Common Place No. 18

LOVE AND MARRIAGE: A Story in Two Parts, 2005–'20 COMMON PLACE No. 18 | WINTER and SUMMER 2020

In February 2020, I found a draft of a story I started in 15 years before. Its setting is Kristiana, as Oslo was known until 1925. It draws loosely on my great-grandfather and his milieu. In September 2020, inspired by a writing class led by the Berlin writer Clare Wigfall, I rewrote the second part and made small revisions to the first.

Love and Marriage A Story in Two Parts

A.S. Kline's translation of Petrarch's Canzoniere, sonnet 61, stanza 2: and blessed be the first sweet suffering that I felt in being conjoined with Love, and the bow, and the shafts with which I was pierced, and the wounds that run to the depths of my heart.

Part I: Summer

E benedetto il primo dolce affanno Ch'i' ebbi ad esser con Amor congiunto, E l'arco e la saette ond' i' fui punto, E le piaghe, ch'infino al cor mi vanno.

— Francesco Petrarca The Solstice Damn! Magnus lit a cigar and looked out at the water. Smoke rising, the sun warm for once, children running and yelling, but his eyes were on the ferry. Two rings of smoke—nothing to do but wait— and then a sigh. Hot suddenly and what was all that noise? The whole day had been like this, and now half an hour before the next boat. He leaned against a wall, feeling its heat on his back. Fingering the cigar, looking across the pier, how many summers was it now that he’d headed out there, supper at four, Charlotte in her country attire and him still in his city clothes? The boat, the launch, the cart up from the jetty past waterside houses, the cemetery, the old church, the barn with its slat sides and sod roof, woods to the right and fields to the left, to where an allée of linden trees broke through and he’d get down and walk up to the summer house with its porches and gables, the house his maps had built.

Nothing to do, no runner to cross the fjord like Jesus to tell Charlotte I missed the damn boat. He pulled at the cigar, shifted his back, finally looked for a place to sit, the boat off in the distance now, smoking too. A beer, he thought, or tea, the manuscript. I could give myself a headache, reading it in the sun. Squinting, he leaned against the wall again. Another sigh, two or three more rings, wafting, growing larger. Two children stopped to look.

Magnus obliged them with another. “I missed the boat and now I have to stand here and blow rings until the next one comes.” A hell. Oda would like that, an eternity at the pier while small demons surround him demanding rings.

Somewhere out there, one boat was passing another. Young men, probably, were on their way in, while he was trying to abandon the city, his work finished, or parts of it, the rest stuffed in his satchel. A week, a rare week during which the sun would hardly set and he would sit out on the lawn and read close to midnight, a cigar lit to hold off the nits.

The devil, Oda more or less told him. He pulled on the cigar and let the smoke curl up from his mouth.

Well, yes and no. At dinner, she’d cut him off in mid-sentence. Would it be like this on the Styx—two or three millennia of his anecdotes cut short? More smoke, like a horse in winter. Her anger seemed to bring her to life, but not as she’d been—mouth open, that half-angered look, or was it bliss, up above him, her long hair falling around her head? Or that look of ice she gave him on the road? Everyone adores her, and so had he.

Like layers of the earth with fragments of himself scattered through it, bones with no marrow, and yet he was standing here again—he, Magnus, with his cigar between his fingers—another summer, the ferry slowly coming into view that would take him to Charlotte in her summer clothes, to Charlotte in her element—the garden, her children and her children's children. Still standing, he thought, the green light that Greta said she saw pouring out of him like a lantern—Greta with her sixth sight.

He ground the cigar out in the wall. He could see the other boat off in the distance, with its varnished seats, its smells of food, coal, and human bodies, overdressed and ready to shed it all, find each other in the summer twilight. By August, some women might be pregnant. Like Charlotte, pulling him on her, no sign of night, only the hard knot of her sex, and the hunger of winter finally slaked. Then in April or May a child.

Maps, books, all this got stoked up, the rest of the year spent paying for that swollen bud and the flood six weeks later when, ravenous, she would keep him up all night. Into autumn by then, in darkness, without a word or a cry from her, arms wrapped around his neck to hold him so close he could hardly breathe or move.

So, another summer, Oda angry, but his heart afloat in it and the ferry approaching. Tarot might be the game, cards laid out on the table. The stakes? “There are children, Magnus!” Oda had hissed. You bear down and place your bet. The cards face up and down, but no broken tower for Magnus, only the hanging man. The men falling from the tower don't look happy. There are always two, and now he knew why.

Five minutes left, Magnus guessed, lighting another cigar. People gathered—men in suits, youngsters with their mothers, the priest and his wife, who nodded at him when he caught her eye. Does she know? Will she also cut me off, my anecdote left hanging in midair? He leaned back against the wall, smoke wafting, the smell of it mixing with the summer afternoon, and winter over. ^

^

^

The men slid the wooden walkway from the ferry to the dock and the passengers disembarked, mostly young men, dressed for an evening, but some families, too, heading in for parties, weekends in town. Standing to the side with the others, Magnus nodded to several of them—friends of his children, children of his friends.

He felt for his ticket, hauling it out. It always felt like a race, everyone heading for the same wide portal. Two ticket takers stood guarding it, their blue jackets stained with coffee and grease and God knows what.

He pushed through with all the others and found a seat. Most headed for the upper deck to enjoy the sun, so the cabin was emptier than usual. He put his hand down on the bench and looked at it against the wood. It was all like this, wood planks and strips trapped in amber like leaves or insects. His hand always looked the same, enough hair growing to his knuckles to confirm Darwin. A smell of sausage from the shop between the stairs, and he was tempted—dinner still a long way off. Children and their mothers crowded around to buy ice and drinks, and the men to get beer to drink out in the sun. Magnus walked over. "Coffee and a sausage, please." The woman nodded, her hair knotted above her head, the sleeves of her blouse rolled up from the heat. Winter and summer, there she was, someone's sister, probably. By now, the boat was some distance out, the castle behind them. Soon they'd pass the lighthouse and, halfway there, the returning ferry, the one he'd missed. He sipped his coffee and ate the sausage, a small feast of salty juice.

Several weeks since Charlotte had quit the town for the summer house. On Saturdays, he left his office at midday and took the boat over there, but today he'd lingered. Company, Charlotte had written. I dread it, he told Kat when he saw her at the park. I dread it, but then I end up having a good time. In his satchel, the afternoon paper, still folded up, a book, manuscripts to be read and acted on, and her letter, handed to him, which he'd sat and read before walking to the boat. His heart would race, going to meet her, so he paused to calm down. She’d given him her conspiratorial look and a quick, almost furtive kiss. Her letters rehearsed her days in all their texture, so that he could feel how they were or would be. He thought how her eyes would sometimes catch his as they walked, her expression warming.

In the spring and summer, Kristiana had its beauty, even its modest glamor. They’d walk near the castle, into a new district with its cafes, aquavit, smoked salmon, the oysters Kat ate by the half dozen, those times they ventured there. He loved the proportions of the buildings and their spare elegance. Modern, he told her, the rage in cities to the south. Everything will change. Its harbingers were in the theaters and galleries.

