Orchard

by Larry Watson

  And when she got home it was strange because nothing was strange. Daddy was in the kitchen doing something with his fishing reel and tangled line, and Mommy sat on the end of the couch sewing the lining in her winter coat. Wait, wait—something was strange. June stood inside the front door breathing hard, and even before Mommy said hello or Daddy asked her if she got a good haul, she heard . . . nothing. And June knew that all the time she was gone no one in this house had spoken, and suddenly it was not so important for her to stay close. Whether June was there or not, nothing went on between her mother and father. Nothing.

  Hardly any trick-or-treaters came that night. June should have known. Their house had a long, steep driveway, and the kids wouldn’t want to waste their time walking all the way up there to knock on a single door. Only Betty Engerson came, and that was because her mother drove her there to see if June was all right. June knew no one else was coming, so she gave Betty a whole handful of caramels.

  “Why did you quit trick-or-treating?” Betty asked.

  “I just didn’t feel good.”

  “Did you have the diarhee?”

  “No.” June hated the way Betty’s family talked about some things.

  “A sick headache?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have a temperature?”

  “I wasn’t really sick. My mom is, and I thought I’d better stay with her.”

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “She has . . . a disease.”

  “Can’t your dad take care of her?” While they talked, Betty unwrapped three caramels, and now she put them all in her mouth at once.

  “He might not hear her. Because of his bad ear.” June reached into the bowl and grabbed more caramels. She gave these to Betty, hoping she would shove these into her mouth too and so be unable to ask any more questions.

  “Is it like polio? Your mom’s disease?” A thin stream of tan spittle bubbled out of the corner of Betty’s mouth.

  “It’s a little like that. But different.”

  Betty nodded, wiped her mouth, and shifted the wad of caramel to the other cheek. “I’ll see you on the bus tomorrow.”

  But then Betty dropped the extra pieces of candy back in the bowl, and June wondered if from now on Judy Tilghman would be Betty’s best friend.

  Daniel Chen, whom June met and married when they were in college together at the University of Minnesota, eventually became a professor of film studies at Western Minnesota State University, and he often told his classes that Meet Me in St. Louis was a “perfect” movie—not the greatest, not the most profound, moving, innovative, or complex film, but of its kind, without flaw. He found it endlessly interesting, and whenever he came across it on television, he watched it.

  June, however, had to leave the room during the movie’s Halloween sequence. It was not only that Tootie’s hobo costume was similar to June’s, but Margaret O’Brien’s near-hysteria after the trolley car incident also reminded June of that cold night when something seemed to gust inside of her as well as in the trees as she ran home to make sure her father had not murdered her mother. Daniel teased her about this sensitivity, but June said, “I OD’d on Halloween candy when I was a kid, okay?”

  During the period when she was in thrall to the Abstract Expressionists, June attempted a painting that she thought of as Halloween-inspired. Onto a large canvas she painted great Motherwell swaths of black paint— reminiscent to her of burnt cork—and these she lined with narrow, dripping orange strips. Daniel professed to find something arresting in the work, but June dismissed it by saying it looked like something high school students might have wiped their brushes on when they were doing the decorations for the Halloween dance.

  27

  Weaver professed not to believe in inspiration—the work itself could be counted on to provide more work—yet occasionally an idea for something new came to him in such a way that it seemed it could only have issued from the gods. When this happened, subject, setting, medium, perspective, and tone all came together at once, and Weaver knew enough not to question the gift.

  This occurred on an evening in early November, at the end of one of those gray flannel days when it seemed as though dusk fell shortly after noon. Weaver was nursing a bourbon and idly flipping through a book on Degas. Generally he didn’t like to look at reproductions because they couldn’t offer a sufficient sense of technique, which was what most interested Weaver in the work of other artists, but since this collection was a present from his daughter Emma, he felt an obligation at least to page through it. His other daughter Betsy—Betsy, who understood him as well as anyone—had long ago caught on to the futility of giving him anything related to art—would you give golf balls to a professional golfer?—but Emma, sweet, slow Emma, had never learned.

