Orchard

by Larry Watson

  He had released Sonja’s wrist, but she did not move away. She kept staring at the canvas.

  “I would have to refuse the offer.” The huskiness had returned to his voice, but he went on speaking. “If my life depended on it, I would refuse. I don’t delude myself. I know who and what I am. I’m a selfish prick. I’ve been an unfaithful husband and an indifferent father. I’ve neglected friends and family, and I don’t give a good goddamn about the problems of my fellow citizens. But I’ve never compromised on my art. Do you know what that means?”

  She struggled to produce a small, mirthless smile. “That you will not paint a picture of my son.”

  “That’s right. And it means you will not have to give up your body as a bribe. I’m sorry. What was the word you used? Reward. And my God, what a reward it would have been. What a hell of a reward . . .”

  Sonja pulled at her sleeves and smoothed the front of her dress exactly as she would have done if she had just put her clothes back on after lovemaking. Then, as if she remembered where she was and her true reason for being there, her fingers went to the dress’s zipper. “Would you like to continue with yesterday’s pose?”

  He had been painting her at the window where she stood naked, leaning on the sill and gazing contemplatively at the woods. In his mind, he shifted while he worked from one informing narrative to another. In one, she had just risen from her lover’s bed, and she was looking out at all the licit world beyond. In another, she waited for that lover to arrive, thinking that if not that day then soon it would be their last together. He had shared neither story with her, yet without prompting she had assumed an expression that worked for either version.

  “Not yet,” Weaver said. “I’m not finished with my demonstration.”

  With that, he picked up a round number two sable brush and dipped it in the red he had mixed that morning. He used the lightest of strokes— he likened it to a tongue flick—and in exactly that part of the canvas he had referred to earlier, he gave one of the skaters a red scarf.

  He put the brush down. “Do you understand?”

  “I understand.”

  “I planned to put a bit of red in the picture, but it can only be there because it comes from inside me.”

  “I said I understand. You intended that all along.” She had unzipped her dress and started to pull it from one shoulder. “I should go to the window again?”

  Even though her tears had not spilled over but merely glossed her eyes, it was enough to alter the look that Weaver wanted for the painting in progress.

  “I think we’ll skip today’s session,” Weaver said, then quickly added, “but I’ll pay you for two hours.”

  “You are still not feeling well?” She ventured another quick wipe at her eyes with the base of her thumb.

  Weaver’s guts still cramped from time to time, but they squeezed down on nothing but air and his morning tea. If he swallowed any more regret, however, he’d have a lump in his stomach that he might never digest.

  “Let’s just say I don’t feel like working.”

  Sonja put her daughter’s colored drawings back into the bag, but the photograph of her son she placed in her purse. She closed the clasp and was on her way to the door when Weaver stopped her.

  “Wait. You said you had two favors to ask, and I’m not sure I understand what you wanted for your daughter.”

  She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “No, come on. What did you want?”

  “If I bring my daughter to you someday, would you . . . would you help her?”

  Weaver wondered if that was truly what she wanted to ask, or if she was making up something to help her reach the door. “Help her how?”

  “A word of advice. Encouragement. Anything.”

  “I’m not a teacher. I don’t have the patience or the temperament.”

  She nodded as if that was exactly what she expected to hear.

  “I’m sorry. I struck out on both your requests.” To Weaver’s own ears his apology had a tinny ring; how must it have sounded to Sonja? But she merely shrugged, and then she was out the door.

  Even seconds after the fact, Weaver had difficulty believing what he had done, and he went to the window as if only sight could confirm the deed. Yes, there she went, down the aisle formed by the untrimmed lilac bushes, their leaves so shriveled and dry this late in the year that Weaver expected them to fall simply from the movement of air she created in hurrying past. “You think your daughter might want to be an artist?” Weaver said to the window glass. “Stop her before it’s too late.”