The frankness of the times will tear away the gilding and free the women to live as they please.

Magnus rose and climbed the stairs to the upper deck. The point and pier were visible, and, distant, the entry to a favorite sailing haunt, with its cottages and summer inns. He longed to take Kat there, a proposal that always drew a sardonic, indulgent smile. Men and women alike had shed their clothes, the sun being generous. The rich chased after it in winter, to Sorrento or the Canaries, but the rest stayed and slogged along, an hour of sunlight at the solstice, and now it was all reversed, with just a bare hint of night.

He wrapped his hands around the varnished railing and looked out the water. Sailboats dotted the fjord, along with a steamer headed in to port. Closer in, there would be double-enders and children fishing. He cupped his hands and lit a cigar, the smoke billowing back. Charlotte would be in the kitchen at this point, the doors and windows open, her recipe book open on the table, glanced at once, and the smells of cooking.

They had money now, but Charlotte rarely left things to her helpers. She had many, of course, here and in town, along with the children when she could get their attention. The older ones were off, especially in the summer. The house in town was their base, but they were hardly ever there now, Magnus knew.

He drew on his cigar, listening as conversations hummed around him. Like bees, he thought. He loved the fat black ones that flew slowly through the garden. The dog liked to chase them, occasionally suffering for it, his nose swollen like a balloon. As the city warmed up, he and Kat would sometimes sit together near the pier, talking about their day and their families. She’d reach over and take his hand, or hold his eyes. His whole world then was suffused with her, brown and radiant in the summer sun.

At a dinner in town, an argument broke out about a politician, his career eclipsed by scandal. Was he to blame for the deplorable things that followed? No, it was beside the point, he’d said, but felt as he said that he was defending himself, in reality, with Oda saying in so many words that he wasn’t far from scandal himself. Their world was so small and all of them friends. Kat was the cause. "Anyone else I could tolerate.”

He thought how some painters left in what others left out. If they portrayed a couple, you’d see his jealousy and pain, and her loneliness and anger—or the other way around--people who spend their half their lives unwinding from each other or from themselves. You could see these lives plays out in the theater.

Sometimes he and Kat sat off by themselves, hidden in markets, in cafes filled with a crush of travelers, sailors, students, hidden by such anonymity as the city afforded. Someone in the future might open a drawer to find more than one sheaf of correspondence. In the midst of conversations, that smile of hers. How often did it come to mind? Her letters could take his breath away, the ink aflame. There were bundles of letters to and from Oda, too, that year of comings and goings. A strange life he led, pushed by fate and pulled by intuition.

He thought suddenly of the small and spindly child he'd been, taking the measure of the world he'd been dropped into, every last attribute of it. A little hedonist, admittedly, but there were feuds and quarrels, friendships and crushes, liaisons that were so charged and full of risk. All this before he was 10. And the beauty, and everything alight with it—their meeting point, he knew. Some novels, poems, and paintings spoke to it, but so many were oblivious, and hostile often to those who saw it and drew attention to it.

Now the pier was clearly in view, a crowd waiting. Magnus looked for the launch that would take him to the parish dock. It was tied up, its pilot trying his luck with the fish. People roused themselves, the women’s tanned arms like Kat’s in her light dress. The world renewed; he'd said as much to Kat as she ate an oyster. ^

^

^

The priest and his wife were ahead of him, with several others, but the launch pilot’s back was to them, his attention elsewhere. Soon they would be in earshot, and his mind would be dragged from his imagined fish.

The priest cleared his throat, and Magnus could see the sound registering. The pilot reeled his line in, stood up, and faced his tormentor. The priest helped his wife aboard and then stepped on, nodding to the pilot.

"No luck?" The pilot stared at him. "Maybe it's too hot," the priest ventured. The pilot grunted and began feeding the fire. Magnus stepped on and sat down. "How is Charlotte?" the priest's wife asked him. "I've been in town these six days, so you've probably seen her more than I have. How is she?" The priest's wife laughed. "I see your grandsons, but Charlotte I haven't seen." He nodded. "Probably gardening."

The priest lit his pipe. "Two funerals this week. "Any births? Surely these things balance out."

"Weddings. It's the season," the wife said. “Right. So, March before we'll see any replacements." She colored slightly. "It's like the theater," Magnus added. "People are always coming on or going off."

The launch rounded the point, forty feet or so out and parallel with the narrow shoreline along the steep hillside. Here and there, roads zigzagged down and a house or cottage jutted out. Small jetties marked these moments of settlement, with children fishing and swimming. Wood smoke and pipe smoke blotted out any other smell. He thought of Oda’s waterside cottage, Christian's easel in one room and their bed in the next.

"Charlotte has company," the priest's wife said. "Two young men and an older one with a red face."

Magnus looked at her. “The older one paints barns.” She shook her head. “He doesn’t look like a worker.”

The priest nodded. Magnus laughed. "Two visitors from England and a professor at the academy who paints country scenes, but likes them to be close at hand. We're handy and we have a barn. More than that, we have food, drink, and conversation, so he'll be staying for a while, I think." The priest's manner shifted.

“I’d be honored to meet him." Magnus looked at him. "He’s a pantheist. Perhaps you can convert him."

A barn and a field with a horse--Magnus could see the painting. Then another came to mind, Peter in evening clothes, and in his cups. It was hard to square the one with the other, and now here they both were.

Peter would be chatting Charlotte up, laying siege to her larder and his wine cabinet, but mostly he'd be out walking and sketching. He rose early, working until mid-afternoon, then eating, resting, and carousing.

Magnus admired his energy. He taught his mostly female art students by day and haunted what passed for the city’s demimonde by night. He was courteous and familiar with these women, evasive with their fathers and with men in authority. He hid behind his society face, closeted in his evening clothes, but in the countryside, he was himself amid animals and farm folk. “His pantheism is stronger in the summer,” Magnus said. “Nature brings out the worst in him.” The priest nodded, still angling for an invitation. “I won’t try to convert him.”

By now they could see the priests' dock, not far from the flat rocks where the children swam, where he sometimes went to sit and look out at the fjord, watching the skiffs and double-enders pass. He’d spent most of one summer a few years before contemplating this scene while struggling to loosen Ota’s grip on his heart.

The pilot slowed the launch down. The cart driver was out on dock, waiting for them. "The fish may bite later," Magnus told the pilot. "Maybe," he answered. His mind was still at the pier. A theory had formed, about five minutes back, that the electrical magnetism of his body might flow better if he stripped the cork off his rod. He could lead the fish on a dance the way the fiddlers did at solstice, the girls dancing past midnight and falling for the hooks. He snagged the priest's wife's maid last summer, so why not a fish? Picking at the cork with his thumbnail, he thought of looking for his knife, but now the jetty needed his attention. ^

^

^

Two horses to pull the cart, dappled white-grey, one pawing the ground with a hoof as the driver fed them apples. He averted his eyes as the priest's wife shifted her skirt, then clambered up to take his seat, shaking the reins. The road from the jetty turned and angled up to meet the road that came down the hill. Straight on would take them to the rocks, past the white clapboard house with its wide lawn that looked out at them.

