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A Posthumous Affair

Originally published in Pretext, with particular thanks to Paul Magrs, the story is dedicated to Beth McHattie and Hugh and Ali Levinson, fellow members of the Crivelli Quartet

I
The day they meet they trail a red balloon across Washington Square.
         It's the boy's balloon, but he lets her hold the string. She feels it tug as the warm air pulls and lifts it. She runs, arm high, and soon outraces it. He trots beside her. The red balloon follows in their wake.
         This would be in the spring of 1864 when he is nine and she is three years younger. Money will never be a problem.
         She is a Miss Cooper Glass, christened Grace, an orphan child, unattached except to a line of aunts who will weigh her down with money. He is one of the lesser Milltown Blakes, Master Peter, affectionately Pierre. He is born to the Law, but will not follow it.
         The surnames mean something in this world. If dropped, all New York would hear them fall. They have substance, weight, are larger than these two children who must bear them. The names - their names - will mean something to us, too. They will have weight. They will have consequence.
         There is nothing of consequence in a red balloon, but the six year old heiress, Grace Cooper Glass, marvels at it, open-mouthed, and even forgets to breathe. She is charmed that something so round and fatly red can fly, and Master Millltown Blake is charmed by her. She is so young, so plump, so volatile.
         In the lives that are to come, each will remember this moment, slight though it is; the red balloon, Washington Square, the spring day's petal sheen. They will record it, recreate it time and again in letters, diaries, poetry and prose. They will be the most important person in each other's lives. They will anchor one another.
         But, for now, there is a red balloon. They are children. They are not in love. They are buoyant in each other's company. It might always be just so.
         Even in play, the gospel of clothes demand these children be dressed as little adults. He, high-collared, twill-suited, wears a waistcoat of ivory sateen while, underneath a smock of watered silk, a thick ribbed corset encases her.
         A tender age to be wearing such a thing, but her aunts insist. The child is too robust, too full-bodied. She must be contained, her figure tamed and trimmed.
         The corset creaks as she runs and laughs. She does not mind. It is a cage in which she has learned to live, but he, clutching at her, believes her midriff to be composed entirely of bone.
         Shocked, he lets her go.
         Surprised, she releases the red balloon.
         The red balloon is a swollen heart. It is a blood-filled rose. It floats across the rinsed blue of a Nineteenth Century New York sky. She wishes they could follow it, but he is rooted to this earth and so he anchors her.
          
II
The body, for him, will always be one of life's more sorrowful mysteries. His own he will find easy to ignore. It is a good body, short but compact, obedient to his will. It will not bother him. Women's bodies, however, so repel and fascinate him that he finds it best to ignore them, too.
         As much as he is able.
         And he is very able.
         Even in his late teens, he cannot rid himself of the notion that women have no legs, that they do not walk but hover, glide full-skirted across the earth. Undressed, ideally, they would be made of air, the heads floating, unattached.
         He knows that this is not so, but thought will not flesh them out.
         Yet this his forte - thinking. A clever boy and gifted, his fellows call him the Great Mind, but it is a long while before he realizes this may not be a compliment.
         In the courtyard of Grace's home, there is a pool, a fountain.
         It is 1874.
         They are in their teens, of equal size and weight - a fact that pleases neither of them.
         She has not been well. She will never be quite well. Her health will be a rich girl's hobby.
         His father visits her aunts upstairs.
         She is dressed in a green velvet as surprisingly iridescent as the water in the pool. A froth of deeper green ripples about her neck. The colour dominates her, but her aunts are convinced it suits her well.
         While convalescing, she has been reading Shakespeare, Hamlet, for the first time.
         ‘I never knew it could be so...that anything could be so...’
         She cannot finish. Her words turn into sighs, become air. She is so exhilarated by what she has read, the memory of it, she looks as if she is gazing down from some great height.
         He will understand, she hopes. Who else but he will understand?
         ‘I know,’ he says, and he does.
         ‘It is so sad when Ophelia dies, don't you think?’
         ‘She must,’ he says flatly. ‘For the story to work out.’
         ‘I know,’ she says. ‘I do know.’
         ‘Can you imagine Hamlet married? The idea of it?’
         She can. She does. She says, ‘If Hamlet did live, I think she would come back to haunt him. It would be...’
         She searches for the words as if they lay at the very bottom of the ocean and, finding them, she rises to the surface, to the air and light of this her garden, courtyard, fountain, pool.
         ‘It would be,’ she says, offering him the words, ‘a posthumous affair.’
         There are vines overhead and dawn-blue bells of Morning Glory. The sun through the leaves stains her skin a further, paler green. They could be at the very bottom of the sea and she a mermaid singing to him until he notices the swell, the generous parabola of her chest, that she has a body beneath all that green, blood-filled and real, a heavy body, sorrowful.
         The fountain freckles their reflection in the pool.
         He wonders, if he pushed her in, would she sink or float, Ophelia-like, then drown?
          
