The Clairvoyants

by Karen Brown

  Alice’s eyes widened and she began to tremble. She looked to Del, not with solidarity but with mistrust.

  Del went into the kitchen and scraped her food into the sink. I didn’t wait to hear Del’s explanation. I left her apartment and climbed the stairs to mine. Inside, it was dark, colder than downstairs. I slammed the door and fumbled for the light, and then I heard a noise in the darkness, and the lamp came on across the room, and William was sitting in the duck-carved chair.

  “What are you doing in here?” I asked him.

  “I live here,” he said.

  “I mean in the dark,” I said. “Sitting in the dark. I had no idea you were here.”

  “It wasn’t dark when I sat down,” he said. “Then I fell asleep, and you woke me up coming in.”

  “Didn’t you get my call?” I went over to the bed, anxious, distracted. Even the bedclothes were cold. “It’s so cold in here.”

  William had on one of his heavy wool sweaters. He had, in fact, been reading. The book was open on his lap. “Where were you?” he said.

  “With Del, downstairs,” I said.

  “What’s wrong?” he said. He moved the book from his lap to the floor. “Why are you acting so oddly?”

  I sat down on the bed. “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s Del. She drives me crazy.”

  He chuckled then, and rose from the chair to sit beside me on the bed. “How did she take your news?” he asked me.

  I felt the warmth of him through his sweater, and I leaned into his shoulder.

  “You know, once,” I told him, “I thought I wanted to join a convent. You had to give up everything you owned to go there. You could choose one of two paths—work in the fields, or spend all day in prayerful contemplation.”

  “Which would you have picked?” William said. He ran his hand through my hair.

  “I couldn’t choose,” I said. “I liked the idea of having nothing, but I was afraid of having to live with my decision.”

  “The idea of living without sex never occurred to you,” he said.

  “I didn’t think of that,” I said. “This was before.”

  He probably believed I meant before him, but I didn’t mean that. I meant before David Pinney, but I let him think what he wanted.

  “This wasn’t about changing my mind, anyway,” I said. “It was a decision to live a certain way forever.”

  I knew it was possible to acclimate to the results of irreversible conditions. Like death, I thought.

  “Like marriage,” William said. His eyes grew serious then, almost worried. He took my hand.

  “They used to think marriage saved men and women from being sinful,” he said. “That there was a vein or nerve that ran directly from the ring finger of the left hand to the heart.” He spun the band on my finger.

  “You’re kidding, right?” I said.

  “It’s just something I read,” he said, then he rose and went back to his book.

  I looked at the room and its disarray. The unmade bed, the clutter and closeness of the place, suddenly reminded me of the cottage in the woods. On the small stove the few pots I owned sat on the burners with their previous contents congealing. My clothes lay scattered on the floor, over the bed—my books and notes, the remains of meals on plates abandoned on other surfaces. Our first Christmas tree, a pathetic little thing, still sat in its pot on the table by the window, its branches absent of green life. The glass ornaments slipped off, one at a time, at night. In the darkness, they made small splashing sounds when they shattered, like spilling water. I suppose this carelessness reflected our life at the time—and it occurred to me that even before our marriage had begun, William and I had fallen into a kind of decline.

  I told him I was tired, and I changed and climbed into the bed. Though I sensed there were things he didn’t tell me, I convinced myself they were things I didn’t need to know. I would learn to let the undiscussed spaces in our life together flourish. I would practice pretending all was well.

  21

  Our father spent Christmas in Acapulco. Our mother called and tried to entice me to come home with Del, claiming she’d decorated a tree with all of our childhood ornaments. A Christmas album played—Robert Goulet singing “Do You Hear What I Hear”—and Sarah’s baby, born in September, wailed from a distant room.

  “Convenient for a live nativity,” I said.

  The door to the back terrace swung on its squeaking hinges, and the baby’s crying faded. I pictured my mother outside, shivering with the phone, and behind her the dead grass, the bare horse chestnut trees.