A swim would be nice, he thought, as the cart began its slow ascent. The hillside was thick with trees and ferns. Here and there the edge dropped away so the tips of the trees were at eye level. In early spring, the road still dark and wet, this could be an unnerving half-hour. "Charlotte wrote me a letter, Magnus,” the priest’s wife said. She waited for him to ask about its contents, but he just nodded. "Strange you haven't seen her, but her garden takes all her attention until she is happy with it. After that, she'll be round for a visit."

"That's exactly what she wrote! You know your wife well!" This reverberated among them for a moment.

"What does he say to these couples when he marries them?" he asked" The priest answered for her. “The verities—faith, hope, and charity. The parents love it.” She nodded. “You may have an opportunity to try it on us,” Magnus said. “Our oldest son is headed for marriage.” Smiles broke out. “Such good news! But surely the wedding will be in town?” He shook his head. “The young woman loves it here. She’s a romantic like our artist friend.” The priest’s wife turned to her husband. “You’ll have to write a new piece for them!”

The priest felt his text slipping out of his grasp. He was especially proud of it, a theme begun at seminary and then expanded. Like funerals, weddings were a chore, especially if he had no real knowledge of the families. The couples stood there, anxious to be off, yet wanting to hear themselves named and honored. His piece did the job, even if every young person attending found it ludicrous. And he knew it by heart.

At last the road flattened out, the church on one side and the priest's house on the other. The cart stopped and they all got out. "I'll walk from here," he said, paying the driver. "I'll talk to Charlotte about a dinner," he added. "I'm here for a week, so you'll see more of me than you can stand, probably." The wife smiled and shook her head. “Perhaps I can help you rework the wedding piece,” he ventured to the priest.

Later he remembered how, after making love, he said to Charlotte that the act seemed consequential because the couple brought their ancestries, generations piled on generations, "like two colliding constellations." ^

^

^

Magnus glanced sideways at the cemetery wall and its low gate. In town, they keep them at a distance. The long sleep of death, or is it Swedenborg’s nap and then more of the same, stripped of its illusions? Ten years since his father died, a door slamming behind him, a high wall in view. You end up pressed against it, only the sense of touch to tell you where you are, crawling or laid out like a corpse, what's left of your hair grazing the footing. When your father dies, your first instinct is to bolt, but that door is already shut behind you. Yet how life quickens from moment to moment—from your mother's swelling ears right through to that last tinge of orange! And those women! When you die, do they tell you who was who before it all starts up again?

Would Kat be with him? He pictured them in Heaven—Charlotte, Kat, and Oda—along an inlet with gardens and jetties. At dinner with all their children, they'd laugh at the folly of their quarrels. Charlotte would cook and Magnus would host. Later, he’d retire to his room and Kat would join him, loosening her hair, her eyes meeting his. The thought aroused him. That will survive death, Swedenborg assured him.

At the rise, the woods opened onto a field, an old barn at the far end of it. Like the woods, the field was his, farmed by a tenant. And there, at the edge of the road, Peter sat, painting the barn. He shifted slightly as he worked, a bucolic figure in a straw hat and a loose, long sleeved shirt. If a subject pleased him, his endurance was remarkable, but it was also penance for a winter of earnest if partial dissolution.

He crossed the road. The sun was still high up, warmer here than at the dock. Moving out into it, he shaded his eyes with his hand. "Peter," he called out, and his friend slowly turned his head, nodding an acknowledgement. Magnus quickened his pace. Reaching him, he put a hand on his shoulder and glanced quickly at the painting. "Supper is delayed, am I right?" Peter laughed. "I’ve painted for hours, with time off to piss. Don't tell the farmer!" "It's my land, piss wherever you want. How do you like painting my barn?"

Peter looked around appreciatively. "It's a revelation. I dreamt about it all winter."

“And now you can take it home with you." As a child, Magnus imagined that he could step into paintings, slipping into their world. He thought of Christian's painting of Oda, the aloof look he encountered later.

"Too bad we can't do this with people." "Isn’t that the point of portraits?" Peter asked. "This place is exquisite. Ruskin was wrong. Your barn is worth ten times Venice." "Is this what you tell your students?"

The painter shook his head. "I tell them to follow their instincts. Not that they ever listen." ^

^

^

Across from the field and barn was a long pathway through the trees, the summer house’s back entry. The land had originally been part of the parish, seized and sold off in the Reformation. The land crossed the main road, taking in the woods and fields across from the old Romanesque church, now Lutheran, and its fields and jetty. The priest and his wife lived off their land, supplementing his stipend. Magnus got some cash and crops from his farmer, but the summer house and their livelihoods came from elsewhere. The house was like a ship anchored in the wood, he thought, its larder below decks, a trap door in the kitchen with a ladder, a front porch with steps up from the formal entry and a veranda out back surveying all he owned—a private joke, as Charlotte ran the house and garden, chose the yellow, gave the dinners, did everything. Only the dog was his.

Small, tawny birds flitted along the edge of the road. They made their homes in the trees and bushes, invisible except for their chirping. In town, they’d land boldly on a chair or table, demanding food. Here, there was no need. Once the children found a baby bird in the garden, covered with ants. They brought it inside, raised it in a box and then in a wicker wastebasket turned upside down. When it came of age, they taught to fly by throwing it gently back-and-forth. Once it got the knack, it moved out to the garden, but sometimes flew through the house, greeting them. Like my grown sons, he thought, rarely seen yet also close at hand, present in brief moments, flashing their smiles, giving Charlotte a kiss. Their outside lives figured now, but the house was still a desired place in summer, and for some of their young women, also.

A week ahead to catch up. In the summer, it was harder in his office to do this kind of work—reading and editing manuscripts. This was what set books in motion, the meetings with authors and printers, planning, exhorting—all the things a publisher did. The success of his school maps was unexpected, and he was made a Knight, with a medal and sash Charlotte made him wear to the grand social events. Her estimation of him rose. The success of translations and books aimed at the Norwegian diaspora raised his stock still further. He never cut a flamboyant figure the way Leon did when he dazzled Charlotte and they went off together, but he began to fit the part she foresaw for him when they first married. Their life together mended and improved.

There are two poles, feminine and masculine, and you and Charlotte move from one to the other across successive lives, Greta told him. It seemed true. Other partners brought their polarities out and suppressed their native ambiguities. For Charlotte, Leon was the necessary man; for him, Oda the necessary woman.

