Station Eleven
“I insist. No strings attached.”
Miranda is momentarily distracted by the coat-check girl, who is staring adoringly at Arthur. He whispers, “You don’t have to make any decisions right away. It’s just a place you can stay, if you’d like.”
Miranda’s eyes fill with tears. “I don’t know what to—”
“Yes. Thank you.” It occurs to her as the hostess opens the door for them that she must look terrible, the bruise on her face and her eyes red and watery. “Wait,” she says, fishing in her handbag, “I’m sorry, just a second—” She puts on the enormous sunglasses she’d been wearing earlier in the day, Arthur puts his arm around her shoulders, the photographer on the sidewalk raises his camera, and they step out into the blinding flash.
“So, Arthur.” The journalist is beautiful in the manner of people who spend an immense amount of money on personal maintenance. She has professionally refined pores and a four-hundred-dollar haircut, impeccable makeup and tastefully polished nails. When she smiles, Arthur is distracted by the unnatural whiteness of her teeth, although he’s been in Hollywood for years and should be used to it by now. “Tell us about this mystery brunette we’ve been seeing you with.”
“I think that mystery brunette has a right to her privacy, don’t you?” Arthur’s smile is calibrated to defuse the remark and render it charming.
“Won’t you tell us anything at all about her? Just a hint?”
“She’s from my hometown,” he says, and winks.
It’s not a hometown, actually, it’s a home island. “It’s the same size and shape as Manhattan,” Arthur tells people at parties all his life, “except with a thousand people.”
There are children on the island who go barefoot all summer and wear feathers in their hair, the Volkswagen vans in which their parents arrived in the ’70s turning to rust in the forest. Every year there are approximately two hundred days of rain. There’s a village of sorts by the ferry terminal: a general store with one gas pump, a health-food store, a real-estate office, an elementary school with sixty students, a community hall with two massive carved mermaids holding hands to form an archway over the front door and a tiny library attached. The rest of the island is mostly rock and forest, narrow roads with dirt driveways disappearing into the trees.
In other words, it’s the kind of place that practically no one Arthur encounters in New York, Toronto, or Los Angeles can fathom, and he gets a lot of uncomprehending stares when he talks about it. He is forever trying to describe this place and resorting to generalizations about beaches and plant life. “The ferns were up to my head,” he tells people, performing a gesture that suggests greater and greater height over the years until he realizes at some point in his midforties that he’s describing plants that stand seven or eight feet tall. “Just unbelievable in retrospect.”
“It must’ve been so beautiful” is the inevitable reply.