Where or When by Anita Shreve Read Free Book Online Page A

and the view was obscured.
Actually, I often go to the beach and look out toward Portugal. This activity consumes more of my time than it ought to.
This letter is hard to write, knowing you are far away and won’t even read it for at least a week. I wonder what it is like for you in England, what you are doing. I imagine you with a long scarf wrapped around your neck, walking along a path toward a beautiful stone building where your students are waiting for you.
I was moved by your archaeological dig and by the two photographs. It was the last day of camp, and we had asked someone to take the picture of us together. I remember that my parents had arrived already, before yours, and that they were standing off at some distance, watching us, barely masking their impatience. I also remember that I cried all the way home in the car and that when I told my mother I had given you a gold bracelet with the words “The Ridge” on it, she said to me: “So where’s
my
bracelet?”
What happened to me thirty-one years ago was love at first sight. I don’t understand the phenomenon entirely, and I’m more than a little embarrassed at having to resort to the cliches of old 45s, but I can remember vividly that gut-wrenching feeling. I am less clear about what happened to me when I saw your picture in the newspaper two months ago. Last night I was reading Paul Ricoeur, and a line of his stopped me: “the fulfillment of an antecedent meaning which remained in suspense.” He meant the irrational irruption of Jesus Christ in the context of the New Testament, but I tend to take bits where I find them and apply them to my own life. The difficulty for me is that I can’t completely absorb what happened thirty-one years ago or on September 15, because I don’t have enough access to the antecedent.
All this means is that I want to meet the woman who has grown from the girl I remember.
Time has taken on a new dimension. I feel the chaos of time, but I’m trying to comprehend it in relationship to loss. I spent all of August with Stephen Hawking, thinking about “quarks” and black holes, but he didn’t mention how waiting for a letter or recrossing a warp of thirty-one years to a young girl’s face can make time fold in upon itself. My daughter is now the same age as we were then, a “fact” of physics or of nature that baffles me.
Perhaps I am looking only for an open connection.
Today has more warmth than you would imagine for the fifteenth of November. The ocean was a dusty blue when I drove to the beach earlier, with the haze on the horizon. There was a stillness this afternoon, both visual and sensual, that was soporific—or at least that’s the excuse I am using to explain why I dozed for twenty minutes in my car with the sun warming the front seat through the windshield. At the beach, across a long wooden bridge from the mainland, you can hear the bells from the church tower in the center of town, and I like listening to them, interspersed with the calling of the gulls. Even the gulls were half asleep today, though—enjoying this short Indian-summer respite from a string of cold gray days. I nearly missed my lunch appointment.
You mention my wife, and I mention your husband, and we receive in reply only further questions or silences. I might one day be able to speak to you or write you about my marriage, but I am more engaged now (and have been for some time) with the sound of bells from a church tower or the mysterious physics of time. What to reveal and what to conceal is perplexing to me.
For the same reason that I cannot focus on my marriage, my business is shot to hell. I used to be better at compartmentalizing. I’m supposed to sell insurance and real estate, but the entire town is under siege, and every dime is frozen. I could write you more about this, but I’d like to keep the shit out of this correspondence. I’d like to transcend the