Twenty years since Leon captured Charlotte's heart and upended things. For Leon, older and childless, Charlotte was irresistible. For her, Leon was an excursion back in time, just as she'd been drawn to Magnus as she first imagined him. Or so he surmised from Greta's account of their lives together. Clairvoyant, a leader of his people, he’d loved another more than her, Greta said, and the spurned one’s heart had burned with anger. This residue of the past was the only explanation for his marriage that seemed true. Everyone was wrapped up in it, like a saga. But now the house was in view. The garden hummed with the bees Magnus loved and he wanted to touch it, feel its texture as well as hear it, but it was enough just now to breathe it in. ^

^

^

Charlotte looked approvingly at her garden, framed in the open doorway—layers of herbs, flowers, and vegetables that formed a square within a square, separated from the house by a terrace, and from the woods by gravel paths and hedges, "like the French," as Peter had put it. She’d nodded exuberantly, pouring him another cup of tea. His comment set her mind wandering. She pictured a conservatory at the back of the garden, its terrace extending into the woods like the Dutch reclaiming land from the sea, a gravel path to tie it to the house, and four beds to make a small park. "Magnus will take it over," Peter laughed when she told him. "He’ll be out there working, surrounded by your orchids." She considered this. He often wrote, but she rarely read any of it, preferring novels to his essays and poems. For her, writing was a talent like cooking—you were born with it. It had passed through her to their second son, "a writer like his father." But then her youngest daughter was a writer, too, like Charlotte’s sister. It was a bond between her and Magnus. ^

^

^

"I missed the boat," Magnus said, but he could see that Charlotte was running behind. "Peter's here," she answered. He nodded. "I saw him at the barn. 'Better than Venice,' he told me. Who knew it would achieve immortality?" It was true, he reflected. His maps would be dust and the barn would be still be there. "When should we sit down?" she asked. To him, the solstice made supper almost pointless. "Peter is likely to paint a while longer. I had a sausage on the boat, so I'll survive." She nodded. "There are others expected, friends of Gunnar's from England. He went into town earlier to meet them." "We must have passed each other," Magnus said. He made his way upstairs, to the room he used as a study. Glancing out a window, he saw that Charlotte was already in the garden, wearing her hat. In her element, he thought. He took a nap.

Out in the sun, Charlotte surveyed her beds. Informed by advice from all quarters and from her own reading and observation, the garden played out its envisioned possibilities. In the winter, the house in town and her buildings occupied her, but a piece of her was always here, picturing how it could be, what could be added or taken away. How eager she was to get here, to work on it and see it flourish.

Only certain things mattered, she felt, and the garden was one. She placed it in the genus family, along with Magnus, the children, the houses, the properties, the furniture, the whole realm their marriage encompassed, much of it through her efforts. Magnus had risen in her eyes and she had stayed with him, despite the pull, the terrible pull. Charlotte shook her head, dispersing the memory. Leon was Leon, with his black eyebrows, his sardonic grin, his unambiguous desire. Every woman needs her stalking wolf, his hunger for her visible on his face. But how many of her friends who'd taken the plunge, leaving one marriage for another, found happiness? The scandal of it led many of the women to live abroad. Impractical, she concluded, for all of them. So, she'd pulled back, bit by bit, while Magnus made his own arrangements.

Ruthless, she thought as she tore out the weeds—she’d done exactly as she liked. Although she felt that Magnus had acted similarly, she saw the toll it took on him. So much was left unspoken between them, yet it was all there in plain sight, the souvenirs of her trips with Leon left here and there in her rooms, and his diaries, daybooks, and correspondence, the life he wrote out, there for her to read. It was not such a surprise to her when Kat's man appeared one morning, waving a sheaf of letters. She recognized the small, hard-toread script and the paper. Rein him in, he demanded. Magnus is a poet, she told him, and people get carried away. Don't take it so seriously. He looked at her incredulously. “The devil,” he said. So, Kat was the heart of this quarrel, Kat who she liked, who also enjoyed her garden and gave her advice and books, with a husband who was jealous of his centrality. Did she want to marry Magnus? She hoped not. He was married, after all.

And now her garden was taking form, the house and grounds her canvas, the summer her chance to remake them, drawing on all the places she'd visited. It was all there to mull over, try out, see what worked.

In between their separate lives was their real life, Charlotte felt, and this house and its garden made their contribution to it. It was always her sense that if you made them beautiful, everything else would follow. She said this once to Magnus, at a moment when the full weight of her love for Leon was pressing on their marriage, and it seemed incongruous as she said it. Yet it was true, their marriage was bound up in these two places and their family. Her love for him was part and parcel of her love for them, an indissoluble whole. ^

^

^

Magnus awoke still in his dream, the clothes in his closet and the books on his shelves swaying gently, as if a hidden current ran through the room. He struggled to hold on to it. Slowly, the room became itself again. He could hear Charlotte talking to herself, among other sounds in the garden. He thought of Peter’s small, efficient brushstrokes as the barn took shape on his canvas, every board’s nuance observed and set down.

Magnus was with Peter when he met Kat, standing on a train platform. They were returning from a lecture at the university. It was as if he recognized her, he said later. Away, visiting a son, he realized how much he desired her. On his return, they met again and then she sought him out. In his mind, his heart had several chambers. Charlotte had staked her claim early, but others were admitted. Oda came and went, not without considerable pain, but Kat seemed to have a place there already, as if he’d long expected her.

No such intuition preceded Oda’s announcement of her love. He watched his desire for her uncoil, wondering if Charlotte saw Leon similarly, as a pure type that demanded that its complete opposite. Later, incensed, Oda took their time together and threw it in his face. “So soothing,” she mocked. He was reminded how the cremated dead end up as ashes in pots, all their beauty and substance burned away. And which version was true? Perhaps they both were. Even ashes have value, Charlotte told him. We arrive with our inheritance: writing from his father, intuition and devotion from both parents, his love of women from his mother's father. And a compass of a kind to cross the ravines and deserts of midlife. Bleak and yet alternately as radiant as Charlotte in her garden or Kat's face in the setting sun. Is this destiny or just happenstance?

A wedding set-piece came to him: “Life unfolds. You follow the rules until they diverge from life, really diverge, and you understand that it’s just you and your compass. Meanwhile there are children to raise and work to do. What's real persists and what isn't falls away. Life answers so many questions, and you learn to wait and trust your own ways of knowing. Marriage has primacy because so much orbits around it, but how we honor it can’t be prescribed. This is the one truly private thing, about which no one else can venture an opinion, although of course everyone will. Ignore them. Now kiss, enjoy the party, go forth and multiply. It will be fine. You're not the first.” I should pass this along the priest, he thought. No more of his verities.

^

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^

"Magnus?" Supper was in the air, and he roused himself "Yes, coming." He saw someone setting the table in the garden, and heard Peter's soft voice, talking with a younger man with dark hair. Their conversation was in English, so likely one of the expected friends of the son who'd studied there. He brushed his hair, then went downstairs to hear Charlotte in the kitchen talking with the other of the pair, voluble and high-strung.

Light poured in through the windows. He made his way to the garden where Peter sat enraptured by this young and handsome visitor. "Mr. Grant," he said to Magnus. "Gunnar met us, but he went back into town," Grant said. "Something about a girl." On the table was Grant's open sketchbook. "He’s painting my barn."

Magnus said to him. "A wonder in this light. Oh, but in my haste, I forgot the essentials!" He went back into the house, this time to the kitchen where he found the other young man in conversation with Charlotte. He introduced himself, then fetched a pitcher of wine and his cigars.

