Swan Song Read online

  ALSO BY LISA ALTHER

  About Women: Conversations Between a Writer and a Painter (with Françoise Gilot)

  Blood Feud: The Hatfields and the McCoys: The Epic Story of Murder and Vengeance

  Stormy Weather and Other Stories

  Washed in the Blood

  Kinfolks: Falling Off the Family Tree

  Five Minutes in Heaven

  Birdman and the Dancer

  Bedrock

  Other Women

  Original Sins

  Kinflicks

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2020 by Lisa Alther

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Alfred A. Knopf: “Ithaca,” “Remember, Body,” and “Waiting for the Barbarians” from C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems by C. P. Cavafy, translated by Daniel Mendelsohn, introduction, notes and commentary, and translation copyright © 2009 by Daniel Mendelsohn. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

  Hal Leonard LLC: Lyric excerpt from “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground,” words and music by Willie Nelson, copyright © 1978 Full Nelson Music, Inc. All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC.

  West Virginia University Press: “Swan Song” by Lisa Alther from LGBTQ Fiction and Poetry from Appalachia, edited by Jeff Mann and Julia Watts, copyright © 2019 by Lisa Alther. Reprinted by permission of West Virginia University Press. All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Alther, Lisa, author.

  Title: Swan song: an odyssey / Lisa Alther.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2020.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019022764 (print) | LCCN 2019022765 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525657545 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525657552 (ebook)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Love stories.

  Classification: LCC PS3551.L78 S93 2020 (print) | LCC PS3551.L78 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019022764

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019022765

  Ebook ISBN 9780525657552

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design by Jenny Carrow

  ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  For Ina

  The realisation of one’s own death is the point at which one becomes adult.

  —Lawrence Durrell

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also by Lisa Alther

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1: The Death Magnet

  Chapter 2: Arabian Nights

  Chapter 3: Reverse Cowgirl

  Chapter 4: Too Close to the Ground

  Chapter 5: Wine-Dark Seas

  Chapter 6: Angel Gowns

  Chapter 7: The Flappers Ball

  Chapter 8: Trios and Quartets

  Chapter 9: Puffer Fish

  Chapter 10: Palimpsest

  Chapter 11: The Love Cave

  Chapter 12: Slave to Love

  Chapter 13: Fish Food

  Chapter 14: The Valley of Death

  Chapter 15: Metaphors

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  The Death Magnet

  It was snowing the afternoon Jessie recycled her sex toys. A sharp wind from Canada was whipping sheets of white across the parking lot at the household waste dump in Burlington. It was like being smacked in the face by a line of wet laundry. Most Vermonters had the good sense to stay home during a blizzard.

  Jessie hauled a black plastic bag from the rear seat of her CRV and emptied its contents into the garbage mangle. Driving home, she wondered if someone could trace this paraphernalia back to her via her tire tracks in the snow. She realized she had been watching too many episodes of CSI.

  By abandoning this junk, was she acknowledging that her love life was now over? she mused as she exited from the interstate. Her conscious motive had been less terminal: Last week, while transferring names and numbers from her tattered address book onto her new iPhone, she had realized that many of her entries were now dead. She pictured herself dead and her son Anthony’s finding her antique VHS tape of Lesbian Hospital while searching for her will. To spare him this trauma, she had decided to dispose of it herself.

  Yet she had learned in therapy that unconscious motives were often at odds with conscious ones. Sadly, if you knew what your unconscious motives were, then they weren’t unconscious anymore, so you could never claim to know them. But one of hers might have involved an interview with Jack Nicholson in a recent National Enquirer she had read in a Price Chopper checkout line. He had talked of realizing that it was no longer “dignified” for him to hit on young women in parking lots, as he was evidently accustomed to doing. Likewise, Jessie had recently stopped dancing at parties, feeling it was undignified for someone in early old age to do the Bump. But since when had either Jack or she worried about dignity?

  Jessie dropped her keys into the pottery bowl on the chest in the entryway of her condo. She turned on the radio and plopped down in the leather armchair in her living room. Outside the French doors, circles of ice, like giant peppermint Life Savers, were forming on the surface of Lake Champlain. One midwinter day they would merge to form a solid sheet of ice. Before global warming, cars used to race up and down this ice. Skaters had twirled around it. Fishermen had sat drinking Bud in little wooden huts atop it. Iceboats had swept along it with silver blades flashing and ghostly sails luffing. But now the ice was deemed hazardous. Last winter a pickup truck had broken through it and sunk. Jessie had signed the death certificate for its idiot driver in the ER.

  Glancing around her living room, Jessie realized that she was completely surrounded by the ghosts of her ancestors in the form of their furniture, recently moved from her parents’ house, the Victorian where she had grown up, which she had sold after her father’s death. A sea chest bound with black metal bands had accompanied a family of flour millers across the Atlantic from Ireland. A wooden shuttle had earned a living for some French Huguenot weavers from Picardy. A steepled clock on the mantel had kept time for a family of draft dodgers from the Saarland. Beside it sat an ebony jewelry box containing the ashes of Kat, her lover of twenty years.

