Romantic History

By Michael Harris

Of Michael Harris' debut, "The Chieu Hoi Saloon" (PM Press, 2010), a noirish look at the Los Angeles area during the 1992 riots, Publisher's Weekly said, "This impressive novel reaches deep into the souls of its characters."

Now, in "Romantic History," Harris turns his attention to the love affair of two spectacularly mismatched people. Paul Siebert is a reporter, a shy, depressive Vietnam veteran. Maggie Ryan is a wild child, a rape victim, a musician, an armed robber. In 1971, they meet at a halfway house in Seattle. Paul is writing a feature story; Maggie has just been released from jail. Somehow a spark flies between them, beginning a relationship that dies and revives over the next 35 years. To Paul, Maggie promises a sexual and emotional fulfillment he has found nowhere else, though whenever he gets close to her, she disappears. To Maggie, Paul is sometimes the agent of the radical freedom she demands from life, but just as often his love seems to threaten that freedom. In 2006, thanks to the Internet, Paul and Maggie happen to connect once again, with consequences neither can predict.

Harris, formerly a news editor and book reviewer for the Los Angeles Times, has an M.A.T. from Harvard and a M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. He and his family live in Long Beach, California.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Harris
• Release date: Jun 20, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301887675

Michael Harris

MICHAEL HARRIS is a contributing editor at Western Living and Vancouver magazine. His award-winning writing appears regularly in magazines such as The Walrus and Frieze and has been featured in several books. He lives in Vancouver.

Book preview

PART ONE

SUMMER 2006

1.

Paul Siebert is sixty-one, but he rises before dawn and drives away from his mother's old house in Pusher as thrilled and guilty as a teen-ager about to climb a ladder to his girlfriend's bedroom window and elope with her to Reno. His arthritic left hip twinges as he folds himself into his little Acura coupe; he gives an involuntary Oof — a sure sign he's a senior citizen now, his wife, Raquel, enjoys telling him — as his rear end plops into the bucket seat. But the pine scent in the cool morning air hasn't changed since Paul was a boy. A frightened boy, comforted by the pine scent, by the way forested mountains cup the town as snugly as a baseball in the pocket of a fielder's glove, even as he dragged his feet with dread whenever his father called him down to the basement garage to lie on a scrap of cardboard under a half-disassembled car and pass wrenches and screwdrivers, hold bolts with his too-weak hands against the old man's twisting. In the swaying yellow light of a barred lantern hooked to something high on the engine. Huge, leaping shadows. Dirt sticking to the back of his father's torn T-shirt, maybe blood dripping from a cracked knuckle. And Paul right up against him, breathing a smell of grown man's sweat and grease and sheared, tortured metal, a smell the boy would never forget, the smell of impatience, then of rage, raw as gasoline fumes, with no place to hide when the explosion finally came, the curse, the sudden, stinging slap ... as it nearly always would.

Paul's father is long since dead, but all that fear still lives in the basement. He sniffs it as he backs his car out this morning, past the old man's workbench, the cobwebbed tools hanging from rusty nails, the vise, the pipe-cutter, the Hills Bros. coffee cans full of screws and washers. Useless junk now. No basement mechanic would dare tear down a car like the Acura — this sleek, humming Asian bundle of electronics. Who knows what's going on in there? Not Paul Siebert, for sure. Even his father's level of skill would be useless, and this strikes Paul, in spite of himself, as sad — so much simple human competence lost to progress. Yet the tools remain. They have a spell on them, some kind of grim magic; Paul's mother hasn't touched them in all this time. What's he going to do with them, now that they're about to become his?

For Paul's mother is dying, in Red Fork, fifty miles south of Pusher, down the Sacramento River canyon in Northern California. He isn't going to the hospital today to sit beside her, as he should. He's driving a hundred miles north to Medford, Oregon, then flying to Spokane.

To visit a woman he hasn't seen in more than thirty years.

A woman who may or may not know he's coming, and may not welcome him when he arrives.

.

It's not that Paul doesn't love his mother. He and Raquel have cared for her the last year and a half in L.A., ever since she had to go on kidney dialysis. Now, for the Fourth of July, he has packed her wheelchair, her walker and a supply of Depends and driven her the length of the state, back up to Pusher for a reunion of the high school class of 1940, the very first she'd taught, a single girl fresh out of UC Berkeley. Now, at eighty-eight, she's the only surviving faculty member. The reunion was yesterday, and Paul went to the city park to tell her ex-students — only a few years younger than she is — that she couldn't attend after all. She was in intensive care. The day before, when he'd come back from a round of golf to pick her up at the DaVita center in Red Fork — the town where he'd held his first newspaper job, ages ago — the technicians who unhitched her from the dialysis machine told him, You'd better take your mom to an ER, right away. She may have pneumonia. She doesn't look good at all. And they were right. His mother was disoriented, wobbly, her voice faint and slurred, her eyes unfocused; Paul had to half-carry her, step by step, to the wheelchair, straining under her weight — she had heft to her even now, when she seemed to have shriveled half away.

