On Love
Love takes root—Love takes to the sea—The simultaneously predictable and miraculous results of love
It is fashionable among intellectuals and sophisticates to scoff at true love—to pretend it is nothing but a sweet fairy tale sold to children and young women, to be taken as seriously as magic wands or glass slippers.11 I feel nothing but pity for these learned persons, because they would not say such foolish things if they had ever experienced love for themselves.
I wish they could have been present at the meeting of Yule Ian and Adelaide Lee in 1893. No one watching their bodies crash together in the waist-deep surf, watching their eyes glow like lighthouses leading stray ships home at last, could have denied the presence of love. It hung between them like a tiny sun, radiating heat, remaking their faces in red and gold.
But even I must admit that love is not always graceful. After Ade and Yule peeled themselves apart they were left standing in the waves, staring at the perfect stranger before them. What do you say to a woman you had met only once in a hayfield in another world? What do you say to a ghost boy whose boot-leather eyes have haunted you for twelve years? Both of them spoke at once; both of them stuttered to silence.
Then Ade said, passionately, “Shit,” and after a pause, “Shit.” She ran her fingers through her hair and smeared seawater on too-warm cheeks. “Is it really you, ghost boy? What’s your name?”
The question was a perfectly natural one, but it dimmed the sun between them. Both of them became abruptly aware of how unlikely it was that two people who did not even know one another’s names should be in love.
“Yule Ian.” It came out in a rushing whisper.
“Nice to meet you, Julian. Could you give me a hand?” She gestured back toward her boat, now bobbing amiably southward. It took long minutes of wrangling and thrashing before the two of them had the little ship hauled into the bay and anchored to a standing stone in the surf. They worked in silence, studying the movements of each other’s bodies, the miraculous geometry of bone and muscle, as if it were a secret code they’d been assigned to translate. Then they stood on the shore in the red bloom of sunset, and it became difficult to look directly at one another again.
“Would you like—I have a place to stay, in the City.” Yule thought of his cramped room on a washerwoman’s second floor, and wished very much that he were inviting Ade to a castle or palace or at least one of the costly balconied bedrooms rented by traveling merchants. Ade nodded, and they wound back up through the City of Plumm side by side. The backs of their hands brushed timidly together sometimes on the narrow streets but never lingered. Yule felt the heat of those passages like matches struck against his skin.
In his room he perched her on the end of the unmade cot and skittered briefly in circles, consolidating piles of books and raking empty ink bottles into corners. Ade didn’t say anything at all. If Yule had known her for longer than a few hours in her youth, he would’ve realized how very unusual this was. Adelaide Lee was a woman who wore her desires openly, without shame or artifice, and generally expected the world to accommodate them. But now she sat in a cluttered room that smelled of ocean and ink, and could not find the right words.
Yule sat hesitantly beside her. “How have you come here?” he asked.
“Sailed through a door on a mountaintop back in my world. Sorry it took me so long to get here, it’s just there are an awful lot of doors out there.” A little of her usual swagger slunk back into her voice.
“You were looking for this world? For me?”
Ade tilted her head at him. “Of course.”
Yule smiled, hugely, and it seemed to Ade it was a smile stolen from a much younger boy. It was the same smile he’d given her in the field when she promised to meet him in three days, giddy at his own good luck, and it was suddenly clear to Ade what she ought to do next.
She kissed him. She felt the grinning curves of his lips reshape themselves against hers, his delicate scholar’s hands settle lightly on her shoulders. Ade pulled back very briefly to look at him—the red-edged dark of his skin, the very different smile now gleaming at her like a scimitar moon, the seriousness of his eyes on her face—then laughed, once, and pushed him downward.
Outside Yule’s room, the City of Plumm sank into a sweet evening stupor, its citizens caught in that quiet hour after dinner but before nightfall. Beyond Plumm the Amarico Sea shush-shushed itself against a thousand tarry hulls and rocky islands, and blew salt-heavy breezes through doors into other skies, and all the ten thousand worlds reeled in ten thousand twilit dances. But for the first time in their lives, neither Ade nor Yule cared about these other worlds, for their own universe was now contained in a narrow cot on a washerwoman’s second floor in the City of Plumm. It was some days before they emerged.
Once we have agreed that true love exists, we may consider its nature. It is not, as many misguided poets would have you believe, an event in and of itself; it is not something that happens, but something that simply is and always has been. One does not fall in love; one discovers it.
It was this archaeological process that so occupied Ade and Yule during their days in the washerwoman’s room. They discovered their love first through the strange and miraculous language of the body: through skin and cinnamon-sweat, the pink-edged creases left by rumpled sheets, the deltas of veins charting the backs of their hands. To Yule it was an entirely new language; to Ade it was like relearning a language she thought she already knew.
But soon spoken words filtered into the spaces between them. Through the underwater heat of the humid afternoons and into the relief of the cool nights, they told one another twelve years of stories. Ade told her story first, and it was a thrilling confabulation of starlit train rides and foot-worn journeys, of leaving and coming, of doors standing slantwise in the dusk, half-open. Yule found he couldn’t listen to her without a pen in his hand, as if she were an archival scroll sprung to life, which he had to document before she vanished.
She finished with the story of Mount Silverheels and the door to the sea, and only laughed when Yule pressed her for details and dates and specifics. “That’s exactly the kind of nonsense that ruins a good yarn. No, sir. About time you told me your story, don’t you think?”
He lay on his stomach on the cool stone floor, legs tangled in sheets and forearms smeary with ink. “My story is your story, I think.” He shrugged.
“How do you mean?”
“I mean… That day in the field changed me just as it changed you. Both of us have spent our lives seeking out the secrets of doors, haven’t we, following stories and myths.” Yule laid his head on his arm and looked up at the golden sprawl of her in his cot. “Except my quest involved much more time in libraries.”
He told her about his dreamy childhood and dedicated youth, his respected scholarly publications (which never directly asserted the existence of doors but merely presented them as mythological constructions offering valuable social insights), his unending quest to discover the truest nature of the doors between worlds.
“And what have you found out, Julian?” He reveled in the foreign, rolled-together way she said his name.
“Some,” he said, gesturing at the many volumes of A Comparative Study of Passages, Portals, and Entryways in World Mythology that lay stacked on the desk. “And not enough.”
She stood and leaned over his desk, perusing the angles of foreign words on the page. Her body looked strangely calicoed to Yule, her skin shifting dramatically from palest milk to burnt freckles. “All I know is there are these places—sort of thinned-out places, hard to see unless you’re doing a certain kind of looking—where you can go to somewhere else. All kinds of somewhere elses, some of them packed full of magic. And they always leak, so all you have to do is follow the stories. What else you got?”
Yule wondered if all scholars dedicated their lives to questions that other people had already casually answered, and if they found it vexing or pleasing. He suspected Ade would often be both. “Not very much,” he told her dryly. “There are, as you say, thinned-out places, where worlds bleed into one another. But I have this idea that this leakage is somehow… important. Vital, even.”