  “A cloud of witnesses,” her mother used to call her ancestors. With the least encouragement she would quote the entire passage from the Book of Hebrews: “Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us.” Her mother had lived by these instructions. Her role model had been Laura Bush, who had sacrificed her own career as a librarian in order to advance that of her husband. But Jessie suspected that this
cloud of implacable Protestants would probably view her as a laggard in the race of life—having long since abandoned organized religion, not opposed to the occasional sin, and rarely noted for her patience.

  The snow outside the window had let up, but a stiff north wind was roiling the bay into swells that were surging against the ice-coated boulders along the shoreline. She reflected that if her love life wasn’t, in fact, over, she had just made a big mistake. Or at least her parents would have seen it that way, since they never threw anything away. Her mother’s favorite saying had been “Waste not, want not.” On their anniversaries, her parents used to go to the Hallmark store in the mall. Each would pick out a card and hand it to the other. They would read them, replace them on the rack, and drive back home, pleased to have expressed the requisite sentiments to each other at no charge. Sometimes these spawn of the Great Depression went to the family waiting room at the hospital for the complimentary coffee. At the cinema her father would retrieve a jumbo popcorn bucket from the trash can and present it at the counter for a free refill. They reused tea bags until they ran clear, turned old socks into vacuum cleaner bags, and refused to drain the bathtub in winter until the heat had dissipated throughout the upstairs.

  Yet their profligate daughter had just discarded a still-functional vibrator. But you could hardly donate it to Goodwill for a tax deduction, or pass it down as an heirloom. Though, according to the Enquirer, a family in Bar Harbor, Maine, had recently found hidden in a nook of their ancestral manse an ivory dildo, scrimshawed with couples locked in exotic embraces. The family concluded it had belonged to a great-grandmother, the wife of a whaling ship captain, whose voyages had lasted for two years at a time.

  Why is it so unnerving to imagine a great-grandmother with a dildo? Jessie asked herself. She knew firsthand that the hungers of the flesh didn’t flag with the years, even though the energy and opportunity to fulfill them might. But younger people preferred to imagine that they had invented sex. Like Facebook, once they discovered that their parents did it, too, it lost some of its allure.

  An old gray mare behaving like a colt was perhaps distasteful to some. But Jessie’s memories of her colt days in Vermont in the 1970s remained vivid. She had belonged to the Multiple Relationship Group, which had insisted that monogamy was a male invention designed to enslave women. The members were expected to conduct as many simultaneous affairs as possible. Their meetings were spent dealing with the resulting rage and misery, archaic emotions, the group agreed, that women were conditioned to express by a patriarchy intent on keeping them in chains.

  From the radio came the voice of Celine Dion, wailing the theme from Titanic. As Celine explored the erotics of drowning in an icy sea for want of a life raft, Jessie felt suddenly bereft. Love and its loss used to incite in her a turmoil similar to Celine’s. But now that Kat had died, Jessie couldn’t imagine loving ever again. Humans were the only species that based their happiness on relationships that both partners knew would inevitably end in grief for one or the other.

  Jessie turned off the radio and climbed the steps to her bedroom, passing artwork Kat had collected on trips abroad to promote her books—a Samoan tapa cloth, an Aboriginal dot painting, a Chinese pen-and-ink drawing of a waterfall, an oil painting in tones of gray and blue of the English town in which Virginia Woolf had spent her childhood summers. Upstairs, some unread medical journals lay on her desk. She eyed them warily. New research used to excite her, too. As a resident at Roosevelt Hospital in New York City, she had believed she and her colleagues would transform this wounded world into a place of compassion and healing. The world had rung its changes on them instead. What difference had their long hours of service made? The ice caps were still melting. Terrorists were still murdering hapless civilians. Ebola was on track to become a new Black Death. Sooner or later what now passed for Western civilization would collapse. The overheated Earth would ignite into an inferno. Billionaires would flee to other planets in their spaceships. Chaos would rule the streets, and gargoyles leering down from Gothic drainpipes would howl their triumph in the piercing rays from an angry red sun.

  Jessie stretched out on her bed and reached for Kat’s final journal, a lined school composition book with a black-and-white mottled cover. Jessie had found a dozen of them among Kat’s papers, one for each of her published books. There was no apparent organization to them. Recipes and grocery lists mixed with quotes from whatever books she had been reading. She had also written out entire poems by others, along with drafts of new poems of her own. She had recorded overheard conversations and sketches of characters who were evolving in her imagination. She had pasted newspaper clippings and printed-out e-mails on the pages. It was a stream-of-consciousness screenshot of Kat’s busy brain as she generated her next novel.

