Iger
Martin would not have liked learning Iger blamed him, for Joan’s lack of output, for taking her to Rhome, for making her the mother of two sons, and Joan knows that he deliberately included Iger’s note to remind her of his good qualities, that he thinks she may have forgotten. She thinks about calling him to apologize for Iger’s words, but Iger’s not entirely wrong, and Martin would interpret such a call as an invitation to come here, or a tacit acknowledgment that she is ready to return home, and neither is accurate. Paloma Rosen would not call Jean-Pierre Beson, would never doubt her decision, imagine it in any way a mistake. Joan hasn’t yet made a mistake, and she doesn’t want Martin to bank on something she is not sure she can or wants to deliver.
The last thing in the box, tucked into a corner, is another box, small and compact, filled with bubble wrap that machine-gun pops when she tries to uncover what’s hidden inside. It is like something belonging to a spy, a secret decoder, or a minuscule bomb that will blow her up if she makes jarring moves or moves too fast. She knows it’s for the computer, she thinks it’s called a memory stick.
She opens Martin’s letter:
Dear Joan,
I miss you. I hope these months have allowed you to solve what you needed to solve, but please, it’s time for you to come home, to return to our life. I never agreed—
It goes on for eight pages, but she only needs Martin’s opening salvo—the confused mix of caring followed by demand—to know that the rest of his words will be at odds with the box he has sent her, the warm clothes contained within. This is how it’s been, she realizes, conditional love all the way through, despite giving him what he wanted right from the start. It’s Martin’s love that has been conditional, it’s why he did not notice, or care, when she stopped writing, or when she began writing again, wrote Words of New Beginnings over nine long years, the reason why she wrote Words, with its story about an arcadia, her Devata, or why he left her to do the dirty work, policing Eric all on her own. His life has taken no detours, has not been delayed at all, moved forward as he wanted, every step exactly as he arranged. There is no need to read every word of his letter this moment; she will, later, from start to finish, and figure out exactly the stand she will take, but right now she wants only to know why she has been sent this memory stick that came wrapped in its own box. She moves her index finger down through all the pages looking for an explanation, but Martin does not mention it at all.
She strips out of her jeans and pulls on the old sweatpants. She lifts the blue sweater to her face, inhales her perfume long twined into the weave, scented with their past. And suddenly she is pining, as she did in this room at the start of her life here. But pining for what she and Martin had, at the very beginning, and the good and sweet times they have shared these marital years, and it catches her hard.
She trades her workhouse black cashmere sweater for the blue and her stare shifts from Willem’s photograph of her, to his letter, to the mysterious black device. She carefully inserts it into the slot on the side of the computer and an icon pops up on the screen. She clicks it twice, and when it opens, there is an audio file simply labeled: For Joan Ashby.
Months ago, she tossed into her suitcase the miniature speaker Martin gave her, along with the laptop. She’s never had any reason to use it and it’s sitting in the top drawer of her pine bureau. She retrieves it and finds the small hole on the laptop, plugs it in.
In the instant before she presses the button, she thinks how her world is this moment fantastic, that she will lament no longer, that life is too short for anything else, that she has all she needs, all that she requires—the orchestration of her days and her nights, her writing, her meditation, her explorations, her new friendships, her new class of writers, her blessings, whatever sins she may choose. So many of her people in her stories sinned, though never before has Joan considered their actions this way. But weren’t they all sinning—big and little sins, some thunderous, some small as a white squeaking mouse. And she, Joan Ashby, in her own life, she has not sinned nearly enough. Except in her thoughts, the anger and impatience she felt toward husband and children, in her selfish desire to get back to her own life, subject only to her own needs. But outright sin, no, there’s been none of that; she rejected Willem’s offer on the roof of the lodge when no one would ever have known had she spent that night, and all the following nights, and days, with him in bed. But that’s not the kind of sin she means, and she wonders when and how she decided it was sinful to heed her own destiny.
Then she presses Play.
51
It is Columbus Day weekend, a weekend of symmetry for me. I am looking out my wall of windows, sitting in my favorite armchair that you found for me when I bought this apartment. The chair is covered in some kind of soft fabric that makes me think of a blue lake, and I wish I were on the banks of that lake right now. Instead, I have a digital recorder in my hand, as weightless as my steps in the wrong direction, heeding my every word, the various inflections in my voice.
I have debated what to call this recounting. I considered “Testament,” but my brain reconfigures that into Last Will and Testament, which makes me think of death, and although I deserve severe punishment, I hope even you might think death extreme. I considered “Explanation,” but that implies there is one, and no configuration of reasons or rationales exists to justify my actions. I have decided to call it “Recordings,” since I am doing just that—recording to confess, to elucidate, and, I guess, to soothe in some way. No matter what, I will have told my story. Such a roundabout way to arrive at a story worth telling: I never expected deceit and deception would figure in its creation.