III
Two years later, she turns eighteen. Hers will be the season's biggest party. Her aunts insist. It is some recompense for the lack of parents. They would wish it, each aunt says.
         They?
         Dead, her parents are ghosts who do not haunt her. If she thinks about them at all, she thinks of them something she does not have - an absence, not a loss - and perhaps it is this, their absence, that explains why sometimes - sometimes - she feels she does not belong in this world. She exists in it merely and unaccountably.
         Candle-lit, the vast and mirrored ballroom shimmers, blooms, darkens, drowns, flickers, glows - as if the room is a mind struggling to remember itself; the white gowned girls, their black-suited beaus who swirl them about are thoughts it cannot quite control.
         This is real life, she thinks, and people. And I am one of them, too.
         The thought is permission to enjoy herself, to let go.
         Wide skirts are even wider this year. When she walks, she totters. She cannot see her feet. They may not even be there. Below the waist, she may not even exist. She is made of air. She will float away.
         Foolish notion.
         Grace is a big girl grown bigger. Corsetry cannot contain her, quite. Her ample back is pushed up into rippled folds behind her shoulder blades. A shawl, a tumble of pearly gauze, disguises it.
         She is rich, considered intelligent. It is her party. She will not lack for partners, not tonight. Even he is there - in a far corner - a nail holding the room in place for her.
         He is Peter Milltown Blake - no longer Pierre to anyone but her. He has finished Harvard and will join the family firm. He has had oral sex (once) with a prostitute in Brooklyn. They kept their clothes on and he had plunged his hands into her hot hair while she chewed disconsolately at his lap.
         He has grown a moustache.
         But then so has Grace. Bleached tonight to an aery gold, it shimmers above her lips and almost suits.
         It is not bold of her to ask him if they might dance. How can he refuse? Why would he? They are old friends. Once they trailed a red balloon across Washington Square. His hands had touched her waist.
         Now their gloved hands accept each other like lock and key. They are made to dance together although she towers over him. They fit. They move in concert. Their breathing rhymes.
         ‘I have been reading Flaubert. Is that bold?’ she asks him above the music.
         ‘Very,’ he laughs, and together they make a giddy swirl.
         Few other girls would have heard the name, much less read the work. Fewer men would have been impressed.
         ‘Salammbo?’
         ‘Of course. And George Sand,’ she continues. ‘And Leopardi. And Goethe. The -’
         ‘- Elective Affinities?’
         ‘Yes, yes. The very one. And - this is a great admission - I have been writing!’
         ‘So have I,’ he says at last for this, too, is a great admission.
         ‘I knew it. How could you not? Will you continue with it?’
         This is difficult to answer.
         Across the room his own family stand like a reef, their expectations coral.
         ‘The Law. There is the Law. I must follow it, you see.’
         The way he says it, The Law, as if it were the name of an island a long bleak distance away to which he will be condemned. He would rather drown on the journey than reach such a place.
         What can he do?
         He is bound.
         The music swells. They rise with it, are rushed away - or she is.
         ‘I am going to France,’ she says, an intention, not a boast. ‘London first. And then to Italy. There is so much to see. So much to write, to think, to be. Come with me. Follow me!’
         The music is a ribbon unfurling about the room, but at these words it is as if it has wrapped itself about his feet. She dances on, exhilarated at having said something so bold, so free, so generous as Follow me. She floats away across the ballroom, a solitary thought in its glimmering mind. Only when someone sniggers does she come to halt and finds herself alone and breathless and him, standing where he stopped, his back to her.
          
