Letter 4 - Letters from London

"Hecate, Worms, Kisses"

The first week they were in London he left the apartment to explore his new neighborhood on foot. He decided to learn to walk around Bloomsbury without looking at his phone. He decided also on a plan: each day he would walk in different directions in something like a methodological fashion, making each walk a mix of places he’d been and places he hadn’t. They were going to be here for four months and he didn’t want to be peering into his phone all the time, walking with that iPhone hump forming along his back. He was already trying to moisturize away the laptop line on his neck.

There was a park near his apartment, or was it two? It seemed divided perhaps into three parks. Or they were in close proximity. An underground bathroom had been converted into a wine bar, and seemed like maybe it was a trap set by vampires—WINE BAR DOWNSTAIRS was a perfect ruse for luring people down. The pub where Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes went on their first dates was right by the mailbox Virginia Woolf used, according to a writer friend who would bring the news months later. Each time he passes it now it seems to grow a spiritual aura. The other day he introduced an old friend to it and they hugged it on each side, as if it were another old friend.

Further up the street he found four restaurants that would become favorite restaurants. A tailor where he dreamed immediately of buying a suit. An umbrella store with expensive umbrellas that he lingered over all the same. It had been so long since he’d lived near stores where he wanted to shop for clothes, or even to browse. He had long ago given up on favorite restaurants though some had found him in the last few years in Vermont. But they required at least 30 minutes of driving each way. London a daily reminder of the ways America makes you drive a car or give up.

He came back and eventually reached the tripartite park, coming to a stop in front of a hand-drawn, hand-lettered flyer pasted to the side of a black iron box along the entrance to Coram’s Fields. The writer had made the lines of their message too thin for anyone to read easily at a distance so he got up close to read it.

                                    MISSING

                        VERY TAME HAND-REARED

                                    YOUNG MAGPIE

                        MAY ANSWER TO “HECATE

                                                              WORMS

                                                                 KISSES”

                                                            LOOKS A BIT LIKE THIS

An arrow pointed to a fairly decent drawing of what could be any magpie.

                        PLEASE CALL _______________

                        IF YOU FIND HER IN DISTRESS

                        OR SHE’S BEING A NUISANCE

The poster had the feeling of a trap, as if the name of the magpie was a spell, and if you were to say it out loud, you might be changed or transported. You might become the magpie, in that story, trapped until the next person sees the poster and says the name, releasing you from the spell as they take your place.

He wrote it down and took a photo of the poster. He didn’t see a magpie for the rest of the day, though, and not for some time after, though he finds he keeps an eye out for them. He wonders if the falconer he sees on the building’s terraces a few times a week might have somehow chased it away, or worse. But there is no nuisance, there is no distress call that he can hear. He sees only the pigeons and the seagulls.

*

Use this in Spencer, he tells himself in the note he writes. This is shorthand for a novel he has left unfinished for many years. There are magpies in that novel, magpies connected to spirits who follow the main character around, protecting him in ways he knows about and ways he does not.

*

When he posts later about the magpie flyer on social media, a well-meaning former student suggests he reach out to Frieda Hughes, who has just published a memoir about raising a magpie. Initially hesitant, he considers putting the flyer in an email to her and then stops. Is a memoir really an invitation to have a conversation about your interests in life, he wonders. He decides against it. But then the Goodreads reviews when he checks on the book contain the usual bullying from people complaining the memoir is too sad, a peculiar spectacle all its own—who searches for the happy memoir? Who demands it or who could even write it? He has his own memoir manuscript he pokes at from time to time—no magpies are in it yet but who knows now—and yet even for all he’s written about his own life, it seems like an impossible thing to do while one is alive.

He resolves to read the memoir and then to write to her but only if he loves it.

He has read from his own memoir in progress a few times in the last few years and joked that he is waiting for others to die before he publishes it, but if he could write it after his own death, maybe that would be better. Then he decided to write only about the dead and to let the living be, a limit and a challenge he was immediately interested in.

His former teacher, Marilynne Robinson, once said in class that when writing I close the door and imagine everyone I loved has died and cannot interfere with the writing, and then I open the door and it’s a miracle, they are all alive again, and I rejoice. And then she laughed and laughed.

