In January he received a letter from her that was different from the others — longer, written over three sittings (he could tell from the slight variations in ink and pressure), and more searching in its quality, as if she had been working out something difficult on the page.
She wrote about the new composition, the piano piece she was calling, tentatively, River Nocturne. She wrote about how it was different from the elegy — lighter was the word she had used, but she refined that now: not lighter in weight but lighter in orientation, a piece that looked forward rather than at what had already happened. She wrote about the choreographer in the Brooklyn studio — a man named Marcus Webb who made dances about cities, about the geometry of urban movement — and how watching him work had made her think differently about structure, about how you could describe a thing by showing how it moved through space.
Then she wrote: 'I've been thinking about what we are to each other. I've been thinking about this since October, since the West Village, since you walked with me in the dark and recited your novel and it turned out to be the same thing as the elegy. I think we are — I think we're composing something together, without having agreed to. I think the question is whether we're going to keep composing it from a distance or whether we're eventually going to be in the same room.'
He read this paragraph several times.
She continued: 'I don't know what you want. I know what I want, I think, but I'm afraid to say it before I know what you want. I've been trying not to ask for things that aren't being offered. But I've also been thinking — and this is the elegy thinking, the thing I learned from it — that it is worse to not say the true thing than to say it and find out it costs something. The cost of saying it is finite. The cost of not saying it goes on indefinitely.'
He sat at his kitchen table with this letter for a long time.
Then he took out a piece of paper and wrote, without stopping, without drafting, the most direct letter he had ever written to anyone:
'I want to come to New York. Not for a visit. I want to come and stay. I want my life to be in the same place as yours, because I have been doing the accounting all winter and this is what the accounting says. I know what this means practically — leaving Carver, finding a footing in a new city, all the uncertain mechanics of it. I'm not afraid of any of that. What I would be afraid of is staying here, in the ordinary safety of this city and this job and this life that is good but not full, and letting the thing we have be what it is from a distance when it could be what it actually is in proximity. You said we are composing something together. I want to be in the room where we do it. Tell me what you want.'
He sealed the letter and walked to the post office in the January cold and mailed it before he could reconsider.
She called him three days later. She said: 'I want you here.'
He said: 'Then I'm coming.'