Stay with Me

//

The first thing I wrote, even before L died, was this:

She kneels and looks down into the water. A floating jetty extends some distance, it could have been a bridge, only it stops. Where it stops is where she kneels.

She looks down into the water, as if the water was a membrane and there was another world underneath.

As if what's there, in that other world, is bits of her, bits that aren't visible to her, or to anyone.

And so she kneels and looks down into the water, and it's not that she's waiting, she's just being.

For a couple of years, only that image. I got no further. And it's true, she wasn't waiting. She was being. Being there on the jetty, being that image inside me, a state of being. It's me who's been waiting. Going around with that image, standing on the shore, walking all the way out along the jetty behind her, sitting down next to her, trying to see what she sees. Only I've never been able to reach her, have seen nothing.

And then one day it becomes possible to write:

She has remained there. She came with Myrto who was conducting at the concert hall, only then he died.

They'd been married just over a year, known each other five. She buried his ashes under the tree in front of the house, the one she sees from the window when she looks out. Last week his daughter told her she wanted some of his ashes too, to spread them somewhere (Papà). Judith scraped the grit aside with a trowel and there underneath lay the ashes still, as if a whole autumn of rain and a winter of snow had not passed since she buried them there, piles of snow that froze and later melted, over and over, and she tipped some of the ashes into a small container made of metal and sent them by post across the sea.

The images are so still. Unmoving. As if they've simply stopped. She being is all there is. But what is she? She is this body that exists through the days. When night comes she lies down in the big bed, on the mattress that's too soft, she turns off the light and the night is then all around her until it's morning again.

A short time he was with her. In the mornings when they woke, he would look at her from his pillow and his grey eyes were so soft upon her.

Afterwards, in the beginning, she cried from the pit of her stomach, a weeping that was heavy and felt endless, that she could go in and out of, that was there with her the whole time.

How long does the beginning last. When does the beginning melt into something else, and become a person's days. And when do those days change, and become something else still.

And what is there now? It's as if she has emerged from what was dark and oppressive and hung over her, into something wide open and empty.

It's not possible to know more about her than this. We see what we see. She knows no more about herself.

There are no eyes any more that see her as he saw her. That see in such a way that she could feel waves surging from a point in her middle, the heart presumably, as if her heart was a pink and opening bud agitating the surface of a bright green lake, bringing its waters into motion.

She had never been there before, to it lasting. To the softness in her chest enduring. To it not being cut off, the goodness in his eyes, that made it happen. To it not suddenly being gone. She started to believe in it, to bend, and become without thought.

And then it was he who was gone.

They were picked up at the airport by the concert hall's factotum. They had two big suitcases each, Myrto's two red ones and hers, a black and a blue. Her hand luggage included her laptop, the old heavy one, and a few books she hadn't been able to leave behind. There'd been no logic to her choice, she'd simply taken the ones that had stood out to her as she scanned the bookshelves back home in Milan. Besides his sheet music, Myrto had with him a collection of Chekhov's short stories and two books in French about music and meaning, as well as the notebook in which he wrote things down in tiny handwriting. It had always bemused her how a hand that could write so small could also make so much sound happen - how his body, so soft and gentle next to hers, could contain the same man who would burst into such life in front of an orchestra. So wild he appeared then, so unfamiliar and unexplored. The way she often thought of him when he came inside her, that every thrust was him, straining for the very limits, for insecurity and frailty too, straining for where there was no longer any distance between what was inside him and what was outside, in the music. And she had her first dress with her too, the one she'd sewn in secondary school, the fabric was brown, cotton, she'd sat in the kitchen with the sewing machine on the wobbly table, the evenings grew lighter with each day and when at last she was finished she'd worn it one day at school, only it hadn't been at all like she'd imagined, that something about her would be made visible, that the dress would open something, draw the others closer to her, instead it was the opposite that happened, it was as if they moved still further away, she saw how they tried to hide their sniggers, no one understood, and yet the dress had survived, she took it with her every time she moved somewhere new.

In the car on their way from the airport Myrto engaged in chat with Hardy, as the driver was called, while Judith looked out of the window, and even then: the feeling of everything being too big. That she'd ended up in a world where everything was oversized, the streets were extra wide, the buildings extra tall. As if everything was so big she could see the curvature of the earth, like on a beach where the whole horizon stretches out in front of you, the way it tilts away at the edges.

And the way she'd felt immediately that the green timber house in front of which Hardy pulled up was a place to be glad for, a home. It was a semi, theirs was on the right, two floors, red and yellow around the windows, it made her think of Pippi Longstocking. The other half, identical, was empty when they arrived, and still is now. The house belongs to the philharmonic and the concert hall. Hardy gave them the keys and wished them welcome, turned and waved as he went back to the car, and they stood a moment on the porch with their suitcases before unlocking the door and going inside.

Myrto holds the front door open for her as she steps through into the big hallway where the first thing she notices is the staircase, its brown hemp runner secured by a polished brass rod on every stair. He follows her in and pauses, his fawn-coloured coat hanging open, his tousled hair swept back from his face as if he's been standing in a strong wind, and he smiles, yes, he smiles at her.

And in that image of him smiling there, in the hallway of the house in which they're going to live, she sees glimpses of so many other moments, she sees him in the music room in Milan, where the piano was, and the keyboard with the headphones, the big iMac on the desk beside it where he wrote his music, and in those moments he is so very far inside himself, or what he is listening to, or doing, standing shaking his arms that are held out at his sides, his eyes closed, or else he's seated at the piano and looks so small, as if the piano is enormous and he's just a little boy sitting on the stool, stretching up to reach, his back quite straight and his nose as pointed as a bird's beak, stretching towards the sheet music higher up.

The way she's closest to him when he's not thinking that she's there too, when he's doing what he does and is not only immersed but consumed, it's the intensity in him then that opens him to her, something opens to show her the place inside him that is so alive, and when he smiles at her in the hallway in the green house, she sees that place inside his smile.

Further inside, everything is so big, the worktop in the kitchen, like the ones she's seen in films, in the middle of the floor, The Bridges of Madison County, Meryl Streep a fifties housewife, Clint Eastwood constantly pulling up outside in his pickup, he's a photographer and from the Midwest, from Bellingham, Minnesota, not far from where they are now, and Francesca, as Meryl's character is called, is Italian, and now she and Myrto coming straight from Milan, as if there's a connection, Judith thinks, standing there in the kitchen, but says nothing, simply watches Myrto as if he was Clint and she was Streep, and now it's all about them, the two of them together, in the kitchen, where the sink stands in front of a wide bay window. Now we're in America, she thinks as she opens the extra-wide fridge. The 2.5-litre plastic bottle of milk, the brown paper bags on the worktop with the groceries someone's bought for them at the supermarket. The big sofa, also green, in front of the fireplace, a blanket with stars and stripes draped over the armrest.

And there, inside the door, Myrto lifts her up in his unmuscular arms, strong enough nonetheless, and staggers the few steps to the staircase, and they laugh, she buries her nose in his white hair and sniffs in his smell, his hair, thinning now on top, revealing to her the brown flecks on the pink of his scalp, here a strand, there a strand, like stems of trees in a vast forest in which she's running about - Myrto, she says, and pulls his head to her chest, the globe of the earth and the heavens together, and now she holds the whole world in her hands.

And then he had to go and DIE? It's impossible to even imagine then. No one goes around thinking about...