Charlotte's garden, visible as he descended, was a work in constant progress. She gave form to things methodically. Writing wasn’t like this for him. Instead, the barest hint of an idea floated in, prompting him to add ideas and more ideas, with no apparent thread. Yet a thread would gradually emerge, tying one idea to another. It always amazed him when a piece finally took shape. Charlotte never expressed such amazement, only satisfaction or dissatisfaction. The way she cooked was closer to how he wrote, the ingredients of a meal not always readily at hand, the family sent scrambling to obtain missing items, and then a meal would emerge from this chaos, delicious. His writerly chaos was of the mind only, his desk in constant order. Charlotte's kitchen was in disarray when she cooked, but the garden in full flower reflected her mind’s evident serenity.

He set the pitcher on the table and stepped back to light a cigar. "I'll have one later," Peter said. "So, Grant, what's new in England? Surely a new era is upon you." Grant nodded. "Yes, and our fathers won’t get over it." It was like a door opening on to a new world, he felt, and university was its antechamber. Now here he was, off in this rural place with a friend who loved him. How could he staunch the wound he was about to make? He'd sketched him so much that he'd become mere details, gloves and shoes instead of a man. ^

^

^

Magnus surveyed the table, with its plates, crystal and silver, linen, and platters. Bourgeois, this heaping up of things, but its aesthetic played off against the simplicity of the house, modest by the standards of the times, and wood as against stone or brick. The painted walls, with their portraits and landscapes, the flowers on the credenza, the old brass sconces with their candles—these were part of their world of here, wrapped up in the endless summer light. The others made their way to the table. Magnus poured the wine, then sat down at one end, with Charlotte at the other. He remembered how she passed him once, her hair tied up, talking softly to herself, and giving him a meaningful look on the eve of her departure for the south, 18 months away.

"How are his children?" Magnus asked his visitors. A few years since one of his English authors had died of cancer. "They're selling the house," Grant’s friend said. "Their brother is trying to find husbands for the girls." Magnus thought of the father with his long, morose face, and of his daughters. As with Charlotte, Beauty descended through the women. “I wouldn’t think they’d lack for suitors,” he said. "They shun society," the friend said. "I can imagine," Charlotte commented, thinking of their overbearing father and those two girls. "They're lucky that it’s now possible to resist that pressure." Lucky their parents were dead.

The mother was just as impossible, she thought, pandering to that tyrant while sacrificing herself to the poor.

Grant thought of his father, the General, ex-India, and the family's expectation he would follow in his footsteps—a commission, colonial duties. Quite a row when he'd announced his plan to study art with Nessa at the Slade. But then old Watts rescued him, predicting that with his talent he’d be a national treasure. Ha!

"They bought a rowhouse and intend to live on their own," Grant said. Charlotte nodded. "Very sensible. Their brother must be in a panic,” she added, smiling to herself. "He moans about it, but they pay no heed," Grant said. Magnus remembered their father abandoning religion but clinging doggedly to the mores of his class. His daughters, this new generation, would finally cut the cord. He could imagine them and all those young men, breaking decidedly with the past, and their poor, bewildered brother sensing without knowing why that the whole edifice—the very order of things that kept his world aloft—was lurching. Not a good situation to be in when something that large begins wobbling. Who knows where it would lead? ^

^

^

"I'm going to spend time at the Slade in the autumn," Peter said. Grant looked over. "Nessa hopes to break Watt’s grip." Peter nodded. "We have the same ambition." He’d been wondering if painting in the old style made any sense. "It might be better if I left the barn to the photographers." Magnus could see it in its gilded frame. "As long as they have eyes," he said, "that barn will have painters." "As long as they have hearts," Charlotte added. Peter nodded his assent. Grant thought about Peter's visit. He had a harem of young women at the academy, and he and Charlotte had an easy familiarity that spoke of harmlessness. He knew the type, mostly chaste but catching the odd fish hooked almost incidentally. Or allowing himself to be caught.

Magnus’s mind was on the painting. Photography had its place, like the panorama of the family gathered for his and Charlotte’s anniversary, arrayed across the summer house front porch and stairs. Printed on thick stock, such photographs were handed around, proof of descent or lateral ties. They had their own collection, most of it in albums, but one or two of them with their children were displayed. Peter’s painting mattered.

The barn had waited for eons for him to discover it, bring out its grooves and striations. Magnus was aware of the barn's beauty, but was no painter. His namesake son liked to paint, but architecture was his calling.

Grant, his friend, and Peter went off together on a walk. Charlotte and Magnus cleared things away and then went out into the garden. It was nearly eleven, but it felt like late afternoon. From her chair on the terrace, Charlotte looked out at her garden. All that work was paying off. A low hum of bees persisted, along with the sounds of birds and the distant barking of a dog. Soon they would hold a summer party that brought out neighbors and town folk, a mix that seemed to work despite the social differences among the guests. ^

^

^

Magnus breathed in the solstice and its fecundity, the whole smell of summer. Kat might be knitting, he thought, her children running around excitedly, free of parental restraint. How often she recounted her daily round, with wry observations and those sweaters that he felt were the pure expressions of her heart. But he knew this picture he painted was idyllic. Kat was an idealist, even a freethinker, longing for a life without convention's boundaries, free to love whom she chose and be herself at last, unhidden and unapologetic. It was a dream many shared, the promise of new century, and sometimes it seemed that it would come true.

And yet to be this in a provincial city, barely free of the baleful hold of the last century, tolerant of certain artists and writers, but otherwise closed to deviance, especially from women, was a suicidal ambition for a married woman. Even before the last century gave way, the plays, novels, and paintings drummed this message and the ruling classes ignored it. He was torn between having understood—reason enough to ignore convention—and knowing that his own hedonism arose from anguish, pure desire, and injured vanity, just as Oda accused him. Having to be cautious, to sidestep scandal and recriminations, forced them to live in the shadows, and jealousy drove them deeper into hiding. It would be hard to sustain, for neither of them liked it.

Part 2. The Turning of the Year

Christmas The noise and aroma of the kitchen filled the house. Not far away, Charlotte's sister Astrid was baking, and the comings and goings between the two houses were marked by doors opening and closing with a shudder that Magnus could feel despite the heft supposedly achieved by the builder. Soon enough, the two families would gather for Christmas dinner, "enough food for an army." A resistance to this invasion arose in him, as it always did when faced with unavoidable things that he welcomed, couldn't really live without, and dreaded.

Charlotte was in her element, preparing the feast. He'd learned to be her counterpoint at the table, presiding over it. She was alive to the throng, festive in its presence. He sought out Astrid if she chose to sit by or near him, a fellow conspirator in some way, he thought, steadfastly holding up tradition. She made the pies to which Magnus looked forward. Even more loosely tethered to time than her sister, her pies were the clock by which Christmas dinner was timed. Some of the runners between the houses were sent out to learn where things stood with her ovens. For she could reckon time in that sense. The two kitchens, thermally conjoined, led guests to handicap Charlotte's optimism with the harder reality of Astrid's projections. ^

^

^

She let herself sink into the heat of the bathwater. Christmas was over, the dinner memorable in the way that such gatherings are, "the best ever" until the next one supplants it. Not everyone was at her table, as some of them had other families to consider. Christmas was in this respect an audit. Magnus would give an account of it in his New Year's Day letters, summing up the year behind them—its life events and travels. Others made resolutions, but he saw the day as a stopping point, taking in what was just crossed before setting out again.

