David Malouf - The Complete Stories

For one thing, it had become clear that she hadn't made this trip “down here” only to see him. However eager she appeared to be, and full of interest in his workplace, the house, the bottlebrush with its sprays of pink-and-gold blossom that drooped over the front porch— "Callistemon, I think,” she pronounced accurately — all the flow of energy in her, and it was considerable, was towards the young sailmaker, Scott, one of those easy-going, utterly likeable, ponytailed young fellows from good North Shore families and the best private schools who, instead of following their fathers into accountancy or the law, went back, led by nothing more radical than their own freewheeling interest, to trades their grandfathers or great-grandfathers had practised, and became carpenters and did up houses, or built boats, or made surfboards or sails.

Diane Novak was from Madison, Wisconsin. Three years ago Sam had come across one of her poems in an anthology and was led to set it to music. Later he sought out others and had ended up with a loose cycle. He wrote to her. Diane Novak wrote back. A correspondence developed.

Correspondence.

He had never given much consideration to the word till then, but “correspondence” and all it implied seemed entirely rich and right for what had since then flowed so easily between them: the current of curiosity and interest, of shy revelations on his part, flights of extravagant fancy on hers; jokes, wordplay, essays in boldness that took them, he had sometimes felt, to the edge of flirtation; small hints at the erotic. A hint too of darker things. Disappointment. Pain. Which his music had found in the poems, and which corresponded, he felt — there! that word again — to something in himself that had remained to this point wordless, though not entirely unspoken.

There was nothing dangerous in it. No suggestion of an affair, even a long-distance one. He passed all Diane's letters on to Maggie, though he suspected she did not read them, and could, without fear, have shown her his own. The deeper connection was impersonal. It lay in the inwardness with which he had taken her words, felt out the emotion there that had given them just their own shape, weight, texture, and found music for it. Released, she might have said, the music that was already in them and in her. She recognised that. Had felt it strongly as something secret, though not quite hidden, that he had subtly but again secretly made plain, for which she was grateful to the point of an agreeable affection that constituted a correspondence of an even more intimate kind. Inexpressible, or rather not needing expression, because he had already expressed it for them in the thing itself — the music.

So there was no need for them to meet, she told him. They had already done that, in their own chaste but public consummation, there.

In the meantime, they could joke about passing one another as intimate strangers on the moving walkway in some airport, Hawaii or Atlanta, or pressing fingertips on either side of a glass partition in Anchorage.

When she wrote out of the blue announcing a visit, he had assumed, foolishly, and with some trepidation, that she was coming because of him. But then, from her hotel, she had called and admitted to another “down here,” this Scott the sailmaker, whom she had met at a poetry reading in Seattle. And now they were seated, Diane Novak, this Scott, who at twenty-seven or so was a good twenty years younger than his companion, at the big pinewood table in their front room, together with Maggie's sister, Stella, and Miss Stinson. Maggie and Diane, Sam thought, seemed entirely relaxed and easy with one another, like old friends united in understanding.

Of what? he wondered. Him?

Only now did it strike him that Maggie might have her own correspondence with Diane Novak. Through the words he had found music for. To which Maggie, in performance, had brought an exploratory sense, which she was now testing, of the other's shifting emotions, but also her own presence and breath. Is that why he felt so uncomfortably displaced, the only one here who seemed out of tune with the occasion?

The truth was, he was confused.

Very blonde and tanned, very carefully presented, but in a stringy way that was a mite “American,” Diane Novak was not what he had pictured. There were angularities to her that he had not foreseen. Something in the way she came at things — too directly, he thought— set him ill at ease. He wondered now if there had not been in her letters a suggestion of — what? Artfulness and high self-mockery that she had expected him to share but that he had mistaken or missed.

In her letters, not in the poems. She was rounder, softer there. Or was that because he had translated the poems so fully into Maggie's sphere?

Either way, while remaining excited, fascinated even, he had begun to doubt his clear sense of Diane Novak, and was disconcerted by the speed with which she and Maggie, for all the differences between them, had caught one another's tone.

DIANE NOVAKwas also disconcerted. She had brought presents, of course: jewellery of various kinds for the girls, a Ferragamo scarf for Maggie. For Sam a pair of Indian moccasins. He had received them, she thought, as if they were an exchange, not quite adequate, for something she had deprived him of, rather than as a gift, and was suddenly aware of all those little signs of unease she had felt between the lines of his letters and put out of mind, but which in the man himself were too close to the surface to be ignored. Goodness, she thought, what have we got here? She was disturbed a little, amused a little, but also touched.

Because the music he had found for her was so inward, so intuitive and acute, she had assumed a degree of knowingness in him that had led her into a kind of playful exaggeration that she saw now might have been a mistake. He wasn't at all knowing. He was, for all his sleekness, altogether boyish and at the mercy of his own wild starts and emotions.

Proprietorial too, she saw. Of herself, of Maggie. Of everything. She would have to be careful of wounding him. She would have to rely on Maggie to get them through.

Thank goodness, she thought, for Maggie.

She shot Sam a glance that was meant to be reassuring, collusive even, but all he did was look alarmed, and she was reminded yet again of how much of what life cannot deal with may be taken up, taken care of and reconciled, in the work.

She was well aware of what this meant for her own work, and had assumed that he too must know it — which is why she had responded so completely to him. She saw now that he might not. And saw too, almost too clearly, how much of “life” his work might have to make up for.

Scott, meanwhile, had transferred his attention to Miss Stinson, who, seventy-five if she was a day, was glowing in the full light of his interest.

He was amazing, Scott. He had a fund of attention, of youthful excitement over this, that — everything in fact — that seemed inexhaustible and which he bestowed, in an unself-conscious way, on everything in his vicinity. Which was a bit of a problem really. She knew from her own case how easy it was to be misled. But not, in her own case, dangerously; she was pretty skilled, at this point, at protecting herself from ultimate disappointment.

Miss Stinson was telling them how she had discovered Maggie and Stella, while Stella, the subject of the story, sat placid and indulgent, but frowning. It bored her to have these ancient wonders trotted out again — as she would have said, for the forty-second time. Any glory they involved was more important, these days, to Miss Stinson than to Stella herself, who had long since put well behind her the tattered, if once glowing, clouds they trailed.

“Such funny little things, they were,” Miss Stinson told. “With no shoes, and scars on their knees, real harum-scarums. Tomboys.” They were her next-door neighbours, their father a removal man. They were always hanging over the fence to hear the scales that rose and fell behind the blinds of the little house she shared with her sister, and the big practise pieces their students performed. Longing to join in. Well, she had taken them on at last, in exchange for a couple of hours of ironing each week, because their mother had wanted something more for them — but without much enthusiasm. And lo and behold, miracle of miracles, by one of those quirks of fate that make you wonder at things — life was such a lottery, so unexpected, so unpredictable — little Stella Glynn had turned out to be just what her name suggested — a star. The one undisputed triumph of Miss Stinson's career. She won the Sun Aria. Went to study in Paris, then London. Sang at Covent Garden and the Met and was for ten years an “singer of renown,” and was still described that way when her records turned up on local radio. But the gift she had been endowed with had never meant as much to Stella as it did to others. As soon as she could manage it she gave up the irregular life of glitter and savage discipline, married her Swede, and came home. These days she co-managed a successful travel agency. It suited her to a T