         IV
          
         She sails to London and then to France and drifts towards Italy and Turin.
         She travels alone - so bold. She buys more books than gowns. She sees more art than people.
         She stays in Italy.
         Her aunts, three of them, die that winter. Her money is her own.
         She stays in Italy as if her sleeve had caught on a branch and she cannot - will not - pick it free.
         She takes this as her fate.
         Grows fat. Fatter.
         Claims to be happy.
         Is happy.
         No one believes her - but him.
         She rents what will be the first in a series of houses.
         She gathers her thoughts.
         They grew so numerous they become a burden.
         Writing releases them.
         Line after line she writes until the I becomes she, loses four stones, grows pretty, falls in love then dies. The she is called Nadine - as is the novel. Her first. It is published in London and one year later in New York where it is more praised and loved than she will ever be.
         He has left New York by then. Finally. He treads the same path - London, France and Italy. Many a rich American travels this route - even one who had floundered so surprisingly at the bar - and no one will think that he is following her.
         In life, as in dancing, the man should take the lead.
         They arrange to meet in Venice.
         She has bought a palazzo, canal-side, on the proceeds from The Italian Maid and His Sweet Blue Eyes: a Tale of Love.
         They talk as old friends do.
         They laugh.
         They do not run.
         They do not trail a red balloon.
         She wears grey, a soft dove. She could be wearing ash.
         They talk of Gautier, Maupassant, Leopardi (always Leopardi) and of his own attempts at writing. They do not talk of Cooper Glass, Nadine, The Italian Maid, His Sweet Blue Eyes.
         It is high summer. They walk along the Fondamente del Incurabili, not quite hand in hand but connected somewhere in the deep heart's core.
         Both admit that this has always been just so.
         They come to a stop and a silence on to which she floats, experimentally, these simple words.
         ‘Marry me,’ she asks, ‘might you?’
         The canal steadies, as if expectant. A rare event, this water stilling, lacquer black, a mirror in which they are both faithfully reflected. Each looks deep into this sudden mirror, deep, deep, as if they had been searching for it all their lives and this is the only chance to see themselves - each other? - truly.
         Truly.
         No. He cannot marry her.
         ‘Am I not worth loving?’ she asks.
         She has ninety thousand a year. She will have more.
         ‘I do not think myself capable of loving,’ he explains. ‘Of loving you, I mean. Not in that way.’
         She will understand, he hopes. Who else but she will understand?
         ‘I know,’ she says, and she does. ‘We are friends. We can speak to each other. Our words have weight. We are in accord. Yes?’
         ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘We are in accord.’
         And they are.
         But why, if she is the one who has been rejected, does he feel diminished by her? Made light?
          He would search their reflection in the water for evidence, but a vaporetto passes and mottles the black mirror, separates and distresses them. Their images drown in the water's shimmer.
         Neither remember the pool in Grace's courtyard, the fountain freckling their reflection. This will come later. For Grace will use it in Sweet Will Be the Flower and Clarastella. He will use it as the sad climax to Angels and Ministers, in which it is the hero who is rejected - in Paris, not in Venice.
         This is what writing is. A jumble, a deep crosshatching from which the writer takes one line only. The writer will pretend not to know where the line will lead. The writer always knows. It leads to the reader and the reader will either slip the bond that is meant to tie, or stay, a happy prisoner.
         They stay and wait for the water to resettle so that they can see themselves again. If so, they will not be ghosts. She will not be made of air, but of flesh and bone and he, unleashed, will be terrifyingly free.
         Unfastened.
         What now?
         What next?
          
