A Wal

Never seek to tell thy love,

Love that never told can be;

For the gentle wind doth move

Silently, invisibly.

Love's Secret

William Blake

He had felt this heart's storm coming for so long he failed to pay heed to the meaning of his words. In the end, he knew, he had failed to understand the terms of their contract, the bargain they had struck, all rendered meaningless by time. For years now, her hand in his had been a bittersweet thing -- nothing now was as it had been. The sound of her voice -- left him quiet, wary. When he came home to their kitchen he turned away from memories laid out on the table, his appetite for such musings at an end. His love was dying and he had killed it, just as surely as she killed him.

He heard the screen-door slam shut after his gathering footsteps, heard her despair take flight and drift away on errant breezes. He cut across his overgrown lawn, making for the trail he had cut years ago, the trail that led down to the sea. To the trail that had been cut, he could see now, for just this walk.

He stopped at a white skinned birch and looked up at it's narrow branches, at it's autumn finery now long spent, waiting for the next storm to bring an end. He reached out and placed his hand on the tree, feeling it's strength, his sorrow like the coolness of the tree's skin. He turned and reached out to the house on the hill, to the amber-hued grief so casually concealed behind lace-curtained windows, and he looked at the weathered shingles, so at home in this landscape. Worn out and cold -- like the feeling in his breast.

Nothing. He felt nothing beside the burning in his arm, and he wondered why. Why, after so many years love could be reduced to such a wretched, withered thing. His wife, his friend, the mother of all that had gone wrong with time, the womb of his every hope and dream. A thing to be pitied now, in this autumn's fading glow.

He turned to his trail, turned to face the seas ahead. A gathering storm at sea, winds racing ashore, slicing through trees. They sway of life's eternal rhythm and he watched as a dry leaf lost it's hold on life and fell into the wind's careless embrace, and he watched for a moment as it flew away, skittering across bending leaves of blowing grass.

He could smell the sea now, if faintly, beyond the faint echoes of a fireplace casting autumn fires to the wind, or the first fires of another winter. Fires once again, a reminder, memories of distant winters coming for another visit, for one more look at life, and the idea caused him to turn once again to this house of his, their home, and he watched her pacing in the kitchen and he wondered how, because that shouldn't be possible. Like a suitcase by the door, waiting to flee, and he felt decisions not yet made beating the air above his head with vulturine fury.

He shook his head, looked at gray clouds gathering overhead as he resumed his walk to the sea. Through a deeper wood now, shadows cast in blue ahead and lost in sudden silence, shadows with arms all around him. He heard a cracking branch and smiled -- for he thinks death would be a fitting end to this day. But no, he knows there are no easy answers waiting in these shadows. Because he has another trail to walk, one more journey to complete.

He paused and remembered her, as she was -- in the beginning. Another autumn evening, walking under storm-tossed skies much like these. Blue shadows along tree lined streets, deep autumn in Cambridge -- walking up Holyoke Street from her dorm to the music lab amidst a sea of swirling leaves. His senior year. Her thesis loomed. Debussy. Prelude to the Afternoon of a Fawn. Stacks of notes caught by a passing gust, papers joining leaves in a flurry down a windswept, cobbled street, frantic grasping, and how he'd joined her rounding up notes before they disappeared in the next gust. How she cried, how he had helped her pick up the pieces, carried her along even then.

The afternoon of a fawn. Indeed, his entire life, the entire score of their days together had been little more than foreshadowing. Such a gentle piece, sun-warmed and infinite. So like her smile. So unlike the life he dreamed of. He remembered watching her play later that winter, viola or piano, it didn't matter. Profound genius. That was what they said of her, that was what he knew in his heart when he felt her play.

Then she was gone, with only a few chance sightings after that breezy autumn afternoon, until one snowy evening somewhere between Thanksgiving and Christmas. On Holyoke Street once again, walking in shifting drifts of snow, and he saw her just ahead -- walking his way in the amber light of streetlights. Snow falling on her shoulders, their brief flight caught in pools of light. He could see her lips through the snow, feel the warmth of her smile even then.