The ex-students, sitting at long tables in the park under cedars and black oaks, eating barbecue, beans and salad off paper plates, expressed their condolences. Ladies hugged Paul; men patted his shoulder. But the news didn't seem to surprise them much or put them off their feed. Not with the smells of woodsmoke and grilled tri-tip swirling around them and a caterer's crew to refill their cups of raspberry punch. These people were used to death by now, Paul thought — they were so close to it themselves. He'd thought there must be at least a few old guys who still had a crush on Miss Arnold, with her springy dark curls and a set of boobs that the innocence of her face absolutely refused to acknowledge (Paul has observed this, wonderingly, in tiny black-and-white Brownie snapshots in the family album), who had taught these soon-to-be GIs English and supervised the staff of the yearbook. Had they dreamed of his mother when they went off to World War II? Paul had to doubt this, meeting them. These were old people, their skin bleached nearly as white as their hair, even the liver spots on their hands faded. Sexual desire seemed to have drained away from them at last, leaving them at peace. Should he envy them? Maybe. But Paul's reaction instead was: Not me. Not yet, by God.

Thanks to Maggie.

.

At the entrance to Mercy Hospital, emerging from his air-conditioned car into the brutal heat of Red Fork — it had to be 110 degrees — Paul had found he couldn't lift his mother up out of the seat. She had gone limp. He called attendants, and they wheeled her into Emergency. Then he filled out a questionnaire and produced her Medicare card and sat in the waiting room under a blue-robed plaster statue of the Virgin in a niche, reading an article in the Atlantic Monthly about how people are hard-wired to believe in God. Everywhere in the world, studies indicated, the littlest children had a concept of the afterlife, of a Being watching over them. Religious instruction might cement this faith but didn't create it. It was part of the human inheritance. Did that make it valid, true? Paul hoped so, at least as far as his mother was concerned. She deserved to go to Heaven if anybody did.

For himself, he wasn't so sure. Even if there was a Heaven — just for the sake of argument — would there be room in it for a son who played golf on the day his mother collapsed? Paul felt the shame of this keenly, though dialysis took four hours — time he had to kill one way or another. The course had been deserted because of the heat wave; he'd rented a cart and raced around alone, stirring up a breeze, for the full eighteen holes; he'd played surprisingly well and returned to DaVita on time, sweaty, sunburned and happy. What was wrong with that? Plenty. And golf wasn't the worst of it, Paul knew. His mother's illness, at the very last moment, had just cracked open a door and made it possible — just barely — for him to use the plane reservation to Spokane he'd booked four months ago and hadn't had the heart to cancel.

And that's what he was going to do.

Which makes me what? What kind of a son?

.

Paul phoned Raquel at her office in a Bank of America branch in Long Beach. She in turn would call their son, Gerry, taking summer classes in biology at San Jose State.

"Turns out she does have pneumonia, Paul said. And that isn't all. She has a perforated ulcer. Isn't that weird? You'd think she'd have thrown up a lot, or had trouble eating, but no — all this time, she's had plenty of appetite."

I knew I shouldn't have let you take her up there by yourself, Raquel said.

She had her heart set on going to the reunion.

"She's eighty-eight years old, Paul. She had no business traveling that far when it's hot."

It's nice up in Pusher.

Well, she isn't in Pusher now, is she? You know what Melinda would say.

Paul's sister-in-law is a registered nurse at the L.A. County hospital in Torrance. So many Filipinas are nurses in Southern California that Raquel, a loan officer, is almost an oddity.

I'll let you know whatever happens, he said. Maybe she'll be OK.

I'm sorry, Paul, really sorry, but I don't think so.

She's pretty darn tough, my mom. Don't you know that yet? She not only stood up to my dad, she outlived him twenty years.

"You've told me that. Still."

Paul suddenly felt tired. When he was allowed into his mother's curtained cubicle and saw her sound asleep, or sedated, he wanted to lie down on the bed beside her, but he was afraid this would disturb the IV tubes taped to her skinny, purple-bruised arms, so he just sat in a plastic chair and watched. She was snoring. Loudly, shamelessly, as unguarded as a child. Her mouth a cave, her nose whittled to a sharp point of cartilage and skin. She had never lost the innocence of those old snapshots, he thought — the innocence and cheer that had given him hope throughout his growing-up years, even as she disappointed him. Because, contrary to what he'd just told Raquel, his mother hadn't really stood up to the old man. For her own sake, maybe, but not to protect him, Paul. And hadn't they both once almost let him starve?

The sun through the window shade angled lower.

Then his mother opened her eyes. Slowly she smiled at him. "I feel so silly."

Oh, Mom.