  How long had Weaver looked at “After the Bath” before inspiration— fuck it, no other word would do!—struck? In one instant he was thinking, yes, he’d stood for a long time in the Courtauld Gallery noting how Degas had used lines of blue to approximate her pallor, and in the next second he was trying to remember when he had last worked in pastels, and then, by God, there it was! He slammed the book shut, and it was all he could do to keep from calling her then and there and begging Sonja to come over. Was it any wonder Weaver felt he needed her near at hand every hour of every day?

  Harriet was sitting at the kitchen table drinking tea when they came in the back door.

  “Don’t get up,” Weaver said to her. “We’re on our way upstairs.”

  The woman who came in with him stayed by the back door as if she were unwilling to venture far into Harriet’s territory without permission.

  Weaver spoke to his wife’s bewilderment. “Working, Harriet. We’re going to be working. If you need to use the bathroom, you’ll have to use the one on this floor.”

  Harriet turned to the woman by the door. “You’ll have to excuse my husband. As you perhaps have noticed, when he’s eager to get to work he forgets everything, including his manners. I’m Mrs. Weaver—Harriet.”

  “I’m Sonja House. How do you do?”

  “Have we met before, Miss—Mrs. House? You look very familiar to me.”

  Harriet knew very well from where she recognized Sonja House. For more than a year this young woman had walked past the house on her way to Ned’s cabin. And Harriet, in her secret forays into the studio, had seen Sonja’s face and body rendered in ink, charcoal, watercolor, and oil. Ned had never shown her a single one of those works, and for that reason, Harriet found a way to make them her own. The best of them, at least those to which she had the strongest response, she removed from the studio—easy enough to do since Ned had always been careless and uninterested when it came to storing, much less cataloging, his work. Those tasks had always fallen to Harriet, Ed Lear, or Gloria, his gallery manager. If Ned missed any of the paintings or drawings she took from the trunk or the locker in the studio, he never said anything to her. Besides, it wasn’t as though this work was gone for good; it was all in the attic, Harriet’s own private collection, compensation for the thankless job of being Ned Weaver’s wife. Certainly Sonja House was familiar to Harriet.

  And just as Harriet was wondering how complicated these introductions could become if she were to say, I’ve met your husband, Mrs. House, and had my breasts exposed to him, Ned said, “All right, Harriet. We can get acquainted some other time.”

  Harriet stood, tightening the belt of her robe. “Can I at least offer you something, Mrs. House? Coffee?”

  “No, thank you.”

  Weaver set down his easel in order to grab Sonja’s arm. “Upstairs. Come on.” To his wife he said, “You can play the hostess some other time too.”

  He picked up the easel again, tucked it under his arm, and repeated his command to Sonja. “Straight ahead. Go.”

  Before they left the kitchen, Harriet called out, “Mrs. House, do you have a daughter?”

  Sonja stopped abruptly on the threshold. “I have a daughter, yes. How did you kn
ow?”

  “Oh, Ned must have mentioned it. Or perhaps because I have two daughters myself I’m able to recognize something in other women. Did your daughter have a nice Halloween?”

  Sonja turned to face Harriet Weaver. “Like most children, she ate too much candy. Are you angry that I’m here?”

  Ned was about to insert himself into this dialogue, but even he must have been able to see that something was now playing itself out between these two women that he could not be a part of.

  “Angry? No, Mrs. House, I’m not angry, and I’ll tell you why. I believe in my husband’s greatness, and I would be a shallow, selfish person indeed if I allowed my tiny domestic concerns to interfere with the production of great art. We probably both know something about the sacrifices that have to be made at the altar of Ned Weaver. Now, for reasons he probably hasn’t shared with you either, my husband wants you upstairs. You should go with him.”

  Ned clapped his hands slowly. “Very impressive, Harriet. But it sounded too damn good to be spontaneous. Have you been rehearsing that little speech?”

