CHAPTER XL (for extra love!)
August 22nd, Green Gables ~ with my heart in my mouth, and on my sleeve, and racing madly, madly, madly!
I love him.
I love Gilbert Blythe.
I roll his name around on my tongue. I suck it like that broken heart necklace. But this isn't musky and sweet like a piece of candy. This has bite and juice and it runs down my chin and I lick up every drip.
Gilbert Blythe!
He tastes of apple. Not only the fruit, the entire tree. The wood and the leaves and the blossom, petally soft like fingertips when they touch their beloved for the very first time.
I love him, I love him, I love him, I love him.
I never get tired of saying it, thinking it, spelling it out in the air.
I love Gilbert Blythe.
There isn't a why, there isn't a when, there's only a how. And it's an overwhelming, overflowing how that loves every part of him. I love his strength and his laugh and his will and his eyes, and the eyelashes on those eyes. His eyebrows too, like inky brushstrokes that tell me when he's teasing and when he means it. And his nose. I never considered how perfect it was, I suppose because I am always thinking about what lies beneath, which is his even perfecter mouth. His sweet, full, kissable mouth, filled with bright teeth and brighter words that go right to the heart of me. Every single word. Every single time.
Say toothbrush, Gilbert Blythe, and I promise you I will blush so red you won't know where my face stops and my hair begins. Say metaphysical poetics, say parabolic anomaly. Say marry me, marry me, marry me, marry me!
And today he comes! Today after weeks of waiting and dreaming and hoping I shall finally see my love.
I'd like to think I'll have the presence of mind to say, "Don't you dare nearly die on me again!" But I know what I'll really do is fling away whatever flowers he has in his hands and leap into his arms.
How long has it been since I've felt them around me? And there was nothing else like it. He held me as though he thought I'd float away, like I was a cloud. Never grasping or greedy, with a confident touch which said, "I'll let you go, but only when you tell me to. Till then my arms stay right where they are."
He can hold me as close as he wants to now. I want to run into him so that he staggers back and can do nothing but grab at my waist. How I've missed the feel of his hands upon me, missed the way he was able to guide me around the room so that I forgot we were dancing. The way his fingers dipped into the small of my back, and his thumb settled lightly on my ribs. I could feel the heat of his skin through my dress as though there was no dress. And felt him looking at me as though there was no me, just a great big beating heart, which beat faster and faster till all I could do was say stop!
But I won't say it now. I won't ever say it now. No more no. No more wait. No more don't. Only yes! More! Again! And again and again and again. I'll never stop saying it, I'll never stop loving him, I'll never ~
Oh! He's here! Mrs. Blythe said to expect him at three. I haven't even changed my dress yet. No matter, he's here! He's here!
Later...
He's gone. He was here for fifteen minutes and now he's gone. There was no rushing down the stairs and into his arms, there were no charged looks and frantic words, there weren't even any flowers. By the time I'd tidied up my hair, he was already seated on the porch between Marilla and Rachel, with a blanket over his knees! His mother had gone on to the Barry's saying she'd be back in fifteen minutes. And she was. Fifteen minutes to the second. Then she asked if he needed help getting into the buggy, gave the reins a tug and drove away.
It was the longest and shortest fifteen minutes of my life. We said a total of six things to each other. Six. And none of them needing the sudden but deliberate absence of Marilla or Rachel. In fact, by sentence number three I began to wish they would come back so that I could run upstairs and hide.
"Hello you," I said. (Hello you? Have I ever said such a thing in my life?)
"Anne," he said. (Anne? I already know my name, Gilbert Blythe. Perhaps he wanted to make a point of showing he'd remembered mine, because he thought I'd forgotten his.)
"You're looking well," was my next feeble remark. Honestly, how many people must have said that to him?
"Like a scarecrow is how I look. But it's better than being six feet in the ground."
He made a small laugh, and it would have been the perfect time for me to say, Don't you ever die! But all I could think was if I'd run at him like I'd meant to I could have killed him all over again.
