I gave George a postcard at the grocery store. “It’s like our art class, you remember?”
“Yes! Ms. Law-Raw! Yes!”
George is still doing well. I noticed the smallest patch of gray hair above his left ear the last time I saw him, and it seems unfair. I can’t imagine him tightening down into an old man, his skin wrinkling, his back stooping. Youth is the strength he shakes in the face of his adversity.
My benefactors in Santa Fe have assured me they’ll be here.
“It’s going to be such a success,” Bonnie promises. She is already drinking.
Evening ushers in the first arrivals—strangers who saw a poster somewhere.
“Welcome!” Bonnie shouts, playing hostess. “This is the artist”—a hand on my arm—“and she’s happy to answer any of your questions.” They help themselves to glasses of wine and plates of food, then stroll along the walls. More people arrive before I have a chance to speak to the first ones, a stream through the door until the gallery is crowded and loud.
George appears with his parents, and all three of them hug me close. From behind George’s back, he proffers a canvas.
“For me?” I ask, and he nods, wide-toothed and generous.
“You.” He points at my neck. “Lah-Raw.” Slightly abstract but a portrait all the same, my likeness clear.
“Thank you, George.”
“He’s been working on it nonstop since he got the invitation,” George’s mother says.
“There’s my girl!” Ed’s voice breaks us apart, startling George into a hop-skip backward, his painting still gripped in his hands. Ed lumbers in and gathers me against him, too intimate, too assuming. I make eye contact with Tim across the room. You need help? he mouths, and I shake my head, pushing Ed back to arm’s distance. I note the combed hair, the cologne, the suit. He looks fancy, just as I asked, and he smells better than he has in years.
“Ed, you remember George and his parents, don’t you?”
I watch the question spread across Ed’s face, watch him parse it. I imagine his brain, a dusty tunnel, every question a torch he has to relight, illuminating dark corners, uncovering dusty skeletons. The smile on his face shows something awakening, bones growing muscle and tissue, whole figures rising up and setting to work.
“George!” he shouts, shoving his hand at the man. “Of course! How the hell are you?”
I don’t know if his recognition is real. George’s face registers terror and confusion. I take the painting from his hands so he can shake, that social habit well ingrained.
“Doc-Tor. Ed?”
“That’s right, George,” his mother says. “Your old doctor from Boulder.” She turns her attention to Ed. “You were always so wonderful with George. Besides Laura’s classes, time with you was what he missed most when he left. We’ll never forget what you did for our boy.”
George’s father shakes next, and I watch Ed’s face, his frozen smile. He doesn’t remember them.
“So good to see you both,” the mother says, leading her men away.
“Thank you for the painting, George!” I say.
“Yor. Well. Come.” George smiles over his shoulder, the confusion over his former doctor dismissed by my praise. Hopefully. I try to see Ed and George together again, sharing in the same unmooring, the two of them floating in a deep sea of unfiled papers, memories and names and knowledge all churning together. Ed was the one to reach out a hand before, to drag George to the edge of the pool and give him a place to hold on and catch his breath. But together now, they would both drown, I am sure, each unconsciously pushing the other under to get his own head up, to gulp in just one more breath of clear air.
Ed can’t save anyone anymore.
“Get you a drink, beautiful?”
“That’d be great, Ed.”
I watch him limp to the drinks table, smiling along the way, still able to play the socializer. The food clearly beckons him, but he takes two glasses of wine and returns to me quickly. I remember all the times over the course of our marriage that he offered to get me a drink and never returned, engrossed somewhere else, consumed by everything but me.
He sets a glass in my hand and raises his to toast. “To your success!”
“Thank you, Ed.”
“Will you walk me through?”
“No monopolizing, Edmund. I need to talk with some other people, too.”
He laughs his rich guffaw. “Go work your magic. I bet you sell everything.”
He limps away again, and Tim announces himself with his hand on my back. “Everything okay?”
“Everything’s great.” I slip my arm around his waist, this other husband of mine. “It’s wonderful,” I say, believing it, feeling something like comfort, a settling.
