Wyatt

She wrote back, asking for time to think, and wrote again two months later -- I'd begun to worry, although she'd always procrastinated on this sort of thing -- inviting me down to talk.

The airport there, in San Jose, was so small and primitive that you had to walk from the aircraft to the terminal. I looked for her while I waited in line, and when I saw her I couldn't read the expression on her face. Puzzlement, or apprehension. But when I'd answered all the official questions and my passport had been stamped, she was waiting to put her arms around me and press herself into me and say,

"Wyatt. Wyatt. All those years. Now I see, I've missed you."

That night, in the bed we shared, she said "uncontrollable passion", and laughed, and drew me down to her, and I remembered these, her ways. Her joy in me was unchanged.

"You were right," she said. "That time you came back to Lawrence to try to talk some sense into me. We have no choice."

The next day we drove her father's ancient Land Rover up the Pan-American Highway, and turned off at a dirt road and bucked and swayed our way up that savage, decayed mess, full of holes and rocks and mud, for hours.

She lived with her father Thomas and her stepmother Maria. There was no room for me in the house, not because it was too small, but because Ada was embarrassed to have her lover under her father's roof. I slept in the place she called her "tree house", a huge hollowed-out stump with a small room in it, which had been her playhouse when she was growing up. I spent most of my time outdoors or in the real house, but at night I slept on the table in the little room. There was no space on the floor. In the morning Ada would come and wake me, and we would sit on the stoop holding hands until Maria called out that Clover was awake. The treehouse was too small to live in and after a few days of this she asked her brother Henry to loan me the little cabin he owned near the Meeting house. Occasionally he rented it to hippies travelling through, and I insisted on paying the going price; it was only about five dollars a night. After dinner she and I would ride the mile and a half there on horseback, and she would stay a while. Usually she would nap after we'd had sex, and then go back to the house, riding her horse, the horse I'd ridden trailing along behind. This went on until the night we fell asleep and didn't wake. She galloped off at dawn and found her family at the breakfast table.

"I'm not in charge of your life," her father said to her. "I want you here. I haven't seen you for years. But I think you should move over there. I see you looking out the window, trying to see the place. It's where your heart is. I understand."

So she moved in, bringing Clover with her, and for the first time I had a family. During the day, when Ada was helping at the Quaker school, I would take Clover around on horseback or foot, and we would investigate the forest. It was as Ada had said: endlessly interesting. People think of jungle. They think of using a machete to get through impenetrable plants, but it's not that way. The trees are tall, and spaced apart, and there's less underbrush than many woods in the Midwest. The shade is deep, and there are only scattered spots of sunlight, so few plants grow on the floor. The real action is higher up, where the contest for a glimpse of sun is waged. The boles of the trees soar up a hundred or two hundred feet, some smooth, others covered with vines and epiphytes and bromeliads, adorned with vegetable matter not their own. Above, an irregular roof of leaves. No glimpse of sky, except occasionally where an old forest giant has fallen and left a clearing with plants pioneering the new opening. These rare gaps are raw blemishes, not damp and dim and cool, but bright and hot, and improbably crowded with plants struggling with each other for every inch of space and sun.

You almost never see animals. But there are bugs, and butterflies, and every kind of plant, with every imaginable kind of leaf. Mostly you have to be content with plants and insects. Though you hear birds, you see them in bursts. Once every couple of hours a mixed flock comes through, and you're busy trying to see all the species. A minute or two later, and they've all moved on, and you're alone again.

There are birds that don't flock, but in the deep shade they're hard to spot. Some sit and blend in. Even the most brilliant merge with their surroundings -- even the quetzal, which I wanted to see. I'd been taking Clover to the preserve every morning, hoping for a look. Ada had described it to me, and I'd seen the color plate in Birds of Costa Rica. And when she had that two-foot-long green feather woven in her hair, that was the clincher. I was in love with a bird I'd never seen, a famous bird, the way a boy falls in love with a beautiful movie star. The bird that is spoken of with the adjective "resplendent" before its name. The inspiration for the phoenix.

I saw it through a gap in the trees -- a male, sitting on a branch, with those incredibly long tailfeathers trailing below. He was in a spot of light, with the scarlet breast showing. The rest of him was a brilliant iridescent emerald. I watched until he took off, and flew down and to the right, the tail coverts flowing sinuously behind. I waited, hoping to see him again. When I turned, Clover had vanished.

