The Tipping Point
“I’ve got someone who wants to speak to the manager,” Janet said.
I assumed it was a customer looking for a rare first edition or demanding a discount on a best seller with a torn dust jacket. Instead, making my way to the front of the store, I instantly recognized the petite young woman standing beside the register. “Lavinia. What a surprise.” This can’t be good, I thought.
“May I have a word with you?”
“Of course.”
“In private.”
I escorted her back to my office.
“I’m here as a representative of the family,” she said. “What you did to my sister was cruel.”
“What did I do?”
“You ghosted her.”
“What?”
“You stopped responding to her letters and emails without explanation.”
I said, temporizing, “A clean break is usually best in these matters.”
“It wasn’t clean. For her. She’s very vulnerable, my sister.”
“The relationship didn’t seem to be going anywhere, frankly.”
“That’s your view. Did you consider hers?”
“Actually,” I said, “I couldn’t always tell where I stood with your sister.” This was a rationalization, but it had a certain validity. Between our few dates, Emily would send me emails as well as snail mail, sometimes jotting down poems at the bottom of her letters. One of them started, “Wild Nights, Wild Nights?/ Were I with you wild nights/ Wild nights would be our ecstasy,” which was strange since we’d never even held hands. Another went, “The soul selects her own society/ Then shuts the door/On her divine majority/Obtrude no more.” So I was confused.
“Emily could be more straight forward,” Lavinia said.
“It wasn’t my intention to cause her pain,” I said. I knew I had, though, and I’d been living with a niggling guilt over my unilateral withdrawal, dreading the awkwardness if Emily should ever return to the narrow aisles of Amherst Books, home to both new and used titles. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but what can I do about it?”
“The family’s extremely worried about her. My mother fears for Emily’s mental health. My brother doesn’t know what to do. My father’s losing patience. Emily’s always had reclusive tendencies but a year ago she stopped going out except to our brother’s house and your book store. Now she refuses to see anyone outside of the immediate family.”
“And that’s my fault?”
“Yes and no. This has happened before. There have been others. My sister comes on stronger than she knows and when she’s rebuffed she recedes deeper into herself. You happened to be the tipping point.”
“I didn’t rebuff her,” I said. “I declined to pursue a relationship that seemed unlikely to flourish.”
“Isn’t that what’s called a distinction without a difference?”
“I’d be happy to send her a card or letter of apology.”
“It’s gone too far for that. Only a in-person meeting will do.”
“If she refuses see anyone what makes you think she’ll see me?”
“Oh, she’ll see you. But I can’t guarantee a face-to-face conversation.”
“Come again?”
“You may have to talk to her through a locked door. The family hasn’t given up. We still have hope it’s not too late to pull her back from total isolation.”
*
She’d been frequenting the store for weeks, always by herself in the middle of the afternoon, as if she had nothing better to do. In her late twenties, she was short with a slim figure, long auburn hair parted in the middle, full lips and large dark eyes that darted up and down the pages of the books she pulled from the shelves. She dressed modestly in knee-length skirts and collared blouses and sensible leather shoes. Sometimes our eyes would meet and she would look quickly back to her book. I was fascinated. She was so quiet, so demure. And I’d always been attracted to women with a strong intellectual bent. Despite being a contented bachelor of long-standing, despite being perhaps twenty years older than the woman in the poetry aisle, I approached her.
“I couldn’t help noticing your interest in the Lake Poets. Were you aware there’s a new biography of Wordsworth? It’s gotten excellent reviews.”
“I hadn’t, no.”
“As a matter of fact, the author’s giving a reading here this Friday. It begins at seven if you’d like to attend.”
“Seven you say?” She turned on me a look of supreme archness.
“Seven,” I said, no less arch.
“I never go out alone after dark. And I don’t drive.”
“If you’d permit me the honor of accompanying you, I can pick you up on Friday, six-thirty sharp.”
“In that case it would be my honor to accept.”
We both laughed.
*
With such a charming introduction I had every reason to believe the evening would go well. I looked forward to spending time with this captivating young person. But things went south from the get-go. When I arrived at the address she’d given me (a two-story house in the Federal style on Main Street) Lavinia explained that her sister was not ready and invited me to wait in the parlor. Twenty minutes later Emily came down the staircase and smiled at me from the foyer.
“Are you coming, sir?”
“Am I coming? I’ve been waiting for the last—”
“No argument. Chop chop.”
