5

THEY ATE THE FISH IN THE LATE AFTERNOON, AND that passed for both lunch and dinner. Later, in the early evening, they each read a little and then Emily read aloud.

William liked it when Emily read to him, and he did not much care what she read. They were, of course, pretty limited with scarcely six books between them. William’s Alan Watts did not lend itself very well to this, so mostly Emily read her poetry, Hart Crane and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

William liked the Crane better. It was sonorous and striving, moving through and beyond great things and spaces, while the other seemed to stand in one place, throbbing and flashing, singing like a bird. Not that he necessarily understood one better than the other: Understanding was not the point. It was more like listening to music.

That night Emily was reading Hopkins. “He didn’t really write this one,” she said. “It’s a translation. From an old Latin thing, a hymn or a prayer really.” And the part that stuck in William’s mind was when she read, “ ‘But just the way that thou didst me/I do love and I will love thee.’ ” That was the part she wanted him to hear, the part that might have been about them.

When she finished, she said, “I suppose at school they’d make us translate it back into Latin.”

“So that’s another good reason to be here instead of there.”

“I suppose,” she said. She did not know what to say next, because she sensed it could cause trouble, that it could take them back where they had been yesterday. Because the truth was, she found herself missing school a little. She found herself missing a lot of things. But missing them seemed to go against her loving William; against the very thing she had meant for him to understand from the lines she had just read. It had never occurred to her that there might be something she dare not say to him; still less that there might be something she might want that he would not want.

“Should I read some more?” she asked.

“Oh, it’s awfully dark,” William said. “I suppose it’s awfully late.” The one watch they possessed, Emily’s, had been allowed to wind down, and of course now there was nothing to reset it against, except approximately: the rough time they supposed the sun rose this time of year.

“It’s getting cold.” After she said it, Emily realized that this, too, was another thing it might not be wise to say.

William understood what she had intended not to mean. “It is. But we have good blankets. And the tent. And we could always go to that cabin, if we needed to.”

“Oh, I wasn’t even really thinking that,” Emily said, and understood that her love might ask her not merely to not say certain things but to tell lies.

William loved Emily as much as Emily loved him. He sensed her worry. “We’ll see. Maybe we’ll go someplace else for the winter. Maybe to California. Wouldn’t that be cool? Wouldn’t you like that?”

“Oh, yeah. I would,” Emily said. She felt terribly sad. She would have liked to crawl over to William and have him hold her while she cried a little. But how could she have explained? There was no place for her to go, not California, not even right here, to William’s body.