But I wake up in the morning and blink with swollen eyelids as the sun rises and spills in through the window. Sometime in the night, Meredith has rolled over, and is sleeping now with her hair fanned out behind her, her cheek against my shoulder.
Though we never talk about it, it is somehow decided that I will stay with Meredith indefinitely. While her professional life is crowded with people, her personal life is a mostly solitary one, the long hours filled with books and words and wine. For a week we reenact Christmas in New York, but more cautiously. I sit on the couch with a mug of tea at my elbow and a book on my knee, sometimes reading, sometimes staring past the pages. At first she sits across from me. Then beside me. Then she lies with her head in my lap and I run my fingers through her hair.
When I explain all this to Leah, I can’t tell if she’s disappointed or relieved.
Alexander calls and we agree to meet for drinks next time he’s in the city. I don’t hope to hear from Wren—Meredith tells me she’s in London, working as a dramaturg and living like a recluse, afraid of the outside world. We don’t talk about James again. I know that whatever else happens, we never will.
Filippa calls and asks for me. She says there’s something in the mail. Two days later it arrives, a plain brown envelope with a smaller white envelope inside. The sight of James’s handwriting on the second one stops my heart for a moment. I hide it under a couch cushion, and resolve to open it when Meredith is gone.
The next week she’s filming in Los Angeles. She puts a new key on the nightstand, kisses me, and leaves me sleeping in what I’ve come to think of—prematurely, perhaps—as “our” bed. When I wake up again, I retrieve James’s letter.
I know more by now about what happened. He drove north from the small apartment he’d occupied outside Berkeley and drowned in the icy winter waters of the San Juan Islands. In his car, abandoned on the ferry landing, he’d left his keys, an empty bottle of Xanax, and a pair of almost identical envelopes. The first was unmarked, unsealed, and contained a short handwritten farewell, but no explanation or confession. (He respected, at least, the last request I’d made of him.) On the second, he’d written only one word:
OLIVER
I open it with clumsy fingers. Ten lines of verse are scratched in the middle of the page. It’s James’s writing still, but more jagged, as if it had been written hastily, with a pen that had little ink left to give. I recognize the text—a disjointed, mosaic monologue, cobbled together from an early scene of Pericles:
Alas, the sea hath cast me on the rock,
Wash’d me from shore to shore, and left me breath
Nothing to think on but ensuing death.
What I have been I have forgot to know;
But what I am, want teaches me to think on:
A man throng’d up with cold: my veins are chill,
And have no more of life than may suffice
To give my tongue that heat to ask your help;
Which if you shall refuse, when I am dead,
For that I am a man, pray see me burièd.
I read it three times, wondering why he would choose such a strange, obscure passage to leave me—until I remember I haven’t heard these words since he chanted them to me, lying drunk in the sand on some beach in Del Norte, as if he’d been washed up beside me by the tide. I am all too aware of my own desperate need to find a message in the madness, and as it takes shape I am suspicious, afraid to hope. But the implications of the text and its small part in our story are impossible to ignore, too critical for a scholar as meticulous as James to overlook.
When I can’t stand another moment’s inaction, I race up the stairs to the office, my head full of what would have been Pericles’s last words—if he had not asked for help.
The computer on the desk crackles to life when I touch the mouse, and after one interminable minute I am on the Internet, searching for every record I can find of James Farrow’s death in the bleak midwinter of 2004. I devour five, six, ten old articles, all of which say the same thing. He drowned himself on the last day of December, and though the local authorities dragged the freezing water for days and miles, his body was never found.
Exeunt omnes.
Author’s Note