If she’s even said this, that is. She has not been known to write about her family for example, and when he has asked her about other comments, other anecdotes he recalls her describing in her classes and office hours back when he was her student at Iowa, she does not recall those or even disavows them. These were stories she told thirty years ago, of course. But this can happen when you are a writing student: you invent a version of a teacher in your mind as a part of studying with them. They stay there for a while. It is like they are the captain of a ship in the bottle of your head, but of course, they are also the ship and of course, they are also just you, dressed up as them for the purposes ahead. It’s like writing a short story or a novel you’ll never show anyone in order to keep you company while you write your short story or novel. A metafictional guide, part imagination and part memory.

*

Six weeks later, at a meeting with his agents at their offices in Bloomsbury, as they sit in a beautiful courtyard behind the office at a wooden table, a black and white flutter catches his eye on the roof next door and he notices it is perhaps one—no, it is a group of them, moving along the tiles of the next building along the top floor, four stories up. He points the birds out to the agents and they all look up together as he tells them the story of the flyer he found, which makes them laugh.

“Do you know the song about magpies? One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four, a boy,” one of his agents asks. He doesn’t, though it sounds familiar, something to skip rope to, or an incantation. He looks up and tries to count the birds up there. Four? Five? More?

Later, he looks up the rest of the rhyme:

One for sorrow,

Two for joy,

Three for a girl,

Four for a boy,

Five for silver,

Six for gold,

Seven for a secret,

Never to be told.

Magpie, magpie, why do you sigh?

I sit so alone as the world goes by.

Eight for a wish,

Nine for a kiss,

Ten for a bird,

You must not miss.

Who is Maggie, he wonders. And what is the omen here, he wonders. Is there one? A boy child? Probably not, he thinks. He and Dustin had agreed that they are not having kids. It was the sort of thing you had to discuss early, before marriage, in case either person needed to make a decision and move on. No, if there is a message he receives from the birds and the rhyme as he sits there, it is that he needs to return to that novel he has set aside again, the one that has magpies in it. He and the one magpie that seems to look in his direction as he watches them, do they understand each other? It looks away. He ponders the possible message silently. And anyway, if this were a novel about a writer like him, making a decision based on a coincidence that feels like a message from the other side, well, this is typically considered a fateful mistake.

His husband Dustin meanwhile has forbidden him from writing about fate for a while, and curses especially. And he agrees. Dustin is right about these things.

His memory is that magpies are good luck in Korea. When he fact-checks his memory, well, it seems he was right, the omen was already good and there was no need to add meanings. Magpies in Korea are a sign good fortune is on the way. Auspicious for the meeting, then. When he googles this to make sure, he finds a blog saying Korean children were taught to throw their baby teeth on the roof and the birds would bring them a new tooth—a kind of Korean tooth fairy. And the magpies were on the roof, their business likely all their own. But maybe it was only a sign that a Korean child in that neighboring apartment had lost a tooth. Some part of him hopes it is.

*

No curses, no omens, he tells himself. No curses, no omens.

An old friend comes to town a month later, someone he hasn’t seen in almost a decade. They used to drink together in the East Village, back when he was a steakhouse waiter working on his first novel. She would sit at the bar and when he came in in his starched white shirt, she would give him a kiss and say, “I do love a man in a starched white shirt.” It was the only part of his uniform he wore home. She is married, has an adorable son with her wife, and they live in Massachusetts. She has a mother who has a Google alert on her name so he is careful to never mention her name when he blogs about her after accidentally getting caught doing so.

He takes them on a tour of the neighborhood, looking at his phone map just once. And then they go to the vampire wine bar together with her wife and child, laughing about the vampire trap as they descend. It is a very charming bar, with the beautiful ceramic tile he associates with subways in New York. The son, age 13, smiles as he holds up the bar menu and how it has bathroom trivia on the back. They sit down in a booth across from two men in tuxedos. The bartenders do look, well, like beautiful young vampires and the men in tuxedos do also. They order drinks and after they come, they catch up. Neither can recall why they haven’t seen each other and it seems not worth examining. They only want to see each other again.

“Whatever happened to that novel,” she says, and then loosely describes the one that has magpies in it.

“Oh, I set it aside,” he says, feeling the long finger of fortune reach out and point at him again, even as he brushes it away. “But I pull it out and work on it now and then.”

She nods as she pushes her straw into her drink, smiling.