Not once in all the days since I heard he would live did I consider why it was he nearly died. All I could think was that we had another chance, and what I would do with that chance. How I would make up for all the lost time and misunderstandings, and we could go back to how we used to be. Then I saw that rug, saw his pale hands resting on that rug, saw a shirt that seemed a size too big, and a such a curly mop of overgrown hair, that the next thing I knew I was blurting out (I can barely write this down without cringing)
"Is that MacLeod tartan?"
Then I sat down beside him, picked up the corner closest to my knee and began teasing out the soft wool fringe!
We sat like that for ten minutes and if another word was said then it was so dull and commonplace as to be utterly forgettable. The poor rug was in danger of being completely unravelled, and was only saved by the appearance of Mrs. Blythe, and those two other good women ~ who I know very well had been busying themselves right by the front door. They went to take the rug from him but he clung to it, stubbornly. And all I could say as he walked down the porch steps was ~
"It was good to see you."
But it wasn't good. It was the most painful, drawn out, awkward, shocking and disappointing miracle of my life. And I've already had quite a number of those so that is saying something.
…
August 22nd, Allwinds
Mother warned me. "Don't go," she said, "it's too early, wait a bit." But would I listen? Nope. Instead I turned up on Anne's doorstep with all the charisma and style of Charlie Sloane's grandfather – the dead one at that.
What a heedless, hapless fool. I got that letter from Phil and all I could think of was getting to Anne. Every spoonful of cod liver oil and every bowl of pap getting me closer to the day I could see her again. I pictured it hourly. She'd be wearing that dress she knows I love and her hair would be down round her shoulders. And she'd say, "Gilbert, there's something I need to tell you." And I'd say, "Sweetheart, I already know."
I can recite that part of the letter by heart. No doubt Mother could too, I made her repeat it that many times.
I always wondered how you Island types manage to achieve as much as you do. Now I see how it's done. If there's something you want you must make it yourself, And if you fail you either find the will to try again or learn to live without it. There's nowhere on that rock for you to buy it. No one to simply give it to you. That was why Anne refused Roy – didn't you know that, Gilbert Blythe? Well, now you do. She doesn't want someone who can shower her with 'diamond starbursts and marble halls' any more than I do. She wants to make her own life, with dreams that look very much like yours. So what do you say, Island boy, have you got in you to try again?
Did I have it in me? At the time it was all I had left. I truly believed it was enough and could have cursed Mother for insisting I kept the visit brief, that I kept a blanket round me at all times or there would be no visit at all. I was prepared to say yes to anything. What I wasn't prepared for was how I would feel when I saw Anne again. All sorts of alarming things sprang from my mouth. And not only my mouth. I had almost forgotten how to tell time. Then Anne puts her hands on my blanket and all I can think is thank the Lord that's there, because this tick-tock beats through me so powerfully, I was reluctant to open my mouth in case she heard it.
As reassuring as it is to know that's all in working order, I could have stood to have discovered it on some other day. Or at some other hour, or on someone else's porch. But it had to be Anne's. It's always been Anne. I know it was a mistake to see her so soon, but all I want to do now is to make that mistake again.
…
September 3rd, Green Gables ~ and going going gone out of my mind
He lent me his new book. He walked me to the graveyard. He returned a quilt pattern his mother borrowed from Rachel. He came to help Davy with some secret project, and Marilla with the gate to the cow shed. We've talked of the comparative merits of Lawsons peppermints versus Blairs, and the works of Emerson and Thoreau. It's all been perfectly lovely and perfectly friendly and perfectly how it always was. There was only one awkward moment. When I asked him if he'd read any Whitman, and he looked at me askance and said, "Have you?"
Have I? I am living inside a Whitman poem. I am the Body Electric!