She said aloud that she was tired. Even with help, Christmas was a lot of work, as was the rest. But she was active by nature, distrustful of slowing down. To find the daybed, read a novel, drift off into a nap—that was permissible—but to fail to rise and rouse herself, pursue what she pursued, was impossible. That she was tired couldn't be denied. but equally that Christmas dinner was like the demands of midsummer, what the season required of her, her family, and their guests. What society expected of ones like them.

Charlotte liked winter—its chill and the way a full moon brought the bare white trees alive. Magnus struggled with it. He longed to flee south, but his businesses kept him from going. They would travel—trips she organized. When his namesake son was in Berlin, they went there and explored it. When they went to Paris, a daughter came along, staying on to perfect her French, and paint and sculpt at the academy. But they went back, the anchorage of their extended family. That son was in America now and could well stay there.

Sometimes they traveled on their own. Their natures and proclivities differed, and she could only follow where they took her, even if in time she came back. This is where the familiarity of marriage rubs raw, she thought, and how absences that arise from yearning and unhappiness are abrasive in the everyday, bruising others although this isn't the intent. You follow instinct, but it's more than that—not just the impulses of your animal nature, but the desires of your human imagination, your need to feed it something new.

Things arose from this, of course, and there were strains, but she viewed it all as the sort of foolishness that you have to experience in life, whether sooner or later. ^

^

^

You let the dinner wine burn off. You go upstairs before the last guests depart, drained by their company.

This is how it goes with you, you think, the opposite of her, although she too voices the toll the dinners take.

You hear her saying this to herself as she finally excuses herself, leaving the cleaning up to others.

Two women you loved come back to you, most often at the edges of sleep. They were the leitmotif of a period of unhappiness between you and Charlotte, and now they surface as fragments. Grief, you've noted, is more like a rogue wave that catches you unaware, a riptide of sadness, but these fragments are an afterlife.

They remind you of how, making love, the arousal it brought was simply stoked by these others, their import running behind. This was first of all a bodily perception, as if arousal had its own momentum. And while you remember episodes attached to this, what persists are the conversations. It may be that it was them that you wanted, and having them was like the way women have children—not as long, but elongated.

So different, Oda and Kat. Looking back at this decade, already a decade in the past, you see how desire mixed with domesticity, a kind of web women spin unconsciously that furthers the illusion of starting again without exactly leaving off what was—more a change of venue, if that were possible, more like an operetta.

Oda needed you and then dispensed with you. Her need, which you shared, was to restore her sense of self in bed, to be actively wanted there. Kat wanted to reclaim her freedom. Eventually, badgered by her jealous man, she wanted out and wanted you. Possession governs everything, you could say, whether a gift or a demand. Love can't be coerced, a thought that saved your marriage. It applies equally to you.

Larochefoucauld's book is close at hand. "There are three cures for love, none of them foolproof."

Thwarted in personal and political life, his maxims speak of territories you shared. No helping it, he wrote.

Yet he finally found a woman who desired conversations—was prepared to have them without complications.

You have such a friend now, Magnus. This is your life's great dispensation. A woman for whom your mind is enough, although your body still knows beauty when it sees it, how she moans and move. Fecund, desiring children, these things are there, but you're not the one. You're done with knowing down to the bone.

You saw what you saw, all the signs the gods put there as you acted out this play of their devising. You read into them, but life alone grants you experience. If you forge a different path, it's not for lack of trying to forge others when they arose unexpectedly, plausibly. Charlotte did this, too. You have this unspoken tie.

Boxing Day

Painting by Patricia Sonnino

It should wait for New Year's Day, Magnus thought, but on New Year's he rarely had a minute to himself and tradition wanted him to look ahead, make resolutions and write out his hopes and desires. Going through his diaries, he would run across these entries and marvel at how much came to pass, although in forms that rarely resembled his intent as he remembered it. Diaries are more accurate than other personal writings about the unfolding present, even if he tended to write about the just-past. As he moved through life he sifted it for observations and anticipations that might fuel his notes to self and his intuitions about the future.

Boxing Day, this English custom, was always clear of obligations. Even Charlotte kept society at bay. It was a good day to consider the year, not as a curriculum vitae but as experience—his own and their reflections.

The latter were often memories of what was said or done, pertinent again. His reverie the night before came back to him—how these women figured despite time passing. He glanced over at Larochefoucauld. It was the life that interested him. He looked for models, despite knowing that these life narratives were fictions.

Destiny backgrounds this. Each woman seemed foreordained, but the meaning of their connection has to be worked out—an endless effort, constantly revised. And now this friend, a correspondent like himself, who never came to mind unbidden but always wrote unhesitatingly about her emotional life to give his replies a context, valuing what he might write in response. A man who desires women can only be a sage when love's intimate discourse, a mind that speaks what her heart feels, is desirable in itself. A sage, Magnus thought, is what a man becomes when he hangs up his spurs and takes up his real work, whatever it might be.

When the body is desirous, the mind follows along, improvising and observing. All of it comes back, but as scenes, vivid as paintings but of course in motion, unfolding not as they happened but as in dreams, taking liberties with time and space to serve the fragment's reason for being, seen in a brought-back-to-mind state.

A glimpse of it opened other doorways, giving out to scenes that feeling etched on memory. It was possible to find the corridors and doorways, but more often his mind went there involuntarily, prompted by some spark.

He saw in retrospect how he craved domesticity, yet it was bound up with the telos of expectations, the source of hope and betrayal when domesticity on a continuing basis proved impossible. And while he craved domesticity, it resembled his need for society—leitmotifs to or the supports for his working on his own. In his marriage he more or less kept this balance. It took two forays to show the futility trying to add a third party.

^

^

^

"The telos of expectations"—the phrase was germane. How you Magnus have sought to reconcile material success and its tangible signs with the pull of your inner life. Not unique in this, of course. Along the pier in the summer, you see the survivors of winter's bitter destitution, older men who live on luck and charity, but perhaps have notebooks of poetry, sketches, novellas that slip from grasp or are brought with them to be found by relatives, landlords, or the police. Many are mad, of course, or too sapped by their lives to do much.

What if their lives had been different? How much money does it really take to be sheltered? Not as much as you've spent on bourgeois life, the summer house and house in town, the children sent abroad for school.

You look over at the notebooks and manuscripts, the real products of your inner life. Even the letters, gathered and tied with string, could be said to have more reality than what your work generated. You'll die. In a generation or two, the houses will be sold off and the family dispersed. What will persist? A lineage, maybe, of Charlotte's beauty and your instinct for it, of the words that flow from you, facile but undisciplined. To the authors, you're publisher and editor, midwife to their creativity. If work is a marriage, you're the wife.

They'll break into your rooms and find you've been unfaithful to your station. What will they make of it?

