Three years later, our second
winter in New York City was the worst in a decade. Too many times, Mindy and I
joined the huddled masses in a bus shelter, feet sunk in a drift of slushy,
dirty snow, staring at some travel poster placed there to tempt us. The photos
were almost always of islands in the Caribbean or Greece—-ironically, often our
own Santorini. Along with the other misérables, we stared at the posters unabashed, drunk with longing. We wanted an
island like that. Who wouldn’t?
One winter’s day, as I stood in the hall outside our cramped,
illegal sublet apartment, tugging at my snow--soaked shoes, Mindy came to the
door holding a sheet of paper folded in thirds: a letter. The moment she began
reading it aloud, lightning struck. Suddenly the gods were speaking. They’d
chosen a human voice so as not to frighten us off—-the voice of a woman with a
French accent. A familiar voice. Gwened Guedel was writing “to give a piece of
news” as she quaintly put it. We heard it amid thunderclaps—-unless that was my
heart pounding:
“A small house, in quite poor
repair, has come up for sale in the village.”
Gwened Guedel wasn’t really a goddess, but she was
the first Frenchwoman I’d ever known. And Mindy’s stories had built her up
grandly in my mind before I met her in person. The impressions I’d gathered
over the years—-we’d made a couple of visits to Belle Île since that first
winter—-had been of a scintillating but stern fairy godmother: love the shoes,
fear the wand.
Because Mindy was always on her toes around Gwened, I was, too. Her
mental energy was exhausting. Even in her kitchen she darted and jabbed, light
on her feet, as if in a knife fight refereed by Larousse Gastronomique: “Take that, you ham! En garde, mon tête du veau! ” Petite and fashionable,
more voluptuous than any college professor I’d ever seen, Gwened seemed to
invite men to flock around her while maintaining that she only cared about
their minds.
Most of all, Gwened played the teacher. At every opportunity, she
tweaked Mindy’s accent and grammar. Similarly, lowering her aim quite a few
notches, she would take pains to acquaint me with my educational and cultural
shortcomings. Not intentionally, of course. Well, it probably was
intentional. With Gwened, intention was everything. All shortcomings were to be
recognized as such and dealt with summarily, without delay. Cognizance
mattered. And culture. Sans blague,
was Gwened ever cultured! But that hadn’t stopped her from setting the hook on
us as ruthlessly as a real estate speculator.
“…quite poor repair…” Mindy repeated, holding the letter in her hand
and looking at me. She was smiling. So was I. “Poor repair” could only mean one
thing: cheap.
Were we crazy?
Maybe enchanted was the better word. Though we joked about it, there
was something witchy about Gwened Guedel—-in the modern,
chic, Updike manner. Yet Gwened hardly needed clairvoyance to guess that this
particular island village lingered in our minds.
Still, her writing out of the blue like this was unprecedented. It
had been three years since we’d shown up at her door—-and been shown the door
the next day with a brisk “Enjoy the island!”
On the island, a visit meant to last a week or two stretched into a
month, then two months. Mindy and I got our mojo back, and then some, before
stumbling over a new self--discovery: we couldn’t bear to leave. Our families
in the United States, and even Gwened herself, hinted it was time to return and
face the music, but like a pair of Peter Pans, we didn’t want to grow up. I’m
embarrassed to say that Gwened had to kick us out.
But our reluctance to leave must’ve made an impression, because her
letter was written as if it were yesterday. Which for us it practically was.
Captives of our New York daily grind, we looked backward to “island time” as if
it were a window through which we might one day stroll again into a greener,
saner world.
We thought of Belle Île on dark nights when we needed to restore
ourselves after some setback, such as my being invited to a second
job interview at the New Yorker only
to have the editor pick up the phone and arrange for “a better fit” at
something called MotorBoating & Sailing.
Or Mindy’s agent calling to say he’d accidentally mislaid the manuscript of her
novel for an entire year, calling her “Penny” the whole
time. Or just a little thing like finding a drowned and boiled cockroach in the
tea strainer after we’d finished our cups of Earl Grey.
After these New York moments, we would console ourselves with
village scenes, treasures to be taken out and shaken to lifelike images in a
crystal paperweight. On sunnier days, when we felt brave enough to make plans,
one of us might pop the question—-as in, “My dream would be a little house in a
place like Kerbordardoué. What’s yours?”
“The same.”
So of course we were flattered to be approached, as Gwened no doubt
intended. But that didn’t change the fact that the notion was lunacy. When
you’re living on $17,000 a year, buying island cottages isn’t in your Top Ten
priorities.
Besides, we’d already settled on
an island—-that big one called Manhattan—-although I must say it was doing its
best to shake us off, the way a dog does fleas. Mindy and I were barely hanging
on, working entry--level jobs at age thirty. And then there was Hawaii, where
Mindy was born and raised. If we needed some island R & R, we could always
stay with her mom in the graceful, old termite--ridden house on Diamond Head.
We could squeeze in with her four brothers and fend off Mom’s boyfriends, eat
Korean leftovers, and surf practically off her doorstep.
And yet here came Gwened, eyes burning bright, bringing us the news
that we needed another island—-a third island—-three
thousand miles away. And here’s what I don’t understand even now, so many years
later: we listened.
“I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to ask how much,” I said.
Mindy nodded, thinking the same thing: cheap.
“I’ll write her back.”
“A house in Kerbordardoué. I wonder which one it is?”
“I’ll call her.”