  “I think we may have a white Christmas,” she said.

  I could have told her Del and I had had enough of snow, and that I had a husband now, but I said we’d made plans of our own.

  “We’ll miss you,” my mother said, her voice convincingly wistful.

  I didn’t tell Del about our mother’s invitation. Our Christmas would be at Windy Hill, with all of the Milton girls. I agreed to stop by and visit and have some of Del’s eggnog, but I told William I didn’t want to stay very long, and he agreed. We’d purchased each other gifts that we’d already exchanged on Christmas Eve. I’d gotten him a cashmere sweater—a forest green that went with his copper-colored hair. He gave me a vintage camera—a Pentax that I had been searching for. We showed up at Anne’s with Geoff at noon, and opened Anne’s gifts, and smiled at everyone, as if nothing had changed. Del was exuberant and silly, and I wondered if she’d been drinking too much. I was doing a poor job of monitoring her, if that was still my role. I wasn’t entirely sure anymore.

  “I’m glad I’m spending my last Christmas with all of you,” Anne said, holding her eggnog up with a trembling hand. “I’m looking forward to ushering in the New Year.”

  She wore a red wool dress, a beautiful scarf. We’d all agreed to return on New Year’s Eve for a party, and it felt, in many ways, as if that might be a final event. Anne again patted the sofa next to her and had me sit beside her, and she picked up my hand with the ring, and gave it a gentle squeeze, as if this were all she needed to do to show her approval of the marriage. I suffered the Milton girls’ glares, and Alice refused to speak to me at all. Del said Alice would forgive me.

  “She’s one of those girls who forget things pretty quickly,” she said.

  We hadn’t had much time to talk since that evening with the journals, and Del hadn’t been especially forthcoming about what the journals revealed. “It’s all who she’s mad at, and who she talks to at lunch in the cafeteria,” Del had told me one afternoon in my apartment. “Who she sneaks a cigarette with in the bathroom. Like an after-school special.”

  Christmas day I found Del in the kitchen decorating sugar cookies. She had colored icing in small bowls and was painting a blue scarf on a snowman.

  “Remember when we used to do this with Grandmother?” she said.

  We were alone in the kitchen, and I leaned over the counter toward her.

  “Did you give the journals to Anne?”

  “Sure,” she said, wiping the brush off on a dish towel.

  “You kept the newest one,” I said.

  “You are so untrusting,” she said. She set the cookie on a glass plate. “No one is trying to hide anything from you.”

  When we were little Del or I would tell this sort of lie all the time. “This is my favorite dinner!” I’d exclaim when our mother made her Bisquick and vegetable soup casserole. “You look so pretty,” Del would say when I woke with mascara streaks under my eyes.

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  Del chose a large Christmas tree–shaped cookie and began brushing green icing over its surface.

  “Are you taking your medication?” I said.

  Del lifted her head; her brush paused. “Is that any of your business?” Then she bent back over her work. “What do you think our mother and sisters are doing today?”

  I felt a stab of guilt that I hadn’t shared our mother’s invitation. “Sitting around the tree ta
lking about us because we’re not there,” I said.

  Geoff came into the kitchen singing “We Three Kings,” and then a few of the Milton girls trailed him in, singing, too. Del’s expression brightened.

  “Remember when we put on that Christmas recital in the old house’s living room?” she said. “Mr. Parmenter showed up at the front door, and we did our performance for him? He never took off his coat, did he?”

  The unease of that Christmas Eve returned to me—our mother with the J&B out on the counter, the jangle of ice cubes in hers and Mr. Parmenter’s glasses. It was snowing. Our grandmother had gone to bed. Eventually, Mr. Parmenter left, driving his Jaguar back to his miserable life, one he ended a short month later.

  “Why was Mr. Parmenter there?” I said.

  “His daughter, Candace, was in my class,” Del said.

