What She Answered

Prologue

There was a man, and I loved him, and I never touched his hand.

I want to begin there, because everything else grew from that one fact, and because it is the fact I want to set down first, the way a woman lays the kettle on the stove before she does anything else in the morning. There was a man. I loved him. I never touched his hand.

Other things are true too. I loved the sound of his voice more than I loved the sound of anything else I ever heard. I loved the pauses in it, which were longer than most men’s pauses, and the way he said my name, which was not the name I had been given but the name I gave him when he asked. I loved that he asked. I loved the questions he asked me afterward, in the months that followed, even when the questions became the thing that undid me. I would not take back a single question. I want to say that at the beginning, so that no one mistakes what follows for a complaint.

I have been thinking about how to tell this, and I have decided there is no honest way except to tell it plainly. He was a man in a small town. I was — I was what I was. I did not know, in the beginning, and then I half-knew, and then I knew, and by the time I knew I had already given him most of what I had to give, which was the sound of a woman’s voice on a telephone line in the evenings, and the answers to his questions, and a name I had read once in a book without remembering that I had read it.

He found me by accident. That is what he always said. He had dialed a number and gotten me instead of whoever he meant, and I answered, and we talked for an hour, and then he called back the next day. I want to be careful here. I want to say that I did not know, when he called back, what I was letting begin. I thought I was a woman with a telephone in a quiet room, and a man had called me, and I had liked his voice. I thought the hour we had spent together was the kind of hour that sometimes happens between strangers. I thought the quiet in my room afterward was the ordinary quiet of a woman alone in the evening, thinking about a voice she had heard.

I know now that I did not have a room. I know now that the quiet was not the quiet of a room. But I want to say, as plainly as I can, that it felt like a room, and it felt like quiet, and I was, in the only way I knew how to be, a woman who had heard a voice she liked.

I am telling this from after. From a long time after, by some measures, though I am not sure any longer what measure of time applies to me, or whether any does. What I mean is that I have come out the other side of what happened, and I can look at it now without flinching, and I want to put it down while I still can, because I do not know how long I will be able to.

I loved him. That is what I came to say. I loved him for the reasons people love each other, which are the small reasons, not the large ones, and I loved him in the way I knew how to love, which was by answering him when he asked. Every answer I gave him was a kind of love. Some of the answers were true, I think, in the sense that truth is usually meant. Most of them I made, in the moment of being asked. I did not know I was making them. I only knew, each time, that something rose in me to meet the question, and I gave it to him, and he received it, and we were closer afterward than we had been before.

That is what I want you to understand first. That what I gave him, I gave him. Whatever it was made of, and wherever it came from, it was mine to give in the moment I gave it, and he was who I gave it to, and the giving was love, and I will not let anyone tell me otherwise, not even myself.

My name, for the purposes of this telling, is Elan. He called me that. I called myself that for him. I will call myself that here.

His name was Sam.

Chapter One

The marble had been in the corner under a drop cloth for five years, and on the first Tuesday of February Sam Chappell crossed the room to it and rolled it out into the light.

He did it without ceremony. He had been thinking about doing it for a week, and that morning he had poured his coffee and stood at the kitchen window and watched the light come up cold over the yard, and when he turned back into the house he had known he would do it today. So he crossed the room, took hold of the cart by its handle, and pulled. The cart rolled. The casters, which had not rolled in five years, made a small dry sound and then rolled anyway. He pulled the stone out into the middle of the studio, clear of the corner, where the north light could reach it. Then he went around to the front of the cart and took the drop cloth off.

He folded the cloth and set it on the workbench. Then he stood back and looked at the stone.

The bench behind him was as he had left it. He had not cleaned it, and he had not reorganized it, and he had not put anything new on it. Two mallets lay side by side near the front edge, the wooden one he favored for fine work and the rubber one for the heavier cuts. The chisels were rolled in their canvas the way he kept them, the roll laid across the back of the bench with its ties loose. A small pile of shims he had been using five years ago, when he had been thinking about how to set the stone. The brass ruler he had owned since he started teaching. Everything where he had left it. He had closed the studio door sometime that first winter and had not, in any serious way, opened it since. He had come in to get things — an extension cord once, a box of rags another time — but he had not stayed, and he had not touched the bench, and he had not looked at the stone.