And then she stopped when he drew near, and she looked at him, snowflakes in silence.

"I've seen you," she said slowly, almost -- was it uneasily?

"Excuse me?"

"In my dreams. I've seen you, in my dreams."

Her eyes were far-away, this side of dreamy, like she had just come from sleep, and he didn't know what to say to the expression in those blue pools.

"You were walking, holding a deer. A fawn, I think...and then you slipped away from me."

And as suddenly she started to slip away.

"Excuse me? I'm sorry, but you don't walk up to someone and tell them you've been dreaming about them, and then just -- leave?"

"You helped me that day, in the wind, when my papers blew away. Do you remember?"

"Of course I remember. You were doing research -- on Debussy, wasn't it?"

"That's right," she said, smiling. Such an unbelievable smile, so unexpected and, he suspected, so rarely given. "Have you had dinner yet?"

"No, not yet," he remembered saying as he took in her eyes, and her lips. The gentle sweep of those lips, the warmth within meeting frost, the vapor that formed and so suddenly gone. "Would you like to...?

"Someplace quiet. I'd like to go someplace quiet," she said slowly, "someplace I can watch your eyes, and not be distracted."

"My eyes?"

"Yes. I've thought about them and little else since that day. A fireplace. I want to see your eyes, your eyes in firelight."

He hadn't known why, but he took her hand in his and they walked over to a place near the Yard, across from the Coop, an old pub with a red brick fireplace in the back, it's hearth blackened by time and too many winters. They drank coffee and smoked cigarettes, and when their waitress looked annoyed they ordered dinner and ignored the food when it came. They talked and talked until lights blinked out, then hand in hand he walked her back to Holyoke Street and to her dorm. The drifts had been very deep then, the night bitter cold, yet he could not have cared less.

They walked into the courtyard and she pulled out her key, opened the door; they looked at one another in the bare light, unsure but sure what would happen next -- then she pulled him inside her world and they snuck up to her room. They both missed classes the next morning, but by then all had been decided. She wanted him to come home with her for Christmas, she wanted, she said, for him to know everything about her world.

They sat side-by-side, Logan to LAX in a shiny new 707, and they talked all the way to California. Her kid brother picked them up and drove them north on Sepulveda to Sunset Boulevard, east from there to Foothill Road, to a garage behind a hideously large house. There was a room above the garage, he remembered, where he'd slept that first trip, but what he remembered most was the backyard, and the absence of snow.

There was a pool there, not a field of white so cold it hurt, a pool with water so clear it had blinded him. Avocado trees stood in sentinel rows beside one side of the house, and he saw squirrels running along their limbs, pausing to eat green fruit before jumping to another limb, to another avocado. Orange trees, and lemon too, and birds of paradise basking under the fierce afternoon sun. A lawn that looked like a putting green, little flagstone patios scattered about in shaded procession, secluded islands lost in seas only Hollywood could fathom. Palm trees, high and swaying in the breeze lined the house's perimeter and dotted the backyard, and he watched, dazzled, as a coconut fell to the ground and bounced into the pool.

Her mother sat in the shade of one of the avocado trees, her tanned legs stretched out for miles. She was watching him, measuring his every move behind opaque walls of glass perched on her nose. She watched as her daughter let go his hand and dashed to her side, and he walked up to this woman as she took her sunglasses off.

Of course he recognized her. There wasn't a man in the world who dared not, and he was sure she approved of his reaction, of the surprise and approval she saw on his face.

Introductions were made, smiles and knowing glances passed between them. He remembered looking at her eyes as he said something inanely banal, and he'd watched that smile again, the same lips he'd admired on the silver screen. She smiled again at an awkward complement -- his unease clear to see, yet the woman was gracious -- she did her best to make him feel at home.

Would they mind going to Burbank, she asked, as she had to tape a segment with Johnny Carson at five-thirty. They were expected for dinner at The Bistro, joining her husband there, hopefully, he remembered her saying cautiously. He rode with them in the limousine NBC had sent, and watched the taping as if he had disappeared down a rabbit hole -- and taken a wrong turn.

Had he taken a wrong turn? Had the wind confused him so?

