Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

Then came the confessionals — the lighthearted list of everybody he had slept with prior to Helen. It wasn't a great number, but enough, he was thirty-two after all. (He could not make that list now — names all gone, a few faces remain as a sort of puppetry but they could belong to anybody.) Joy had no such list. At twenty, he was her first.

Amongst the letters here is a little package wrapped around with elastic bands which, when opened, contains leaflets and pages of text entitled AIPAC: American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Joy's husband was Jewish. He doesn't even know if the man is still alive; in any case he belonged to AIPAC in order to lobby for Israel's rights — he knows this because he reads the leaflets in front of him. At the time these leaflets, and Joy, and her husband, had unwittingly granted him permission to honour his past, not by running backwards to find it but by standing up for its future.

He remembers that Joy would send him the latest news from the committee, and indulged him where others would not in this path towards himself he so wanted to follow, and through it they became allies in a joint cause. There seemed to be so little difference between allies and lovers — or at least one seemed a condition for the other — and they are still allies now, he thinks. Joy is always on his side, always fighting his war; heaven knows, Joy has been the only person in his life who has even recognised there is a war to fight.

It was two years or more before Joy sent any photographs of herself; he had kept asking, trying to stave off her demise into ghostliness. The photographs, of course, he still has. Joy in the bright bleached Californian garden, Joy on a sun lounger in the garden, Joy eating lobster on a sun lounger in the garden, her hair no longer red but (interpreting loosely from the black-and-white) a far more civilised earth brown, flooding to her elbows. Joy's overlong over-tanned body clung to by a pair of shorts and a cotton shawl and a man — her husband. He struggles for the name briefly and then decides to let it go. Joy's body adorned by a ball gown and hunks of ruby and a man, her husband. Joy's body wrapped in a faux-fur throw that does not become her and is bought, and owned, as she is herself, by a man, her husband. Joy's body, wrapped in nothing, clung to by nothing except some shadows and light. Joy's naked body in front of a photographer's tripod in a series of modest poses that use cushions and armchairs and silk screens and Indian fabrics, all of which are chosen specifically to strike against her skin in the most flattering and tastefully sexual way. Joy's naked body in a series of immodest poses that use the same cushions, armchairs, screens, and fabrics as nothing other than gratuitous props for one inevitable sexual overture that he found amazing, and amazingly unbearable.

She sent pictures of her husband, too, as if she expected him to show them to his children or pin them on the cork-board in the kitchen. He inspected the man — his slick and charming demeanour and leaking intimacy. He was a man with undeniable charm; he had not thought this was Joy's taste, and then realised that he had no idea what Joy's tastes were, or even who she was. He might have fallen out of love with her there and then had it not been for one photograph of her standing in a car park, just standing, looking blankly away from the camera clearly unaware she was under the lens. She looks thin, a little haughty, a little fuck you. To him, this was Joy — the woman who in her most unguarded moments was guarded, and in her most inelegant moments was elegant. And into that aloof, black, white, and grey metallic tarmac scene he could, with confidence, inject some colour. That dress she was wearing was yellow, he knew it, he knew that dress. He, in the spirit of the pioneer, in the spirit of the man who illuminates through his knowledge, could put colour where it was not. Joy in her yellow dress.

In a letter written a few months after the photographs came, she said that it was no good, she did not belong. America had her but did not want her, it just tolerated her presence. Had he seen the photographs? Did he see the costumes she wore just to entertain this gruelling, demanding America? She was playing the game at full tilt with all her faculties attuned, dressing up, playing up, learning the accent, learning to spend dollars without converting. But it was a game. Perhaps she would come home, she didn't after all think much of — the man, her husband — anyway; perhaps she would come home and live in Rook's eccentric house or find some of her family in Italy.

He drafted a reply. He told her that because America was divided into square grids, every so often there had to be an extra bit of land that wasn't a mile square, to account for the earth's curvature, just as there is an extra day in the year every so often to account for time's curvature (and this day, he added incidentally, is Henry's birthday). He suggested the bit of land she lived on must be one of those extra bits that did not quite fit, which was why she could never make America feel like home.

She wrote back jubilantly. Of course, she would move. The problem would be solved. They had already started looking.

He was equally jubilant at her happiness. He told her that since money was no object she should move to somewhere with a great deal of glass and a view of the ocean. She could stand there on a shag-pile rug and sip martinis.

No, no, she wrote. Not martinis — the rage these days, the thing you drink if you want to be modern, is mint juleps. At the bottom of the page she wrote out the ingredients and a few quick instructions. Mint, ice, sugar, bourbon. The smell, she wrote. The smell — heavenly! Once you've smelt the sugar and mint, you will never, dear Jake, go back to martinis.

These branches and leaves look like chaos, but they are not. There is a pattern. Each leaf has a pattern, and each bit of bark, and each pattern in the leaf has a smaller pattern. And the patterns are repeated, and the patterns of the patterns are repeated.

He walks the wide path looking above him at the tree canopy. The branches lattice in mad arrangements across the sky. The sky is pristine with light, it is true sky-blue, and he is warm under it, hot even. Sara insisted that there were patterns here, and that the madness had methods finer than the eyes could comprehend. Mathematics held it together. Clasps of numbers cohered what the eyes saw as separate. Of course he agreed; he went so far as to say that the logic going through the leaves must proceed infinitely through all things, at which she called him reckless for his choice of expression. She did not believe in words like infinite; it was that very optimistic carelessness in Helen that she balked at. One does not see infinity, one cannot put a value to it, nor measure it in stones.

He enjoys looking up. Upwards, being on the vertical plane, is not connected to time. He is troubled by the recollection of Eleanor talking to the fox-haired woman, nodding, her arms crossed, and that look of sympathy softening the wrinkles around her mouth. Apparently he is struggling with numbers and shapes, but his words are good — his ability to label things is still very good. He cannot accept this; he realises that he has no real wish to label things. If he can no longer call a tree a tree, it is sad, pathetic, but the tree will go on. But if he can no longer calculate or piece together through numbers then the invisible sense, the sense behind the apparently chaotic stray of branches and leaves, is gone. Order will be a dream he once had that has melted like glass, slowly and quite imperceptibly.

He sees himself sitting in the chair trying, failing, to make a paper triangle. Rook would ridicule him now for this dysfunction — Rook who was so canny with those fingers that could fold infinite objects into being. And now Sara would chide: Infinite, there you go again, Jake!