I called, and looked in a circle. I waited and watched, and I prayed, though I don't believe in prayer. The choices were to wait, to run for help, or to start searching alone. I watched and listened a little longer, then ran along the trail in one direction as far as I thought she could have gone, calling her name. I ran back the other way, calling again, and heard a giggle. She was hiding behind a large leaf, a few feet off the trail. She was very pleased with herself when I picked her up.

"Clover," I said, "don't ever, ever do that," and held her to me until she struggled to free herself.

From then on, I tied a string around her waist and held the other end when we were in the forest. Barring that once, she was no trouble, except when she was tired. She was curious, always looking around her, even though she was a toddler. She could stare longer than I could, wholly absorbed in deciphering the holes in the leaves, or the manner in which the ants cut up and carried away their loads. When she got older, and interested in mathematics, and began to work on proofs and problems, we would call her for dinner and the response would be silence. When I spoke to her from the door of her room she wouldn't hear. We learned that when this happened we only needed to leave a plate of food on the table, and she would wander downstairs after everyone was in bed and she finally, after all those hours of work, had given up her train of thought.

The next day, she always asked, "Why didn't you call me for dinner?" and never believed us when we said we had. But all that was later, when we'd returned to Lawrence and she was older.

Maybe my memory has tricked me into remembering her more that way than she really was. Maybe she wasn't unique. I'd never spent time around a child so young. I had no one to compare her to. But I do believe she was like her mother in that absorption. In other ways, though she was not my daughter, she was like me more than like Ada. Clover had the detachment I'd always tried to cultivate. With her, though, it was inborn. She was an odd child, but lovable and happy and good-natured. It was later that she became withdrawn. She seemed to lose her innocence young.

When I wasn't traipsing with Clover, I helped Ada's father with his farm. Since I didn't know anything about cows or coffee bushes, I did a lot of the heavy work, and enjoyed it, although Thomas kept telling me not to shovel all the shit and unload the truck and all the rest of the manual labor. But after years of sitting behind pianos, or touring, or recording in studios, using muscle felt real, and good. And I wanted to help Thomas, because he was always willing to stop whatever he was doing and help me.

Thomas looked like a Quaker: plain blue clothes, simple scuffed boots, a beard of biblical proportions. They'd abandoned the broadcloth clothes and the wide-brimmed hats, but he wore the equivalents -- denim, chambray, and an old felt hat. He never pretended. What he was, he was right on the surface. He seemed almost to have no interior. He gave his attention to simple things: the health of his animals and plants, the soundness of the roof on his house, how much longer he could drive before he needed gasoline. His most complicated concerns were the happiness of his wife and daughter and son. He didn't think about himself much. He was a happy man.

One morning we'd been looking at an old barn he was considering buying and tearing down for firewood.

"Too much work," he pronounced, "tearing it down. Too well built."

He liked me to drive, so he could watch the countryside. We were halfway home when he said,

"I hope you're not taking advantage of my daughter. I've been here so long I don't understand people like you. Are you sincere? If she's hurt again, it will last a long time. This divorce, you know."

"Sir, I love your daughter. I'd never hurt her, not if I could help it."

"That's what I hoped."

I downshifted, and the engine raced. I shifted back up into third. "There's something I want to ask. Ada's afraid you think she had an affair with me, you think that's why the marriage broke."

"No. It never occurred to me. She wouldn't do that."

That was the only time we spoke personally. He didn't talk much. Mostly, he worked.

I helped him with the cows in the morning, the breath coming from their nostrils in clouds. Their hooves made positive clunking noises like horseshoes, but duller, on the cement floor of the milking shed. They looked and acted incredibly stupid, but they were peaceful. I'd never been near any. They were much larger close up. I felt the heat of their bodies on my skin when I hooked up the machines to their udders. I grew used to their sweet stink.

I helped with the coffee harvest, too. I didn't have the knack for finding all the berries on a plant -- sometimes they hide at the bottom of the bush -- so they made me the bagger. They'd dump their baskets, and I'd bag the berries and carry them to the trailer hitched to the Land Rover. When it was full I'd drive to the factory for sorting, washing, and extracting the beans. Those were some long days and I was ready for a break.

I'd been wanting to see other parts of the country. I needed a car, but there was nothing for sale in Monteverde or Santa Elena at the time, so I caught a ride down to the capital. I was gone a week, and glad to get back home.