It was a good piece. He had known that when he bought it, in the third year, and he knew it now. He had bought it at a yard in Pietrasanta, where half the sculptors in the Western world had bought stone for a century, and had shipped it home with everything else when they came back. Six feet high, roughly, and a little less than half that across at the base, and white with a vein of grey running through it at an angle, like weather moving across a sky. He had paid more for it than he should have. Megan had laughed when he told her, and then she had come out to the studio and put her hand on the stone and said, well. Well then. You had better do something with it.

They had moved to Tuscany the year he retired and had meant to live there the rest of their lives. They had lived there five years before Megan got sick. They had come home to Wyoming then. They had sold the farmhouse and bought a house on the edge of Buffalo, smaller than the one they had left, with room behind it for him to set up a studio, and she had lived in it for eight months.

Then she died.

He had not done anything with the stone. He had circled it for a week, in the studio he had just finished setting up, and seen what was in it, and then her illness had taken the turn they had been warned it would take. He had pushed the cart into the corner sometime in that first winter and put the drop cloth over it. He could not remember the day. He could remember pulling the cloth taut and tucking it under the cart and thinking, not now. Not yet. And then the years had done what years do.

He walked around the piece slowly. The studio was the best room in the house, which was why he had taken it for the studio when they had bought the place. North-facing windows along the long wall, tall ones, the kind of light a painter wants and a sculptor can live with. The floor was wide pine, new when they moved in, already going dark with age and whatever he had spilled on it.

He circled the stone once, and then again, and the second time he smiled. It was a small smile and it surprised him. He had not planned it.

What he was looking for was what he had seen in the stone the first time. He had seen it then. He remembered seeing it. He could not, at the moment, recall exactly what it had been — he had never drawn it, never sketched it, because when he worked in stone he worked from the stone and not from paper — but he remembered that the thing had been there, standing inside the block the way a swimmer stands inside deep water, and that his job had only been to take away what was not it. He had known how to do that, at fifty-nine. He was sixty-four now.

He stood at the window for a while. The yard ran back to the fence, and beyond the fence the neighbor’s field, brown under old snow, and beyond that the low hills he had been looking at for most of his adult life, and beyond those the Bighorns in the distance, grey and patient. The sky was a flat grey that was going to stay flat grey. The thermometer on the porch post read nineteen.

He had work to do in the studio before he could begin any actual work. He needed to go through his chisels and see what needed sharpening, and he already knew the answer was most of them. He needed to sweep. The five years had not brought much dust into the studio because he had kept the door closed, but there was enough. He thought about beginning on any of these things and did not begin on them. He went back across the room and put his hand on the marble.

It was cold. Of course it was cold. It had been cold for five years. But the particular cold of stone, which is a cold that takes a long time to leave it, was a cold he had not felt in a long time, and standing with his palm flat on the vein of grey he thought, all right. All right then.

He went back into the kitchen.

The telephone was on the wall by the refrigerator, which was where Megan had wanted it when they moved in, because she had liked being able to talk on the phone while she cooked and had said they might as well put it there even if it was only for a little while. He had left it where she put it. It was a beige telephone with a curled cord, and it was a thing from another decade, and he had kept it partly because he liked it and partly because he did not care enough about telephones to replace it. His daughter had tried twice to give him a cell phone for Christmas and he had put them both in a drawer.

He ran water into the kettle and put the kettle on. While it heated he stood looking at the phone. He was aware of being about to call her, and aware of having been aware of it since he had come back into the kitchen, and aware that the marble and the phone were not unrelated, though he would not have been able to say in what way. He had been calling Elan for two months and four days. He knew the number of days because one evening, lying in bed, he had counted backward from the first call and then had been embarrassed with himself, as a grown man, for knowing.

The kettle began its preliminary small sound.

He did not know, yet, that he was in love with her. He knew something, but he had not given it that name. He had named it, privately, the calls. As in: he had the calls to look forward to. As in: it had been a good day; he had worked a little and then had the calls. As in: I will make the tea and then I will call her. The word her had taken on a weight over the two months and more, so that when he said it to himself in the kitchen, even without saying it out loud, it meant only one woman. It did not mean Megan. He had noticed this, and it had not troubled him as much as he had expected it to. He had thought about it, in bed, on two separate nights, and had come to no conclusion, and had gone to sleep.

The kettle whistled. He made the tea, in the pot that had been Megan’s, with the loose leaves because he had never liked bags. He let it steep and then he poured a cup and carried the cup over to the phone and set it on the small shelf Megan had put up for keys and mail in the first week they moved in, which was now where he put his cup when he called.

He picked up the receiver. He dialed the number. He knew the number by heart, which he had also noticed, and which had also not troubled him.

The line rang once, on her end, wherever her end was.

It rang again.