  “For decades, Ned. For decades.”

  Weaver set up his easel and pastels outside the bathroom door and gave Sonja her instructions. She was to undress and prepare for her bath exactly as she would if she were unobserved. When she climbed into the tub, she could either wash herself or lie back and relax, whichever activity appealed to her at the moment. When she was finished, she should dry herself and get dressed once again. At no time should she look back at the door, open a few inches to allow Weaver to watch from the hallway. She should not think of herself as posed at any time, yet she should also be prepared to freeze in any position, no matter if that meant she was putting a washcloth in her ear or standing on one leg as she stepped in or out of her underwear.

  And why, after such a careful setup, didn’t it work? Weaver couldn’t find any combination of line or color that made the room seem anything but washed out, and he had hoped to make it shimmer with morning light streaming through the window and reflecting off the water. Were the white walls, the white sink and tub, the problem? As Sonja shed her clothes, her flesh, her exquisite flesh, seemed to turn paler and to lose some dimension. Weaver knew November’s light was wan, but shouldn’t that only serve to accentuate her warmth?

  Or was the problem Weaver’s vantage point? He positioned himself in the hall because he wanted to make the picture seem, like those in Degas’s series, as though the woman were being watched at her unselfconscious ease. Or perhaps Degas’s technique was blocking Weaver. He couldn’t apply a line or stroke without questioning it, so aware was he of the way Degas’s hand had moved over the paper.

  And somehow Harriet seemed an obstacle as well, and Weaver couldn’t figure out why. He was upstairs, she was downstairs—how could she possibly interfere? Yet each time Weaver saw Sonja in a pose that he might want to reproduce, it seemed as though he could hear Harriet pointing out something about Sonja’s anatomy—look, when she raises her arms to tie up her hair, her breasts lift and you can see that one is larger. There, as she steps into the tub, notice her buttocks tense as the muscles anticipate the water being too hot or too cold. Had that brief exchange between the two women allowed Harriet to take possession of Sonja in a way he could not? Ridiculous—and to stake his claim Weaver darkened the room he had already created on paper and made a vaguely phallic shape, a shadow characteristic of the day not beginning but ending, hover over the bathtub.

  Harriet looked up Henry House in the Door County directory, and when she heard the water running in the bathtub, she placed the call. A man’s voice answered, and Harriet said, “Mr. House? Henry House?”

  “Yes. That’s me.”

  “Mr. House, this is Harriet Weaver calling.” As soon as she gave her name, Harriet realized that she had picked up the telephone with no clear idea of what she hoped to accomplish with the call. Perhaps she had a vague notion of taking Henry House up on his earlier offer. Mr. House, I’ve changed my mind: Would you please come over here and beat the hell out of my husband?

  “Who?”

  She was tempted to say, You’ve seen my breasts—remember? Did they—did I—make so slight an impression? “My husband is Ned Weaver. The artist? We met . . .”

  “Okay, I know who you are.”

  “Mr. House, did you know that your wife is here?”

  Henry’s silence was so protracted that Harriet finally added, “Here, at our house.”

  “I know your husband’s been painting her. Against my wishes. Not that what I say makes a damn bit of difference.”

  “I think the circumstances are slightly different today, Mr. House. She’s not out in the studio. She and my husband are here, in the house. Upstairs.” When Henry House said nothing, Harriet added, “I believe she’s taking a bath.”

  “Yeah,” Henry said. “I saw. I mean, I didn’t see her going into the bathroom, but I saw the two of them walking into your house.”

  Henry House’s voice sounded slow and thick, and initially Harriet wondered if her call had woken him, but could it be unconcern that dulled his voice? Could he have been drinking? Could he have found a drug to help him cease to care? If he had, she envied him.

  “You saw?” she said.

  “That’s right. I’ve been keeping my eye on your little cabin for some time now. Or I follow Sonja just to be sure it’s your place she’s going to. We don’t live so far apart. You’re on the lake and we’re on the hill on the other side of Fox Harbor. I just came in when you called.”