The kitchen was on the left when you entered the house. Maria spent most of her time there. When I came back from San Jose she met me at the door and handed me the baby and pulled me into the kitchen. I sat there, at the great kitchen table, with Clover in my lap. Maria hurried from cupboard to cupboard, getting out a plate and a bowl and utensils. She had a big pot of stew going on the stove. She ladled it into a bowl and set it in front of me, with cheese and bread and butter on the plate.

"So good you are home. Ada stayed here while you were there. She will be happy to see you."

I hadn't touched the food yet, admiring the table. A single slab of wood three inches thick, it had to weigh hundreds of pounds. Everything in Thomas' house was built to last for centuries. I didn't notice this the first few days, because the only thing I saw was Ada, even when she wasn't in front of me. But when I got over my hypnosis, I saw how thick the table was, and then I went looking around the house. Everything was plain, but durable like the table. One day when no one was home I jumped up and down in the middle of the main room. Not a shiver. Not a sound. It was like jumping on rock.

The top of the table had been sanded and varnished. A few scratches and dents marred it, and made it more beautiful.

"Eat," Maria said. "You come from far."

I lifted Clover onto the table and picked up the spoon. Goat stew, with vegetables from Ada's garden. There were tomatoes and carrots and potatoes and celery and corn, and others I didn't recognize. Flecks of pepper floated on the surface.

Maria watched. This was her favorite thing to do: feed someone, and watch them as they ate, and talk. When I wiped the sides of the bowl with my bread, she refilled it.

"This is better than anything I ate in San Jose," I said.

"You nice man. You bought car?"

"Yes. It's outside."

She excused herself to go look. "Toyota Land Cruiser," she said when she came back. "Good car."

"Yes. A good car for bad roads." It was used. I couldn't afford a new one.

"What is that thing in back?"

"I bought a keyboard."

She looked blank.

I pantomimed piano playing. "An electric organ. So I can practice my music."

"Ah! Good. I want to hear."

"I'll be glad to, but not right now." I wiped my mouth. "Please excuse me. I'm sleepy. I'm going back to the cabin."

"No. You sleep in Ada's room. She is home soon. I play with Clover."

She smiled at the girl and smacked her lips. Clover giggled. They were both laughing when I fell asleep.

Ada probably looked in on me when she got home, but she didn't wake me. I roused when I heard her voice through my dreams.

They were sitting around the table eating dinner. Even her brother Henry was there. Ada was at the far end, her current reading next to her plate. She always had some great thick book within reach. I've seen her stumbling home not paying attention because she was absorbed in reading. Sometimes she walks right past the house. She says she's even gone by, turned around, and done the same thing going the opposite direction, passing the house a second time. She's not in the least embarrassed about it; she laughs along with whoever she's telling this to.

"Hello," Thomas said. "Get a plate and join us."

"Maria already fed me. I won't need to eat for at least two days."

"You bad man," she scolded. "I feed you good food."

"Yes. It was good. It was so good I ate too much."

I sat at the other end from Ada, next to a girl I hadn't seen before. She had long blond hair and vivid green eyes. Around her neck were what used to be called love beads. She wore a peasant blouse and earrings like chimes.

"This is Dawn," Henry said. "Dawn, this is Wyatt."

I exchanged some innocuous pleasantry, and Dawn nodded and smiled. She had a wide mouth and large, even white teeth. Her eyes squinted when she smiled.

"She was renting the cabin before you," Ada said.

Dawn smiled at Ada.

"How was your trip?" Henry asked.

"I wish they'd mark the roads. I went past the turnoff and got to Limonal before I realized my mistake. Then I came up the back way, and it's worse than the regular road."

"How did the car stand up to it?"

"Great. I'm the one who feels damaged."

"You did pretty well to get all the paperwork done in a week. Where are you going with the car?"

"Both coasts. The big volcanoes. Braulio Carillo. For starters."

Dawn spoke. "I can write a list of cheap places to crash."

I'd heard her story from Ada. Dawn had been wandering the country for six weeks before she drifted into Monteverde, liked it, and decided to stay. She'd rented the little cabin from Henry for a while, before moving in with him, ostensibly as his housekeeper. This was the subject of a lot of gossip and speculation among the Quakers and Ticos both, and it was clear to me that Henry was keeping his mouth shut for a reason. He was being too careful, never doing anything in public that might be interpreted as intimacy. He didn't even look at Dawn when he was talking to her. He was trying hard -- too hard -- to cover up what was going on between them.