  In the first eleven journals Jessie had been able to watch this chaos condense into finished books—like the clouds of matter from the Big Bang congealing into stars. After college in Boston, Kat had moved to a commune in Vermont, where she grew vegetables, raised livestock, made cheese, wove cloth, married, and gave birth to two sons, Martin and Malcolm. Her commune had fabricated giant puppets of political figures, which they had paraded in anti–Vietnam War demonstrations all over the country. She wrote a satirical novel about those years, which became a bestseller. She published several more novels, taught and did readings, and wrote articles for newspapers and magazines, cobbling together a living for herself and her sons after her marriage ended. But the story that had been brewing as Kat was dying had remained unwritten. By studying the twelfth journal, Jessie was hoping to discover what had been on Kat’s mind during her final agonizing months.

  On the first page Kat had written out the poem she had later asked Jessie to recite at her memorial service—“Ithaca,” by Constantine Cavafy. Jessie had done so in the Interfaith Chapel on the shores of Lake Champlain, with sunlight pouring through the skylights onto the ebony jewelry box in which Kat’s ashes reposed:

  As you set out on the way to Ithaca

  hope that the road is a long one,

  filled with adventures, filled with discoveries….

  Jessie glanced out the glass doors beside her bed. A frail winter sun was emerging from the storm clouds to begin its descent toward the snowy peaks of the Adirondacks on the far side of the lake. Abruptly she realized that a dark blob was floating in the water at the foot of the bank on which her condo perched. As she studied the blob, it dawned on her that it was clad in blue jeans and a forest green parka. It lay facedown, arms and legs splayed like a starfish. The swells were slamming this body against the rocks and then dragging it back out to open water.

  After phoning 911, Jessie raced downstairs, pulled on her parka and boots, and ran out to the bank. The body was bobbing in the surging water. Copper-colored hair drifted around the head like the skeins of spun gold in “Rumpelstiltskin,” which she had read to her granddaughter the previous evening. Hearing the cacophonous sirens of the ambulance, fire truck, and police cruisers as they wove through the streets of her neighborhood, she resisted the impulse to clamber down the cliff and probably break her neck. Soon blue and red lights were flashing in the gloom of the glowering sky.

  She recognized one of the policewomen. Back in the day, Brenda and she had belonged to a women’s karate group. A surgeon at the medical center used to drape his arm around Jessie and grope her breast as they emerged from the OR. She repeatedly asked him to stop, but he wouldn’t. Finally she got skilled enough at karate simply to throw him to the floor. While he lay there cursing on the tiles, she just stepped over him and walked away. He never touched her again.

  In her off hours, Brenda taught a gun-safety class at a local firing range. Jessie and Kat had taken the class when Kat bought a handgun to store in her Subaru after some drug thug keyed her car while she was researching a piece for the Free Press on the opioid crisis in Vermont. This crisis heralded a seismic shift from Vermont�
�s commune days, when both Kat and Jessie had come of age. Drugs then had concerned the search, however loopy, for personal peace and a higher purpose. Now it involved profits for the Bloods and Crips and Latin Kings.

  During the gun class, Brenda revealed that she had Glocks stashed all over her house so that one would always be available no matter where an intruder might break in. She taught their class to yell “GET OUT OF MY SPACE! I HAVE A GUN!” Whenever Kat had been in a bad mood, she had yelled that at Jessie.

  Brenda nodded to Jessie as she and several other cops and EMTs climbed down the bank. Two in hip boots waded into the water and pulled the rigid corpse to shore. A medic felt for a pulse at the neck.

  Even from the top of the bank, Jessie could see that the woman’s face was contused and lacerated. They zipped her into a black body bag and loaded it on a stretcher, which they passed from hand to hand up the cliff. Placing the stretcher on a gurney, they rolled it across the condo lawn. Some neighbors, gathered on the sidewalk, watched in appalled silence.

  As another cop stretched yellow crime-scene tape around the beach and bank, Brenda questioned Jessie. It was a short interview, since Jessie had nothing to tell, apart from her spotting of the body in the water.

  “Do you think someone killed her?” asked Jessie.

  “Too soon to tell. Just keep your sidearm nearby, like I taught you.”

  * * *

  —

  Jessie sank back down in her leather chair and tried to recall where her sidearm was. She had probably left it in its hiding place in Kat’s Subaru, which they had sold after Kat’s Barrett’s esophagus had morphed into esophageal cancer. Murder, suicide, or an accident? The woman’s face was battered, but that might have resulted from falling off a cliff or being pounded on rocks by the waves.

  A recent FBI sting had identified a major route for both the drug trade and sex trafficking that ran from Montreal, across the densely forested New York border, down the interstate on the far side of the lake, to New York City. Kat had written her final article on it. Overdoses had been skyrocketing at the Burlington ER. Jessie had dealt with one every few days. The woman in the lake looked eastern European. Could she have died trying to escape from traffickers? The ferries to New York State were still running. Could she have jumped off one and been carried south by the currents?