  It was not the painting of skaters or the portrait of Sonja at the window that Weaver returned to after she left. Instead he pulled from the shelf a sketchbook. He decided to begin work on a painting he had done the pencil study for decades before, a view looking through open French doors, across an empty balcony, and out to the sea beyond. The final work would allude to Bonnard but would have none of that painter’s blobby imprecision of color. Weaver remembered well the day he conceived of the painting. . . .

  As soon as the girls were old enough to understand what it meant to visit a foreign country, he and Harriet took them to France. They rented a small apartment in Brittany, and Weaver rode back and forth to Paris on the train to meet with gallery owners and a few artist friends. Harriet wanted to be free to accompany Weaver on these trips, so they brought with them from the States an au pair. She was Becky Morse, a sixteen-year-old neighbor girl. Emma and Betsy loved Becky, and she was a capable, dependable sitter.

  Late one afternoon, after a day at the beach with the girls, Becky came out onto the balcony, where Weaver sat sketching and drinking a glass of white wine. Becky approached on all fours, both girls on her back, and all of them alternately giggling, whinnying, and trying to make the clipclopping sound of a horse’s hooves. When Weaver turned toward the girls, he noticed how the fabric of Becky’s bathing suit sagged with the weight of her still-new and perfect breasts, and before he could look away, he saw clear down to the tips of her mauvey-pink nipples. He drew in his breath sharply, but he realized almost immediately that there was as much despair as desire in his gasp. She was little more than a child herself, given to the care of his own children. She was the daughter of a friend, and Weaver had pledged to Brian Morse that his daughter would be looked after and protected. And to Becky, Weaver was a stand-in for a father—aging, foolish, trustworthy. The only reason for which she would ever get down on her hands and knees before him was to carry his own daughters to him. Or away. He told Becky to take the girls back into the apartment; he was trying to work.

  Weaver was not much interested in analyzing the psychological states that lay behind his or any other artist’s drawings or paintings. The work was what was important, and whether it was born of ecstasy or boredom or joy or despair mattered not at all. And that he began to work on this painting on a day when he had learned—again—that some breasts could not be touched, why, what possible effect could that have on the finished product? By the time he finished it, all his thoughts would be preoccupied with color and shadow and no longer on his unmet desires.

  Harriet Weaver had been in Green Bay all day looking at carpet samples, and when she returned at dusk to a house that smelled like pumpkins, her first thought was, Emma’s home. She’s brought the kids home for Halloween, and Ned’s carving jack-o’-lanterns for his grandsons just as he once did for his daughters. Before she reached the kitchen, however, Harriet amended that thought. Except for the room she was walking toward, the house was dark and silent, and it could be neither if the boys were there. All right, they hadn’t arrived yet, but they were coming, and Ned was preparing the pumpkins for them.

  Nothing in the kitchen initially told her she was wrong. Ned was sitting at the table hollowing out the first pumpkin while the second waited on the counter. The seeds and stringy, smelly pulp were piled on a newspaper. In addition to his tools, an X-Acto knife and two kitchen knives, Ned had near at hand his cigarettes and a w
ater tumbler.

  The fact that he was working with scant light—only the flickering fluorescent tube over the sink was on—made Harriet uneasy, but she decided to proceed on the basis of the optimism that had entered her with the first whiff of pumpkin.

  “Should you carve one for Emma too?” Harriet asked. “You know how she loves Halloween.”

  The chill of autumn’s early dark had settled in the house, but Ned sat shirtless and barefoot at the table. He turned a dark, blear eye on her, and even before he spoke Harriet knew it was not water in the glass and that children would not soon walk through the door.

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I just thought . . . Never mind.” She picked up the tumbler and sniffed, less to confirm her suspicions and more to replace the aroma of pumpkin with an odor more in keeping with the spirit of the household. She took a cautious sip. Well, she had been mistaken. Vodka, not gin.

  When she put the glass back on the table, Ned grabbed it and slid it out of her reach.

  Harriet pulled one of his cigarettes from the pack and lit it. This time he made no protest of possession.

