January Thaw --iv

 The cemetery lies a mile or so west of town, up on a bluff above the river. The view is extraordinary, the town down there beneath them, streetlights like a string of pearls in the midnight darkness, now and then a car. Occasionally, one of them comes up the road from town, driving west. The tires sing a higher pitch as they cross the bridge, but most of the time—everyone remembers the exceptions—those cars just keep going, especially at night. No one in the neighborhood hides as they pass, but then no one is afraid. Why should they be?

She knows she needs more from him. “What makes you think you know what happened—between Garrett and me, I mean?” she asks. She turns to face him, not because she’d planned it that way but because she wants him to answer her, not evade. “What makes you think you can create all of that out of thin air and sell it as your own?”

“You don’t understand—“

“It wasn’t ‘thin air’ either. Believe me, I wouldn’t feel the way I do if it was all ‘thin air,’” she says, but she’s not angry.

“I didn’t even know you,” he tells her.

“Then how is it you think you can become me the way you did?”

“’Become you?’”

“Tell the whole world what happened to me—to us—here, in this ‘secret place’ that doesn’t exist.” She pointed north and west. “Walk with me, why don’t you?” she says. “Let me show you.”

“You don’t have to—“

“Let’s go to this ‘Garden of Eden,’” she insists. “Let’s find this place you describe where he took me, this secret place where Garrett and I first made love.” She comes up close to him, and even though he stands a foot taller than she does, she seems unafraid. “You’re surprised that I say it that way?” She looks into his eyes. “Why? I was as human as you. Maybe that’s why it hurt—“

“When I wrote that book,” he says, “you were gone.”

“Not so,” she says, raising a hand as if it were self-evident. “I was here.”

“If I’d have known—“

“If you’d have known it wouldn’t have stopped you for a moment,” she tells him, her voice astoundingly mellow, restrained. “You were driven. It was your calling—these stories. It was what you were born to do.” And now she takes hold of him at the elbow. “Let’s go—you and me—let’s find this secret place.”

“I made it up,” he says. “You know that.”

“But you didn’t make me up,” she says, her hands dropping once again. She takes a few steps back but doesn’t turn around, and her voice is straight-forward, disarmingly passionless. “That’s why these people hated it—what you did—because it was half-truth, and half-truth is worse than a lie because no one knows what to believe.”

“Stories are not to be believed,” he says.

“If that’s true you never would have written a word,” she says. “You wanted to be believed. You wanted nothing but to be believed. That’s why you gave your life for your work. Don’t try to deceive—it doesn’t become you and it never did.”

Just exactly what she wants from him is not so easy to name, but she knows as yet she doesn’t have it. “We remember when you came and chose your plot, some of us do.” She doesn’t raise her voice. “We remember the tears too, not for dying but for your marriage—how it broke just then. We remember these things.”

He looks up at her, amazed.

“Of that you never wrote a word,” she says.

“It’s in there,” he tells her, “that damned agony—it’s in there. You can find it all over in my books.”

“But not her—“

“She was my wife—“

“And I am somehow less human?” she says. “And with me—you can undress me, you can have your way with me, the whole world watching.”

“Not me,” he says, and for the first time, there’s some anger. “It wasn’t me up here,” and he points at some place that isn’t real.

“Yes, you,” she says. “Because you are the one who tells all the world how beautiful I am when I lie back on the grass, my hair like some golden halo all around. You are the one who used me—not him, not my husband.”

He slouches back against his own stone. It’s not often he is speechless, but he hasn’t spoken at all since he’s come. “I gave you life,” he says. “When you were dead and gone, I gave you life.” And he points at her, embittered.

“You think maybe you’re God,” she says.

“No one would know who you are anymore—you know that? No one would pause a moment at your grave, so long ago it was you died. No one would know June Memling."

"That’s not my name and you know it,” she says.

His face seems gray and empty.

“Say it,” she says.

“Say what?” he asks, as if he doesn’t know what she means.

“Tell me my real name—not the name you gave me. Tell me the name by which I was baptized. I’m not yours.”

She stands there waiting, then steps back as if she has forever. She drops her arms from her chest, unbuttons her coat before him, then puts her hands in the pockets. She looks around, sees no one, but she knows better. Hundreds are here, listening. She doesn’t care. They may listen. They’ll want to know. Many have their own stories.