“Ed’s not too much?”
I shake my head. “Look how much he cleaned up.”
Tim kisses my cheek and moves back into the crowd. He will sing my praises, like he always does, and I hear that therapist asking me again what Tim thinks. Does he find it boring? She was asking about sex in particular, but there’s also the question of our whole marriage. Is it boring, Tim? And I am starting to go after him—to ask? to prove something?—when the Santa Fe couple pushes their way in, demanding that I walk them through each piece.
They call everything “exquisite,” and when they ask about purchasing, I direct them to the gallery owner. She’s handling sales tonight because I don’t want to deal with logistics. I want to mingle and drink and eat, bask in attention, be the star. It’s a new role, and I love it possibly too much. I talk to strangers and friends. I refill my wine and eat very little, pleasantly. I forget that I have a question for my husband.
The Santa Fe couple recognizes Ed, and they make a great fuss about the Gold Bar and its incredible sandwiches. Ed plays his part perfectly, showering them with his smile and his laugh. Tim is talking to Bonnie in front of the loosest painting of the show—rows and rows of bones lined up like writing, growing larger and fuller as they write themselves down the canvas, expanding into whole limbs and parts by the end. Pete is pouring himself another glass of wine, right up to the rim of the glass. He’s worn down, and I make a mental note to touch base with him. Grab a drink, just the two of us. Let him confide all the hard things Bonnie no longer has the patience for.
My eyes are moving between these people—this disjointed family I’ve somehow acquired—when Penelope slides into the empty space next to me. She doesn’t belong here, but something in me knows I’ll never rid myself of her, so her appearance isn’t a surprise. Just a disappointment.
“You never showed us much of your own work when you were our teacher.” She looks around. “They’re all pieces of Ed, right?”
Of course this girl would see that.
“No,” I say. Over her head, I see the Santa Fe woman throw her head back in laughter. Ed has his notes in his hand. He must have told her one of his latest jokes.
“I’m moving,” Penelope says. “My boyfriend got a job in Missoula, and the library there has an opening. We’re not leaving for a month or so, but . . .”
I turn my full attention to her. Missoula is two hours west, and though I’d prefer more distance—how about California? New York? Florida?—it is still far enough away to create a real absence.
“I’m sorry to show up like this. I didn’t know how to get ahold of you, and then I saw a flyer for tonight, and I just wanted you to know in case Ed gets confused.”
“Are you going to tell him you’re leaving?”
“Yes, but I don’t think he’ll understand.”
“Ed understands leaving.”
He forgets the details of my departure. He forgets the time frame. But I know he still feels it, and that feeling fuels behaviors—the excuses he makes up when he’s late or not where he’s supposed to be. He’s lost so many threads, but I know he’ll absorb Penelope’s absence the same way. It will haunt him, like mine does. And he’ll look for us everywhere.
He finds me, again and a
gain, and I envy Penelope’s ability to truly disappear.
“Good luck out there, Penelope.”
“Laura—”
I walk away, toward Ed and my Santa Fe people. I’ve given Penelope Gatson enough of my life. Now I will have to take on elements of hers. How will I explain to Tim that I need to add reading time to my Ed responsibilities? Or that I need to hire some sweet young thing to meet with Ed regularly at the library? I find myself wishing the brothel were still open—it’d solve at least one of our problems.
“There she is!” Ed hollers. “Woman of the hour! Woman of the year! Isn’t my wife a brilliant artist?”
“Ex-wife, Ed.”
The Santa Fe couple do their best not to look shocked.
Penelope slips out the door, and I’m relieved that Ed didn’t notice her. I couldn’t do that tonight—watch them together.
“I love when everyone’s amiable,” the Santa Fe woman says. “And yes, my dear, our Laura is a brilliant artist. We’ve bought nearly half the show.” She laughs her wealthy laugh and takes her husband to the wine table.
I’m alone with Ed. I feel his hand on my lower back and his breath at my neck. “See?” he whispers. “My talented girl. I always knew you’d make it.”