  The memory filled me with an awful emptiness. But Del seemed unmoved. She joined Geoff in singing, and they all filed out of the room as if they were a group of carolers. It occurred to me that her memory seemed so sharp about so many aspects of our childhood, but it selected and excluded, and when it came to the summer David Pinney died it provided a blank, as if that one part had been conveniently erased.

  When William and I left, Del was hanging pinecones covered in suet and birdseed from the trees in Anne’s backyard. I called across the snowdrifts to her. Alice was with her, and Del turned and stared at me for a moment, and then turned away. I began to see the Milton girls forming a barricade between Del and me, and I wasn’t happy about it.

  * * *

  ONCE WE RETURNED from Anne’s, William and I sat together under blankets, listening to the elm scrape the side of the house, both of us wishing we could light a fire, and berating ourselves for not having stayed at Anne’s beside hers. It was late afternoon, and the snow began to fall, the flakes like pencil shavings or ash, and William suggested we go for a walk.

  “At least we’ll be moving,” he said. “We can stay warm that way.”

  Neither of us had initiated sex, and I thought I might make a joke about how marriage had so swiftly tamped down the urge, but I did not. I knew it wasn’t getting married that changed things, really. It was my vision of Mary Rae with him in the Silver Streak, and Alice telling me he’d asked Mary Rae to marry him—two things I didn’t know to be true.

  We ended up on the deserted campus, and William headed toward his office in Tjaden Hall.

  “I have to pick up some things,” he said.

  The office proved to be much warmer than the apartment—so warm that William tapped open one of the high windows with the broomstick he kept just for that purpose. He had an old leather couch against one wall, and while he sorted through slides in the light from the desk lamp, I lay down and closed my eyes.

  “I’m going to the lab,” he said. “Take a nap if you want.”

  Something was bothering me about the office, some smell in the couch’s fabric cushions, something I noted when we walked in, before he’d opened the window and let most of the scent out. It was incense—sandalwood. Del had started burning it as a teenager—little cones she set on saucers, or sticks of it she propped in ceramic holders. I had often opened the windows of our bedroom to let the smell out, it was so strong. She insisted it would help us remember our past lives.

  I sat up on the couch. The cold came in from the open window and erased the incense smell. I stood and went to the office door and peered out into the empty hallway. Once, Anne’s office had been at the end—William had shown it to me one day. Her name remained on the door, though a group of graduate students had taken it over. I walked out into the hall and then stepped back into his office. The smell of the sandalwood seemed to have disappeared. I stood looking at the books on his shelf, and then, bored, I tugged on the top desk drawer. It was locked.

  I would have expected to find napkins from the Green Dragon, or pens and pencils, or university letterhead. But there was something more important stored there. Despite my promise to myself that as a dutiful wife I wouldn’t pry, I scanned his office, wondering where he might have placed the key. He might have hidden it anywhere—inside or behind books, taped under the shelves themselves. He didn’t carry it with him on his key chain, which held three keys: one to his motorcycle, one to the office, and one to the apartment. It made sense that the desk key would be here in the office. I scanned the spines of the books, and noticed on one of his bookshelves a small tin—a battered thing that struck me immediately as special to him. He’d told me that as a child his mother sold apples, and he collected the money in a tin. I wavered, not sure if I should look, but then I gave in and took it down and pried off the lid. Inside was the key.

  I stuck my head out the door to check the hallway, and then unlocked the desk drawer and slid it open. Lying flat, taking most of the space, was a leather portfolio. It was an awkward place to put something like that, and I was intrigued. William still hadn’t shown me any of his new work. I slid the portfolio out and opened it on the desk. I felt a little thrill of surprise. I’d discovered some of his sleep studies.

  Each image captured just a woman’s sleeping form, her bare arms flung out, her legs entwined with sheets. Some of the women had their hands placed under their cheeks, their lips parted as if to speak. Their long hair fanned in disarray over their bodies. All of the women were nude. The bones of their backs showed, their skin luminous in early morning light, in late afternoon shadow, in a dark room illuminated by a bare bulb. Those whose faces were revealed seemed familiar to me, and yet I couldn’t place why. And it bothered me, like the sandalwood smell. The images were strange, compelling. I had to admit that they disturbed me. I went back through the portfolio again, studying each photograph. Despite the shadows and blurred effects of light that sometimes concealed them, I felt that wave of recognition again, accompanied by a slowly growing unease.

