Ann Patchett - State of Wonder

Barbara took the joint from her husband, allowing herself a modest inhalation before stubbing it out in a small silver ashtray. She gave herself a moment and then exhaled. “Annick just wanted something nice. That was the only thing she said to me about it. Of course you would, wouldn’t you? Coming in from all that time in the jungle, that’s not so much to ask. Good sheets, good bath towels—”

“A decent glass of wine,” Jackie said and raised his glass as an indicator that they should all drink up.

There was something perfectly spare about it all, a bouquet of some sort of white flowers she had never seen before on the dining room table, a long, low leather bench in front of an equally long white sofa, walls that were painted a shade of blue so pale it might not have been blue at all, it might have been the evening light. And then there were the Bovenders themselves, whose many physical attributes were highlighted by the elegance of their surroundings. Barbara’s stacking bracelets seemed to have been carved from the same wood as the floor boards so that one might notice how the color of the floor complimented the warm color of her skin. Still, it was difficult to imagine Dr. Swenson perched on that sofa. Marina doubted Dr. Swenson’s feet would touch the floor. “Where do you go when she comes in?”

Barbara shrugged. “Sometimes we just move to the guest room. It depends on whether or not she needs us for anything. If we have some time we go to Suriname or French Guiana so Jackie can surf.”

“I need to get to Lima,” he said, glad to have the topic turn in his direction if only for a sentence. “The waves are exploding there, but getting flights from Manaus to Lima is an unbelievable bitch. It would take me about as much time to walk there.”

Marina wandered over to the balcony. She couldn’t take her eyes off the river; that thick brown soup was a mirror in the darkness. “I wouldn’t have expected there would be something like this in Manaus,” she said. She wouldn’t have expected the Meursault either, and she took another sip. She couldn’t help but wonder what all of this was costing. It couldn’t really matter to Vogel. The expense of one apartment in the Amazon for a researcher who didn’t use it was nothing when put against the potential profits of fertility.

“There was a lot of money here once, you have to remember that,” Barbara said. “It used to be more expensive to live in Manaus than in Paris.”

“They came, they built, they left,” Jackie said, dropping himself down on the sofa and stretching his bare feet out on the bench in front of him. “When there wasn’t any money to be made in boiling the rubber out of the jungle anymore that was it, instant history. The people around here were very glad to see those people go.”

“I think there’s a lot about this city that’s still very elegant. This building is as good as anything you’d find in a real city,” Barbara said. “And Nixon takes care of everything at the front desk like a professional. I tell him all the time he could get a job in Sydney.”

“Nixon?” Marina said.

“Seriously,” Jackie said, his eyes lightly pinked.

“Well, he isn’t much for delivering the mail,” Marina said, and then she thought again. “Unless you did get the notes I sent you.”

Barbara stood a little straighter. In her heels she was taller than Marina. “We didn’t. I told you that.”

Marina shrugged. “So much for Nixon.”

“All the mail goes into a box for Annick.” She walked away and came back from another room holding a neat looking steel crate with handles on either side, the kind of thing an idle girl would order from a design catalogue to be delivered to Brazil when putting mail into a cardboard box seemed too messy. “Look,” she said. “I don’t even check it. Annick says straight in the box and so there it goes. I keep it in her office.” She put the crate down on the bench near her husband. There was a pale V marked across the tops of his brown feet where his flip-flops had interfered with his tan. “I used to answer the letters, to tell people they couldn’t come to see her, but in the end Annick decided that any interaction was a form of encouragement so she told me to stop.”

“These people take no as encouragement,” Jackie said.

Marina came and sat beside the box, putting her glass of wine down on the floor. She did not ask. She slipped her fingers into the back and moved the letters forward. She didn’t have to go very far before she found her own handwriting on the hotel’s white envelopes. “Bovender,” she said, dropping the first one on the bench and then going back to find the other two. “Bovender, Bovender.”

Jackie leaned forward and plucked the paper from the envelope. “Dear Mr. and Mrs. Bovender,” he began.

“Please!” Barbara said, and covered her ears with her hands to make her point. “It makes me feel like a total idiot. From now on I’ll look at the mail, I promise.”

Marina looked up at her. “Don’t you pay the bills?”

Jackie shook his head. “They all go straight to Minnesota. I bet that was something to set up.”

Of course, so no one would be bothered. Marina went back to the box. The magazines stood up neatly at the side, Harper’s, The New Yorker, Scientific American , the New England Journal . There seemed to be a host of letters from Vogel, letters from other countries, envelopes from hospitals, universities, drug research companies that were not her own. Her fingers kept flipping, flipping.

Barbara peered over the edge and watched her employer’s correspondence sift through the hands of someone she in fact did not know at all. “I’m not so sure we should be doing this,” she said in a tentative voice. It seemed it was just now occurring to her that bringing out the entire box of mail might not have been her best decision. “Unless you wrote us more letters. She doesn’t like for us—”

But there it was. Marina didn’t have to go so deep into the crate. It wasn’t such a very long time ago that he had been here. “Anders Eckman.” She dropped the blue airmail envelope on top of the stationery from her hotel. Jackie pulled up his feet quickly, as if she had set down something hot.

Barbara leaned forward, looked without touching. “My God. Who do you think it’s from?”

Anders Eckman, in care of Dr. Annick Swenson , a particularly inaccurate phrasing. “His wife,” Marina said. Once she had identified Karen’s handwriting she could find the letters quickly. Everything she pulled from the box now would have been written after he had gone into the jungle. Writing in care of Dr. Swenson in Manaus was the only chance Karen had of reaching him once he had left the city, there were no other addresses. Before he was in the jungle she would have called him or e-mailed or, if she was feeling sentimental, sent him a letter at the hotel. Karen would have told him about the boys and the snow, told him to come home now because he was sounding worse, and anyway, they obviously had not thought this through well enough at the outset. Marina knew the contents of every letter that passed through her hands and one by one she dropped them onto the bench where Jackie’s feet had been. She could see Karen sitting at the island in her kitchen, perched on top of a high stool, writing page after page in the morning after she had taken the boys to school and then again at night when she had put them to bed, her head bent forward, her blond hair pushed behind her ears. Marina could read them as if she were standing over Karen’s shoulder. Come home. The letters came singly and in pairs. They came in groups of three. Karen would have written every day, maybe twice a day, because there was nothing else she could do to help him. But she didn’t help him. Marina did not doubt that Anders knew Karen was writing him and knew that her letters had hit a wall in Manaus. He would have known his wife’s loyalty as a correspondent. But by not receiving those letters he never knew that she was hearing from him. Anders would have died wondering if any of his letters had made it out of the jungle. Who wouldn’t imagine that the boy in the dugout log would have simply taken the coins he was given and let the envelopes float in the water as soon as he had rounded the bend in the river, and that those letters were divided between the fish and the freshwater dolphins? In the meantime, Karen Eckman turned her love into industry, writing her husband with a diligence that was now spread across a low leather bench in Dr. Swenson’s apartment.