"I do. Causing so much bother."

Don't even think that. You were sick. Paul rose stiffly — he never used to get stiff after a round of golf, a round in a cart, for Pete's sake — and went to the bedside, leaned over her and brushed a wisp of thin, damp hair from her forehead. It's no trouble. Just get well.

I'm going to miss it.

The reunion? Don't even worry about that. He noticed a plastic pitcher on the nightstand and raised the lid: orange juice. Would you like something to drink?

Yes, she said. I think that would be very nice.

Her voice trailed off. She closed her eyes. Paul poured her a glass and waited for her eyes to open; then he placed the rim of the glass at the edge of the dark hole she'd snored through — a hole that smelled of something sour and musty, like decay — and let her sip. A little juice spilled down her chin. He wiped it with a paper napkin.

Bless you, his mother said.

He put the glass aside and took her chilly, bony left hand, the one closest to him. Her fingers gripped his.

You were always a good boy, she said. Always. Even —

It's OK. Mom. Just rest.

Bless you, she said again. Then she sighed, closed her eyes and lay still.

And Paul understood that these two words, sinking into him and dissolving like pills, like warm doses of tranquilizer, were what he was going to get from his mother. His legacy, his reward. What he was always going to remember, with gratitude. Wasn't it enough? Those other things, his grudges and resentments — weren't they all ancient history? He felt softened, hollowed out by tenderness. He was glad they'd had these eighteen months to get to know each other again, after years of visiting only at holidays. They'd talked about the old times, about his dad. He had taken her out to lunch, finished her crossword puzzles. He had answered her embarrassed calls for help more than once when she'd been unable to climb out of the bathtub, wrapping his arms around her wet, floppy nakedness and hauling her up, hoping he wouldn't throw out his back. He had literally wiped his mother's ass — she'd been incontinent ever since a bout with ovarian cancer and radiation a decade ago. Hadn't she wiped his ass when he was a baby? He'd felt no disgust doing this, little awkwardness; how strange it was to find, at his age, that he had an aptitude for nursing. He had done the best he could. He thought he could say that honestly. Would it be enough for his mother in turn, now that he was running out on her?

Hang on, he begged her silently as her mouth fell open and she resumed snoring. Will you, please, Mom? Just hang on till I get back.

.

It's no surprise that Paul has death on his mind the morning he drives north; the surprise is that he feels so energetic, so crazily cheerful. He rolls the windows of the Acura down, smells the pine scent. Acorns pop under his tires. Early July, and the oaks are already shedding. A hard winter coming, then, people in Pusher used to say. And Paul smiles. Being able to remember this, to remember hearing it as a boy, on this same narrow street with its rumpled pavement, under these same trees, is just more proof that he isn't old at all.

If asked to give his true age as he turns up the ramp to Interstate 5, he would say without hesitation: Twenty-seven. His age when he first met Maggie.

At first he travels in the shadow of the canyon, but after he mounts the steep grade north of Pusher there's sun on the Eddys to the west and sun on Black Butte straight ahead, which interrupts a horizon line as pure as any artist could draw, though only Nature made it: the miles-long, barely perceptible curve on which ash and cinders from the great volcano to the east came to rest. And Paul asks himself the same question he's always asked — yet another connection with his youth: It's beautiful, it has to mean something, but what?

In his youth, though, he had no answer. Now he does. He's making an answer by being in love, by being insane, by abandoning his mother, by going AWOL from Raquel, by being — despite the birth date on his driver's license, despite his neat charcoal-gray car, his pale-blue polo shirt, his khaki Dockers, his white walking shoes, his short hair, his shave, his hands in the regulation 10-and-2 positions on the wheel — at least as much of an outlaw as Maggie ever was. And maybe, he hopes, that makes him worthy of her at last.

Up in the Shasta Valley, traffic is sparse, and Paul gooses the Acura, sees the tachometer needle jump, hears the engine scream. Wind buffets him. He grins and goes even faster — a mindless response to the high clear sky, the smells of rich grass and manure from the ranches he passes, the fear and exhilaration running through him in waves, because there's no other reason to hurry; he'll just have to wait longer at the Medford airport before boarding his plane, and then there'll be a two-hour layover in Seattle — only a few miles from where it all began.

WINTER 2006

2.

What can I say? It was a Universe thing. I'd just started reading the Seth books and Absalom books and learning about the Law of Attraction — how the Universe gives us whatever we ask for, good or bad — and then this happened.

It was the first Monday after New Year's. Steve had come home for lunch from the cabinet shop he manages only a couple of miles away. Now he was heading back out to his truck, promising to bring me milled lumber for the floor of the new bedroom with the slider looking out on our field and the Spokane River and Tower Mountain. I was in my beautiful kitchen with the Victorian sofa and the tall white Swedish clock in it, washing the dishes. I heard Steve shut the front door. His boots squeaked on the dry snow outside. Then he stopped, and I heard a different squeak, rusty and metallic — the mailbox. His footsteps came back. He opened the door; a gust of bittter-cold air swirled in with him, but I still didn't turn around.

