Transcript #2 The Maytrees

About a third of the way into this beauteous book.  Annie Dillard's writing steamrolls me...did anyone make a movie about this story?  It, like so many others, would lose so much in translation.  But this part would have jazz from 1950s Provincetown in the air, gulls, and blurry-eyed flashbacks of laughter, one after another, and mumbled voices.  The one time I ever visited Provincetown was with some Santa Cruz exchange students I met while studying at the University of New Hampshire.  I never would have left Creamcheese, NH, had it not been for these folk.  I remember a saltwashed boardwalk with lots of coffee shops and bookstores, having crabcakes for the first time out on some pier, finding beads for our necklaces, and the people dressed like the fisherman on that blue, cylindrical salt container - Mortens? - as though any minute it might start raining, which it did.

     After their first year or so, Lou's beauty no longer surprised him.  He never stopped looking, because her face was his eyes' home.  No, what so endeared her now and forever was her easy and helpless laughter.  He felt like the world's great wit.  She worked, walked, stood, or sat like a mannequin, shoulders down and neck erect, and his least mot slayed her.  Her body pleated.  Her rusty-axle laugh sustained itself voice-lessly and without air.  At table, if she was still chewing when the laugh came rolling on her backward like a loose cart, she put a napkin on her head.  Otherwise she dropped on the table.  If it slayed her yet more, she knocked the table with her head in even beats.  Or her long torso folded and her orbits fell on vertical fists on her knees.  Unstrung with hilarity, she lost her footing and rolled down a dune.  More than once - anywhere - she dropped backward and staight-legged like a kid in diapers.

     He fell in love with Lou again and again.  Walking, he held her hand.  She seemed, then and now, to roll or float over the world evenly, acting and giving and taking, never accelerating, never slowing, wearing a slip of red or blue scarf.  Her mental energy and endurance matched his.  She neither competed nor rebelled.  Her freedom strengthened him, as did her immeasurable reserve.  Often she seemed the elder.  She opened their house to everyone.  Actively, she accepted what came to her, like a well-sailed sloop with sea room.  Her face was an organ of silence.  That he did not possess her childhood drove him wild.  Who was this impostor she sang with in college - how dare he?

     Their intimacy flooded.  Love like a tide either advances or retreats, Maytree opined into a recent notebook.  Their awarenesses rode waves paired like outriggers.  Maytree thought Plato wrong:  physical senses and wordless realms neither diverge or oppose; they meet as nearest neighbors in the darkness of personality and embrace.