V
The years will flesh them out until one night she falls beneath their unaccountable weight.
         This is the line. This is where the story was always leading. It has already happened. You are following in its wake.
         She stays in Italy and lives first in Rome, then Naples, back to Venice and then Lake Garda before finally she moves to the Marches, an obscure area of Italy which she describes as being to the Right of Nowhere.
         She buys a lakeside house, remotely placed and the colour of burnished gold. It is shadowed by an unfinished belltower, and rimmed by mountains that pearl and haze into a sky of Marian blue. Cypresses circle the house. Olive trees trail like smoke along a lake that is kidney-shaped and a shocking dusty turquoise green.
         Her readers know it well.
         It is here that Clarastella waits in vain for the dead Arthur Kennedy. Here, the evil Count Rinaldo forces Herman Blanchard to a duel. And, surely, certainly, inarguably, in the crowded garden Nadine lies buried and daily Maxim de Montefiori weeps at her marble tomb.
         This is the Casa Ulissi which Grace renames the Casa Penelope. She has thought enviously of how Penelope had spent her days weaving line after line of thread across the loom only to unravel it all at night, returning what had been made, patterned, worked over, to the air.
         She buys the local art and decorates her walls with it. It is art that goes unconsidered by her peers: flattened Madonnas hovering on cushions of gold, skin so dark they might be Indian or Turkish; virgin saints with rainbow haloes and God dressed like a Maharaja. These figures are less the muscular saints of Italian Catholicism and more like little Buddhas or Byzantine queens. Gloriously gowned and buoyant figures, they ache for abstraction, to be no more than pattern, light playing on a wall, coloured air.
         At some point in time, this part of Italy came untethered - West touched East, East reached West - and then both retracted, one shocked, one sweetly surprised. The mountains around Casa Penelope know of a more ecumenical Heaven and so, in time, will Grace
         Her special love is an Annunciation in which the Virgin's belly is already swollen - in expectation or in prophecy - and from it extends an umbilical cord that reaches to the sun. The Virgin Mary seems to be trailing a yellow balloon but, in truth, the balloon is God and God has hold of her.
         Grace's books happen more slowly but she continues to sell. Her readers have the habit of her.
         He will fare less well.
         Socially, he is buoyant.
         He returns to America from time to time, travels widely and is anchored, if anywhere, in London, a villa by the Thames.
         He writes. He is published. He is known in the smallest way. He will never quite rise. He will never quite break the surface of public attention but there are those prepared to dive, to seek out the pearl. There follows a string of tiny books, roundly worked, shiny from his attention; The Earthen Lot; Exquisite Bias; A Formal Feeling; The Invisible Worm; The Ever-Fixed Mark.
         He does not, will not, cannot marry. He is not bold enough nor free. There are affairs with titled ladies, but it might be their names he loves, their rank, the long line of their history. There is one long directionless romance with a sculptor - male - and many letters pass between them on anatomy and the intractability of stone.
         His prose becomes lapidary. His books are vast accretions that take years to form only to crumble in his hands. They become more written. They become less read.
         The world is too much with him, he thinks, and withdraws to Norfolk and a mansion by the sea. He walks the beach each day. It figures in his dreams. He sits and counts the waves, describes for himself their singular variety. He loves the sea. It does not bother him. It does not throw back reflections.
         He wastes his life. There is nothing of true substance he has done. A rich boy making art, not money. A rich boy growing old. A dilettante. He can afford to rise above the marketplace but with nothing to answer him, nothing to frustrate, contain, correct or stretch him - nothing, in short, to hold him fast - he falls into muddle. Stutter. Lovely muddle sometimes. Rhythmic stutter, too, quite musical, but ugly muddle mostly, painful stutterings.
         He writes Angels and Ministers.
         This should float, he thinks.
         He sets sail in it.
         It never quite leaves harbour.
         It is an attempt - a bold one - to express the very part of himself of which he is most unwilling to leave go.
         It expresses her.
         A review juxtaposes the words most frequently used in his early works  - sigh, ripple, freckled, swirl, sour, balloon and bone; physical sensuous words, pallid but palpable: in them, a world is, at least, embodied, made evident – with those in this, his latest, his heart's core, a rose filled with his own blood: the recurrent words are folly, breeze, ghost, love and, again, love. Too much love. Too much.
         The review concludes: ‘Milltown Blake has long since left this plane. He has risen to a higher one where lesser mortals want for air. Sadly, we have no reason to follow him.’
         She will follow him.
         Haven't they always been in accord although long miles and even longer years have distanced them?
         She writes to him: ‘In this one work you have spoken my very soul. You have revealed the very ties that bind us. I am in sweet bondage to you. It has always ever been just so.’
         She calls him Master.
         He is flattered, touched.
         The letter is a twitch upon the thread. It pulls him to her. He must visit. He must make contact.
         It has been years.
         Years.
         There has been no one else.
         I have been haunted by you, he wants to say.
         Ideally, this is what he wants to say.
         The thought lifts him.
         It exhilarates.
          
