Asylum--Chapter Six The Interior

Chapter Six
The Interior

I slumped in the corner booth of our favorite restaurant in Pullman, staring at the paper placemat showing the signs of the Chinese zodiac. Pig, goat, dragon, snake.

“You look like shit,” Thomas said, in his typical blunt way. 

“Thanks.”

Thomas held my hand cross the table and looked into my eyes, deeply troubled by what he saw. Hi face showed love, caring, concern, confusion. Perhaps my long absence had made him more appreciative of me.  It surprised me and gave me hope. 

“Tell me what’s wrong,” he said. “You were so strong, so happy when you first got back from Eagle, so full of life. And since then you’ve just gone down and down.” 

He was right. Since coming home three weeks earlier, I’d felt like I was sinking—getting mired again in our marriage, in a life I no longer found satisfying. I missed the boreal woods, the grand flow of the Yukon River, the peace I had found in having nature all around me. The truly alive person I’d been in Alaska was starting to fade.

My tears dripped onto the cheerful red figures on the placemat, blurring the monkey and the rooster. I was glad the booth afforded us a little privacy. My sign is the rooster, Thomas’s the rabbit. According to the placemat, he and I have a basic incompatibility. 

“You’ve been traveling so much. What is it? Do you just need more privacy? You don’t like our house anymore?” 

I sighed and said, “You know how much the noise gets to me.”

“Is it me? You don’t like living with me anymore?” 

I didn’t answer.

“If that’s it, then I wish you would go.” He spoke tenderly. “I would rather have you happy without me than unhappy with me.” 

I started tearing the label off my beer, still unable to speak. He was giving me an out. But I didn’t want it. Thomas was the cornerstone of my life. I wanted to stay with him and see what we could do to mend our relationship.

A note of resignation crept into Thomas’s voice. “I know you probably had plenty of opportunities to an affair while you were gone. But if you did, don’t tell me.” He appeared to be less shocked at the idea of an affair than I’d been when I’d lured Billy into bed and only later realized what I had done. I wanted desperately to tell him the truth: I’d had a one-night stand; it was over; I didn’t expect to ever go back to Eagle or see the guy again. But part of me was afraid this was true—that I’d never see Billy again or Eagle or the Yukon River. It was all bound up together: the man, the village, the surrounding wilderness. I couldn’t separate one from another.

I couldn’t bear to hurt Thomas. I thought of his gentle side: how he still hugged and kissed the boys, even though they were teenagers; the softness of his hands on my back as he gave me a massage. But I knew how quickly he could go from loving to harsh. I was scared of how he would react. He saw the world in black and white: I had slept with another man; therefore I must not love him anymore. 

Thomas already felt a profound sense of rejection. For his entire life, people had considered him crazy or an incredible asshole, not understanding his odd and sometimes off-putting behavior. Even as a young man, with his pale hands that spoke of many solitary hours at the piano and the way he easily took offence, thrusting up his chin in protest, he seemed to be alternately hiding from and fending off the world. The hardest blow had come just six years earlier. We had uprooted our family and moved to Illinois so that both of us could go to graduate school. I would be earning a master’s degree in writing, and he would be getting a doctorate in music composition. Three years later, doctorate in hand, Thomas had job interviews all across the country—Oregon, New Mexico, Minnesota, Indiana, Kansas, Washington but had bungled every one. 

Once, when he was getting ready to fly to an interview at an exclusive men’s college, he put on his favorite outfit—a ripped plaid flannel shirt and baggy pants with the cuffs rolled up.

 “You’re not wearing that, are you?” I asked.

“Yes, I have to be comfortable on the plane ride or I’ll never get through it.” 

Any chance of getting the job was blown when the head of the department picked him up at the airport and took him directly to the interview, dressed like a bum.

Other interviews went equally poorly, even though Thomas was eminently qualified to be a university professor, with his encyclopedic knowledge of music history, his years of adjunct teaching, his conducting ability, and his complex and original compositions. But no matter how hard he tried, Thomas always said or did something glaringly inappropriate. The hiring committees were always impressed with his qualifications and experience, but, apparently, when it came to asking themselves if he would make a congenial, easy-to-work-with colleague, the answer was always no. We hadn’t learned yet that Thomas had Aspberger’s—that wouldn’t come for another year, so we were both frustrated and mystified by his inability to land a job. 

