It’s difficult to imagine that Gordon or Marshall have particular songs that evoke romantic feelings. Sonja loves classical music; Beth tells me she likes “New Age.” I thought to leave Miles’s letters to one of the boys — Marshall, I thought, at first, because he is a college professor, words are his love, his business, but hesitated because he already thinks too much about everything. Neither of them would know that landscape. That haunting music. The resonance of the world in which we lived. Giving the letters to either one of them would be like giving them a silent film, based in a foreign land. Which made me think that Sonja should have them. Yet she is dismayed, now, at how men act. They would only reinforce her skepticism. So: Gordon. Better to give them to Gordon, along with something pretty for his wife, and hope that the person who so patiently explained things in his youth — who explained to his brother, at the same moment he was improvising stories himself — would discover things in them worthy of his attention. Gordon has spent his life on the run. He might be interested to know that there was a period of his father’s life when he, too, kept himself apart from everyone. When he wished to reinvent his life.
I’ve been wondering, lately, what it might have been like if I’d never left Montreal. That first day we spent together alone, when I was still a teenager: Miles jumped off the lift and spread his arms, stood at the top of the mountain and whispered Paradis, then drew his arms in tightly as if to embrace the air. If I had drifted away like hot breath hitting cold then. Or skied down the slope, away. What if I had never started with him, let alone been won back through the years by fragments of romantic melodies. Or by an avalanche of letters to which I added a P.S. that was not there: that he loved me. If I had not responded, on the ski slope, or later, sealing my fate as easily as I licked an envelope, I could have had a different life. I could have been the white space between words.