Today we went out for apples. Not just apples. The apples. Those apples. I didn't think he could manage to walk that far. If I had known, if I'd had an inkling where he was taking me I would have worn more than my calico overall and my hair in two braids. He arrived in a vest of dull midnight silk and as I admired it I realised how quickly his body had begun to fill out. How the shirt sleeves that once hung from his shoulders now strained at the seams as he reached for the tip most branch. I didn't know where to put my eyes when he handed me an apple, even his fingernails took on a forbidden quality. It only got worse when we lay beneath the tree. Gilbert said he wanted to look up at the clouds but I knew he was tiring. Soon he had drifted off to sleep, his breath stirring the blades of grass round his face, and I couldn't stop staring. Drinking him in as though I had been on my knees with a raging thirst and he was a pool of clear, cold water.
He was beautiful. It was an unexpected beauty because his eyes were closed and I always thought his eyes the most irresistible thing about him. Instead it was just how people who lose their sight or their hearing often say, that as one sense goes the others get stronger. His ears, his mouth, and his hands that cradled his newly cut hair, appeared so beautifully made and expressive that all I wanted to do was run my lips all over him. It's a terrible, wonderful agony to lie next to the one you love, never knowing if they love you back. Your mouth so brimful with kisses you feel if you don't let them out they will escape of their own accord.
So I stopped looking at his sleeping face and turned to the sky, but there was nothing there to hold my attention compared to the man who lay beside me. My eyes began tracing a line down his body, to his hip. I could see his shirt tail had come out and saw a glimpse of smooth bare skin, about the size of the palm of my hand ~ I had to stop myself bringing my hand to that skin just to be sure. To see his body like that made me overly conscious of my own. A woman's form is so different, flaring out like the base of a tree as it grasps at the earth. Whereas a man's starts straight and narrow and then branches out to the sky. But it doesn't do to be looking at Gilbert and thinking of trees. At least not until he asks me ~
Why won't he ask me? Surely he can hear it inside me, every part of me beating hard with the words, ask me, ask me, ask me. Yet he doesn't. Or he won't. I don't yet know which one is the truth. What I do know is that I'm starting to see every little thing we do together as a great big thing. I can't help but gather all his gestures to me like armfuls of flowers, hoping each day to make something meaningful from this riotous mess I've made. I think, how can you lie there next to me, Gilbert Blythe, and not know what it means? Then I remember all the times I sprawled out next to him when marriage was the last thing on my mind. Now it's the first, and I want him so dearly there isn't room enough inside me to eat or even to dream. There's just him.
How did it happen, that we were best enemies and then best friends, then we were nothing, and now we are ?
I think I know what we are. I know without doubt what we could be, and I would to tell him if only he would ask.
I'm not ready to believe that the reason he hasn't is because he asked somebody else.
…
September 3rd, Allwinds
She loves me.
It's true. It's real. I haven't spent half my life hoping I might see it in her eyes not to recognise it now.
Anne Shirley loves me.
I never believed those letters could be arranged to make those words. Some things are just impossible. Some dreams are always out of reach. But today I knew if I'd reached for her she would have never let me go.
So why didn't I? Even now I'm not sure. In that moment under the tree, I was laid so low with the weight of all her want I couldn't move. I never wanted to. What I wanted was to feel it pour all over me, to be rained on and drowned in her fierce and unrelenting love.
She loves me.
It's like walking into unknown land. As I rediscover the Island I am rediscovering Anne, and every day we venture out a little further. It reminds me how I tried to teach her how to sail on open water all those years ago. A gale blew up from the north and she stood on the shore in her oilskin and rubbers insisting – as only Anne can insist – that we go out in it. And I told her, "If I let you go out in that you'll learn to be afraid, you'll learn not to trust yourself."
Like all good advice I never applied it to myself. Anne came into my life like a storm. Instead of heeding her warnings I jumped right in, and she spat me out just like she said she would. So maybe now I want to test the waters. Maybe I'm afraid this is all a mirage. Or maybe I'm just gathering my strength so I know I can take all she can give. And she can give a lot. I feel her soak into my bones. There's nothing like the spirit and the will of that woman. There's nothing and no one like Anne.
Anne loves me. She loves me. I know it. And I know something else. I never stopped loving her.
...