Who do you know in California? Steve asked.

California? Nobody.

"Well, somebody in Long Beach knows you."

He dumped the rest of the mail on the kitchen table but held onto this one envelope, which he stuck under my nose.

My hands are wet, I told him. I'll read it later. Go on.

"He calls you Maggie Ryan," Steve said. I've been Maggie Brady for twenty-two years now. How come?

How should I know?

Well, find out.

I looked at it, finally, as I reached for the dishtowel.

Paul See-bert, Steve said. Or is it Sye-bert? Guy's got crappy handwriting.

He started to open the envelope himself, but I snatched it from him.

Hey, Steve said. The sleeve of his parka had chilled in just the few seconds he'd been outside; when he brushed the back of my neck, I shivered. He insisted on reading the letter over my shoulder, and I found myself trying to shield it from him, just as if I had something to hide.

I don't know whether you remember me, Maggie, but back in 1971 I was a reporter for a little alternative newspaper in Bellevue, and you were in a halfway house run by Lloyd and Sherry Barnes. I'd gone there to write a feature story....

My God, I said. I think I know who this is.

Steve read aloud, '...and you looked at me across the room with great intensity and asked me to talk to you.' Great intensity. What the fuck is that?

I don't even remember.

"Well, he sure does. This See-bert guy. One of those creeps you knew before you met me."

He isn't a creep, I said. I know a lot of them were, but Paul didn't belong in that world — criminals and cops. I don't even like to think about those days. He was just —

A stalker, then. Call him that. Trackin' you down ... on the Internet, he says here. For what? What kind of person would do that?

He's a writer, I told Steve. He'd just about managed to piss me off, beginning with the sneer I'd heard in his voice when he first said California. I mean, somehow Steve knew. He was scared — though except for that one time with the Russian I'd never given him reason to be, and that was ten years ago. They aren't like other people. That's just the kind of thing writers do.

You gonna answer him?

Why shouldn't I? Look what he says. He's married too. Has a son in college. He just wants to know if I'm still alive, how I am.

And maybe that's all Paul thought he meant by it. You could argue that, just from what he put on the paper. But I know a love letter when I see one.

"Are you gonna answer him, Maggie? This writer. This Mr. Intensity."

Steve isn't much taller than I am. He took hold of my upper arms and turned me around and looked straight at me, appealed to me, with his baby blues, his good square windburned face, his nice brown mustache, and suddenly I didn't feel irritated anymore. I felt sorry for him.

Of course not. I'll throw it in the garbage.

.

What I should have done, maybe, is burn it right then, in front of Steve, before I could memorize the return address or Paul's phone number. But I didn't, because for some time, without even knowing it, really, I'd been starting to feel a little of that restlessness I'd felt when I was a single girl, when I used to change apartments every six months — even oftener. Not because there was anything wrong with the place I had. But because once I'd fixed it up just the way I liked, there was nothing to do but toss everything out and start over — or move.

Every person, thing or thought is a vibration, Absalom says. So a thought is the same as a thing. I'd sent a vibration out into the Universe, and this letter came back.

.

The Russian was somebody I met through my translating. His name was Viktor, the same as the boyfriend of a Ukrainian woman named Olga who used to work for my dad, who was like an older sister to me. We get a lot of Ukrainians and Russians here in Spokane — the climate makes them feel at home. I worked for an agency that sent me to the welfare office or the hospitals, Deaconess or Sacred Heart — anyplace I was needed to straighten out somebody's problems with the System. It paid $25 an hour. I was good at it. The Russians were always amazed by how well I spoke and understood them. I'd been kind of a hermit when I was young, and all that studying, six hours a day, paid off. Besides, nothing they said could embarrass me. I'd already lived a lot, seen just about everything. Translate it straight but be compassionate about it — that's my rule. They loved me, especially the old people. They gave me gifts — nesting Russian dolls and a fabulous red-and-gold samovar.

I didn't even like this Viktor. He wasn't half as cool as Olga's. He was a borderline thug — he wore a gold earring and had black hair on his chest, which he'd show off by unzipping his sweat jacket down to his navel, even in the cold. When he came on to me, it made me angry. All I wanted to do was get his grandmother hooked up for SSI benefits. I did not want a lover. I'd left all that disorder in my life behind — I tried to tell him that. But do you think Viktor cared? He kept touching me by accident and finding excuses to get me alone; he'd whisper in this low growl of his: I know you, babe. You dress like a frickin' librarian. You hide behind those thick glasses. But you can't fool me. I can see the fire inside you. On and on like that, until I gave in, just to get it over with.