By the time we got to the store the reading was already in progress. Fortunately, I’d gotten Janet to handle the arrangements. The only seats were in the back row which was just as well since Emily talked throughout the program, a running commentary on everything from the tragic demise of private book stores (“But I adore Amazon Prime, don’t you?”), to the overly air-conditioned room (“Some one should tell the manager. Do you know him?”), to her opinion of the biographer’s response during the Q&A regarding Wordsworth’s relationship to nature: “Wordsworth draws comfort from a rainbow,” she said, “but it could as easily be ragwort. Nature is what we know, yet have no art to say. Don’t you agree, sir?”
I was finding her chatter, however informative and insightful, a little draining. By the end of the reading I was ready to call it a night. But I did not want to be rude and suggested we go for a drink somewhere. I thought she understood I was just being polite, so I was surprised when she took me up on it.
On the walk to a popular bistro two blocks from the book store, she became strangely silent—and distant, literally. I am a lanky man, perhaps a foot taller than Emily. Nevertheless, I had to increase my stride to keep up with her rapid gait. Also, it would have been a stretch to say we were walking together, as she remained half an arm’s length ahead of me. We looked like two strangers who happened to be going in the same direction.
At Timberlake’s, Emily plopped herself down and perused the drink menu. I stared at the part in her hair as she ran her finger down the page, flipped the menu over and ran her finger down that side. Even sitting, she gave the impression of constant motion, her small frame emitting a perceptible vibration. She was never still in mind or body.
When the server appeared I ordered an Irish Coffee.
“I’ll have the same,” Emily said. “Hold the Irish. Hold the caffeine.”
It began again, the non-stop talking, the intense focus, her off button flipped back on. She spoke of her dear sister, her hard-working brother, her stern father, her frail mother. Just when I was about to dismiss her as someone who never asked personal questions she said,
“What about you? Have you family in town?”
“No family anywhere, I’m afraid. My parents have passed. I’m an orphan.”
“Like me.”
“But you just said—“
“There’s more than one way to be orphaned. You can be orphaned by the world. You can be orphaned by God.”
“Which are you?” I asked.
Slyly, she turned the conversation back to me, asking how long it had been since my parents’ death. Going on four years, I said, my mother from cancer, my father from an aneurism not three months later.
“How have you dealt with that?”
“The usual way, I suppose.”
She put her elbows up on the table and rested her chin on interlocking fingers, studying me with her large brown eyes. “And what’s that? What’s the usual way?”
“I honor them in memory. I visit their gravesite.”
“Do you miss them?”
“Of course. They were my parents.”
“You were close.”
“Yes, well, in a restrained sort of way. How’s your coffee? Mine’s a little weak.”
“Do you think you’ll see them again?”
“See them again?”
“In heaven.”
“I don’t believe in an afterlife.”
“Does that make the grieving process easier or harder?”
I thought these damned formidable questions for a first date. “I’m not sure,” I said and countered, “Do you believe in an afterlife?”
“I have only the dimmest sense of it. Do you fear that new road?”
“New road?”
“Death, sir.”
“No more than the next person. Do you?”
“Oh yes. But I wouldn’t miss it for anything, would you?”
I smiled. “I’ll get the check.”
I drove her back to her house, then walked her up to the front door. I was surprised again when, after putting the key in the lock, she turned and asked for my addresses—both street and email—and punched them into her cell. Out of courtesy I did the same with no intention of using them. The evening had left me feeling uneasy, agitated, off-kilter. I decided I wasn’t looking for a relationship after all. It had been years since my last one and I’d grown too accustomed to bachelorhood to change now. Managing a private book store with its day-to-day challenges was all the conflict I wanted in my life. More to the point, after four hours in Emily Dickinson’s presence I was exhausted.
*
A smattering of emails and letters followed, including one proposing a second date: lunch at any restaurant of my choosing. “My treat,” she added. “Your wheels.” I should have ended it then and there, but I’d always found it hard to say no, and there may have been a part of me that wanted to give her another chance. I wrote back suggesting lunch at Pita Pockets on North Pleasant a week after next, ten days hence. The smattering turned into a flood, letters stunning in their detail and nuance and contradictions about her hobbies (gardening and cooking), her favorite foods (cake and bread), her goals for the future (immortality: a joke?), and on subjects like the lifespan of butterflies and the nocturnal habits of the moon flower, all of which may have interested me if she’d been more direct in the telling. I cherished the written word. The Elements of Style, Strunk and White’s guide to simple, lucid prose, was my bible. I appreciated a well-crafted sentence, but there was little about Emily’s letters that was simple and lucid. Portions of them seemed willfully obscure.