Mindy put her hand on the black Bakelite wall phone, one of the
apartment’s 1940s relics that contributed to the musty air of a time capsule.
It was, of course, a dare. Were we still crazy? Still reckless? Still
unembarrassed? Did we really think there was any point or sense to pursuing
this blind alley, other than to reinforce previous bad decisions and to nurture
the reveries that had led to us living underground on the black housing market
and in a state of constant vigilance about keeping a low profile, like
fugitives from the law?
Were we, in other words, still us?
G
A month, two months, three months went by. We kept talking.
Gwened’s preferred mode of communication was a handwritten letter in proud
English, the composing of which undoubtedly added time to the process. Each
letter had to cross the Atlantic, be read and discussed, then replied to by
Mindy in carefully crafted French, dictionary at her elbow. The process became
attenuated like a nineteenth--century epistolary novel. But eventually Gwened obtained
a key to check out the interior. She wrote back: I regret to report that the house is in not--good shape.
What upset her most, however, was the lack of a garden. Not to have
even a terrace, where one could sit out in the afternoon, or a place to plant
flowers—-this was unthinkable. No wonder the house had been on the market for
so long. In good faith
I cannot advise you to buy it, Gwened wrote, until I
have looked around
at property in other villages.
We were disappointed. Already we’d grown accustomed to thinking
about our house in our village on our island. We’d begun to save money, just in case.
For a long time Gwened didn’t write. We understood. She had her
teaching and her family in Tours, the pressure of being a representative of La France Féminin,
tending to her husband and his wine cave and the teenager who threw
typewriters. We knew she could only visit Belle Île during school vacations.
After a couple of months, though, we wrote. Her reply came a month later,
saying she would canvass the island in the summer. Months went by.
By the time she got back to us, almost a year had passed.
Dear Friends,
I am enclosing the list of the available houses in Belle Île. As
you can see, the house next door is the cheapest. I went to see another one at
120,000 F but it is a ruin, damp with no sun. Sun is
really the big advantage of the house in Kerbordardoué. Of course, I insist
that it is not pleasant in July and August, since everyone is parking there.
The price is now 300,000 F. I do
not think there is any possibility of having it lower. Taxes should be added
(+12, 15%) and at least 200,000 F for living in the house. The roof is full of
holes and should be remade. There is one tap of cold water in the house, but no
sink.
…So having considered everything, I am convinced that the house is
not a bad bargain. I went inside, and I was surprised to
see that it is rather dry and healthy. Upstairs you can have two or three
bedrooms, downstairs a nice, big kitchen about the size of my middle room, a
bathroom, and a small room. For about 550,000 F on the whole, you could have a
nice house. Of course everything has to be restored from
the beginning.
…I would love to have you as neighbors. I would help as much as I
can for counseling the good enterprises in Belle Île. Good for you, one dollar
is now worth 10 francs…
Love to you both,
Gwened
We were right back where we started. The house still didn’t have any
land for a garden, there seemed to be something unpleasant going on with
parking in summertime, and the roof had holes. You’d think any or all of these
might give us pause.
But still the idea would not die. What kept us writing letters and
on the phone that second winter, listening to Gwened Guedel? We had neither the
time nor the money for this, no business thinking about islands, villages,
houses. Even now, I really don’t understand it—-or us. I only know that we both
wanted out so badly. Out of this world, our lives, the jobs we held, the times
we lived in.
The longer Gwened spoke, the more we opened our minds. Maybe
thinking of her as a bit of a witch wasn’t very polite of us, given her past
generosity, proper manners, and stern professorial bearing. But it wasn’t
altogether wrong.
Because when Gwened spoke, we could see.
Because it would be ours.
Or so the gods whispered.
We heard. We saw. Now, when we closed our eyes at night, when we
woke in the morning, when we swayed to the rhythm of the subway rocketing
around a curve and grimaced at its horrific shrieking brakes, we saw the
island.
When we wandered north of Hell’s Kitchen in the West Fifties and
found ourselves in a tiny, rundown neighborhood of French Pressing dry cleaners
and grimy storefront restaurants with Escargots à la Bourguignonne and Crêpes Suzette on
the menu, we saw the island. When we went to see a foreign movie at the old
Thalia and it turned out to be Local Hero,
a whimsically devastating tale of a tiny village in the north of Scotland, we
saw the island. It might be said that we saw the island everywhere in
everything.
In actuality, we were seeing through the prism of unreliable memory.
On our first visit, we had been like castaways straggling up onto the shore and
trying to make sense of a strange place whose language and habits were
incomprehensible. We were dazed, awkward, and uncertain, but most of all
grateful to be alive and in awe of the place that had saved us. So each thing
that we encountered there—-every seashell, shady lane, stone cottage, and
village character—-had felt like the first of its kind and the archetype for
all others.
Three years later, the island we dreamed of, that Gwened conjured up
for us, was mostly a shape--shifting reflection of our personal mythology. In
terms of hard knowledge, all that we knew about it could just about fit on a
single page of paper. But we felt we’d embarked on the next phase of our
journey. It was out of our hands.
To stop now, we’d have to live with the bitterness of our stillborn
dreams, knowing we’d flunked some kind of test—-Gwened’s test. Yes, in a way it
all came down to Gwened. Who else would’ve had the gall to write two
floundering Americans, to call us up and grab us by the figurative scruffs of
our necks and state a not--so--obvious truth with the implacability of a seer:
You. Need. This. Island.