You don't think so? You think I was flattered, a guy so much younger than me? Well, fuck you, Dad.

But I will admit this: I hadn't quite lost my illusions about the Russians — my memories of the good times I'd had when I worked in the Soviet pavilion at Expo '74. It took me a long time to realize that Spokane Russians weren't anything like the characters in the books I loved, even though they shared the same beautiful language. They were thugs, like Viktor, or religious fanatics, like his grandmother — worse than our local crazies.

OK, maybe I was flattered a little that he saw through my disguise, saw the wild side of me, the side Steve never wanted to be reminded of. But it wasn't any good — I realized that right away. All Viktor wanted was a quick wham-bam, and then he lost interest. I felt dirtier than I'd ever felt working at massage parlors.

So I went home to Steve and told him.

I was crying. I went right up to him where he was planing a piece of cedar for one of his cousins' hope chest and wrapped my arms around his waist and laid my head on his shoulder. I could smell the cedar shavings — such a good, clean smell.

You aren't gonna like this, I said. But we've never had any secrets between us. How many couples can say the same?

Maggie, what is it?

You aren't gonna like it, Steve. I'm sorry.

It can't be that bad.

"Oh, yes, it is. But I want you to know — it didn't mean anything."

Then it can't be that bad, can it? Steve never stopped holding me close. I was trembling. He stroked the back of my head and sounded almost amused. Just tell me, and then it'll all be OK.

What did he think I'd done? I've often wondered. Overdrawn the checking again? Put a dent in the car? I trusted Steve Brady, like I hadn't trusted anybody since you. His voice vibrated through me like the hum of a bass string — always so steady, so kind.

I just can't stand living a lie, I told him, sobbing now. I want to be one person like I used to be, not two. Can you forgive me?

Knowing of course that he would.

And that's all Steve had to do, I swear. He just had to kiss me and say it didn't matter, and hold me until I'd cried myself out, and then take me to bed and make love to me better than Viktor ever could, and let me fall asleep in his arms. Next morning we'd wake up and the sun would be shining and it would all be over — I mean, really over. It would never happen again. I'd learned my lesson.

I never thought he would get so furious that he'd call me a whore and fling me aside and run out to his truck and drive off and not come back for a week.

But that's what Steve Brady did.

I freaked out. Suppose he didn't come back? I wasn't used to living alone anymore. Steve did everything for me — he was old-fashioned that way. He'd go out in the snow and split firewood for me and carry it in, and I didn't have to lift a finger. I wasn't supposed to work. My translating and music lessons were just hobbies. I didn't know what to do — and then, just as I was totally panicking about how to pay the bills, he drove back from the Oregon coast all bloodshot and stubbly and smelling like he'd slept in his clothes the whole time, and now it was his turn to cry; he wanted me to feel sorry for him. His first wife had left him — disappeared one day and left her clothes in her closet. I knew that. But now Steve told me she'd run off with another woman. For an old-fashioned guy, I guess that's about the most humiliating thing that could happen. And that's why it hurt him so much when I was unfaithful too.

Well, it didn't shock me. Man or woman, what difference does it make? But it reminded me of something that used to bother me a lot: how Claire's clothes — his ex-wife's — were still in that closet a year after she'd left, and still there for the first year of our marriage. So I asked him: What was that all about? Why did it take him so long to throw them out? And Steve said he hadn't meant to make me jealous. It just hurt him too much even to look in that closet.

And I believed him. I was so glad he'd come back to me, and this was the first time I'd ever seen Steve Brady cry. So I didn't ask all those other questions — like what had he been doing for that whole week, wandering around Seaside and Lincoln City and God knows where else, probably spending most of it in bars. How come he had the moral high ground and I was the besmirched wife who had to be on probation forever? Doesn't it sound like a double standard?

It sure does to me now.

But I really didn't think about that until I got Paul's letter. I let Steve's leaving me fade away, like when you look at the sun and close your eyes and in place of the sun there's this wobbly black spot that lingers for a while, then goes. He and I went back to our old life: buying rundown houses, fixing them up and selling them. We played together at the Folklore Society: bluegrass, Irish folk music. Steve made me a Celtic harp. He's a wonderful craftsman. I mostly forgot that he'd called me a whore, knowing full well that was the nastiest thing he could say — a dig at what he liked to call my past, which he'd been nice enough to marry me in spite of. We drove around the Palouse and over to Coeur d'Alene for festivals. We bought a cabin and five acres up on the slope of Mt. Spokane. We were happy. I think we were. Ten years is a long time — longer than anybody ought to be able to fake it.

But when Paul's letter came, I didn't throw it away. The lesson I'd learned was the one you taught me, Dad. Which was that you can't trust anybody 100%, even somebody who seems as simple and straightforward as Steve Brady. You have to keep a secret or two in reserve, no matter what.

.