VI
It is 1905.
         He sets down from the train at Macerata.
         She lives still in Italy, remotely, in the Marches, almost a recluse.
         She has not published for seven years. Her work does not sell so well since her heroines have taken to nunneries and self-slaughter. They no longer hold on to their man. Often, they just let go.
         Still, he is met in a Rolls Royce bought with the royalties from the reprint of her last novel. He hands the chauffeur the suitcase he has bought with Angels and Ministers' unmet advance.
         Signorina Glass, he is told, does not leave the house.
         He is driven through cool green valleys, past slope on slope of sunflowers - golden-faced and glowing as if they had just seen God and were still trapped willingly in that moment - and up into the mountains where the morning's glare turns the world into dazzle and flat black shadow.
         This is unreal country; a turquoise lake, grey olive, mountains of pearl and a sky of unaccountable blue. It is a landscape aching to be abstraction, pattern. The air has a weight to it, so humid it is almost liquid.
         He does not walk from the car to the gates of the Casa Penelope, he wades. The light is green, thickly so. He might drown in it.
         I have come for you, he says, rehearsing the words, revising and redrafting them. I have longed for you for years, and I know this only now.
         Could you?
         Might you?
         Say that for you, too, it has always ever been just so.
         A servant trails him through tall wide rooms in which darkness hangs like a fog.
         The rooms are soaked in shadows.
         Ghosts could live here.
         One does.
         She comes towards him swimmingly, emerging as if out of a dark lake. It wraps around her, this darkness. She exists in it, a dark balloon against even darker air.
         They are face to face in the black-lacquered darkness.
         They are old friends.
         Neither runs.
         Neither laughs.
         Once there was a red balloon, and she was made entirely of bone.
         ‘I no longer write,’ she tells him. ‘I have no more to give. And was it ever worth the giving? Line after line, I became entangled. You never read me.’
         ‘I did. Most certainly I did. From time to time. Nadine. I read Nadine.’
         She waves his words away.
         ‘Nadine? Even now a trail of New York gels seek me out. They come to the Marches. To Lago di Fiastra. They come to my door. So bold. They tell my servants, 'She must see me. She must! Tell her, I am Nadine!' Even I was never Nadine. Nor the Italian maid. Nor Clarastella. I figured them out of the air.’
         With a gesture - a tug? - she pulls them out again - the darkness peopled - and, with another, dismisses them, releases them into a deeper darkness.
         ‘How can they be anything but ghosts? And I, their maker? I envy them. Do you remember? Once? Washington Square? The courtyard? The dance? Venice? I only ever wrote for you. To suspend a line between us. To keep it taut.’
         What can he say to this?
         ‘I didn't know.’
         He did. How could he not?
         ‘I truly did not know,' he says again.
         ‘Then you should have known. It was not kind. It has not been kind.’
         There is gilt at the edge of a distant window. A promise of blue and gold, of sun and sky and water.
         ‘But you read me?’
         ‘I did.’
         ‘You read Angels and Ministers. You liked it.’
         ‘Liked it? You turned me into words. You took my flesh and bones and made me air.’
         He cannot tell if this is a compliment or a complaint.
         ‘I did not mean to turn you into air.’
         Nor did he, quite. It was a way of loving her. His only way. Why then can he not say?
         Instead he says, ‘There are worse fates. To be air. Mere air. It is, after all, the medium in which we must - what? - exist, is it?’
         She is not listening, but turns to the light from the far window so that she herself, her profile, is also gilt. Her skin is so dark she might be Indian or Turkish.
         ‘This is a beautiful land. There is another casa by the lake. It is mine. Everything is mine. And the belltower. When it is finished. Live in it. Live here. One summer. Let me have you by me for one month.’
         Her hand reaches out, touches his waist. He is made entirely of bone.
         ‘Will you? Might you?’
         This is a house of death. It is a house that does not know how to live. It floats on the lake like a swollen corpse. He is not even a thought in its mind. He cannot live in it. He will want for air, and she will weigh him down with wanting.
         Outside the blades of rosemary are silvered by the sun, made keen. If he stayed he would find stinging rue and nettles by the lake, wild orchids and lilac-coloured thistles vermilion in their youth. He would see how the breeze lifts the heads of mustard-eyed marguerites and the purple vetch trails its bony fingers in the water.
         He will not see these things.
         He does not stay.
         He leaves.
         Or is it that - might it be - she lets him go?
         ‘You were only ever a means for me to ascend,’ he hears her screech, trailing his running figure through dark corridor after corridor. ‘Did you imagine all these years I've been hanging unripe, growing yellow and bitter-skinned? I have always been ready to fall. It's God I love, not you!’
          