We returned to Pullman broke and disappointed. The kids were happy to be home, renewing old friendships and forming new ones. I was miserable at my secretarial job at the university, the only work I was able to find. It was the first time in my life that I wasn’t working at a library, and the office atmosphere felt stifling. The depression that had recurred at irregular intervals since I was sixteen surfaced again, and I lay on the bed staring at the wall for hours. Thomas had to sometimes drag me bodily out of bed to get me to go to work. 

Thomas alternately blamed the world and himself for our state of affairs, switching between anger and despair as he obsessed about our precarious finances and his huge school loans—all for nothing. I realized how many of his dreams had been bound up in that now-useless Doctor of Musical Arts degree. We all had our dreams. Thomas’s of a “real job.” Mine—as I reached middle age—like my grandmother’s, became Alaska. 

After the waitress took our order and we were alone again, I took a deep breath and said, “I fell in love with Eagle.” When I had first come home, I had told Thomas about the old cabins and the river curving beneath the high bluff, the extravagantly bearded men and the women who exuded strength. I’d tried to describe the unearthly light of two o’clock in the morning in May, the rose fading in one corner of the sky while it glowed brighter in another as sunset gave way to dawn. He’d listened with interest as I’d attempted to explain the timeless quality of the place, but it was something that could not be put into words, and my photos of tumbledown log cabins and delicate ice sculptures on the riverbank after breakup captured little of Eagle’s essence.

I traced the blurred outline of the rooster. That night with Billy had changed me, just as it had changed him. I thought of him standing at the boat landing, his shoulders a little straighter, his face more open than the day before. I didn’t know if that experience had transformed his life or whether he’d go back to living his same old hermit ways. But this was my life, and it wasn’t over. Surely there must be a way to revive the woman I’d been in Eagle and put her in an environment where she could flourish.

“I want to move to Alaska,” I blurted out. 

“To Eagle?” Thomas said with surprise. 

“No, there’s no way for us to make a living there. Just anywhere in the Interior. I want to be where there are rivers and mountains. Wilderness. It’s so beautiful up there. If you could only see it, you would understand.”
  “The Palouse isn’t beautiful enough for you?”

You could stand in the middle of Pullman—in front of this very restaurant—and see the hills covered in still-green wheat. I loved the soft undulations of the landscape, with the occasional farmhouse tucked in a secluded fold.

“Yes, it’s beautiful, but it’s so tame.” The Palouse was a long-settled place, a region where every spare acre of land had been tilled and planted until all that was left of the original grasslands, across which wild horses had once run, were a few protected areas and the old, undisturbed graveyards I visited occasionally. The hills, which sloped like sand-dunes, foreshortened the view. I felt sheltered there, but sometimes I got the feeling of being hemmed in, longing for far horizons, distant peaks.

While writing on summer nights with the window open, I heard coyotes yipping from the farmers’ fields, and wondered what it would be like to hear wolves howling. Sometimes I escaped by driving forty miles to Liz’s ranch on the Snake River. The power of the cold, deep river and the timeless solidity of the canyon walls made me feel a peace and wholeness I had not felt before. But my experiences there were borrowed ones. I was just participating briefly in others’ lives. I wanted such a life for my own.

“Up there, it’s wild and huge. You get this incredible feeling of space, like the land goes on forever.” I thought of the wide sweep of country I had looked down upon when I flew from Tok to Eagle. Just the thought of it made me feel as expansive as the landscape—as if anything were possible. Alaska changes people. Perhaps it could change Thomas, too.  Together, in a new place, maybe we could make a fresh start on our marriage.

“You could teach up there. Why couldn’t you?” I asked, leaning toward him across the table.

“Haven’t you noticed? No one will give me a job,” he said bitterly.

“Well, maybe not a university position, but it could be at a public school.”

“You need a teaching credential to do that.”

“If you earned a credential this year, you could look for a job up there next year.”

“Alaska—I suggested that years ago,” he responded with a laugh. 

We’d flirted with the idea of moving north sixteen years ago, when we decided to leave Santa Cruz, California, where we’d been living since I graduated from the university. We had considered Sitka at the time because I’d been there for Smokey’s funeral that spring. I had been enchanted by how beautiful it was, with small islands dotting Sitka Sound and the classic volcanic shape of Mount Edgecumbe rising like Mount Fuji across the water. But the constant rain in the state’s panhandle had made the idea unappealing. Thomas had been attracted to Alaska not so much for the landscape, which he’d never seen, as by the idea that the state was full of iconoclasts, and he thought his own private brand of individualism might be accepted there. In a state full of characters, perhaps his oddities would not seem so pronounced. 