"Thanks," I told her. I'd been planning to camp, but I could stick the list in the glove compartment in case of rain.

Ada came outside to look at the car. "I'm not coming to the cabin tonight," she said.

"What? We live there."

"Father told me what you asked him."

"Oh. He said it never occurred to him. You wouldn't do that."

"How could you?"

"What? Ask him? You were worried, and the subject sort of came up, so -- "

"He's my father and this is my family, and I don't want you trying to fix my problems."

"Ada -- "

"I lived with Owen for seven years, seven years, and that's what it was like. I don't want to be here, I like the U.S. better. And I don't like living on my father's charity. I don't have any money, so I have to depend on him. I had to depend on Owen for money, too, and I'm tired of it, I always seem to end up relying on other people. I don't want an old boyfriend coming in and being my white knight. I'll take care of it myself."

"But -- "

"You'd better go," she said. She stared straight into my eyes. "How dare you? I can't even see straight. I'll talk to you in a few days. In the meantime, stay away." She went in the house.

"Ada? Ada!"

She was closing the door. Everybody changes, even you, I thought. I wasn't worried this would be permanent, but the sting was bad enough that the thought wasn't any consolation yet.

I drove home for the first time, alone. The car had a cassette player and I sat in the turnout below the cabin and listened to Bob Marley for a while, playing No woman, no cry, rewinding the tape each time at the end so I could listen again. There was nothing better to do. Maybe I'd drive down to the Osa peninsula. It was far away, and I could try out the car some more. Timing the river crossings to miss the tides sounded like an adventure.

I hadn't thought to buy a flashlight for the car, and I'd left the headlamp in the cabin, so I had to stumble the hundred yards or so uphill on the path in the dark, continually straying off and feeling my way back on with my feet. When I saw the dim bulk of the cabin I stepped carefully up, past the rotten bottom step. There were a dozen stairs, and the first was the only one Henry hadn't fixed yet. I'd remind him the next time I saw him.

The headlamp was on the board next to the door, where I'd left it. The place was depressing in the light from the bulb: one small room, a woodburning stove in the far corner, and the stone sink and tap along the back wall. Kerosene lamps hanging on nails, one of them from the ceiling, where I had to be careful not to bump it with my head. No refrigerator. A large cupboard with the plates and food -- bread and cheese and other things that didn't need to be kept cold. The rickety table and chairs that, with the bed, consumed half the room. The tiny bathroom was concealed behind an old wool curtain.

I pulled the quilt off the bed. If I had to sleep alone, I'd sleep on the veranda. At least the air would be fresh and I wouldn't feel cramped.

I was dozing off a couple of hours later when I heard someone on the path. A circle of light bounced on the ground, disappearing for a second or two at a time, and getting closer.

"Who's there?"

"It's me," Ada said. She climbed the steps and knelt next to me. She kissed me. "I'm sorry, sweetheart." Her cheek was wet against mine.

"If you don't tell me the boundaries, I won't know where they are."

"There aren't any boundaries. There aren't any rules. Sometimes I wish there were. But there aren't, and with you, that makes me glad."

"Then why -- "

"Shush," she said, and lay half on top of me, her arms around my neck. "I don't want to talk. I might get angry again."

She'd always fallen asleep easily, and that hadn't changed. Now she started to, so I roused her and we went inside. She kissed me again and said, "Hold me."

She rose early that morning -- that, too, was unchanged; she was still an early riser -- and in rising woke me, and we sat on the veranda with our feet on the top stair, listening in the darkness to the birds calling each other. Day came as a slow dissipation of the gloom. Sunrise is quicker in low latitudes, but our little house was among the trees, on the steep side of a mountain sideways to the dawn, and the light filtered in. When it was finally day I said what I was ready to:

"Ada, we have to make some plans. We can't live like this. One shitty room. No electricity or hot water. I'm not used to this. You don't like it. Everybody here has the comforts but us. And what about Clover? Doesn't she deserve better?"

"I'm not ready to talk," she said.

"Get ready, then. We can't go on ducking it."

"Wyatt, I just got out of a seven-year marriage. Seven years of my life, gone, and I'm back where I was, but with a child to take care of, and I am not ready. You are going to have to be patient. Maybe very patient. I know what you're saying is true, but this is happening too soon and too fast, and I need some time."