VII
He marries.
         It is a surprise to everyone. To me, also, but not, I imagine, Grace.
         Perhaps Grace believed that it might always be just so.
         His wife is an undulant, clear-minded girl, happy to be tethered to an older man, pleased to have him as her burden. I will not name her. Not that she doesn't merit naming. She is a line I could also follow. We could trail her, too, but naming her will give her weight. She will become a load we do not need to carry. As we near towards the end, I think we have enough to bear.
         Meanwhile, Grace lives ever more narrowly. She takes up less and less room. It might almost be a holy thing.
         Sanyassa.
         A determined withdrawal from the world, a shedding, to become nothing more to the world than the nib of a pen on a page - or, better still, your eye on this page.
         It is called decreation.
         It is detachment.
         It is release.
         It is the opposite of gravity.
         It is grace.
         The body weighs her down. It is our final burden. She has colds. She has chills. She develops (pretty word) alopecia, nephritis (writerly words); gallstones, cysts. She has a heavy time of it. Her body so pre-occupies her, the world floats off and, if it ever tugs at her - a letter, a visitor, a commission - she pulls herself away.
         She is in love with the misery of her condition.
         Understand that this is a true, an absorbing romance.
         She is Ophelia at Il Lago di Fiastra.
         She is in her late fifties. She never meant to be so. She has drifted there. Age is an element in which she gladly flounders.
         We are made large by what we desire.
         She desires God.
         No wonder she is heavy.
         Bowed under such a weight, she climbs the unfinished belltower. She must needs rise, breathlessly. Her feet do not even touch the steps.
         She could be made of air.
         Underneath her satin, her heart is swollen. She is a blood-filled rose. A red balloon.
         The dawn is here.
         The sky is made of gold and she is dark against it
         She will float across an early Twentieth Century Italian sky.
         Either that, or her gown catches and she hangs herself from the belltower's imperfect guttering.
         Or did you think she would drown herself?
         No, that wasn't where the line was going.
         This story does not end with death, it ends with love.
         It concerns a posthumous affair.
         There is still more unravelling.
          
VIII
She leaves instructions that nothing will survive her.
         Nothing.
         He is made her executor. Nice touch - that legal duty. Wasn't he always bound for the law?
         He spends two weeks in that house of death.
         His wife does not travel with him. She is heavy with child. Gravid, I believe, is the word.
         He follows Grace's instructions to the letter, to the word. He cleans out her rooms. Light floods in, reclaims them. He empties her desk, her trunks, her wardrobes. He makes a bonfire of her books, her manuscripts, her letters.
         For three days he piles it ever higher and finally sets it alight, watches as page becomes flame, becomes smoke, becomes air.
         When were words anything else? Where else should they return, but to the air?
         She, of course, is cremated. Air, not earth, will claim her, too.
         Sailing back across the turquoise lake he will gaze not at the blue ribbon of smoke that is her consumed body as it trails across the dawn rose sky but, instead, at the water on which, the night before, he had sailed out to drown her dresses. They had risen up like angry black balloons and the moon had watched him, superbly white and naked, its body the colour of bleached bone, its reflection quivering, as if water were the only element in which it truly lived.
          
IX
He has a son. He lengthens his line. There will be, in a sense, no end to him and yet it is of Grace - who has come to a conclusion - of whom he mostly thinks. Thinking, remember, was his forte. Memory revises, restores, perfects her.
         One year later, he imagines her freshly dead and yet quivering, alive with human need.
         He dreams they meet again by water - a pool in a courtyard, a black canal, a turquoise lake? He can only dimly see.
         Perhaps it is Washington Square and the years have never been and it has always ever been just so.
         There may even be a red balloon.
         She pulls him to her.
         He clutches at her waist.
         He caresses air.
         When they speak, their words are white balloons.
         It will be an inconceivable communion.
         Weightless, she is a burden he can bear and they commence, of course - of course - a posthumous affair.
         This is the happiest end to which I can lead them. I would have liked them to have had a better life. I care for them. I love them.
         They are made of air.
         They are made of words.
         They are made of things I love.
         There is a little of Melville, some Hawthorne in Peter Milltown Blake, and a great deal of Henry James. A very great deal of James. There is Wharton, Dickinson, Constance Fenimore Woolson  and Alice James in Grace; others, too, writers who are dead to us, ghosts who do not haunt us, their books sealed tombs. Unvisited, they wait to be released.
         This is a story made out of love and for it, but it is not Grace and Peter who have the posthumous affair.
         It is you and I.
         To write and to read is to make something out of nothing, a life, a relationship out of air. To write is to reach. To read is to touch. Between a writer and a reader there is - there can only ever be - a posthumous affair.
         When I wrote this, I was flesh and bone. I figured you out of air. Now you are real, substantial, and I am words. These words. I have had you bound. I have trailed you like a red balloon. Now you will outrace me. You will turn the page, move on, and I will be the one who is tethered.
         These words are weightless. I offer them, this burden. Can you bear it?
         Might you?
         Your answer is in my future. I am in your past. This has been a posthumous affair.
         It can only ever always be just so.