I could tell him that one show in a small-town gallery is far from making it, but instead I let the compliment stand. Ed was my first benefactor, and he has remained my most loyal. I couldn’t see that when we were married, but it’s obvious now. Tim respects my work, but he ultimately doesn’t care what I do for a profession. Ed, though—he loves me in large part because I’m an artist. He couldn’t understand why I’d want to work in a boutique because he believed so strongly that I should be home painting.
He didn’t know how to communicate that, though, and I didn’t have the patience to dig for it.
His hand moves circles on my back. Like Penelope in this gallery, it doesn’t belong there, but I have grown used to this truth as well: Ed may feel my absence, but he will claim me as his own whenever he can.
Chapter 39
There are new headaches, a fluid sort of pain Ed can’t quite articulate and so chooses to ignore. They flutter around the scars on his scalp, then plumb below, through his skull. They are fishing lines without hooks, but they aren’t too bad. Except when they make him sick.
Vitality replaces them today, though, firing through the bright spots of Ed’s brain. He is full—alive, vigorous, robust. The day is rainy and cold, but he is warm and alive, summer inside of winter. Time disappears and then returns, like the creek he takes Benjamin to, up in the Big Belt Mountains where they camp, the water rumbling by, spilling down from its limestone canyon. A mile above the campground, it stops, and most folks turn around there, short-timers, disbelievers, but Ed knows the creek’s secret, how it disappears underground for a mile before reappearing, and so he always takes his son farther, and the boy delights in the water’s resurrection, just as Ed delights in his arrival, here, now.
The creek’s name is the name of a fish, Trout.
The automatic doors slide open, all those stacks of books before him, and among them, his sweet girl, Penelope.
She is at the information desk. “Give me one minute to finish this up.” She pats a stack of papers, and he walks to their spot: two deep chairs tucked away behind the 900s, theirs alone.
When Penelope appears, he is struck—again, always—by her sexiness, such a stunning young thing, and here in a creamy dress, legs bare below the knee, long thin arms.
“You get prettier every day.”
“Flatterer.”
Ed laughs. He’s always been a flatterer, a charmer. “So smooth,” Laura used to say when he complimented her dress or her hair or her perfume, her latest painting. “So smooth.” The women after Laura said the same thing. He smiles at the memory of them, twelve or so, beautiful and wicked and not his wife but lovely all the same. Complimenting their beauty was easy, natural, innate, and Laura used it as one of her reasons to leave. “You may love me best, Ed, but that’s still not enough.”
He does love her best, but here is Pen, sitting down across from him. Her face seems sad, but her words are normal. “How are you enjoying the book?”
The possibility of sadness vanishes as his mind fills. He finished this book in one sitting, an ancient story about a king, two thirds god, one third human, and then he flipped back to the introduction to read it completely, and then he reread the whole thing. It read like the poetry Pen first introduced him to, glowing words that moved on their own, more about sound than meaning, water over rocks, wind in branches—something not said but felt. He couldn’t determine what it was he was feeling, all of it a labyrinth in the corridors of his mind, sometimes tactile, sometimes wispy, ethereal, sometimes vicious. His body lay on her; six days and seven nights Enkidu attacked, fucking the priestess. Ed read those lines again and again. Like Enkidu, he glutted himself on the richness of the scene.
Longing comes in the form of gaps and holes in Ed’s mind. Penelope fills a gap, a need he has for a sexy young ex-patient. The books they read together fill another gap—one for the knowledge he accrued and then applied in Boulder. They’re reading the oldest narrative in the world, older than Homer, older than the Bible, older than the God Ed doesn’t believe in. But still so relevant to his work. Penelope is teaching Homer to the reading group, isn’t she? And Keats wrote those particular lines after he first read Chapman’s translation of Homer. Lines that Skinner then quoted in his discussion of Reporting Things Felt. Ed knows the words . . . Then felt I like some watcher of the skies . . . Yes, that’s the first line, and it rhymes with eyes later, and a planet in between, a planet discovered, and then later, the Pacific Ocean, new and immense.
He pulls out his notes and reads Keats, re: Homer on his list.
. . . Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes / He star’d at the Pacific—
“Skinner quoted Keats to show the practice of association,” he tells Penelope. “We describe how we feel by describing conditions that evoke the same feelings.” Sharing this book with her is like lying in bed with a woman. His wife. Laura. He didn’t do that enough—lie in bed with his wife.
Penelope smiles. “How do Skinner and Keats relate to The Sunlight Dialogues?”
The Sunlight Dialogues. Where were Gilgamesh and Keats, Enkidu and the priestess? Ed tries to trace it back, to light the same bulbs that led him here, but they stay dim. Dark. No sunlight.
He brings his hand to his forehead.
“It’s fine,” Penelope is already saying, dismissing the slip. She nods toward the paper in his hands. “You have your notes.”
“I have my notes!”
The library is eerily quiet, even the regulars missing. Taken away by something, a great flood possibly, cleansing in its destruction. Ea told Utnapishtim to go back to his people with a message. At dawn bread he will pour down on you—showers of wheat. “Bread and wheat have dual meanings in Akkadian. The word for bread also meant darkness, and the word for wheat also meant misfortune.” Ed says it aloud. He read it somewhere.
“Ed? Your notes?”
He looks at the paper in his hands. “ ‘The whiteness, the hairlessness, the oversized nose all gave him the look of a philosopher pale from too much reading, or a man who has slept three nights in the belly of a whale.’ ”
“I love that part, too.”
Ed thinks of Jonah, one of his mother’s favorite tales, foreboding, threatening. Be good, Eddy, or you’ll be thrown from the ship and gobbled up. He hears his babcia: Jak sobie pościelesz, tak siȩwśpisz. “Right, Eddy? You remember: ‘How you make your bed, that is how you sleep.’ ”
Penelope says, “Let’s talk about Clumly’s wife.”
The wife.
Ed flips the pages in his book, that one spot he underlined, he loved. He reads, “ ‘Clumly’s wife was a blind woman with bright glass eyes and small, pinched features and a body as white as his own. Her small shoulders sagged and her neck was long
, so that her head seemed to sway above her like a hairy sunflower.’ ”
“Did the priestess remind you of anything?”
The question makes no sense. There are no priestesses here. He looks at her quizzically.
“From Gilgamesh?” she says.
The word is familiar to him, like the remembered flavor of a food he can no longer taste. Gilgamesh. Didn’t he just speak of it? A book, a story, a film. Something they discussed. They were talking about Clumly’s wife, and before that, Jonah, and before that, wheat and misfortune.
“Never mind,” Penelope says. He can feel her hand on his knee. “What were you saying about Clumly’s wife?” Ed doesn’t know what he was saying. There is this book in his hands, The Sunlight Dialogues. He was reading it, he knows, and talking about it, but even the bits he already recalled are eluding him, dipping out of his reach, playful and mean. Damn it. Just remember. He knows Penelope, sweet beautiful Pen—she’s right there across from him in her own soft chair, and they’ve been having a conversation, one of their great conversations, and it’s about this book that he knows he read. He’s losing the story, though, the characters, the place, left with disassociated fragments—a burned face, a war, a beard, noble queens, King James, bakery trucks—none of it makes sense, though it had. He knows it. “Edmund?” It was in his hands and his mind and his mouth, more than the dulled taste of cigarettes, all that richness, and Penelope here, his girl. “Edmund, are you all right?”
The rain is heavy and loud. He coughs and tilts his head, those damn fishing lines in his brain, and the nausea comes immediately. He pulls a handkerchief from his pocket to cover his mouth and catch the liquid he can feel in his throat.
Escape. You must escape.
Ed shakes his head and struggles from his chair. He limps toward the restroom, flinging that left leg ahead as quickly as he can, throwing it, pitching. Move, he commands. He can vomit in his house, in his bed, all over his floor, in the bathroom, but he can’t throw up here, not in the library, not in front of Penelope.
“Edmund! Edmund, are you all right?”
He hears her voice behind him, but he can’t stop.
The Behavior of Love Page 22
