L.’s relatives are the legendary robber barons, but he lives austerely, rich in feeling. He’s hazy about his own money which he also regards as something to nurture. The importance of art, his lack of accomplishment, and the size of the art world overwhelm him. That’s acceptable because he’s so young. I can help with these problems.

Six A.M. We slide out of mist and cross a mirror lake; we whisper. L. is showing me a pair of loons he’s watched for years. They are shy, eggs unguarded on the bare ground, tender hooting of ghosts, straw beaks.

Greed for more life spoils the life in front of me. I want promotion to the more real universe of freedom and protection from the bill. I can’t strive anymore: we choose between the Adirondacks or the Cape, which would be convenient. My emotions lack precision—I “wake up” to the fear of death, the drive to be heard.

L. quotes my writing, yet now my lack of time to write seems like a character flaw, earning a living like the result of bad planning. My job puts me at the center of so much trouble that I never get out of the center. L. protests, “You only talk about yourself.” He must have been patient for a long time.

He’s warm in letters and on the phone. Leaving a room, he turns off the light as though I don’t exist. I witness this event more than once but doubt its reality: I sit in the dark, my misery throwing itself against the shadows. In darkness I start over, trying to figure it out. By what alchemy does L. complete me when he’s so sketchy himself?

How can the two halves of this novel ever be closed or complete? Or the book is a triptych: I follow L. on the left, Margery follows Jesus on the right, and in the center my fear hollows out “an empty space that I can’t fill.” (That’s how Ed describes his death.)

14

Margery needed to talk to everyone now that she was estranged from her life in Lynn.

In late August she traveled with John to take a vow of chastity before Philip, Bishop of Lincoln. The road was flat and straight as the roads of the Fens tend to be; it ran beside a sluggish green canal. Canals and shallow ponds continued the flat plane in stronger greens. The summer’s broad emptiness dwarfed the invented world. Margery felt excited, empty handed as a windmill. She wanted Jesus and longed to be rid of sensation.

An old woman nodded in the sun by a tiny mud cottage. At her feet a dog—a bitch for chasing spirits. A rowboat, dainty as a toy, moored to the bank. Margery longed for resolution. The plop of a rising fish, the creck creck of a moorhen.