  “Mr. House . . . you follow your wife? And you just watch . . . her and my husband?”

  “Ma’am, I don’t know what else to do. I’ve told Sonja and your husband both that I don’t approve of what’s going on, but you can see how far that’s got me. Now, I don’t know what you were hoping to accomplish with this phone call, but if you’re looking to get a rise out of me, you might as well hang up. Getting mad hasn’t worked. Begging hasn’t worked. I’m about at the end of it. Half the time I’m crazy trying to think what I can do, and the rest of the time I scare the living hell out of myself with thoughts of what I might do.”

  Of course Harriet couldn’t—wouldn’t—ask anything of this man. She had wanted to do something to prove, perhaps to herself above all, that she wasn’t powerless, but this phone call couldn’t do that.

  “I’m so sorry, Mr. House.”

  “Henry. Don’t you think we’ve come far enough we can call each other by our first names?” For the first time in the conversation his voice seemed to lift and brighten. “Besides, what the hell do you have to be sorry about?”

  “Ned’s my husband. . . .”

  “So? He’s just doing what he does. He ain’t going to stop. Sonja’s another story. She’s a wife. A mother. If either of us has an apology to make, I’m the one.”

  Harriet stretched the telephone cord as far as it would go. She was trying to look out the kitchen window, back toward Ned’s studio and beyond, to the hill where the woods had thinned to make way for winter. The bare gray trees reminded her of bones. Was that where Sonja House’s husband set up his watch on the cabin? How close had he come to the house? Harriet often left her curtains open, and in summer when she sunned herself on the patio she sometimes tugged her swimsuit down to her waist—had Henry House seen her before the day Ned exposed her? She suddenly felt as though the Houses, husband and wife, were an invasionary force, limiting her freedom both inside and outside her walls.

  “Perhaps what I called to tell you, Mr. House—Henry—is that Ned inevitably tires of his models and mistresses. He moves on as reliably as a migrating bird. I’ve learned to be patient, and if you can do the same, your wife will eventually come back to you.”

  “Patience?” His laugh was tired and rusty from lack of use. “I ran out of that long ago.”

  Ned Weaver came downstairs when the phone was still warm from Harriet’s ear. He scraped a chair back from the table and sat down heavily. Harriet watched him, but if she h
ad continued staring out the window she would still have known not only that her husband was present but that his mood was dark.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked quietly.

  Ned lit a cigarette. His tossed match missed the ashtray. “How the hell do I know? It’s just not working, that’s all.”

  “What isn’t?” She spoke so softly she could barely hear herself. If he understood her that meant they were attuned to each other as only those who were ideally mated to one another were. She deliberately did not include love as part of this formulation; love was as likely to hinder as enhance communication between a man and a woman.

  He heard. “The picture. The pose. The pastels. The whole fucking idea.”

  “Degas?”

  “I’m beginning to think he’s the problem.”

  Harriet walked over behind Ned’s chair and began to knead his neck, upper back, and shoulders. After massaging him just this way for so many years she felt she could discern with her fingers the difference between muscles cramped from overwork and those knotted with frustration and anger.

  “If Degas is the problem,” she said, digging hard with her thumbs into the ridges on either side of his spine, “then you have to push him out of the way.”

  Ned dropped his head and leaned forward so she could work her way down his back. “Easier said.”

  “Well, where would he be?”

  Ned laughed into his chest. “On his knees, looking through the keyhole.”

  “And where were you?”

  “I tried something like that. I set up shop in the hall.”

  Harriet heard water running again upstairs. “Don’t you think that’s the difficulty? You need to be in there. Degas never showed the faces of his bathers, did he? That’s the work of an artist who feels nothing for his subject. And that’s not you and this young woman, is it? So go up there and try again. Set up your easel in the bathroom. Sit on the toilet—no, don’t laugh. I’m not joking. Try it and see if that isn’t the difference.”