You long sometimes just to declaim it or hand out pamphlets to passersby, but this would be ridiculous. You could publish under a pseudonym, but those ruses never work. A whiff of vanity attaches to these attempts.

This one friend, your daughter, and Charlotte's sister Astrid are your only readers, and only your daughter has some sense of how much there is of it—a long shelf that you described to her as an archipelago.

Your London friend produced a book for his family that one of his daughters likened to the houses of the prominent dead. Such books are the ephemera that life sloughs off, mistaking for an anchorage one more buoy loose in a storm. The shelf invites perusal or destruction or both. Only an archival spirit would hold on to them against someone's curiosity or possible admiration. Vanity again, Magnus! ^

^

^

The boat that took you both to her island, Christian elsewhere to make room for your visit. The cottage along the channel, a fishing village where he'd gone to paint, sick of town and his grand metaphors of its hypocrisy, Oda in tow, where he fell in love with Tine, a young widow with children. Expectations were in the air.

You brought her a dark blue housecoat to appease the protectress of the cottage's domestic order. You helped her prepare the food and cook it, invited to be part of the kitchen that was her element. Her bed too was her element, in a room that faced the water, a curtain blowing outward whenever the wind caught it. ^

^

^

Distance gives you freedom; proximity takes it back. This proved axiomatic, but you condemn yourself for it.

Lack of imagination, lack of courage—these are the charges you put to yourself. Did you ever truly believe that time could expand to meet the demands you put on it? You had some evidence that the radical proximity of lovemaking slowed time down, but that elasticity didn't carry over to the demands of the day and the week. ^

^

^

Kat figures in your poems, the medium where your experience of her is best set out. A phenomenon like weather if weather were human, had a heart, desired. And now elsewhere, although sometimes a loose spirit, the way a shaman, unsure of powers that are mostly unconscious, might manifest on that plane. You know a bit about that, a streak of clairvoyance that she brought once, invoked without even noticing. This is when the everyday opens and you glimpse something else. Nothing ordinary, you realize, but then how to act on it?

You staked your life on it, you told yourself, and then you couldn't. Too much in the picture, and not just with you, but it was more than this. Kat predicted it, knowing her nature, and you saw it early on with Oda.

You were with her at the market when she struck you several times, not hard blows but hard enough. It was moments like this when you might have called a halt, but this is to suppose that it wouldn't be resented.

With Oda, you kept your own hopes alive in the face of everything falling apart once distance was gone and she was back, dealing with Christian, looking for a partner, not some older, unreliable fellow-sufferer. It was different with Kat, a force of nature, a great oceanic trench to Oda's warm shoals with their darting sharks.

You think suddenly how close observation of lovers leaves you with adjectives unique to them, each a tag for some unforgettable feature, response, quirk, or phrase. Clothed and in the world, their natures remain distinct and occasionally circumstance revives this briefly, seemingly against their will. They laugh or look at you, then remember they've resolved never to laugh, to look away or askance. But you too can be surprised by the welling up of feelings you thought were gone. There they are, triggered when she lets her guard down. ^

^

^

In the heat of it, Charlotte thought, there's nothing you won't do. You're afraid, but your fear makes you brave and you brazen it out at home and abroad. You let yourself get swept up in the world of this other, with its occasions, galleries, dealers, and studios. An outsider in Kristiana, Leon was its emissary from the perspective of his local clientele and those he visited, a go-between or arranger. In Berlin, Paris, or Milan, you were an exotic from the far north, but they soon realized you were revisiting their cities, had studied there when young, owing to parents whose emulation of their continental peers took in their daughters.

You were fearless back then, traveling unaccompanied to the Levant, shrugging off the predators. So much seen, and then you saw it again in the company of an insider, there for business. His days were taken up with it, but then there were the lavish dinners where he showed you off. It made you happy, those displays, but it was a relief to come back even if home life was arduous with Magnus rattled and unhappy. You could no longer abide his intimate self, which at first threatened the marriage and then posed no threat to it, as far as you could tell. You kept your distance as he worked through it, pitched into gloom, elated, and wary in turns.

You were fearless but not heedless. The excitement of those outings, their sense of freedom, masked irritations and conflicts. Reality undermined your imagined possibilities. You missed the familiar, however much you chafed at it. You began to question if one world could really be exchanged for another, and what kind of person you'd have to be to do this—someone capable of breaking life in two. You weren't that person, as it proved, and neither was Leon. It wore on both of you. Art was his daily life, but the business of it needed him back at home. He had other interests that lay fallow if he wasn't there, attending to them. You make room where you can in life for the things that matter to you. Leon was one such once, and then he wasn't.

Unlike art, properties can be planned and tended like a garden, with regular harvests to show for it. They give you constant fodder for dinner-table conversation owing to your interactions with managers, the help, and the tenants, too, of course, many of them visitors to this provincial outpost. You've gained a web of connections, each letter beginning, "I heard from my cousin that you can help us find a place to live when my husband takes up his post. We have three girls, two, four, and nine." The King should pay you a stipend, Magnus joked. Young and insecure, these women rely on you to find their footing. Some become friends, invited to your dinners, but they all treat you with deference. Not like your local tenants—bachelors, spinsters, and widows, mostly, a complaining bunch. The professors are different—their work often takes them elsewhere. They become your emissaries, recommending you to visiting colleagues who need temporary quarters. Several are regulars, coming north to avoid the oppressive heat of their summers.

Your oldest son slowly takes on more of it. He's made his share of mistakes, not always heeding your advice, but fewer now as he understands you better and has more feeling for it. You have good managers. It's possible to detach yourself, but then you miss it. You made this life consciously enough. You argue against yourself sometimes and Magnus always contradicts you: "No, Charlotte, you've done a lot." Not that you believe him, but then you do. A garden is not a farm and your properties are not an empire. You're neither a farmer nor an empress, but you've made a situation that's supportable, as the French say.

New Year's Day

Painting by Patricia Sonnino

The social round was over. The new year, a week or two from the solstice, staggered toward the light. Once past that doleful marker, Magnus awaited spring, but the dead of winter lay in between. Some thrive on it, but he wasn't among them. He turned now to the task at hand—some sort of a summing up at the cusp, that brief belvedere between the two terrains, the past clearer but the future the supposed point of the exercise.

He opened his diary. When he looked back at these entries, they often spoke of what was missing. His summings-up showed this by omission. What we expect or demand of ourselves, what we resolve, comes with an awareness that we're unlikely to do much that goes against our nature. Sometimes a specific resolution, made at any point for a pressing reason, is carried out, but this is rare enough that others note it. What we desire, though, more often comes to pass. And then we live it out, learning what the gods had in mind.

The deficits weren't as glaring as before. Life no longer tore at him. Instead, it stretched out beyond its previous limits, but the kind of opening out lawful to our species, respecting time's gravity, its narrowness and its endlessness, the fecundity of what could seem arid and lifeless. In spring this was most evident. When his firstborn arrived in May, a friend said this son of theirs was the result of Saturnalia, when license was granted and taken. How much more so here at midsummer—drunken evenings and the rutting universal.