*
At Pita Pockets (Falafel Plate for me, Middle Eastern Platter for Emily) she spoke again of God and death and other weighty matters along with such seemingly random observations as, “Did you see this morning’s sunrise, sir? It rose a ribbon at a time.”
“I’m not usually up that early,” I said.
“You don’t know what you’re missing,” Emily said, dipping pita bread into her babaganoush. “There’s nothing so refreshing as the day aborning.”
“I have seen sunrises before,” I said.
“But not this one. Precious because it will not come again. How’s that falafel?”
“Good.”
Now, I thought, she was going to say something about food. But she didn’t.
“What’s the last movie you saw?” she asked.
“In the theater? I don’t remember. I don’t see many movies.”
She began telling me how much she was looking forward to a silly romantic comedy that was coming to town, and before I knew it I’d tacitly agreed to take her the following Saturday.
But by then I was absolutely determined to sever ties, come what may. Emily’s strange movie-going behavior reinforced that decision. She ate her small bucket of popcorn one kernel at a time, munching throughout the entire hour and a half, popping in the last kernel as the credits began to roll. Nothing intrinsically wrong with this, of course, but it was irritating. She had a concussive laugh that split the air, particularly when no one else was laughing, which was most of the time. Worst of all, she talked during the movie (“Timothée Chalamet would make an excellent Puck, don’t you think?” “This scene could have been lifted right out of School For Wives) and appeared oblivious to people turning around and staring at her. I sunk lower and lower into my seat. Afterwards, in the car, I deflected her suggestion that we go for a drink. “I have to get home to feed the dog,” I lied. Roscoe had died two years ago. Nor, at her front door, did I permit her to finagle another movie date. “I’m afraid there’s nothing I’m eager to see right now.” Neither did I respond when she stood expectantly under the porch light, big eyes peering up at me. Wishing her a good night, I hurried on down the stairs.
*
I began deleting her emails and throwing away her letters, unread. Finally, they stopped. It was then the guilt kicked in. I knew I could have been more forthright in how I’d handled things, more courageous. I was disappointed in myself. My guilt was compounded when Lavinia came to the store and revealed the role I’d played in her sister’s retreat from public life. Emily was even more complex than I’d thought. She possessed a rare delicacy, even an innocence, that belied her high-octane personality. On top of the guilt was shame. I’d lacked the generosity of spirit, the imagination, to incorporate into my life—whether as a lover or a friend or just a pen pal—a unique and wholly worthwhile human being. So when Lavinia suggested that I meet with Emily in order to make amends, I did not, I could not, refuse.
*
Lavinia opened the door to the residence. I was there for the mid-afternoon meeting she’d arranged. It would be more accurate to say the meeting she’d negotiated, since the conditions of my visit had been subjected to multiple revisions by Emily. Far from appearing eager to affect a get-together, she seemed to throw up as many obstacles as she could think of. Three times she changed the date of my visit and when she finally settled on one she twice altered the time of my arrival. All of this indecision or gamesmanship or whatever it was tended to argue for detaching from such a taxing person.
“That’s not what she’s doing,” Lavinia said on the phone the day before my visit. “She’s not undecided and she’s not playing a game.”
“Is she testing me?”
“Perhaps. Testing your sincerity.”
“Is she depressed?”
“No.”
“Agoraphobic?”
“She’s not afraid to leave the house. She just chooses not to.”
“Has she ever talked to anyone?”
“You mean a therapist? Therapists don’t make house calls. Even if they did she’d run rings around them. You know how she is. We’re at our wits end. Emily’s too young to become a shut-in. We need you to do whatever you can to coax her out of the house.”
“I thought I was coming to set things right.”
“We’re hoping for more from you. There’s a Baskin Robbins right down the street. Emily has quite the sweet tooth. The Mead Gallery has a new Monet exhibit. She adores the Impressionists. Not that I care where you take her. I’d be happy if you got her to walk around the block.”
Now I stepped with Lavinia into the foyer. On my left was the well-appointed parlor, on my right the library with cushy armchairs and wall-to-wall shelving. Straight ahead was the stairway that led up the bedrooms.
“It’s very quiet,” I said.
“Father’s at his law office. Mother made a point of seeing a friend. She knew you were coming. Follow me.”
We went up the stairs, then walked to the end of the hallway.
Lavinia knocked on the door. “Emily. He’s here.“
Nothing.
“Emily. Open up.” Not a sound. “Emily, please. Don’t be rude.” She knocked again, harder. “I was afraid of this.” Lavinia turned the white enamel doorknob. “Oh,” she said, surprised to find the door unlocked.
