Ship Fever. Andrea Barrett
as the ones they lost, and their new home in Palmyra still doesn’t feel quite like home. But all they have lost in order to be together would seem bearable had they continued to feel the way they felt on the island.
They’re sensible people, and very well-mannered; they remind themselves that they were young then and are middle-aged now, and that their fierce attraction would naturally ebb with time. Neither likes to think about how much of the thrill of their early days together came from the obstacles they had to overcome. Some days, when Ruby pulls into the driveway still thinking about her last class and catches sight of Jonathan out in the garden, she can’t believe the heavyset figure pruning shrubs so meticulously is the man for whom she fought such battles. Jonathan, who often wakes very early, sometimes stares at Ruby’s sleeping face and thinks how much more gracefully his ex-wife is aging.
They never reproach each other. When the tension builds in the house and the silence becomes overwhelming, one or the other will say, “Do you remember…?” and then launch into one of the myths on which they have founded their lives. But there is one story they never tell each other, because they can’t bear to talk about what they have lost. This is the one about the evening that has shaped their life together.
Jonathan’s hand on Ruby’s back, Ruby’s hand on Jonathan’s thigh, a shirt unbuttoned, a belt undone. They never mention this moment, or the moments that followed it, because that would mean discussing who seduced whom, and any resolution of that would mean assigning blame. Guilt they can handle; they’ve been living with guilt for fifteen years. But blame? It would be more than either of them could bear, to know the exact moment when one of them precipitated all that has happened to them. The most either of them has ever said is, “How could we have known?”
But the night in the library is what they both think about, when they lie silently next to each other and listen to the wind. It must be summer for them to think about it; the children must be with their other parents and the rain must be falling on the cedar shingles overhead. A candle must be burning on the mantel above the bed and the maple branches outside their window must be tossing against each other. Then they think of the story they know so well and never say out loud.
There was a huge storm three nights before they left the island, the tail end of a hurricane passing farther out to sea. The cedar trees creaked and swayed in the wind beyond the library windows. The students had staggered off to bed, after the visitor from Woods Hole had finished his lecture on the explorations of the Alvin in the Cayman Trough, and Frank and Gunnar and Carol had shrouded themselves in their rain gear and left as well, sheltering the visitor between them. Ruby sat at one end of the long table, preparing bottles of fixative for their expedition the following morning, and Jonathan lay on the sofa writing notes. The boat was leaving just after dawn and they knew they ought to go to bed.
The wind picked up outside, sweeping the branches against the walls. The windows rattled. Jonathan shivered and said, “Do you suppose we could get a fire going in that old fireplace?”
“I bet we could,” said Ruby, which gave both of them the pretext they needed to crouch side by side on the cracked tiles, brushing elbows as they opened the flue and crumpled paper and laid kindling in the form of a grid. The logs Jonathan found near the lobster traps were dry and the fire caught quickly.
Who found the green candle in the drawer below the microscope? Who lit the candle and turned off the lights? And who found the remains of the jug of wine that Frank had brought in honor of the visitor? They sat there side by side, poking at the burning logs and pretending they weren’t doing what they were doing. The wind pushed through the window they’d opened a crack, and the tan window shade lifted and then fell back against the frame. The noise was soothing at first; later it seemed irritating.
Jonathan, whose fingernails were bitten to the quick, admired the long nail on Ruby’s right little finger and then said, half-seriously, how much he’d love to bite a nail like that. When Ruby held her hand to his mouth he took the nail between his teeth and nibbled through the white tip, which days in the water had softened. Ruby slipped her other hand inside his shirt and ran it up his back. Jonathan ran his mouth up her arm and down her neck.
They started in front of the fire and worked their way across the floor, breaking a glass, knocking the table askew. Ruby rubbed her back raw against the rug and Jonathan scraped his knees, and twice they paused and laughed at their wild excesses. They moved across the floor from east to west and later from west to east, and between those two journeys, during the time when they heaped their clothes and the sofa cushions into a nest in front of the fire, they talked.
This was not the kind of conversation they’d had during walks and meals since that first time on the rocks: who they were, where they’d come from, how they’d made it here. This was the talk where they instinctively edited out the daily pleasures of their lives on the mainland and spliced together the hard times, the dark times, until they’d constructed versions of themselves that could make sense of what they’d just done.
For months after this, as they lay in stolen, secret rooms between houses and divorces and jobs and lives, Jonathan would tell Ruby that he swallowed her nail. The nail dissolved in his stomach, he’d say. It passed into his villi and out to his blood and then flowed to bone and muscle and nerve, where the molecules that had once been part of her became part of him. Ruby, who always seemed to know more acutely than Jonathan that they’d have to leave whatever room this was in an hour or a day, would argue with him.
“Nails are keratin,” she’d tell him. “Like hooves and hair. Like wool. We can’t digest wool.”
“Moths can,” Jonathan would tell her. “Moths eat sweaters.”
“Moths have a special enzyme in their saliva,” Ruby would say. This was true, she knew it for a fact. She’d been so taken by Jonathan’s tale that she’d gone to the library to check out the details and discovered he was wrong.
But Jonathan didn’t care what the biochemists said. He held her against his chest and said, “I have an enzyme for you.”
That night, after the fire burned out, they slept for a couple of hours. Ruby woke first and watched Jonathan sleep for a while. He slept like a child, with his knees bent toward his chest and his hands clasped between his thighs. Ruby picked up the tipped-over chair and swept the fragments of broken glass onto a sheet of paper. Then she woke Jonathan and they tiptoed back to the rooms where they were supposed to be.
Imagine an April evening in 1762. A handsome house set in the gently rolling Kent landscape a few miles outside the city of London; the sun just set over blue squill and beech trees newly leafed. Inside the house are a group of men and a single woman: Christopher Billopp, his sister Sarah Anne, and Christopher’s guests from London. Educated and well-bred, they’re used to a certain level of conversation. Just now they’re discussing Linnaeus’s contention that swallows retire under water for the winter—that old belief, stemming from Aristotle, which Linnaeus still upholds.
“He’s hardly alone,” Mr. Miller says. Behind him, a large mirror reflects a pair of portraits: Christopher and Sarah Anne, painted several years earlier as a gift for their father. “Even Klein, Linnaeus’s rival, agrees. He wrote that a friend’s mother saw fishermen bring out a bundle of swallows from a lake near Pilaw. When the swallows were placed near a fire, they revived and flew about.”
Mr. Pennant nods. “Remember the reports of Dr. Colas? Fishermen he talked to in northern parts claimed that when they broke through the ice in winter they took up comatose swallows in their nets as well as fish. And surely you remember reading how Taletini of Cremona swore a Jesuit had told him that the swallows in Poland and Moravia hurled themselves into cisterns and wells come autumn.”
Mr. Collinson laughs at this, although not unkindly, and he looks across the table at his old friend Mr. Ellis. “Hearsay, hearsay,” he says. He has a spot on his waistcoat. Gravy, perhaps. Or cream. “Not one shred of direct evidence. Mothers,