Tess and I fell in love one summer in Cannon Beach. My mother killed a man and went to prison for the difference between one and seven. My father sold our house, gave up his business, moved to White Pine, and took a job at Arbus Lumber. Out of duty, yes. But he would say there’s no difference. Duty is born of love. There are no other factors, he would say. And my sister Claire stayed in England where she married a man named Henry Lloyd who had a red face and thinning hair and a lot of money. He was twelve years her senior and she would never come home. And me, I moved to White Pine too. I took a job as a bartender at a place called The Owl, where a massive man named Seymour Strout worked the door with a towel around his neck, and a pack of Virginia Slims in his pocket. Me, I had come out of duty, but I do not know if that duty was born of love, or if there were other factors, or if those factors add up to love or one of its derivatives. And then Tess Wolff appeared on the hood of my truck, beneath an orange streetlight with her heels on the bumper. Tess whose mother died of breast cancer, whose father had remarried nine months after that, not enough for a year, but enough to have a child. Two of them. Girls. Fraternal twins. She came to White Pine to worship my mother with the passion and devotion of an acolyte.
Tess saying, “You can’t know everything, Joey. There’s something about being alone at night, outside, saying nothing, looking in, all that black space around me, watching from the dark. In the dark, alone on the street, it was me the threat, me the watcher.”
And I will tell you about Tess. And you will take me as an authority, as someone with real knowledge. As someone who knows her. But I do not. I have my memory, muted and warped, but that doesn’t mean knowing.
It means nothing, really.
Tess is gone.
No matter how often or how hard I try, I am always fooled. It is like the eternal. I know it does not exist, and yet I keep falling for its illusion. Even now. Here within the lulling routine of days. This life will last forever, I think. No matter how many times I’m proven wrong.
In the wisdom of her early twenties, Tess said, “Love is not possession, Joe Joey Joseph.”
And that took a long time for me to learn. Long out of my own twenties and even now I struggle. I like ownership. I like control. I am, after all, my father’s son.
I know the two things are connected. My faith in permanence and my desire to possess.
These are not instincts easy to break.
I worry that Tess remains nebulous. And that cannot be. You must see her for any of this to matter. It is not the story, it is her. It is Tess I’m trying to translate.
The story is vehicle and frame. To have and to hold.
But she must be palpable. Her courage, her intelligence, her independence, the force of her lust. Her rage. How all of it seemed alive in her body.
These are the facts you must understand.
These are the truths you must receive.
Listen: she moved as if nothing embarrassed her. She favored no angle, hid no part of herself. Her mother said, “Stand up straight, what are you trying to hide? What are you trying to protect? Nothing.” So, she stood up straight.
She didn’t bite her fingernails or pick at her lip. She didn’t twirl her hair or barricade herself behind folded arms.
But she was always in motion. Once I thought this was how she hid. Taking an ankle in her hand and pulling her heel to her ass. Bending at the waist. Interlacing her fingers and reaching above her head. But now I believe she was giving relief to a body that needed to move, to muscles that ached for something I’d never entirely understand and could not see.
“Harder,” she said when I rubbed her shoulders. “Dig your fingers in. Yes.”
“Push harder,” she said.
“Fuck me harder,” she said, her voice, the same low growl.
Tess, she wanted more of everything.