He could smell the sea now -- and was that the wind? Was it stronger? Hard to tell in shadows so deep.

Their wedding, not a year later at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Friends and roommates arrived at the hotel the night before, his parents, too, but their simple lives withered under the glare of so many imposingly strange people. He remembered Hank, his best friend from distant childhood looking around at the beautiful people and wanting to run away, but he met his wife that night too, for the very first time. He moved to LA, and died in a car accident a few years later.

And so the worm turns.

The trail he'd cut now danced between a running brook and a mass of house-sized granite boulders, a few pines here and there but still mainly glistening white birch his only companions. There'd been bear here -- perhaps a hundred years ago -- but deer and squirrel owned these woods now. Benign...these woods were benign now. Devoid of danger, like his life -- until this day, at least. He had money enough to live a thousand years without worry, yet perhaps that was the problem. What is money without love?

He could hear that song now, the one she'd penned while still in high school. The song, a love song of course. Who had she loved back then? Who inspired those words? Lust and longing, so common, so fierce. She had formed a group with four friends, four other girls she'd known in college, before their divorce. That first album went platinum, her anthem of fierce love front and center, while their second album went down in flames -- like their marriage. She fell into an abyss, psychedelics lit the way and one day he was served with papers, in the middle of his third year of medical school.

And that night, after he'd moved his things to a small apartment in Westwood, her mother had come over, distraught, lost. Her mother, in a red 450SL, the top off, her legs so goddamn gorgeous it hurt. She was distraught about her daughter, she said, afraid this shadow of herself was making all the same mistakes she had. A startling admission. She stayed the night as it turned out, and while that wasn't the only time the memory of those first sweet hours had remained a bright spot in his life. No one else had ever come close, even if he never understood all the reasons why.

But she called him once, a few years later, to tell him her daughter, his ex-wife, was now in rehab and wanted to see him. He was a resident then, in oncology at a clinic near San Diego, and though he'd forgotten all the glitz and glamour of those years, he'd never forgotten the swirling leaves on Holyoke Street -- and it all came back in a rush, memories of her smile leaving him breathless, and alone. He drove up to LA the next weekend, picked her mother up on the way to the hospital.

Nothing had changed, he saw, not even the woman's legs.

He heard the sea now, angry -- disturbed by the coming storm. Waves breaking on rocks, the deep rumble an animate thing, alive, fearsome, waiting in the distance. The wind more insistent now, clawing through the woods, impossible to ignore as he came to his favorite clearing. There was green grass here, a few stunted, windblown pines standing like gnarled old gnomes, guarding the cliff -- and the rocks below -- from careless souls.

He came to a favored rock, one with a view of the water and the woods lining the shore as far as the eye could see. He leaned on the rock, felt his heart beating and he checked his pulse, felt his carotid. Too high, he sighed. Too high...

He saw her in the dayroom, or so someone called that wood-beamed ambrosia, and she was in a wheelchair, and he wondered what had happened to put her there.

Anti-psychotics, her physician told him. She had suffered a break. Schizophrenia, but she was compliant, wanted to fight the disease. He went to her, held her as she cried. As she apologized time and time again, as she breathed her desire for him, her desire to be with him always. He didn't know what to do, what to say, but he told her that he loved her, and that he always would. He felt her resolve grow under the shape of his words, and when he told her he would come back next week the strength he saw in her eyes filled him with joy.

Her mother, too, had expressed support in the only way she knew how, in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. She was older now, her career on the wane but she was still very much the desirable leading lady -- in his script, anyway. She held on to him that night with a fierceness that had left him breathless, yet when she whispered in his ear that she loved him his heart had tumbled, because he knew he loved her too. Impossible not too, he told himself, when he looked into those eyes.

When he spoke those words she fell apart in his arms. She'd played the part a thousand times, yet still the moment had felt so real and good. He loved this woman, he loved her daughter, and it was all so impossible. This palm-lined dream life, this make believe world where anything was possible -- and nothing was real.