"We -- "

"No. You have to trust me. And I want you to remember, always, that I never stopped loving you. I forgot, but I never stopped. I love you, and I know you want us to be permanent, and I want that too, some way or other. But you will have to wait."

We lived together for another half year, and after that once she never lost her temper. Whenever I spoke up she asked for patience and apologized for delaying.

We ate dinner with her family several nights a week, and used their shower nearly every day, and in general were a burden. They never gave us any hint that we were imposing. We often left Clover overnight with Maria and Thomas, both because it was a constant effort to watch her and make sure she didn't wander onto the veranda and fall down the stairs, and because Ada would not have sex with me when Clover was with us in that tiny room. The nights we were free of the child we fucked for hours. This solved our problem.

I'd had the birth-control discussion with Ada our second day, during the drive home.

"Were you taking a chance last night?" I asked. "Are you on the pill?"

"I threw the pills away when I broke up with you," she said. "After my sophomore year. I didn't have sex again until I got married. Then it took five years to get pregnant." She patted my shoulder. "Don't worry. I'm infertile. Clover was a lucky fluke."

I figured she knew what she was talking about. It wasn't until later that I heard the entire story: how she'd succeeded in less than a year once her medical conditions had been diagnosed and treated. So she was playing conception roulette, without admitting it to herself or me.

The two of us living together scandalized most of the Quakers. When I saw this, I understood why Henry was playing cool in public with Dawn. The only opinion Ada cared about was Thomas's, and he was unconcerned. But the coldness from some of the others was obvious. Ada said it would pass. She only wanted to go on from day to day, putting off thinking about what we should do. I wanted everything: the wedding rings, kids, plans, a house together, the tax breaks, the official status. Formal recognition. Permanence. The whole sort of business partnership. The shared enterprise. I wanted to lock it up. I wanted to dispose of the issue and get on with our life. It was a gig: you show up on time, give it your best, and stay to the end.

I tried every trick I could to talk her into getting married. She'd say something that gave me an opening, like yearning to get back to the United States as soon as she could find a way.

"That's easy," I would say. "Marry me."

She would snort, and reply, "I've already failed at that one."

Then we'd argue -- politely, because arguments with her were more like discussions -- and she'd say, "It's all I can do to take care of me and Clover."

"I'll help."

"No. Either you'll try to train me, or I'll try to train you. I've had enough of that."

I tried talking about our social ostracism, and she wouldn't listen. Nothing moved her, until she found out she was going to have another child. Then she shrugged, and sighed, and agreed. She admitted later that she was glad to have a reason. She'd been burned on marriage once, so she needed a nudge. The kid did it.

And so we were married. On the lawn of the Meeting house, in front of her family and friends, we began with silence. I'd memorized the words, and I knew that the ceremony is a promise between the two people. Quakers are like that: there's no officialdom. They don't have many ceremonies, and the ones they do have are do-it-yourself. But I thought there was probably a customary minimum time before one of you spoke, and I didn't know how long it was, and I wanted to hear Ada say it first, so I'd decided to wait. She surprised me with the brevity of her silence. Right away, looking into my eyes, and with none of that tentative, questioning tone of hers, she said:

"In the presence of God and these our friends, I Ada take thee Wyatt to be my husband, promising with divine assistance to be unto thee a loving and faithful wife as long as we both shall live."

I answered in the same words, switching the names, and switching "husband" and "wife". Then I put on her finger the same ring I'd given her in Los Angeles, which she'd returned later. She put a ring on my finger. We signed the certificate, and everyone else signed the back of it as witnesses.

We sat down to a meal at the picnic tables, and Henry announced that he and Dawn were planning to get married. Maria said, "So we going to have two more gran'child."

"How did you know?" Ada and Dawn asked, together, and then looked at each other.

"I am old lady," Maria said. "I like to see the little babies come into the world." She laughed and said, "Lucky guess."

The next week we drove down to San Jose with Henry and gave him the car and got on a plane. We returned to Lawrence and took up life in my house, to start our own family. The child, a boy, was born six months later. They scored him a ten on the Apgar scale, but when I held him I knew the number was too small.

We called him Gabriel. It was a good choice. Like his namesake, he became a musician, though he preferred strings and percussion to horns.