They wrote to each other that winter, actual letters — Mara's idea, suggested over the phone in November with the seriousness she brought to creative proposals. She said that she thought they should write, that screens flattened things, that some things were better said on paper with the hand moving slowly and the capacity to cross out and rewrite and leave the evidence of revision.
He had agreed, partly because she was right and partly because he was writing a novel and thinking about letters — his novel had epistolary sections, letters between his protagonist and his dead father that he had been struggling to make feel real — and because the idea of her handwriting on paper in his mailbox was a form of presence he hadn't known he needed.
Her letters arrived every ten days or so, varying in length between two and seven pages. They came in plain white envelopes with her return address written in her precise small hand. He always opened them at the kitchen table, with coffee, giving them the attention they warranted.
Her letters were long, four and five pages in a hand that was smaller than he expected, precise but with a composer's tendency toward notation — little marginal doodles of musical phrases, arrows between sections, small drawings of the view from her studio window: the river, a tugboat, bare December trees. She wrote about the new composition she was beginning, a piece for piano and strings she described as 'something lighter, I think I have earned lighter.' She wrote about New York in winter — the particular silence of Riverside Park in the snow, the steam rising from the subway grates, the way the city's noise changed in cold weather, becoming somehow more internal.
She wrote about Soo-Jin Park, who had become, over three months, a genuine friend — the kind that arrives in adulthood and feels both unlikely and overdue. She wrote about a concert she had attended at Carnegie Hall, a pianist playing Chopin that had made her reconsider everything she thought she knew about restraint. She wrote about missing Virginia's quiet, the smallness of Carver, the way you could hear the wind in the trees at night.
She wrote also about him — about missing the sound of his voice across a table, about the listening journal, which she was glad he had, about a line from his recited paragraph that had stayed with her for weeks and that she had written in the margin of her new composition's draft.
He read her letters and then read them again and sometimes a third time before sitting down to write back.
His own letters were shorter at first, self-conscious — he was a better writer than talker but found that letters required a different register, more exposed, less mediated by the structures of craft. But he found his way into them. He wrote about the novel. He wrote about Yolanda Chang's Woolf thesis, which was becoming something extraordinary, more alive than she knew. He wrote about Tom and their chess games, about Mrs. Leighton and the lamb stew she had made when she finally met Mara — just once, briefly, in August, and about which she had offered the verdict: 'That one is the real thing. Don't be a fool.'
He wrote about her coffee mug on his shelf. He wrote about the faculty lounge on Tuesday afternoons. He wrote about the novel's ending, which he had found in November, which had surprised him.
He wrote: 'I used to think I was bad at loss. That I didn't know how to live in it. I think what I have learned, partly through you, is that loss is just the shape that love leaves. And the shape is worth honoring, rather than filling.'
She wrote back: 'I've been thinking about resolution — about what it means in music and what it means in life. In music it doesn't mean that the tension disappears. It means the tension finds its home. Maybe that's what I'm hoping for. Not the tension gone, but the tension in a home.'
He folded that letter into his notebook, and kept it there all winter.