  “Who are the jack-o’-lanterns for?”

  Weaver kept scraping at the inner wall of the pumpkin. After so many years of marriage, Harriet knew Ned’s varieties of drunkenness the way some women knew the flavors and uses of cooking spices. So this was to be a bout of silence, just the thing to salt these frosty nights of late October.

  “Or perhaps,” she suggested, “you’re planning on entering them in the Pumpkin Patch Festival.” The few establishments in their village that stayed open throughout the year kept trying ideas to lure off-season tourists. This year residents and merchants were encouraged to decorate their homes and businesses to celebrate harvest and Halloween.

  Ned said nothing in reply but fitted the stem and lid on the hollowed-out pumpkin.

  “Though, really—don’t you think an artist of your standing has an advantage over the rest of the citizenry?”

  Ned leaned back from the table, assessing the pumpkin as though its features were already plain and it could smile, grimace, or scowl back at him. “This is for a little girl.”

  “Someone we know? Or just any little girl?”

  “I made her mother cry.”

  As he said this, Ned himself seemed close to tears. Had she made another mistake? Was this the maudlin rather than the morose drunk? “And how did you do that?”

  “I told her I wouldn’t paint a picture of her son.”

  “Were you perhaps a little blunt in turning down her request?”

  He laughed sardonically. “It broke my fucking heart to tell her!”

  “She offered to pay you?”

  He picked up a knife and dragged his thumb across the blade. “She would have paid. Any price I asked she would’ve paid.”

  “But she didn’t understand you don’t accept commissions?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Hardly an occasion for tears.” Over the years they had had some violent quarrels, but Ned had never threatened her physically. Nevertheless, she wished he’d put the knife down. The sentimentality was so unlike him, perhaps another darker emotional excess was lurking in him as well. “What am I not understanding here, Ned? Why do you feel as though you owe this woman something?”

  He looked up at her, and before a sound came out, his mouth twisted down as though his words had a bitter taste. “The boy is dead.”

  Harriet couldn’t help it; she stepped back from this announcement. “Oh, Ned.”

  “No, no. A photograph. She brought in a goddamn snapshot of the kid. Her little birthday boy. Her little fucking prince.”

  “Do I know this woman?” Harriet asked.

  Ned shook his head.

  “Do you have a relationship with her?”

  As soon as she asked, she knew he was not likely to answer. She pushed ahead anyway. “Are you in love with her?”

  He said nothing, but Harriet couldn’t help herself. Into the maw of his silence, she threw one more question. “Does she have something to do with Mr. House?”

  “Jesus Christ, Harriet. Why won’t you let that go? I apologized.”

  “And I accepted your apology. As I always do. But you’ll understand if I can’t put an incident like that behind me so easily. It takes a little time to get over being exposed and humiliated. And since you exceeded even your capacity for cruelty on that occasion I have to wonder if there wasn’t more involved than your desire to show another man your wife’s breasts. Not that that in itself is understandable.”

  Ned put down the knife and picked up the glass of vodka. After a long swallow and a pause to let its heat subside, his equanimity returned. “I told you before. It was a slow day. I thought I could enlist you and Mr. House to relieve the boredom. To provide a little of the excitement I crave now and then. I misjudged. Now leave it the hell alone!”

  “I’ll let it go, Ned. But only because I know I’m not going to hear the truth from you.”

  Ned ignored her and turned his attention again to the pumpkins. He looked from one to the other as though he was trying to make a decision. When he finished his appraisal, he stood and, as if one of the jack-o’lanterns had just insulted him, he slapped it hard with the back of his hand. Like a guillotined head, it tumbled from the table and rolled across the floor. In the aftermath of the blow, most of the pumpkin’s wet innards slopped onto the floor.

  “I’m through here,” Ned said. “You can make a pumpkin pie out of this shit if you like.”