I was relieved Thomas didn’t dismiss the idea of moving to Alaska out of hand. I knew he was worried about the long-term success of his music school and the uncertainty of our finances. Maybe going north was the answer.

The potstickers arrived and suddenly I was hungry. As we ate, we talked over the idea. Thomas was game. He made decisions impulsively and stuck to them, so his immediate acceptance of the plan did not surprise me very much. Our wedding ceremony in Santa Cruz had included the vow that we would “live in a green and peaceful place.” The fulfillment of that promise had brought us to the Palouse where the green fields provided a vision of bucolic farm life. But what place was more green, more peaceful than Alaska? I was thrilled that the possibility of moving there might become a reality. 

As we discussed the idea of a future in Alaska, the concern on Thomas’s face was replaced by a look of growing excitement. I knew he’d felt for years that I’d put my all into the boys and that he came in a distant third. We had both harbored hopes that when the kids left home, we might be able to rekindle our relationship. Maybe this was our chance. My conflicting feelings about Billy would just have to sort themselves out; after all, he hadn’t been exactly keen on the idea of seeing me again.

The timing seemed to be right: Emlyn was at college; Ambrose would undoubtedly be out of the house soon. Thomas and I spent the rest of the evening developing a plan. It was a good plan, logical, well-laid out, and achievable. We had no idea it would be put into effect sooner than we could have possibly anticipated.

Billy called a few days later to tell me he’d mailed my coat to me, which I had left in Eagle because it wouldn’t fit in my luggage, overstuffed with all the souvenirs I’d picked up: a syrup tin shaped like a log cabin from the old dump, smooth river rocks, curled fingers of birch bark. The sound of his gentle, affable voice was so sweet to me that I couldn’t bear the thought of never hearing it again. But what about Thomas? a voice inquired. We had just made plans to move to Alaska. How could I still want to hang onto my tie to Eagle and Billy? I told myself that a simple phone call between friends was not like spending one night in a stranger’s bed. Even so, I felt guilty as I asked Billy to call me the following week. He expressed surprise and hesitancy but finally agreed.

The next week, Billy called me from the red phone booth. He told me about the small daily news in Eagle: the progress of his garden; who had their king salmon net in the water already and whether they were catching anything yet; the unusually hot, dry and windy weather—perfect fire conditions, he fretted. Billy’s speech was quaint and full of archaic expressions: He found the fire situation “vexing” and mentioned the “baleful unsettling wind.” He’d once been “sweet on a girl” and he’d been “all stove up inside” when they broke up. Phrases like “time flew” and the moon “waxed fat,” and “I bade him goodbye” sounded natural coming from him. When I remarked on his use of language I’d only heard my great-grandmother use, he said teasingly, “By gum, I think you’re right.”.”

“It fits with your old-timey ways,” I said, “All those things you know how to do—trap and hunt, tell time by the sun, make your own bullets and beer, use a sewing awl to mend your moccasins, fashion a pistol holster out of an old boot, bake bread and cakes without recipes.”

“Yes,” he said a little sadly, “I’m full of useless skills from a hundred years ago.” His sorrow was not for himself but for a world so much the poorer because it was a place where these skills were no longer needed. 

 I finally brought up the topic I’d been avoiding because I was full of trepidation at how he would react. Maybe he felt I was safe to have as a friend, despite my married status, because I was fifteen hundred miles away. How would he feel if I was within driving distance of Eagle?

“You know how much I love Alaska, right?”

“Yes, I could see that when you were here.”

“Well, you won’t believe this, but Thomas and I are discussing the possibility of moving up there in a year.”

“Some people are just meant to be here,” Billy said simply, “And I think you’re one of them.”

Relief flooded me that his response was positive. It didn’t occur to me until later that he might have welcomed the idea because to him, with his suspended sense of time, even next year seemed infinitely far in the future. In the meantime, we agreed, our phone calls would continue, though I felt instinctively that I could not tell Thomas about our long-distance friendship. 

The phone rang and it was Billy. Thomas was conducting a children’s orchestra rehearsal in the living room, and I stumbled over the violin cases in the hallway to answer the phone in the kitchen.