What new treasures have you found? Debbie Koyama asked, as she always did, when she came for her two o'clock mandolin lesson. I'd fired up the samovar for tea and put out some slices of homemade nut bread. Your house is like a jewel box. Of course you don't have kids.

Nothing happens by accident. That's what Absalom says. It wasn't that I was tempted to tell her about the two babies I'd had and given up for adoption long, long ago, before I ever met Steve. I don't talk about that with anybody — even Mom. But it was as if Debbie, with her smiling moon face and her high, breathless voice, had arrived just to remind me how excited I was — how I was bursting with news I had to keep to myself.

Steve and I are the kids, I said, only half joking. We never had to grow up. We can make ourselves a magic playhouse if we want. Why not?

I just can't imagine how you find these things, Debbie said. And as usual, before I could even pour the tea, she took off on a tour of our five little rooms, uttering yips and sighs of appreciation. What can I say? It's a tiny house — we bought it because of the land that went with it, the field that runs clear to the Centennial Trail and the riverbank. We'd done about all we could with it, except for the floor Steve was still working on. The color scheme is white and pale yellow — cheerful even in the winter. Steve built the Swedish clock himself. The rest of the furniture is all antiques, including my other Victorian sofa and love seat, a dark wine-red velvet. None of it cost much, and no two pieces matched until I found the harmony between them and added the the right wallpaper, the lamps, the prints of Dutch windmills, the cushions I needlepointed, a couple of my wildlife drawings. There's an art to it. That's what Debbie responded to, not the things themselves.

You should go to estate sales, I said. This town is full of old houses. You never know what you're going to find.

Oh, my God, Debbie said. Look at this!

And wouldn't you know it? She was drawn to the old oak rolltop desk I'd refinished and was starting to paint with designs of yellow tulips and white daisies, pale-green grapes, dark-green leaves. Out of everything else in the house, she homed in on that. Debbie walked straight over the paint-spattered newspaper on the floor, tested the new varnish with her finger for stickiness, and rolled up the top. And there, in one of the cubbyholes, was Paul Siebert's letter.

Without thinking, she reached for it — and just as instinctively I snatched it away, as I'd done with Steve.

There was nothing to do but laugh, we were both so embarrassed.

What is it? Debbie said. Something important? I didn't mean to pry.

No, nothing, I said, but it was, wouldn't you say? It had to be fate that she'd found it. And who can argue with fate — especially if, as Absalom says, it's a fate we create for ourselves, whether we admit it or not?

Really, Maggie, I'm sorry. I don't know what got into me.

Never mind, I said and led her back into the kitchen. I poured our tea into glasses, Russian style. She took off her coat, unpacked her mandolin from its case and flexed her stubby fingers, ready to play, but I could tell she was still flustered.

Did you use a pattern? she asked.

What?

For what you're painting in there. Those flowers and grapes.

And I told her no — I'd pretty much freehanded them, as I usually do.

"That's just amazing. Is there anything you're not good at?"

Plenty. And I laughed again. Praise always goes to my head. It was hopeless. I had to tell somebody. Like figuring out if I should answer this.

I still had the letter in my hand, and Debbie's eyes had never left it.

"What is it? Some big secret?"

Only a lover from thirty-five years ago who up and decided to write to me, just today.

You're kidding.

I almost wish I was. Steve isn't too happy about it.

Why should Steve worry? You've been with each other forever. I could almost see the thoughts form in Debbie's mind: And you're old, Maggie. Fifty-three, isn't it? And everybody in the Society knows how well you play together. Guitar, dulcimer, whatever. You two are the sweetest couple I know. She took a bite of nut bread. Then she made another grab for the letter, and I pulled it away. We were giggling now. Who is this guy?

A journalist. He's on the L.A. Times now. His wife's a banker.

Debbie pondered those last two facts, which seemed strange to me, too.

So how'd you meet him?

And I told her. I didn't tell everything, by any means — it was a PG-rated version — but it was still a lot more than I'd ever expected to say. You can just shut up. It was Debbie's fault. She thought it was all so romantic, how I'd been on the streets and gotten married the first time at eighteen and led a life of crime while still getting an education. She kept encouraging me, asking questions, and each time I answered she'd give a little gasp and smile and shake her head, just as she'd done with my antiques. We never did get around to the lesson. I told Debbie she didn't have to pay, but she said no problem; this was more fun anyway. She ate all the nut bread, and I had to brew more tea.

Of course I won't do anything. Maybe thank him for asking about me. That's all.

Nobody writes letters anymore, Debbie said, putting on her coat. It had started to snow again. Just e-mails and texts. This is so ... classic.

