In which I write more but from a different period in time because sequential ordering feels too much like real life, which is always, annoyingly sequential

           

 The party was supposed to have started at seven, and, by 7:45, he was terrifically bored. He was in love, which was usually a cure for boredom, but Jane hadn’t arrived yet, which meant he was spending the evening talking with people with whom he was most decidedly, not in love. People with whom he was not in love had a greyness that hung about them. They were vaguely put together of eyeglasses, mustaches, hoop skirts, braided hair, balding. They had accents of varying degrees, often talked of the weather, the latest hunting season, and novels. He did not actively detest them as a group. In fact, he felt as though he didn’t have the space or time to care much more about them than he did about a lamp or a book written in French, which he assiduously did not read.

            He crossed the room to speak with his father, George. George was a kind and robust man. In the middle of life’s way he had begun to expand ever so slightly, but in what can only be described as a pleasant way. He had a large mustache that was greying from the center out. He had a large head, and deep set eyes, which were almost always twinkling in a way that made him appear as if he were enjoying some silent joke.

            “Are you enjoying yourself?” he asked, Daniel, placing his large hand gently on his son’s shoulder.

            “It’s impossible not too with so much pleasantness gathered in one room,” Daniel answered, peering around the room and trying to find someone pleasant. His eyes alighted on his father’s old business partner, Mr. Denby. Mr. Denby, unlike his father, had begun to be whittled away as he aged. His legs were slender as was his waist. His voice was thin, reed like and a bit nasally. He had a daughter, Charlotte—a cold girl who spent most of her time up north with a fiancée whom everyone pitied for having hitched himself to such an unpleasant girl.

            The evening didn’t really start for him until Jane arrived. Jane—a girl he’d grown up with, a girl he’d walked through the fields with, named clouds, named stars. He’d been intending to marry Jane for years. They’d grown up, as the children of close friends often do, in close proximity. They’d played in barns, at funerals, at weddings. She was quite beautiful, thin-boned and pale. She reminded him of a very beautiful swallow. She was quick-witted and she laughed frequently. She threw her head back when she laughed. She laughed with every fiber of her being.

            She had the habit of swiping the hair away from her forehead with her left hand, and tucking it behind her ear. She was, as anyone who has ever loved can tell you, probably not as objectively pretty as he thought, which was entirely beside the point because objectivity and love are not strange bed fellows, they live in separate countries, speak different languages, and would only ever hear of the other in the way that a baby can hear the distant whine of a mower, thin and soft.

            The house was large, as houses were in those days. The front porch was adorned by a pair of red greyhounds, old porphyry standing guard over the door. On the eastern side of the house was a field, laden with wildflowers, buttercups, phlox, Queen Anne’s lace. In summer, the children would take walks with their nannies through the field, chasing nut hatches and hummingbirds through the thin reeds. Beyond the field was a brook, which turned into something vaguely resembling a river in early spring. At its height, it would overflow the banks, raising the groundwater, leaving the field a treacherous collection of swamp and gnats. A sodden mess which the children, whenever they’d discover it on their own, would run through with glee, for as any child knows there is a real pleasure in getting dirty. It is something that adults forget and will remember no more than ten or so times before they expire. So much is left in the past.

            When they were children he was not much in love with her. He was in love with the sound the wind made slipping through the branches of the elm. He was in love with the fish, silver flashes in an otherwise dark pool. He was in love with the smooth stones embedded in the rich loam that he sent skipping across the river. The good ones would uncurl across the stream, up onto the other bank, scattering leaves in their wake, disappearing into whatever world existed on the other side.

            One afternoon that they both remembered intently, they’d snuck away from their nannies and into the copse of trees. Down by the water, which cooled their pink cheeks, they’d watched a rabbit, trailed by four of her offspring, big-footed and  yet tinier than anyone could imagine, scurrying down by the water to forage for something. They’d wanted, as you or I or anyone would want, to capture the little rabbits to keep as their own. 

