Alice Hoffman - The Museum of Extraordinary Things

Love, for me, did not exist.

I’d had a series of encounters over the years. Lust was a story I knew. There were many women I took to bed for the night. I yearned for them in the moment, but in the morning, any lover I’d had was already claimed by the past, even if she was still calling my name.

I’d forgotten each woman before I left her room.

Now I thought of nothing but Coralie. I wondered what had filled my thoughts before. I dreamed of the trout I’d once caught. I begged him to tell me what I must do to win her. But my begging went unanswered, for even in my dreams he was a fish and I was a man, and all he knew remained a secret.

I had asked to take Coralie’s portrait on the day she came to me, but she’d refused. You need to want the person that I am, she told me, not the one you capture. But I felt as though I was the one who had been captured. This was why I dreamed of the trout, imagining that he might hold the cure for what I felt, the piercing of my heart.

I hadn’t grasped why my father always brought my mother’s photograph to his workplace or why he propped it up on our table so that he might dine with her each night. Now I understood. She was his everything, and she was gone. This was the kind of love that overtook a man’s daily life, wrapping him in knots.

Desire was too churlish and stupid a word for what I felt. I longed for Coralie. No wonder I had closed myself off. Love like this was all consuming. I found that I was jealous of the strangest things—sunlight, streets, curtains, even her clothing, anything that was close to her. The month of May was slipping away, and I didn’t even notice it. Days and weeks meant nothing to me. I lived within my own hurt feelings, in a cave that was too dark to see the outline of the trees that filled with green leaves.

I took my dog and walked for miles. I thought that by doing so I might break the spell I was under. Walking had always been a tonic to me, steadying my spirit and my mind. But now as I went onward, I grew worse, as if I’d been enchanted. Somehow I had lost myself in my longings. Then I remembered what Hochman had told me when he read my palm. I had the river inside me. I followed alongside the river that was as much a part of me as anything in my life. In the grasp of my passion, I felt I was a madman, and perhaps I was looking for the same in a companion, for I began to think that the hermit might help me understand the intoxication that had befallen me. I’d heard that failed love had driven him into the woods, away from human company.

I didn’t need a psychic talent to find him. He was at one of his favorite fishing spots.

“Did you come to see if I was dead yet?” He handed me the bottle of whiskey he carried with him, and I took a gulp. “You’re the one that looks like hell. What happened to your hand?”

“Some fellows broke it.”

I’d been to a doctor who’d set and bound it, warning that although I would regain some use of it, it might well be weakened and misshapen. I was fortunate that the police assumed every man was right-handed, which I was not. I readied my line with my left hand, and the hermit was impressed with my ability to get things done so neatly. Perhaps my art would not be completely undermined if one of my hands was functional. Still, I hadn’t yet found the nerve to work my camera, just in case what little talent I had left had been broken along with my bones.

“Why’d they do that?” my companion asked. For all his alleged meanness he truly didn’t understand the callousness and cruelty of others. “For the fun of it? Or did you betray someone or mess with the wrong sorts?”

“I fell in love. That’s my crime. With the mermaid.”

“You can’t be blamed for that,” the hermit said soberly.

“You’ve been in love?” I ventured to ask.

The hermit looked at me darkly.

“Not that it’s any of my business,” I added.

“Do you think I want to talk about my life?” Beck asked in return. “I came here to escape my existence. I couldn’t stand the way people in the city treated each other, how they managed to ruin everything they touched. But now it seems the city is following me. Soon enough they’ll pave beneath these trees we’re standing under.”

Beck’s wife, Annetje, was also from an original Dutch family. She became ill with lung disease before she reached the age of twenty, and died in the bed they shared, one Beck’s father had crafted as a wedding present from the wood of an enormous tulip tree that was said to have been planted on the day Henry Hudson first encountered the native Lenapes in 1609. It was their word for island that gave Manhattan its name, for it was the great island then, as it has remained. The Lenape people were accomplished archers and hunters who believed that the Milky Way, which they called the Starry Path, guided the souls of the departed on their journey to the world beyond ours, somewhere in the sky.

Beck abandoned his life soon after his wife’s death, leaving his small farmhouse to fall into ruin. The neighbors helped themselves to his sheep and goats. The chickens became wild, and Beck occasionally found their descendants nesting in the woods. His wife had babied the chickens and let them stay inside during storms, yet they now lived hardily in what was wilderness, while she, who’d been so young and healthy, was gone after an illness of a mere two weeks.

“I didn’t know you had a wife,” I said. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“What do you know?” Beck muttered.

“Apparently nothing. I’d be grateful for any instruction.”

The hermit laughed out loud. “You’re talking to the wrong man.”

“Tell me this, do you regret it?”

“The lung disease? Are you an idiot?” he growled. “Of course I do. The weather was bad and our home poorly heated. Oh, I regret it, more than I can say. If I were a rich man, maybe the illness wouldn’t have befallen her.”

I shook my head, for that wasn’t what I’d meant. I meant did he regret his marriage and the pain it caused him to have had a great love. When I explained, he glared at me. “Are you asking if I would have been better off if I’d never met my wife, or married her, or lost her? I’ll tell you this, a day with her was better than a life without her.”

I was stunned by the emotion in his voice. I had not expected so much from such a gruff fellow, and we both fell deep into our own thoughts. As we sat in silence, a covey of what I thought were quail flew up from the bushes, and we both turned, startled, as if a ghost were near. I voiced my initial notion, that spirits had been close by.

“I wouldn’t mind being haunted. I’d be happy for it,” Beck said as we watched the game birds trotting into the ferns.

When I left he offered me his congratulations.

“On what?” I asked, confused.

“Being human.”

I made my way down to the river. I had the oddest feeling that just as we had become friends, we had also said our good-byes, and would never see one another again. Perhaps that was why he’d told me the intimate details of his life, so that someone would remember him. I noticed tracks in the mud and felt a shiver down my back. Possibly the birds had been startled not by a spirit but by a flesh-and-blood ghoul. Mitts charged off, following the trail all the way to the Old Post Road. As it turned out the game birds we’d spied weren’t quail but wild chickens perching in the undergrowth. There were signs that someone had been past recently, for I could see the fresh tracks of a horse whose rider had made his way down the old road. It seemed an odd coincidence. I wondered if I had been followed to this place, and, just as curious a thought, I wondered what reason anyone might have for doing so.