The rest of the day, I went back and forth — waves of excitement, then anxiety over what I'd done. Would Debbie condemn me once she had time to think it over? I might have spoiled her whole image of me. Would she feel awkward about coming back? Would she spread gossip? But finally I calmed down. For Debbie, this was only a daydream, like going to the movies. Not everybody has what it takes to have adventures in real life. I'm not saying they were fun. Most of the time I was terrified. (That's what Paul never understood. He always thought I was some kind of swashbuckler.) But they were adventures, and Debbie Koyama, in all her thirty-some years on this earth, has never had any and never will. So she didn't really believe what I told her. She couldn't imagine, looking at mousy little me — You dress like a frickin' librarian — that I might have some life in me yet. Otherwise, how could she enjoy my stories so much and still be totally sympathetic to Steve, which she is? Most people are. He'd probably win a Best Husband poll around here hands down.

3.

Of course when I said it was Debbie's fault, that wasn't true. I told her because I wanted to. We attract like-minded people; when we need to learn something, we attract the teacher. That's what Absalom says. If it hadn't been Paul Siebert, it would have been somebody else. But how weird that it turned out to be him. Again. Three times he's barged into my life out of nowhere — in '71, in '75 and now, after so many years I didn't even tumble when I first saw his name on the envelope.

Nothing happens by accident. Absalom is a group of four spiritual entities channeled by Roscoe and Eunice Wilkerson of Greenville, South Carolina. I've read their books over and over and listened to the tapes in my car. But to understand this, I felt I needed something more. I sent a picture of myself and $150 in translating money to a lady in Seattle who's on the Michael Channel — the Archangel Michael. Don't you say a word. In a couple of weeks she got back to me. Here's what she said:

Paul and I have known each other (no surprise) in previous lives. Hundreds of lives — we're very old souls. The first time, this lady said, was back in the Stone Age. She didn't know exactly where, but the land was dry and rocky — the Middle East? I was a teen-ager, pregnant without a husband, and my people were very strict against this. I'd dishonored my family and my village, and they were going to stone me to death or something even more gruesome. So I'd gone to the edge of a cliff to jump off. I was crying. Then Paul came along — he was a peddler from another village, carrying a bag of flint arrowheads over his shoulder. Or maybe obsidian. He saw me standing there and felt sorry for me, or maybe he thought I was hot, even with my belly sticking out and tears running down my face. He stopped and asked me what was wrong, and I told him. He said not to worry — he'd take care of it. He'd been looking for a wife anyway. He took me back to my village and told the people he'd be responsible for the pregnancy; he'd make an honest woman out of me. And that's what happened. Paul Siebert (or whatever he was called in the Stone Age) saved my life.

Ever since, the Michael Channel said, he and I have been bumping into each other. In one life he'll help me out, and in another I'll help him. The lady didn't think we were soul mates, necessarily. We were pivotal facilitators. Our job is to make a sudden impact — often a sexual one — and shake up the other person's life when nothing else will.

Of course, long before I learned all this, I'd phoned the number Paul gave me.

.

So do you feel at peace now that you've finally found me? I asked. Or do you want something more?

I didn't say this right away. In fact, we'd already been talking for a good part of the morning. Feeling each other out. I'd never had a chance to spend much time with Paul Siebert — not even 24 hours straight, come to think of it — and now I didn't know him at all.

When he first heard my voice, Paul seemed overjoyed. I can't believe it, he said. You sound just the same. I never expected you to answer.

Why not?

I thought ... maybe you still hated me. Like the last time I saw you.

I didn't hate you, Paul.

"You could've fooled me. I thought it was all my fault. You were pregnant, and I didn't pay enough attention to that, I know. I was a pig. I just wanted to —-"

It wasn't anything you did. My head was just in a weird place back then.

Are you sure? You were crying, and you told me ... to get the fuck out of your apartment, out of Spokane. Then I lost track of you, and I figured....

What?

That you never wanted to hear from me again. That's why this is such a miracle.

Even as excited as he was, Paul's voice was deeper than I remembered. He used to be so skinny — did that mean he'd put on weight?

"Then why did you write, I asked, if that's what you thought?"

He sidestepped the question, or ignored it. And I was afraid you thought I was too square. I couldn't keep up with you, no matter how hard I tried. Don't you remember? You said you couldn't be with anyone who wasn't a real rebel. Some Indian guy.

I didn't remember that. The only Indian guy I knew, Little Bear, was years before.

So you were a pig and a square at the same time, I said.

I guess so.

Pretty hopeless, right?

Paul laughed, but he sounded uncertain.

There's no right or wrong, I told him, quoting Absalom. "Whatever people do to us, we have total control over how we react. You thought you were square, and that just pushed me away. I thought you were crowding me — same thing. We were young. Now that we've learned so much more, can't we be friends?"

I sure hope so, Maggie.

I don't see why not. Now that you've gone to all this trouble.

There was silence.

Then Paul said suddenly: You know I hired a detective to find you? And he couldn't do it. That's another reason I didn't expect to hear from you. He said you had to be in hiding. And I wondered ... I don't know. Maybe you were in the Russian mafia or something. Maybe your life was in danger.