With this in mind they’d devised a simple plan: Jane would flush the rabbits out of the burrow by stomping on top of the ground, and he’d catch the tiny rabbits up in his coat. Tenderly, she’d crept across the roots of the elm, stepping softly across the bits of sand and gravel. When she’d reached the appointed place she began stomping, her small feet raising flecks of mud that would have spattered had they not been landing on other bits of the same.

            Eventually, the rabbits bounded out of the den, scurrying like tiny players across some unbounded stage. Daniel couldn’t catch any of them. They moved like the wind. They moved like wraith. They moved like the dream of rabbits rather than rabbits themselves. The two of them were apple cheeked, breathless and happy. What pleasures they derived even in failure.

            When they stopped laughing they could hear the nannies calling for them from close by, which only made them laugh more. Beneath this sound though, she became aware of a faint whimper, shallow and persistent. She got his attention and the two of them pulled aside the bits of sand and gravel until they saw the body of one of the little rabbits, curled in an unnatural position, gathering shallow breaths, its small ribs rising and falling rapidly. Neither one of them were yet versed in mercy.

            Their only thought was to cover their crime as quickly as possible, so they heaped the dirt and sand back upon the ragged little body until its thin breathing was hidden beneath the rush of water, the sound of the wind through willows and elms. By the time their caretakers arrive they couldn’t hear a thing.

            Months later, when the leaves were on fire with fall, they’d visit the dirt and dig up the small bones of an animal, stripped clean that had lain there since summer. Who’s to say what binds any two people together?

One afternoon, they’d been reading a book together in the library, his feet playfully placed on her lap, in the way of childhood friends. The book had been, well, something by Sterne perhaps. The late afternoon light was hidden by an oak. They sat in the dark, though not precisely the dark, but something like it. She was reading from the book intently, her eyes flicking back and forth like sunlight on water. Her eyes were green and deep. Everyone’s eyes are little pieces of jewelry when you’re falling in love. And he thought that he’d always remember the particular words that she’d been reading in Sterne the moment that he realized that he loved her, though it wasn’t true. It dawned on him completely as she was turning a page, her head lifted briefly, eyes half shaded by a cascade of hair. I love her, he thought. 

                       

He sat in the meadow, bees drowsing about the field, alighting on flowers and then humming away. It was not a bad summer, he thought, to be in love with two women. The tall reeds of grass bent easily, pillowing his head. He blew puffs of smoke from his pipe that miniaturized the clouds above. It was a hot summer. The river was down to a trickle, exposing its alluvial belly to insects and the cardinals, jays, and starlings that sought them mercilessly. The banks were covered in scrub, abundant ferns, verdant—fronds vaguely reminiscent of swan’s wings.

            A rich black smoke hung untethered against the backdrop of a low lying mountain. The train was winding its way through the hills and valleys from the City up north. The train moved like black serpent through the hills, slinking through valleys, past rivers, and burrowing beneath mountains. The train was industrious and fast.  It reminded him, in some strange way of something almost antediluvian, a predator arriving through a patch of dense forest.

Everyone down south loved watching the train enter the city’s center, greeting relatives who’d spent a week or two, sometimes the whole winter up north. And as custom demanded everyone, after taking off their hats, unloading bags and hugging whoever was there to greet them, always said how nice it was to be home where it was warm. It was considered gauche to say anything else.

            Occasionally someone from the North would arrive, overdressed, wearing a top hat and a fur coat, looking for all the world like a fish out of water. They pitied the poor people in the north, obsessed with the clocks, with work, with keeping idle hands busy. 

What was life for? Who knew? But certainly, certainly it could not be for staying busy. Or so was the thinking of the people who lived in the south, whose pride was as vicious and misguided as any businessman in the north. People everywhere were vicious and stupid, which made them at least agreeably similar.

            The field was full of swallowtail butterflies, wings flexing impressively, paying homage to their own beauty. They were quiet but not shy of beauty. The meadow was two hundred meters behind his parent’s house, tucked beneath a hillock. Beyond the meadow was a small copse of trees, ash and hemlock, which eventually gave way to the river. Tenants farmed most of the land, but these two acres were where he’d spent the best parts of his childhood. And now he lay in them, skin tickled by gorse, as an adult, wondering which woman he’d end up marrying.