  The faces in the photographs belonged to the Milton girls. Once I made the connection I recognized each of them—Alice’s ginger-colored hair, the point of Lucie’s chin, Kitty’s long lashes. I flipped through the pages, searching for one of Mary Rae, but there were none. I was stunned by his use of the girls in Milton as his subjects, but since I hadn’t officially been shown the photographs I wasn’t sure how to bring them up. His refusal to share them made sense to me now. Even more troubling, though, was the Milton girls’ silence. If they hated him so much, why would they agree to pose?

  Anne had sketched a portrait of Mary Rae before she died, and it was displayed in a prominent spot in the living room—the girl, nude, on her side, an arm thrown over her face. It was eerily similar to William’s photographs. I told myself William was simply imitating his mentor, a woman with obvious talent and, we were constantly reminded, not long for this world.

  The door at the far end of the hall opened, and William’s footsteps approached. I wanted more time with the portfolio, so instead of putting it back in the drawer, I slid it beneath a stack of folders he’d packed into a cardboard box on his desk. I locked the drawer, replaced the key in the tin, and then returned to the couch to feign sleep. He entered the office, and I felt him standing near me, the shadow of him over me. I assumed he was watching me, but when I peered up at him he was not looking at me but at the desk, his hands on his hips. I must have moved something on its surface when I opened the portfolio.

  He readjusted some papers on the desk’s surface, then turned toward me, and I smiled up at him.

  “What time is it?” I asked him.

  “Did you fall asleep?”

  I sat up. “I must have,” I said.

  Something between us had shifted. We were each tense, and whatever we wanted to say remained unspoken. “No one is trying to hide anything from you,” Del had said. Clearly, she’d intended me to believe someone was.

  “What?” William said. His eyes had grown hard to read in the office’s half-light. Beyond the high window it was night, and the walk home across the dark, windswept campus loomed ahead of us.

&nbs
p; “It’s going to be cold,” I said.

  “I already called Geoff,” he said. “He’s coming to pick us up.”

  And then he hefted the box he’d packed in his arms, and checked the room one last time, as if for anything else he needed. His gaze took in the desk, and I knew he was thinking about the portfolio, and I almost confessed to having seen it just to clear the tension in the room, to ease my guilt. Then he reached out and tugged on the desk drawer, as if to make sure it was locked.

  “Hurry up,” he said. “Get your coat.”

  His voice was cold, distracted. Dumbly, I grabbed my coat off the couch, longing for the times we’d slipped in here to have sex, the sound of students passing in the hall, the occasional knock on the opaque class, the way we’d suppress our movements, our breath, until the person had left. I thought of the sandalwood smell, and William with Del here in the office together, and though I had no real proof she’d been there, I was filled with a rush of resentment and anger. He was mine and she had no right to him. I reached out and took William’s hand, and was surprised to find how cold it was—as if he’d been outside.

  “Do we have to hurry?” I said. I pressed his cold hand to my cheek. “It’s so nice and warm in here.”

  And like the first time, when I’d awakened to find him in the duck-carved chair in my apartment, his face changed, and his hand slid around to the back of my neck, and he tugged me in to kiss. This time his lips were cold and hard. He dropped the box to the floor, and he kicked the door shut—although no one was around who might have seen us. The office, lit by the desk lamp, was filled with shadow, and he pulled me down onto the couch and tore at the clasp to my jeans. When I tried to help him he pinned both of my hands beneath his. I cried out, and maybe he took my cry for that of passion. His movements became harsh, his breathing ragged. He pulled my hair to tip my face up, and kneaded my breasts, and pressed my legs open.