He doesn’t meet my eyes. “That’s great,” he says, after a pause. “You know, Eleanor and I have that little beach house in Rehoboth, and you’re welcome to borrow it if you’d like. It might do you good to get away for a while.”
I think about it. Early morning walks on the beach with Lorelei running ahead of me, evenings bathed in the scent of sea air. It’s not an unwelcome idea.
Matthew goes on. “The only thing is,” he says, “Eleanor’s allergic to dogs, so you wouldn’t be able to bring Lorelei. But you can always board her or something for a week or two. Julia has dogs; she might be able to give you the name of a good kennel.”
Of course, I think. Of course. “Thanks anyway,” I say. My voice sounds thin and brittle as glass. “But I don’t think I can leave my research at this particular point.”
Matthew nods, looking down at the floor. “All right, then,” he says, turning toward the door. He looks stricken. I soften a bit.
“Really, I’m fine,” I say. “I’m sure this whole thing sounds crazy to you, but I really think there’s something there. I feel like I’m on the verge of something important. I just need some time to work it out.”
He smiles doubtfully, but at least he’s meeting my eyes. “Just imagine,” he says, “what it will mean if you succeed.” He pauses thoughtfully, considering it. “Well, I’ve got to get back to the meeting. Keep in touch, okay?”
“I will,” I say. “Give my love to Eleanor.”
I gather up the things I need and prepare to leave. On my way out, I notice a scrap of pink paper that has, apparently, been slid under the door. I pick it up. It’s a While You Were Out slip. Scrawled across the top it says, “Your dog called.” In the message space below, there are two words: “Woof, woof.” I crumple up the note and throw it away.
Back at home, I pick up Lexy’s sweater from the bedroom floor and hold it to my face. I wonder what she would think of the turns my life has taken. Lorelei wanders in to greet me, and I give her a little scratch behind the ears.
“Where’s Lexy?” I say to her. She looks up at me sharply. “Go get Lexy,” I say. And all of a sudden, she’s off, running wildly from room to room. I watch, heart-struck, as she charges through the house, sniffing in corners and barking. “Lorelei,” I call after her. “No! Stop it, girl! Quiet! Come!” I run through every command she knows. But it’s no use. I can’t stop her, not now that I’ve spoken those magic words. Around and around the house she runs, searching and yowling for what she has lost.
TWELVE
The first time I asked Lexy to marry me, she said no. It was early December, about nine months since we’d first met, and we’d gone away for the weekend. We were staying at a small inn on the beach, and the day had been rainy and blustery. We’d spent most of our time inside, with the fireplace lit, playing board games and drinking wine.
Now, as we lay in bed, Lexy reached over and picked up a felt-tip pen from the bedside table and took hold of both my hands. “This is what you give to me,” she said, and she began to write. She started on the backs of my hands and then turned them over to write on the palms. She covered my hands with words. Square eggs, she wrote, and beaches in winter. Your lips on my neck and a week of appetizers, and really bad music. She wrote, Coffee milk, and Scrabble and flowers that look like the devil. By the time she had finished, there was no space left at all.
“Now it’s your turn,” she said. She gave me the pen and offered up her hands. I didn’t know what to write. Hunger, I thought, and fullness. A feeling like wings inside me. The days and the seasons and a dog with a rough velvet hide. But instead I took her hand, and writing upside down so she could read it, I wrote letter by letter and finger by finger, whole world.
It was the truest, most romantic thing I had ever said, and I didn’t even say it out loud. Caught up as I was in the wide generosity of my emotions, I turned her hands over and, almost without thinking about it, wrote across her palms, Will you marry me?
She drew back and pulled her hands away. “Are you serious?” she said. She wasn’t smiling.
“I am completely serious,” I said, surprised to find that I was.
“You’re asking me to marry you.”
“I’m asking you to marry me.”
She searched my face. “Well… no,” she said. She looked away. “I have to say no. We don’t know enough about each other yet.”
I was perfectly calm. I was prepared to give her some time to get used to the idea. “You know everything there is to know about me,” I said. “And I know enough about you to know that I love you.”
She turned away from me. “What’s the matter?” I asked.
She didn’t speak for a moment. She had made her back stiff and hard, and when I reached out to touch her, she flinched away. “I know you love me,” she said finally. Her voice was ragged. “But how do you know that you love me?”
“Well, I know it because I want to be with you all the time,” I began.
“No. That’s not what I mean. I mean, how does it occur to you? How often do you really know it?”
“Always. I always know it.”
“Yes, you always know it, but it’s… it’s like in the back of your mind, right? It’s like… it’s like the way that you know that you’re going to die.”
I reached for her shoulder and rolled her over so that she was looking at me again. “Lexy, I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
“Well, I mean, everyone knows that they’re going to die, right, but most of the time you let it slip from your mind. I mean, it’s always there in your head, and if anyone asked, you’d know the answer. But then there are some moments when all of a sudden you just know it, you know? It suddenly hits you that you’re going to die someday, and you say, ‘Oh, my God, this is the biggest fact of my life, and I’d almost forgotten.’”
“Well, so what?” I said. “What does that have to do with anything? No, I don’t think about my own death every moment of every day, but that’s because I want to forget it. You can’t go on with your life if you don’t forget about it sometimes. But that’s not the way I feel about you.”
“But still. That’s the way you experience it, right? It’s in fits and starts.” She turned away again.
I ran my hands over my face, rubbing hard at the skin, trying to feel the sturdiness underneath. We had not fought like this before, and I felt as if I were trying to swim through molasses. “Come on, Lexy, why are you doing this? I love you all the time. It’s always with me. But what do you want me to say? You can’t maintain that level of intensity every minute of your life.”
She was very quiet. “Well, I can. I do. I can’t take one breath, not one single breath, without knowing that I love you.”
I just lay there for a moment, looking at the long line of her back. “Where is this coming from?” I asked.
She didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she turned and looked at me. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m sorry. I guess you just kind of freaked me out a little, proposing like that, out of the blue.”
“Do you want me to take it back?”
She held her hands up in front of her face, looking at the words I’d written. “No,” she said. “I don’t want you to take it back.” She sighed. “But I can’t say yes yet. I don’t think you know enough about me. What if you find out more and you change your mind?”
“Well, I don’t think that’s likely. But, okay, go ahead—tell me the things I don’t know.”