After cresting a ridge, the road stepped in switchbacks down a series of terraced slopes. Eventually it leveled and wound its way alongside a narrow river, so that the canopy of trees made a single bower for river and road together. In the spaces where sunlight broke through, the shallows of the riverbed shone clear and stony except where tresses of weed trailed out downstream. Abruptly the river opened to a broad pond, on the far bank of which ranged a line of low stone buildings, steep-gabled, roofed in what must have been tile but looked instead like slopes of moss.
“Voilà,” said Jean-Marie, turning his truck over a single-lane bridge toward the buildings, “we’re here.”
—
I got out of the car and Jean-Marie drove off in a cloud of diesel exhaust, leaving me alone. The moss-furred tiles on one of the roofs had been removed and four workers in blue coveralls were replacing them with newer, more regular tiles. I had no idea where to go. Should I ask the roofers? What would I ask them? Pardon me, messieurs, but can you tell me where my copine is? By the way, does copine mean friend or girlfriend?
I was about to enter a building at random when I saw that Miriam was already walking toward me, her bare feet silent on the gravel, her gait hesitant and unsteady across the sharp stones.
She looked smaller than I’d remembered, her skin a darker bronze, and when she lifted herself on tiptoes to kiss me, I saw for the first time a constellation of freckles faint on the bridge of her nose. Taking my hand with a smile though saying nothing, Miriam led me past the largest structure in the line of conjoined buildings, the old mill itself, toward a separate structure, a stone barn converted into a house, with new-glazed dormers set in the roof.
Inside, once my eyes adjusted to the dimness, I saw that the first floor had been opened out to make an enormous kitchen. Modern stainless stoves and sinks lined two walls, while the original hearth, broad and shallow, dominated a third. An immense smoke-blackened beam served as the mantelpiece. The hearth itself was empty, swept bare of both ember and ash, though behind the grate a sooty outline stood out as though some fire had taken care to leave a record of itself, printing its image in negative on the brick. A trestle table stood on the other side of the room, flanked by benches, separated from the kitchen by a flight of stairs newly constructed and as yet without paint, nailheads bright in the raw lumber. These steps Miriam mounted, and I followed her up into a long hallway running the length of the building, air close with odors of paint and turpentine. On either side of the corridor, between expanses of fresh drywall, doorframes opened on small rooms, each unoccupied and furnished with nothing more than a single bedstead and mattress.
Miriam led me to the room on the end where she was staying, slightly larger than the others, two single beds instead of one, each neatly made up and separated by a desk and a single lamp. From a nail in a doorjamb hung a shirt of hers I recognized; a crucifix hung from a nail above her bed.
“At last you are here,” she said.
“And where is that?” When I spoke, my voice, too loud, reverberated from the bare walls.
With a smile shy or frail, she said, “I was lonely without you.”
“I would be lonely too, in a place like this.”
“With you I am able to think.”
“Think what?”
“Eh bien, if I knew that…,” she began, the smile still fragile, but then she was kissing me again, unbuttoning my shirt, easing the tine of my belt buckle from its belt hole. “You don’t mind me dirty?” she asked, but it wasn’t a question.
—
Afterward we lay side by side, naked on the narrow bed. The view from the bed foreshortened the crucifix nailed above us to a cubist abstraction of wood, gill-sharp ribs, feet.
“You do not mind staying here with me?” she said, turning to face me and lowering her voice to a whisper.
“Are you worried the crucifix will hear?”
“You think He hasn’t heard it all before?”
“Was sex from behind mentioned in the Rule of St. Benedict?”
No, she said, but the room had been envisioned for couples. The hope was that the community would attract single people and couples alike.
“The community,” I said.
“A religious community, yes,” she went on. But a lay community, women and men alike. There would be the possibility of minor vows, but nothing would be required. People could come for a summer, a season, a year. Abruptly I was aware of the difference between this place and the first monastery Miriam had brought me to. There, the bare spaces, the silence, seemed to form an eddy outside of time. Here, however, the ambition of the community seemed nothing more than to give itself over to time, the hours, the seasons, the years, the unhurried, unstoppable clock of the earth.
“Why did you ask me here?”
“You are angry,” she said.
A shame washed over me. Miriam, evidently injured, had begun to dress. “I wanted to come,” I said, trying to make good. “And here—look—I finished my notes on the Herbert poems.” I removed the notebook from my bag and set it down on the desk. She sat beside me and took the notebook onto her lap.
“It is finished? Already?”
“I wanted to give it to you when you got back to Paris, over champagne and a chicken.”
“But we could still have champagne with a chicken….”
“I drank the bottle of champagne.”
“Et le poulet?”
“When you didn’t show up, he drank the second bottle and I released him.”
“Ah, he was a drunkard—like you,” she said. I heard a wounded note lingering in her voice, but she took my face in her hands and said, “Thank you.”
“For being a drunkard?”
“No,” she said, her seriousness alone conveying reproach. “Daniel. I thank you.