  After Harriet had fortified herself with her own glass of vodka, she began to clean up Ned’s mess. She set both jack-o’-lanterns on the cupboard next to the sink. One of the pumpkins, Ned had carved into a face that was half man and half wolf. He had transformed a bulge in the pumpkin into a snout, and the mouth leered with the exceptionally long teeth of a canine, but its eyes were sadly human. The other pumpkin, the one that had been slapped to the floor, had a face that Ned probably believed was comic, but its close-set eyes and gap-toothed grin gave it a giddily maniacal look. Although Harriet admired Ned’s artistry, she wondered how he thought they could possibly be given to a child. They were the stuff of nightmares.

  She spread yesterday’s Chicago Tribune on the cupboard and put the Wolfman on the sports page and proceeded to chop it into small pieces with a meat cleaver. She repeated the process with the gruesome clown, then wrapped all the blocks and wedges of pumpkin in paper and took the remains out to the garbage.

  Not until she was hurrying back to the house did she question her behavior. Why had she turned the face of each jack-o’-lantern away before hacking into it? Their eyes were nothing but holes carved in a gourd, yet she couldn’t lift the cleaver while they were aimed in her direction.

  She didn’t want to, she didn’t want to, she didn’t want to, but Daddy told June she had to go trick-or-treating with Betty Engerson and her other friends. He said what he said every Halloween, that since there weren’t many kids like in cities, the people out here gave out extra candy. He told her again about the house on Pinery Road where he got a silver dollar when he was a boy. June didn’t argue with him—maybe down in Green Bay or Milwaukee they really did give out only one piece of penny candy—but she didn’t think the treats she and her friends got were so grand. She couldn’t remember ever getting a full-size candy bar, and most people handed out things they made themselves—little cookies or popcorn balls or caramel apples or pennies tied up in tissue paper.

  And June couldn’t say the real reason she didn’t want to go. She was afraid that if she wasn’t there, her father might hurt her mother again the way he did that night when June found them in the hallway. She didn’t know why Daddy had made her mother look in the mirror, but June could tell Mommy was scared. And June was too, and she didn’t want to be afraid of Daddy, so she made herself think it wasn’t Daddy, it was the mirror, it was a magic mirror like in Snow White or Alice in Wonderland, and if Mommy stared at
it too long she would faint or vanish or fall into a spell and she wouldn’t be herself anymore. June knew there was no such thing as magic, she knew that, but she also knew that bad things could happen in the world—like with John, and that was on a day she wasn’t home. If she had to go trick-or-treating she’d leave the other kids the first chance she got and run back to her house.

  She dressed as a hobo. Again. It wasn’t really a costume at all. The only thing that made her look like a bum was the old felt hat tied on her head, and the burnt cork Daddy smeared on her face to make it look as though she needed a shave. Otherwise, she just wore some of her dad’s old clothes, and Mommy made her put those on because they were big, and June could be bundled up underneath. This was another of those cold Halloweens—a little snow had fallen during the day, and little drifts had formed in the dirt alongside the road.

  Once June began running with her friends from house to house in Fox Harbor, however, she sometimes forgot about home, and even when she remembered, she told herself that trick-or-treaters would be going there too, and how could something bad happen when children knocked on the door every few minutes? And her father was right—somebody gave her a real Hershey bar.

  Then they went down to Lake Road, and at the first house a man with a beard made them reach into a jack-o’-lantern for their treat, but he hadn’t let the pumpkin dry after he hollowed it out, and when June reached in, her hand touched the side and it was slimy, and she thought she’d found ways to keep from ever thinking of John in the ground again, but the slick inner wall of the pumpkin brought back the grave and its sides and the way the sliced dirt looked tan and dry near the top but dark and muddy the deeper down the coffin went, and June backed away from the house and she told Betty she didn’t feel good and she ran for home. The snow was waving and rolling across the road like a snake, a roller snake—what she called rattlesnakes before she knew their real name— but these were white so they were ghosts, the roads of Door County were haunted this Halloween by ghost snakes but she could run right through them so they didn’t frighten her.