He returned to the hospital every Sunday afternoon until she was released, and when he moved to Boston, when he took a fellowship at Mass Gen, she followed a few weeks later. He felt safe again in Boston, safely away from Beverly Hills and all the hidden possibilities he'd accumulated there. They remarried a few weeks after she came, and he became all too aware that she was anything but well. She was clean, however, and he helped her stay the course with her meds, but he well knew that her's would be a life long struggle. She knew it, too, and he loved her for it.

They lived in a high-rise condo along the banks of the Charles; their living room looked across the water to the college where they'd met, now more than ten years distant, and he remembered even then thinking he could only wonder at the changes they'd faced together -- so far.

He looked out at the sea, at writhing white-caps and wind-driven spume, then he looked down at his hands, the wrinkles and spots so foreign, yet so inevitable. All those hands had done, the life they'd allowed him to live, all so taken for granted -- at least, once he had. He knew the nature of death better than most; he had, after all was said and done, battled death most all his life, and he understood why most people took life for granted, but he knew too that somewhere between that first gasping cry and the last night's dream there was a moment when every human grasps the finite. God thrives in the moment, even as reason pales.

Her mother was in his office one morning, just after he'd completed rounds, and she had a file folder in her lap. She wanted a second opinion, or so she said, but he knew better. She was alone now, her last leering husband had left a few years back and she'd visited once, his love for her intact, on the face of things anyway, but the physical attraction was absent on that first visit and there had been times he wondered why. Still, when he took them to dinner he appreciated her beauty, the timelessness of her smile, the gestures she made a minor symphony of elegance. There was a quality to the woman that had vanished from the scene over the years. A serenity that came, he guessed, from perfecting her craft. It had been almost five years since she'd been in a film, and that had been a supporting role in a disaster epic; her characterization had been best and most charitably described as a valedictory of sorts.

He saw that in her eyes that morning, in his office, felt it when he looked up from her file, tears in both their eyes. He asked her what she wanted to do.

"I want to be here, with both of you," she said, and he remembered the pleading look in her eyes. "I want you to take care of me."

"I always wanted to take care of you," he whispered, and the honesty of those words hit them both.

And so he did. He watched over her as she came back into their lives, he managed her descent as she fell back to starlight. One night he was called in, and he slipped out of the house in silence and lay with her as she passed, holding her hand, looking her in the eye, telling her that he would always cherish her, that he would take care of her daughter until the end of time. When she left him he cried for hours, then signed her paperwork and walked away in silence.

There was no silence now, only wind. He watched as a ship at sea struggled against the storm, making for Portland perhaps, or Boston, and he stood and walked along his trail, looking at the ship and the waves. The wind in his hair felt wild, untamed, and the force of it buffeted his soul as he thought about the years after her death.

His wife had started playing the piano again, but something was different now. Her memory was a game of chance, the biochemical sequencing of the flow of memory altered by her disease. Her conscious mind commanded one note while memory served up another, so she had to relearn all she'd learned and lost. Then one evening he'd come home to Chopin's Nocturnes and her smile was an impossibly radiant thing to behold. They moved to a house he had built north of the city, a large room overlooking the river below held her piano and she lived there, there in that room with her music for company.

He remembered the first time it happened, the first time he heard her speaking in old French to the voices in her head. She was begging, pleading not to be hit again, then her tormentors were cutting her with knives and she was sobbing on the floor, holding her bloody hands up for all of them to see. He remembered going to her, holding her, feeling her pull away, her balled-up fists flailing away, warding him off until he gave up and called a friend, a psychiatrist at Brigham and Women's. She came and sedated his wife, then they drove her into the city. He carried her home -- a year and a half later -- and life resumed, if on a more tentative, cautious basis, and as such the years reeled by. The voices never left her completely, and the medications she took tore away at her ability to play the piano, yet still she struggled on.

There's had become a separate peace, a solitary place where he helped her take her meds before he went into the city to fight the good fight, and then he would force himself into his car for the drive home, where he would see to her medications and help her into bed. The new medications made it easy for her to gain weight, and she struggled with the results until the last vestiges of her desire faded away. Soon, physicians added insulin to her daily regimen, then beta blockers.