“Hang on a second, I have to take the phone into the bedroom and get set up so I can hear you.” 

I set the telephone down on the bed and piled blankets and pillows against the door to dampen the sound. Then I shoved a heavy file cabinet against the door as a barricade and sat down with my back against it.

“What’s all the noise?” Billy asked.

Beyond the sound of violin strings still ringing in my ears, the noise of the students climbing in the apple tree outside my window, the shrieks of laughter coming from the trampoline by the back fence, beyond all that, through the telephone wire, I imagined I could hear the stillness of Eagle. I wanted to crawl through the phone and into that quiet space. The bathroom door slammed as a student went in, and it slammed again as he or she went out.

“Just the usual. Thomas’s having an orchestra rehearsal, and they just took a break, so there are kids rampaging up and down the hallway and three girls are causing a commotion in the treehouse.”

I heard the click of the extension being picked up and the beeping as one of the students tried to make a call. 

“Hello?” 

I recognized little Dong Yang’s voice. “I have to call my mom for a ride.”

“I’m on the phone. I’ll be off in a few minutes.”

The file cabinet bumped against my back as someone shoved at the door.

“Louise, open the door,” Thomas shouted above the sound of the children.

“I’m talking to Ingrid,” I yelled back. “What do you want?” 

“Do we have any corn pads?”

“Look in the medicine cabinet.”

It was quiet for a moment.

Billy said, “Corn pads?”

“Yeah, those little adhesive pads you stick on a corn on your foot. He wants to put one on the end of a kid’s bow so their little finger won’t slip off.”

This, like any talk about music or literature or art left Billy bewildered, as foreign to him as his talk of guns and hunting and trapping were to me. He hesitated a moment before trying to go on with the conversation.

“I haven’t gotten my net in yet. I’m thinking of trying that eddy just down from Eagle Creek or maybe at the end of Dog Island.”

“That sounds good. I’d like to go fishing with you sometime.”

I heard a crash outside my door as a family photo fell to the floor, knocked off by two students who, by the sound of it, were wrestling in the hallway.

“Billy, I give up. I gotta go. There may be broken glass. Next time why don’t you call at night, about ten-thirty or eleven. Thomas will be asleep or he’ll think it’s for my son and won’t answer it. Ambrose is usually still over at a friend’s house at that time of night.”

“Okay, Louise. Goodbye my tender friend.”

Even as Thomas and I started to look into future jobs in Alaska, I couldn’t get my mind off of this strange woodsman. With calls so difficult, and risky—what if it had been Thomas who had picked up the phone?—I asked Billy if I could write to him. He said, “Yes. I’d like that. I don’t get much mail.”

I doubted I’d ever see Billy again, but I wanted very much to keep in contact with him. It had to do with that circle of warmth I had felt in Eagle when I was around him. I felt relaxed and comfortable talking to him on the phone. Deciding to confide in my high school friend, Moana, now living in Texas, I called her from a friend’s house where I was cat-sitting. I told her all about that first night with Billy.

“God, that must have been so incredible! He is going to remember you and that night for the rest of his life,” she laughed. “I'm glad to hear that you are feeling ‘alive, and enriched by the whole experience.’ What you need to do now, girlie, is go get yourself a post office box in some other town so he can write to you.”

A few days later I drove—not without trepidation— to the small farming town of Albion, five miles away, and skulked into the post office, where I rented a box. I couldn’t believe I was doing this. I had crossed over some sort of line. I was having what amounted to an emotional affair. I was a woman who had committed adultery. These things I had thought were impossible were turning out to be true. I no longer knew who I was. Thomas had once described me as a “fairly straight-laced, morally upright person.” I didn’t feel like that anymore. 

The first time I went to check my post office box, I crept out of the house after Thomas and Ambrose were asleep. I started the car in the driveway but I didn’t turn on the headlights until I was halfway down the block. It was June and I drove through the greening fields with the windows open, the warm night thick with the smell of ripening wheat.

To my delight, there was a letter waiting for me. The thrill of it overwhelmed my shame at my devious behavior. I strolled in circles around the parking lot, reading and re-reading the letter, which was a postcard torn from the back of an MRE box. Billy had a whole box full of Meals Ready to Eat—army rations—that he kept on hand as emergency food. On one side were instructions on how to open and heat the meal and a little pep talk for the soldiers on how important it is to eat even if you don't feel like it, to keep up your strength and motivation. On the other side of the improvised postcard was a sweet, short message from Billy.

