotland or at least to complain more about us being apart? His infinite patience seemed to be not a virtue but rather a character flaw. And if he truly loved me, surely he’d want me to be held now when he couldn’t be there to do it? I was struck by an ugly impulse. If he was going to pelt me with book references while I was suffering, perhaps I should give him something to be philosophical about.
When Nate was two, his pediatrician had explained to me the concept of “object permanence.” He’d said that the way toddlers develop it is through constant reality testing. So when they open the kitchen drawer a thousand times a day they’re not trying to drive you insane; they want to make sure there are still no monsters in the drawer, only scissors and string.
Given how far apart David and I were and how shut off I felt from his day-to-day and he from mine, I imagined monsters, like the beautiful department colleague who’d said something forward to him at the holiday party. Every time I went to check my email I imagined I’d learn that he’d begun an affair with her. I wanted to go ahead and put a monster in the drawer just to end the suspense. Martin would make a good drawer-monster. Then I’d never have to wonder when one would pop out; I’d know because I’d put it there myself.
And yet, even in my drunkenness and loneliness, I hesitated. The universe had given me sacred sex. I’d made it out of that first hotel room without being incinerated by holy fire. What was I going to do, say, “Thanks for all the mystical visions. I’m also going to continue to fool around with every game and attractive person who crosses my path. Because holy love and thrilling new friendships aren’t enough; I also need intrigue ”? I’d had a mystical experience—why didn’t I act like it?
Beyond that: What kind of person did I want to be? Whatever I did, it was between me and myself. I’d have to behave in a way that had integrity, regardless of what anyone else told me I should or shouldn’t do. I’d made David no explicit promises. He’d made none to me. But I didn’t want to be the kind of person who slept with people when she was in love with someone else, just as I didn’t want to be married to someone who wanted me to kiss other men. I wanted how I felt to line up with what I did. If you wanted to be loved, you needed to love. In this situation, what would be the most loving thing to do?
This must have been what David meant when he talked about how the sin does the most damage to the sinner, how cheating was something that corrupted your relationship to yourself more even that it exiled you from your partner. This wasn’t about having the moral high ground. It was a question of figuring out who you were and being like that. And I was not, I’d learned, someone who wanted to sleep with anyone but the man I loved, even if he was halfway across the world, almost certainly being groped by nerdishly sexy visiting professors in cardigans and cat-eye glasses.
I hugged Martin, said goodnight, and went back to my little cell, where I switched on my space heater and got under the cold comforter of my twin bed alone, the Whitman paperback on my nightstand.