There was a brass bed just inside the room, lace curtains on the windows, textured wallpaper, a gas fireplace. In one corner was a little square table and a straight-back chair.
“That’s where she does her writing,” Lavinia said. “Poor Em. No one wants her difficult poems.” Lavinia opened the closet door. A row of long white dresses hung there. “It’s all she wears anymore,” Lavinia said. “Which I think is a bit much.” She opened the door to another closet and did some more investigating.
I must have looked quizzical.
“This house is ideally suited for Hide and Seek,” she said. “Emily was born here. She knows all the best hiding places. I suggest we start out back and work our way to the front of the house.”
We left the bedroom and trooped down the stairs. After a short walk we came to a shed crammed with gardening tools and lawn equipment. No Emily. We returned through the living room with its two throw rugs, identical wing-backed chairs and a class cabinet crowded with bric-a-brac. When we entered the parlor I saw a flash of white out in the foyer. Lavinia saw it too.
“Emily!” Lavinia cried. “Come back here! Stop this!”
Emily was moving quickly toward the staircase, her dress hiked up to her knees. She took the steps two at a time. We gave chase. At the top of the stairs she broke into a half-run, reached her bedroom, closed the door.
We hurried on down. The door was locked. “Emily!” Lavinia said, knocking. “This isn’t fair. You agreed to talk to this man. Open up!”
Silence.
After more knocking and pleading Lavinia apologized for her sister’s childishness. “I wish I could say this isn’t like her. Mother and Father will be so disappointed.”
Lavinia and I stepped away. We were almost at the stairs when we heard Emily’s door crack open.
“Quick!” Lavinia said. “Before she changes her mind.”
I sprinted the length of the hall and pushed the door all the way open. Emily was seated at her writing desk. She was in profile, sunlight pouring through the window behind her, head held high, hands clasped in her lap, reddish-brown hair arranged in a tight bun. Her clothes had never been exactly form-fitting but her baggy white dress revealed nearly no shape at all. She looked so austere, so forbidding. Nevertheless, I moved toward her. She put up a hand. “That’s far enough, sir. I wouldn’t want you to get my cooties.”
She’d gone from playing a child’s game to speaking a child’s language.
“I know I hurt you and I feel terrible about that,” I said. “I sincerely apologize for the manner in which I ended our association. There’s no excuse for such cowardly behavior. I hope you can forgive me. But honestly, as a couple, I didn’t think we were all that…simpatico. Again. That’s no excuse.”
She sat up straighter. She had yet to look at me.
“Be that as it may,” I continued, “your sister tells me you’re not getting out much anymore. I’d very much regret it if I’ve had anything to do with your…”
“Immurement?”
“Is that what it is? I shouldn’t like to think so.” I pointed at the window behind her. “It’s a beautiful day out. Ideal for a walk. How about getting some air?”
“You’re here because you were coerced.”
“I’m here of my own free will.”
“No need to lie. Why not say it?”
“Say what?”
“What you really think of me.”
“Well, you’re extremely bright, you’re very well—“
“The truth, sir. Admit it. You think I’m too much. Too much,” she said with a vehemence that was both poignant and startling.
I was about to deny her assertion with equal vehemence but stopped myself. What was the use? She’d caught me out. I’d had my chance. Like the others before me, I’d found her too complicated, too wearing, too much, as she would say. I turned to leave. Immediately I heard rapid footsteps and swung around. Emily was rushing toward me. Rising on tiptoe, she grasped me by the back of the neck, pulled me down and pressed her lips hard against mine. Just as abruptly she let go and scampered back to her desk. Reseated, she squared her shoulders and lifted her head, once again in profile. I shut the door on my way out.
*
I couldn’t help feeling responsible for Emily’s self-banishment, especially when she began to acquire a reputation as the town eccentric, the spectral creature shut up in the big house on Main, the freak. I ghosted Emily Dickinson. Emily Dickinson ghosted the world.
Sometimes after work I’d go out of my way to drive down her street, slowing as I passed under her second story window. Occasionally, I’d pull to the curb and park, hoping to catch a glimpse of her. Once I did. She was suddenly at the window, her hair pulled back in that severe fashion, her dress hanging loosely about her shoulders, her expression unreadable. I raised my hand and waved. The curtain closed.
John Picard is a native of Washington D.C. currently living in Greensboro North Carolina. He has published fiction and nonfiction in New England Review, Narrative Magazine, The Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere. A collection of his stories, Little Lives, was published by Main Street Books???.