doxycyclineâthree months of diarrhea, nausea, blistering mouth, sun sensitivity, and more dizziness. Not that any of this stopped me from going up to the library. Eventually my wife discovered a credit card statement with a series of purchases from gas stations in New Hampshire, reamed me out for lying to her, and then offered to accompany me on any future trip. But I always found a way to politely keep her away from my escape.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
One evening in late September, alone on a hill at West Wind, I began to think about Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The nineteenth-century feminist and author of âThe Yellow Wallpaper,â an autobiographical tale of stifled and forgotten genius, Gilman routinely got cut out of the American philosophical canon. She was a serious writer at a time when serious writers were still not meant to be women. She abandoned her husband and a conventional New England life in 1888 and fled, with her daughter in tow, to Pasadena, California, where she began to make her name as a lecturer. At some point in the spring of 1891 she fell in what she would later call âreally passionate loveâ with Adeline Knapp. This was not the sort of friendship you talked about in public. âI now,â Gilman wrote, âhave some one to love me, and whom I love.â A year later Gilman did what few other women of her time daredâshe got a divorce and sent her daughter back to be raised by her ex-husband. This sort of freedom looked, at least from the outside, like sheer madness. But to Gilman it made perfect senseâsheâd fallen in love and wasnât about to talk herself out of it. And this seemed as good a reason as any to terminate formally a marriage that had probably already died. It was, by my estimation, the best decision of her rather difficult life.
At some point during that September night at West Wind I too decided to leave my spouse and finally admit that I was in love with another woman I hardly knew. The love was unrequited, but that scarcely mattered. My decision, free but apparently insane, made me feel even more guilty. But it also, at least for the time being, relieved the anxiety that had plagued me for more than a year. My father had walked out on us when I was four, and I was brought up by my truly exceptional mother, who gave me many things, among them a profound fear of divorce. In hindsight I know that this aversion was one of the few things holding my silently dismal marriage together. But when my father died, this semi-neurotic fear had died with him. From the outside, the marriage didnât look that bad, but as Thoreau once said, âlives of quiet desperationâ rarely do. High in the New Hampshire mountains, the decision seemed reasonable enough, but as I headed for home at the end of the weekend, I began to doubt my resolve, so I made a Ulysses contract with myself that I couldnât break. At a pawnshop outside of Derry, I sold my wedding ring for $278, just enough money to buy the case of mediocre pinot noir that I needed to temporarily forget the whole ordeal. I never made it home that night, instead hightailing it back to the Hocking estate. The wind had picked up, so I decided, for the first time, to sleep in the library.
The night was objectively terrifying: pitch-black (despite my fatherâs misguided efforts when I was a child, Iâve only recently mastered my fear of the dark), the sounds of scampering paws in the walls, Dorian Grayâstyle portraits looming above. The rodents and ghosts could have me, I thought. I couldnât see how they could make my life any worse than it already was. I listened to the growing storm outside and, oddly, for the first time, pondered the meaning of âWest Wind.â It might have something to do with Pearl S. Buck, who had called her first novel East Wind: West Wind . I imagined Buck owning a similar manor house closer to the coast and naming it East Wind as a subtle
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
One evening in late September, alone on a hill at West Wind, I began to think about Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The nineteenth-century feminist and author of âThe Yellow Wallpaper,â an autobiographical tale of stifled and forgotten genius, Gilman routinely got cut out of the American philosophical canon. She was a serious writer at a time when serious writers were still not meant to be women. She abandoned her husband and a conventional New England life in 1888 and fled, with her daughter in tow, to Pasadena, California, where she began to make her name as a lecturer. At some point in the spring of 1891 she fell in what she would later call âreally passionate loveâ with Adeline Knapp. This was not the sort of friendship you talked about in public. âI now,â Gilman wrote, âhave some one to love me, and whom I love.â A year later Gilman did what few other women of her time daredâshe got a divorce and sent her daughter back to be raised by her ex-husband. This sort of freedom looked, at least from the outside, like sheer madness. But to Gilman it made perfect senseâsheâd fallen in love and wasnât about to talk herself out of it. And this seemed as good a reason as any to terminate formally a marriage that had probably already died. It was, by my estimation, the best decision of her rather difficult life.
At some point during that September night at West Wind I too decided to leave my spouse and finally admit that I was in love with another woman I hardly knew. The love was unrequited, but that scarcely mattered. My decision, free but apparently insane, made me feel even more guilty. But it also, at least for the time being, relieved the anxiety that had plagued me for more than a year. My father had walked out on us when I was four, and I was brought up by my truly exceptional mother, who gave me many things, among them a profound fear of divorce. In hindsight I know that this aversion was one of the few things holding my silently dismal marriage together. But when my father died, this semi-neurotic fear had died with him. From the outside, the marriage didnât look that bad, but as Thoreau once said, âlives of quiet desperationâ rarely do. High in the New Hampshire mountains, the decision seemed reasonable enough, but as I headed for home at the end of the weekend, I began to doubt my resolve, so I made a Ulysses contract with myself that I couldnât break. At a pawnshop outside of Derry, I sold my wedding ring for $278, just enough money to buy the case of mediocre pinot noir that I needed to temporarily forget the whole ordeal. I never made it home that night, instead hightailing it back to the Hocking estate. The wind had picked up, so I decided, for the first time, to sleep in the library.
The night was objectively terrifying: pitch-black (despite my fatherâs misguided efforts when I was a child, Iâve only recently mastered my fear of the dark), the sounds of scampering paws in the walls, Dorian Grayâstyle portraits looming above. The rodents and ghosts could have me, I thought. I couldnât see how they could make my life any worse than it already was. I listened to the growing storm outside and, oddly, for the first time, pondered the meaning of âWest Wind.â It might have something to do with Pearl S. Buck, who had called her first novel East Wind: West Wind . I imagined Buck owning a similar manor house closer to the coast and naming it East Wind as a subtle
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