Louise Dean - Becoming Strangers

A HARVEST BOOK HARCOURT, INC.
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Copyright Louise Dean, 2004

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places,
organizations, and events are the products of the author's imagination
or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

First published in Great Britain by Scribner, 2004.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Dean, Louise.
Becoming strangers/Louise Dean.1st ed.
p. cm.
1. BritishCaribbean AreaFiction. 2. Middle aged personsFiction.
3. Caribbean AreaFiction. 4. Terminally illFiction. 5. Married people
Fiction. 6. VacationsFiction. I. Title.
PR6104.E24B43 2006 2005002400
ISBN-13: 978-0-15-101174-2 ISBN-10: 0-15-101174-5
ISBN-13: 978-0-15-603266-7 (pbk.) ISBN-10: 0-15-603266-X (pbk.)

Text set in Dante MT
Designed by Suzanne Fridley

Printed in the United States of America

First Harvest edition 2007
A C E G I K J H F D B

A LSO BY L OUISE D EAN

This Human Season

"It's hard to believe that this poignant examination of long marriage is Deans first novel, so subtly does she develop the relationships among her characters and so skillfully does she balance delight and despair.... Dean peels back the skin of these marriages with an unflinching lack of sentimentality and an immense talent for close observation and evocative, often poetic detail. She can reach straight into a character's heart, damning her instantly but discreetly in a single sentence. She can redeem (albeit only momentarily) just as swiftly.... All of Dean's characters ... are wonderfully true to their circumstances but are also vividly and consistently themselves, not 'types.' In less skillful hands, the plotand there is a good, strong plotmight have foundered in bathos, but Dean adroitly sticks to the high road.... Dean has produced an ideal novel, right out of the box."

The Atlantic Monthly

"This rich story ... is a masterpiece about the human condition that will rile the reader's emotions. Recommended."

Library Journal

"Dean suffuses [this novel] with a comic touch and handles her several narrative threads with skill. Give this to readers who enjoy thoughtful character-centered fiction."

Booklist

"Adept at sharp dialogue and brisk plotting, Dean is also attentive to character development, choosing authenticity over sentimentality in a book that is poignant, often funny and unexpectedly redemptive."

Publishers Weekly

"What sets Dean's novel apart ... are her astute observations of human nature. Even the novels minor characters are compelling and complex."

Pages

"Read Becoming Strangers for all the complicated and often contradictory truthsabout friendship, marriage, aging, faith, Caribbean vacationsthat can only be found in great fiction; this is a truly remarkable debut."

Kate Walbert, author of The Gardens of Kyoto and Our Kind

W INNER OF THE 2006 L E P RINCE M AURICE P RIZE

"We have rewarded, this year, a book whichsimplybelieves in love. Which takes us into the experience of several very different people; people whoeach commonly caught in an atmosphere of insoluble loneliness and separatenessreach out for the company of another soul, each in their own particular way. I can't think of a better definition of love than this gesture of hopefulness."

Citation from Le Prince Maurice Prize

In memory of Edward George Waller 19141999

Gwendoline Dorothy Waller 19162001

This is the great private problem of man; death as the loss of self. But what is the self? It is the sum of everything we remember. Thus what terrifies us about death is not the loss of the future but the loss of the past. Forgetting is a form of death ever present within life.

M ILAN K UNDERA

B EFORE HE'D HAD CANCER he'd been bored with life. Since he'd taken dying seriously, he'd been busy; he was occupied with understanding the disease and training his body to resist it. How hardy he was, physically. Six years of operations and excisions, starting with his chest, then the cancerous cells had metastasized to his lungs and on to his liver. A suite of initial excisions revealed each encampment to be partially malignant. He'd insisted on warfare. Each time the doctors told him and his family the chances of recovery were poor and the recurrence of cancer a likelihood. Year after year a fresh crop of cells emerged, excisions followed and he lived. The knife-and-forking of his body seemed to give a perverse impetus to his will to survive.

His tenacious hold on life was partly begotten by the conviction that his life must have accrued some value over time. What about all the sights and sounds recorded, all those thoughts tracked? They must be worth something. They must add up to some meaning. Billions of words over the years ordered into a handful of simple notions. His mother! His country! Right and wrong!

He gave up work. He took to reading. Politics, philosophy, biographies.

An exploratory probe of his pancreas had revealed further metastasis just two weeks previously. They could not operate again, they said. He shook the doctor's right hand with both of his hands and nodded. Later that evening, he overheard his wife sharing the news over the phone, from the study, door closed. 'He's ridden with it. They can't do anything for him now,' Annemieke said.

About three days later, their two adult sons had come by with the tickets for two weeks in paradise, a hotel spa resort on a Caribbean island. Very exclusive. Very final. He'd shaken their hands with both of his and nodded. Annemieke had kissed them.

'He's getting weak,' she had said, looking at her husband. The travelling won't be so easy. But I am strong enough for us both,' she'd added, then excused herself to answer the phone.

He had sat with his boys, holding the gift card between his fingers, pursing his lips, stroking his moustache, murmuring in bass tones, weighing reason as he listened to their news. The older boy was running his own Internet search business, the other finishing a PhD in philosophy at the University of Brussels. He tried to see them as real people.

Meanwhile, he could hear snatches of his wife's excitable conversation in the other room.

'Afterwards,' she was saying repeatedly and with emphasis.

He read the gift card again. The instruction was, 'Vermaak jullie!' ('Enjoy yourselves!'), the implication that once that was done, he could come back and die properly.

This was going to be their last holiday. They had had a few last holidays previously, but this was going to be truly final. His wife's way of confirming this was to remind him now, on the aeroplane, that they had had some good times during their thirty-one years of marriage. She sighed from time to time as she turned the pages of her magazine before setting it aside.

'So many things,' she said to him, resting her jaw on her palm and looking into his face, 'and so empty, so meaningless.'