It was my turn to laugh. That's crazy. I've just been here. Being married, behaving myself for a change. He must not be very good, your detective.

Maybe not.

"So how did you find me?"

It was just a lucky break, Paul said. A good thing I'd never moved away from Spokane. He finally found a marriage record online — he wasn't sure how, because he'd never been able to find it again. But once he had my married name, he could find an address.

"But you wrote to my maiden name."

So you'd know I was somebody who knew you back then. Ryan was the name on your letters. You know I saved them all?

What letters?

In a cardboard box. Every last one you sent me in '75. The greatest letters I ever got, bar none.

That's amazing, I said.

And I meant it. It was mind-blowing to think that anyone would keep me in his heart for so long. Even if I hadn't learned about our past lives together yet, it was enough to make me marvel at how a connection like ours could survive on nothing, or almost nothing; it really did seem like fate. But I still didn't know why he'd written me now. It was time to pull back, to be cautious. I didn't have any idea what kind of person Paul Siebert had become. He was several years older than me. Was he bald? Did he have false teeth? These things do matter — I don't care what anyone says.

So for the next twenty minutes or so, any spy tapping the line would have sworn we were trying as hard as we could to convince each other that friendship was all we could expect.

Paul told me how much he loved his son, Gerry; how practical and smart his wife, Raquel, was, despite her movie-star name; how they'd given him the kind of home he'd only dreamed about when he was single.

I told him how it was the same with me — how I realized I didn't have to hang with low-lifes forever, how there were nice people in the world after all, a whole bunch of them right here in the Spokane Folklore Society, and Steve Brady was one of them. Soon after I turned thirty, I put disorder behind me and never looked back.

That's great, Paul said.

I told him I was happy he'd prospered too, after being the lonely newspaper guy I remembered, bouncing from job to job. I told him about my translating, my music. He couldn't believe I played so many instruments. I told him what kind of man Steve was — how we remodeled all those houses together, how we'd ride around the woods and fields in summer and I'd chatter away while Steve hardly said a word. That doesn't mean he can't feel, I said. He just isn't an intellectual. He expresses it all with his hands. You should see his work.

Paul agreed — he wasn't handy himself, but had plenty of respect for those who were.

Then, out of the blue, he said something that gave me a chill — the very same chill you put in my soul when I was fourteen years old.

Who raped you? he asked.

What?

I don't want to bring back bad memories, Maggie, but I've always wondered if I got it wrong. I thought you told me it was your dad — but maybe not?

No, it wasn't him. But it was his fault anyway I was out on the streets. I had to run away from home.

Another silence.

Who did it, then?

Nobody. Just three assholes. They tore me up pretty good.

I said it as harshly as I could, thinking: Fuck it. Am I still damaged goods to him? If so, let's get it all out in the open.

But, believe it or not, it soon went away, that paranoid moment. Paul just said he was sorry I'd suffered so much. He didn't take some creepy interest in it. He didn't blame me — not like Steve Brady deciding after twelve years of marriage that I was a slut after all.

And I began to remember things about Paul — like how easy he was to talk to. I didn't have to translate everything I said into simpler English. He understood things. He hadn't been a Puritan or a prude — just totally convinced of his own unhipness. He hadn't ever given me shit about Bill Mitchell, for instance. Or about being a felon. He'd thought I was wonderful as I was. Then I remembered how gentle his hands were, how he liked going down on me. And I found myself getting a buzz on, sitting in my kitchen, holding the phone, as if I'd broken my rules and drunk hard liquor or toked on some pot. I started dropping little bombs into the conversation. Not on purpose — I was improvising, like playing jazz. I could feel my old powers coming back — from the dead, almost.

I've never been fat, I told him.

And I told him, You'll like what you see.

And I happened to mention that I was growing my hair out. It's down to my nipples now. (I could have said shoulder blades, but I didn't.)

Paul said most people thought he looked young for his age. Yes, he still had his hair and his teeth. He'd wondered about it sometimes — wondered if unconsciously he was saving himself for something or somebody on down the road, instead of giving up.

Now I was really buzzed. Paul didn't know it, but that's an Absalom idea. It's called youthing. He was absolutely right, and I told him so.

I just needed him to take one more step. I almost held my breath.

And here it came. It's none of my business, I know, Paul said, "but how often ... do you and Steve make love?'

Once a week, about. That's not bad after twenty-two years, don't you think? God, back in the beginning we wore each other out.

Paul sighed.

It turned out he hadn't had sex in two years, There hadn't ever been very much of it. He hadn't complained. He didn't want to be one of those old-line husbands who demanded their rights. What good would that do? Love had to be spontaneous. He was grateful to have a family. And Raquel was a good wife, a good mother. She just wasn't very affectionate. Maybe it was his fault — it probably was. Still, it