It tortured him, the sounds of lovers in the fields and woods, and he alone and bereft. Grief's double, he saw later, although it took a layer of skin from him as it tore apart his sense of self. Not much of a Stoic.

^

^

^

How would it have been if he'd married Oda in the wake of Christian's abdication or if he'd married Kat? He realized he'd never given any thought to these outcomes, believing in each case that it was impossible. More children, no doubt, and the unfolding of a marriage. This summer house might have gone unbuilt. It was his success that produced the money for it, but Charlotte's legacy that made possible the extravagance. Oda had no children, but Kat's brood would have to be absorbed, her tyrant appeased. Or not, the children a bone of contention. He'd said as much, in a conversation she threw back at him later as things fell apart.

He was married—that was the truth of the matter, and somehow the marriage would either have to expand to absorb another or return to something like its roots. The passion he felt for both women obscured this, but the pain of losing Oda affected him, he realized, making him wary of passion itself and aware that Kat was as immersed in it as he'd been. These displaced symmetries run through life, despite our efforts to forestall them, to do no harm. We make grievous errors, glaring in hindsight but less so as we make them. We always imagine that we're immune, that what catches out the rest of humankind will exempt us.

Marriage makes you hunger for other—for knowledge of another, to be more accurate. It was clear that women shared this, but their fecundity made it riskier. Not simply because pregnancy was a hazard, but also because everything seemed freighted by it. Accounts of other cultures, like the Tahitians, suggested that this was not inevitable, but then here they were, always, in the once-pagan, ever-patriarchic north. Nonetheless, you hunger. Karin, who he came upon by chance, found him finally old enough to be content to be her friend.

That she had hungers of her own was spoken of, and marriage when it happened might absorb her, but all of this surfaced in its own time, in conversations that had their own peculiar thread, had a tempo that coincided with his own sense of time as being tuned to others of significance, more their tempo than his own. His mind leapt across whole canyons of time as if there's been no interruption, with a sympathetic person.

He saw that in general he preferred women to men. Men were fine and he got on with them, but they were often living within the wrapping of their role or stature, or pursuing some barely hidden agenda. Especially when several men are present, their focus on whoever is important to them gives their game away. Magnus was used to the pecking order of engagement, deference, and a hurried nod. Or they were magnanimous, but only to the point when they felt this tendency of theirs, or whatever motivated it, was sated. Women could be this way, too, of course, but women were more genuinely curious, less caught up in things men valued.

What made their marriage possible was the autonomy that allowed themselves. There's a school of marriage that seeks confessions and sees conduct as so many rules, infractions, and penalties--a lawyer's brief of indiscretions. But their life together was more like the sort of partnership that builds an enterprise.

They had a relationship rather like old business partners who met regularly with a loose agenda and the affection of long familiarity. Their quarrels with each other were forgotten. They discussed what mattered. ^

^

^

Over coffee and pastry, Karin would recount a would-be beau or her latest crush, the agonies of scholarship, the fruits of her travels, her close readings of one writer or another. The conversations made him realize how much he'd experienced. No situation is like any other—this always prefaced his comments. He was also an observer of her over time, able to recount things and note patterns when he saw them. Most of all, he cared for her and was dispassionate, the way he was with his daughter. He tried not to give advice but to share what he saw. When people are starting out, their talents and ambitions are mostly untested by action. They plunge in and learn, sometimes brutally, what works and what doesn't, and how to live with this knowledge as it's gained, to respond to it. The main thing, Magnus felt, was to be convinced of their innate right to be.

At the margins, humanity may shade off into monstrosity, and crowds can be volatile and dangerous, but most people are creative beings—far more so than is normally credited. As such, they live experimentally, hoping not to damage themselves and others. Conventions like school, marriage, and work exist to channel them and try to limit the carnage, but the experiments continue.

We think of ourselves as adepts, even alchemists, but experience is the only thing life gives us. More and more aware of life's perils, we're cautious, but having survived our mishaps, we find ourselves exchanging known perils for unknown ones. It's our nature as a species to experiment, which leads us to err constantly.

And yet we're walled in by a culture that condemns us for it, condemns us for being who we are. The priests pointed to the Decalogue, the judges to the law, and the bureaucrats to their volumes of rules, a mishmash of tradition, trial and error, and common sense that had points in its favor but were riddled with exceptions. Any updating lagged behind daily life as led in households, offices, and the streets. Instead, there was ongoing tension between overlapping interests, each set on bending others to its will. Generational change was forged in shouting matches between parents and children, and between the ruling classes and young resisters.

Magnus sympathized with those critical of society. Its hypocrisy was usually rank, imposing rules they were no longer in danger of transgressing and unwilling, typically, to surrender its own advantages for the commonweal. When youth threw this back, society redoubled its antipathy. If war broke out-- it always threatened to—the young would be sacrificed unhesitatingly by the grand old men who decide these things.

Emigration was encouraged for similar reasons—to ship dissent off to other shores, clear the streets of riffraff.

The young were all too glad to leave society behind, take their chances on less encumbered continents. ^

^

^

Charlotte opened her notebook and wrote the date: a new year. She drew an outline of her garden and its beds, picturing it as she did so. It brought to mind her resolutions for it as summer waned.

With her pencil, she sketched some changes, mapped out what might be planted where. She saw herself in the midst of it, as winter tapered off and the summer house could be visited, preparing the ground, clearing and planting, adding a path or a terrace, trimming before things came alive.

She led these activities and joined in, exchanging city clothes for the freedom of the country.

In high summer, she spent six weeks away from town, receiving visitors but never going in.

She'd made a practice of it ever since Magnus built the house, testing the mettle of her managers and her own tendency to intervene. It was a kind of controlled experiment, not unlike the garden itself, with much hands-on preparation. Six weeks would pass and then, without fanfare, she'd go back for a week to see how things stood. If they stood well, then back again for another three.

Although she liked the bracing cold of winter, daily active life was slowed by it. The world outside her door was harsh, and many suffered who lacked effective shelter from it. She gave her support to a school for indigent girls that did well by them. The boys, she felt, had more options.

God help the old, the alcoholic, the ruined by their own folly. She gave money for their relief.

Summer was a release from all of this—she could feel it in the streets. Those who survived were out carousing, first from gratitude and then later from the panic that penury induces. It was a release, but temporary. She thought of Ceres. If her garden had a temple, it would honor her.

She knew women who fled to the south in the winter, although she remembered being in Venice one February, when the cold, damp air was matched by buildings that were never heated.

That first trip, cutting her teeth on difference, stayed with her. Something of those places is in the garden, she realized—certain herbs, small moments of color or light or texture. The glaciers churned the planet and bits of elsewhere landed here, fragments of things she'd seen, memories.

It doesn't take much to bring the past to mind. She shared this with Magnus, from what she could glean from his writing. He wrote it out and she made it tangible, at least to her. Did Ceres spend the winter months mapping out the farms and crops, the beds her daughter slept on, freed from the hell of another? What was that daughter's life like? Probably not as bad as they said.

My great-grandparents and their family at the summer house on their anniversary.

Common Place | Except as noted Š 2020 by John J. Parman | complace.j2parman.com