I’d come prepared with paper, pen, and stamped envelope, and I wrote back, “You are a complete and total surprise to me—a gift dropped from out of the blue. I continue to be grateful that after our sudden and startling collision, you didn't just get up, dust yourself off and walk away.”

It undoubtedly would have been better if Billy had walked away, never called and never wrote. Better yet, I should have been the one to walk away. He had nothing to lose. I had a husband and family. But still, I checked the post office box twice a week and made secret phone calls to Billy from my friend’s house.  As we got to know each other better, I realized I had absolutely nothing in common with this man. He was a member of the NRA, homophobic, and thought environmentalists were a bunch of nutty bunny-lovers and Democrats. (He once got a solicitation from the Sierra Club; he taped two pennies to the letter and mailed it back.) I had been active in the environmental movement for decades, most recently working to get the local farmers to stop using toxic, nerve-damaging pesticides on their fields. I saw a need for gun control and was pro-choice—things that were anathema to Billy. He made reference to overeducated people who had no practical abilities or common sense, making no secret that he regarded me as one of them. I did not feel insulted; indeed I felt a sorry lack of useful skills.

Despite our differences, my tie to Billy felt more real, more right, than anything I’d experienced in a long time. It was like he was meant to be in my life, but I wasn’t sure in what capacity. Perhaps as nothing more than a friend. Maybe a teacher in some way. I could learn a lot from him. The more we spoke, the more we found we had to talk about. Although he disparaged environmentalists, when I asked him why he lived the way he did, he said he liked the idea of “living lightly on the earth.” He pointed out he used very little water. Unlike many Alaskans, he heated with wood instead of fuel oil. He produced little garbage and got around on foot much of the time instead of driving his truck. I admired him for walking the walk instead of just talking the talk like so many self-avowed environmentalists, myself included. He is proud of his frugality, never wasting anything, especially money. For those who depend on Eagle Trading Company for their groceries, life in Eagle is very expensive. But Billy likes it here because “it is a good place to stretch the dollar.” His subsistence lifestyle allows him to get along without participating much in the cash economy.

In our letters, we skirted the issues we disagreed on and found a common bond in our pasts. We both had loved John Denver as teenagers and had wanted to go live in the mountains. He had grown up poring over maps of Maine; I had pored over maps of Colorado. I wanted to live in a big, old house and bake pies and have long-haired, barefoot children who ran in the grass while on the porch their father played bluegrass with his friends. Billy had wanted to cut a clearing in the thick Maine woods and build a cabin, where he would have a garden and raise goats. His aim was to be as self-sufficient as possible, learning the old homesteading skills and making and growing most of what he needed to survive. He had come closer to achieving his dream than I had. 

It wasn’t until I was twenty-nine that I finally moved away from California, and I was glad to say goodbye to my home state. Thomas and I checked out Colorado, but it had lost much of its appeal for me and it held none at all for him, so we headed for the Northwest, where my sister Ingrid lived.

It was just a couple of years later that Billy’s hot shot crew had flown into Eagle to fight a fire downriver. Like many people who wind up there, Billy knew the first time he saw Eagle that he wanted to live there. He came back to stay, as the John Denver song says, “in the summer of his twenty-seventh year.” He bought a piece of property, built a cabin, and settled down. The only thing missing was a partner.

I didn’t imagine for a minute I was the partner he’d been waiting for. He was still pining for Julia, a girl he’d loved and lost back in Arizona when he was twenty-three. Their relationship had ended badly, and that, he had explained, was why he’d taken off for Alaska. For two decades, he had kept her image before him, a blonde, gray-eyed girl of twenty-one. He was still waiting for her, or someone just like her, to step into his life. A heart-weary forty-six-year-old with more than a touch of gray in her brown hair did not fill the bill. And I wasn’t looking for a mate, anyway. I had one already.

When I met Thomas, I was just a seventeen-year-old girl still wearing braces. My entire adulthood had been spent with Thomas. Life without him was inconceivable. I couldn’t fathom ever getting divorced. It had been off the table since I was a child and had watched my parents fight and then make up again. My dad would ask himself aloud if he’d ever consider a divorce. “Murder? Yes. Divorce, never.” They remained married for thirty-six years, until my mother’s death. I, too, had gotten married for life and somehow I believed that this was still possible.