Ursula Le Guin - Very Far Away from Anywhere Else

I dug out some of the History of Thorn and showed it to Natalie. She really liked it. She said,

“I could write their music. You never talk about their music.”

“It’s all wind instruments,” I said, clowning.

“OK,” she said. “A wind quintet. No clarinets. They’re too sticky for Thorn. Flute, oboe, bassoon… horn? English horn? Trombone? Yes, they’d have trombones…” She wasn’t clowning. She did write a wind quintet for Thorn.

Her definiteness about her plans infected me. It was catching. I began seriously thinking about what I would do if I could. Whether I wanted to go the medical route, or go into biology and work up to the place where bio and psychology interact, or go straight into psychology. They all fascinated me. They were all related, but you couldn’t study them all at once, you’d just flounder. The question was where to start. Where to build up a solid foundation of knowledge on which you could balance ideas. It wasn’t exactly a modest ambition. But what I had learned from Natalie was that you could have a very immodest ambition if you went after it methodically.

All that, talking about our plans, and music and science, and Thorn and Gondal, was great. Sometimes she played me a new bit of the Thorn Quintet. She had an old cornet trumpet she’d picked up for a dollar at a rummage sale, and she’d blow at it with her cheeks getting red and her eyes popping out, trying to let me hear a theme. I’d played cornet for one year in sixth grade in the school band, my entire musical career, but I could do about as well as she could. We fooled around with it and made it do all sorts of peeps and squeals and farts, and I performed “The Isle of Capri,” sort of. Once I drove her out to her Saturday job at the music school and hung around while she put the kids through their Orff Method, which was also great. Everybody had a xylophone or a bell or wood blocks, and when they all got going, fourteen six-year-olds with all that equipment, it was move over, Mick Jagger. She insisted that they learned music theory from it. I suggested that what they mostly got was a good time, and considerable hearing impairment if they kept it up long. Then we drove back and had a shake and French fries on the way and got to her house and her father was there.

He didn’t exactly say hello to me. He said hello to her, and looked at me.

And I got red and the smile came onto my face, the smile I wish I could stamp on. And I remembered that I was in love with Natalie. And so I couldn’t say anything to him, or to her. I got sticky and uptight, and pretty soon I went home, where it was a lot easier and more comfortable to be in love.

I only saw Natalie three or four times in the couple of weeks after that. And when I did it was much less enjoyable. I kept wondering things like whether she had ever had another man friend, and what she planned to do about men in amongst her other plans, and what she thought about me in that particular way, and not daring to ask her any of it. The closest I got was once when we were walking the fat off Orville again in the park. I said, “Do you think people can combine love with a career?” It came out and sort of hung there like a corpse. It sounded exactly like a question out of some magazine for Homemakers. Natalie said, “Well of course they can,” and gave me an extremely peculiar look. Then Orville met a Great Dane on the path and tried to kill and eat it. When that was over, we had gotten past the stupid question. But I kept on being sort of solemn and moody. As we were coming home, Natalie said in a sort of wistful voice, “How come you never do the ape act any more?”

That burned me. That really burned me. When I got home, I was in a foul mood. What I want to do is take this girl suddenly in my arms and kiss her and say “I love you!” and what she wants is for me to jump around with a banana peel looking for fleas in it.

I worked myself up good and proper. I resented her for being so friendly and matter of fact, and I deliberately thought about the way her hair looked when she’d just washed it and it was all sleek and soft, and the texture of her skin, which was white and very fine. And pretty soon I had managed to develop her into the real thing, the mysterious female, the cruel beauty, the untouchable desirable goddess, you name it. So that instead of being my first and best and only real friend, she was something that I wanted and hated. Hated because I wanted it, wanted because I hated it.

In February we drove over to the coast again.

There’s always a week around Washington’s Birthday that is fantastic. It stops raining. The sun gets warm. The leaf buds start showing on the trees, and some first flowers come out. It’s the first week of spring, and in some ways the best, because it’s the first, and because it’s so short.

You can count on that week, and I’d planned ahead. I got her to get a substitute at the music school and postpone her lessons, so that we could drive over to Jade Beach on Saturday. If her father made any static about it, I didn’t care. She had to handle him. We were adults, and she had to learn to do without his approval for everything. I was all ready to tell her exactly that, if she mentioned her father; but she didn’t. She didn’t seem very enthusiastic about this trip, but I guess she knew I wanted it, so she did what I wanted, like a friend.

When we got to the beach about eleven in the morning, it was low tide, and there were some people clamming. We’d worn shorts under our jeans this time, and we played in the surf again, but it was different. There was a low fog over the sand, not thick and cold, just a kind of dimming as if the air was made of mother-of-pearl, and the waves were quiet and broke slowly, curving over themselves in long blue-green lines, dreamy and regular and hypnotic. We didn’t stay together, but drifted apart, wading in the breakers. When I looked, Natalie was way up the beach, walking slowly in the foam, kicking up spray. She walked a little hunched with her hands in her pockets and looked very small and frail there between the misty beach and the misty sea.

The clammers left when the tide began to come back in. After about an hour Natalie came wandering back. Her hair was all tangled in strings and she kept sniffing. The sea air made her nose run, and we hadn’t brought any tissues. She looked serene and distant, the way her mother always looked. She’d picked up some rocks, but most of them were the kind that are beautiful when wet, but nothing much when they dry. “Let’s eat,” she said. “I’m starving.”

I’d built a fire with driftwood in the same place as last time, in the hollow sheltered by the big log. She sat down right by the fire. I sat down next to her. I put my arm on her shoulders. Then my heart started hammering in this terrifying way, and I felt really crazy and dizzy, and I took hold of her really hard and kissed her. We kissed, and I couldn’t get my breath. I hadn’t meant to grab her like that; I meant to kiss her and tell her, “I love you” and talk about it, about love, and that was all. I hadn’t thought any farther. I didn’t know what would happen to me, that it would be like when you’re in deep and a big breaker hits you and pulls you over and down and you can’t swim and you can’t breathe, and there is nothing you can do, nothing.

She knew when the breaker hit me. And I guess it scared her too, but she wasn’t caught in it. Because she pulled free after a bit and drew back, away from me. But she kept hold of my hand, because she saw that I was drowning.

“Owen,” she said, “hey, Owen sweetheart, Owen, don’t.”

Because I was sobbing. I don’t know whether it was crying, or because I couldn’t breathe.

I came out of it gradually. I was still too shaken up to be embarrassed or ashamed yet, and I reached for her other hand, so we were kneeling in the sand face-to-face, and I said, “Natalie, why can’t—we’re not kids—don’t you—”