I went over to her house the day before the prom to see her gown and discuss possible hairdos. Her hair was almost shoulder length by then, and we decided finally that she should just curl the ends and wear it loose.
“You ought to wear my silver and jade barrette,” I said.
Her eyes lit up. “Could I? Oh God, that would be so great with this dress.”
I ran home and got the barrette, one of my prized possessions. Marietta clasped it in her hair. “What do you think? Too much?”
“Nope,” I said. “Perfect.” We stood in front of her mirror and stared at our reflections. We had done this for years, enjoying the contrast in our looks, Marietta with her straight red hair and pale skin, me with my high color and dark, frizzy mop. “It looks incredible. Red hair, green eyes, jade barrette, pale green dress. Keith is going to die.”
Marietta tilted her head, sucked in her cheeks, struck an exaggerated fashion-model pose. “I am actually quite gorgeous, aren’t I?” She grinned. “Thank you, thank you, thank you, Wynn! I promise I’ll take good care of it.”
“I want you to keep it.”
“What? The barrette? Are you kidding?”
“It looks much better on you than it does on me.”
Marietta shook her head. “I can’t. It’s too expensive.”
My affection for her overwhelmed me. I thought of Natasha at the ball. Marietta did look beautiful, and she had been my friend forever, and she was going to the prom with the boy she was in love with. I couldn’t have expressed it then, but I was aware that, for all her sophistication, there was an innocence about Marietta that was gone from me forever. At that moment, I wished I were Marietta, I wanted to be in love and normal and looking forward to something. But, failing that, I wanted her to have something of mine. I had a confused idea that it would be a good omen.
“What?” she asked, seeing my face.
“I owe you everything, Marietta.”
“Give me a break.”
“I do. I couldn’t have gotten through this without you. Please take it. I want so much for you to have it.”
“You’re a dope,” she said.
We put our arms around each other, and I cried on her shoulder. “Oh Marietta, I wish everything was different. I wish I hadn’t screwed up my life.”
“You didn’t, Wynn,” she said. “Just a little piece of it. You’re going to be okay. We’re both going to get out of this hick town and do something great.”
“We are?”
She found a tissue and wiped my eyes. “Yeah, we are. All this is going to be over soon. Summer’s coming. We’ll get great jobs and make tons of money and have a million laughs and everybody will fall in love with us, and one more year and we’re out of here and we’re famous and beautiful and rich and we’ll never look back and everything is going to be completely fabulous.”
By then, we were both laughing. “It will? We are? We won’t?”
“Silly girl. How can you doubt me when I’m always right?” She kissed my cheek. “Thanks for the barrette, dollink. You know I love you, you wacko.”
The night of the prom I was reading Great Expectations for English class. My parents went out to a movie. I took a break to get myself a snack, and as I was spreading peanut butter on a cracker the phone rang. It was Mark Erling. He wanted to come over. I told him he couldn’t. I asked him what he wanted.
“I want you to tell me about it,” he said. There was a catch in his voice. “I don’t know anything! Don’t I have some kind of right?”
I stood there silently for a full minute, thinking. He didn’t say a word. He waited. I remembered lying under him on the sand. He hadn’t forced me. I remembered what it felt like: the quick pain, then, gradually, something resembling pleasure. It occurred to me suddenly that Mark Erling was a human being. This may seem obvious, but it was actually a revelation: that this wasn’t just a druggy, basketball-playing rich kid but someone who was feeling something deeply. I was impressed that he hadn’t gone to the prom, that this had been on his mind, that he had felt compelled to call me. And it was true. He did have a right. Finally I said, “Okay.”
“Was it a boy or a girl?” he asked, speaking quickly before I could change my mind.
“A girl. Eight pounds, thirteen ounces.”
“A girl. Jesus. What else?”
I flinched from his voice, his eager interest—and yet it excited me to talk about the baby, to answer questions no one else had asked me. “Very pink,” I said. “Red. Lots of dark hair.”
“What else?”
I told him that I named her Molly. I told him the name of the hospital where she’d been born, and the name of the obstetrician. I told him the name of the agency that handled the adoption. I quoted to him the profile of the adoptive parents. Then I asked, “Why do you want all this information?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I just do.”
“Well—” I wanted to get off the phone, back to my book.
“I’m going away to boarding school in the fall, for senior year,” he said unexpectedly. “In California.”
“Oh.” I couldn’t think of anything to say. “Cool.”
“Yeah.” There was a silence. “I wish I could have seen her,” he said.
“I’m sorry, Mark.” Just leave me alone, I thought. Just. Leave. Me. Alone.
“So,” he said, and there was another pause.
I told him I had to get going, and we hung up. I ate my crackers and tried to read, but I couldn’t. I watched an old movie on TV until it was late and I became exhausted enough to sleep.
I don’t remember if I saw Mark again that year. Maybe I passed him in the hall at school or saw him on the street. I don’t remember. I didn’t wish him any harm, but as far as I was concerned, Mark Erling had ceased to exist.
I wasn’t ever really able to slip back into normal life. In senior year I became known as a loner, a slightly peculiar artist—but mostly people ignored me. Dead Duck carried on without me. I hardly ever went to a party. Most of my time was spent studying and working on my portfolio for art schools. By the time I left West Dunster, except for Marietta, I didn’t have a single good friend. I had ended up dating Neil Hauser for a short time during senior year, and then, even more briefly, a quiet, studious boy named Marty Kelly who was considered weird, but I wouldn’t miss either one of them.
I couldn’t wait to leave Maine. It wasn’t that I no longer loved my parents. I was tied to them in a hundred small ways. But during those months at Edna Quinlan, no matter how much they wrote and visited and called, I had been alone. I couldn’t tell them how I felt when I held my daughter in my arms, or about the dark, empty space that opened inside me when I lay in bed that morning in the hospital and made the decision to give her up. I couldn’t understand why no one besides Suzanne had ever seen what that had meant, how it was like a little death, like something being ripped away.
After I graduated from Dunster High, I did what I had always been meant to do: I went away to art school in Boston. It was, of course, the city where I had been most unhappy, but it was also the city of museums and cafés and sober, rain-colored buildings. Those four hopeless pregnant months hadn’t quite killed my old affection for the place, and I was ready to give it another chance. Both of us, I figured, could start over.
Marietta was going to film school in California. As always, I had only admiration for Marietta, who could leave us all behind and point herself toward a goal that had nothing to do with family, friends, familiarity. But her decision devastated me, it was so far away. I remembered our childhood fantasy of living near each other forever. California seemed like Mars.
“How can you do this to me?” I asked her—only half kidding.
“She was ruthless—driven—in desperate pursuit of success at all costs,” Marietta cried melodramatically. “Marietta Donnelly was determined to claw her way to the top, and she didn’t care who she kicked aside in the process!” Then she laughed and hugged me. “I’m going to miss you, ki
d. This is not a joke. I’m going to miss you bad!” She looked me in the eye. “But I’m going.”
All that remained to me, I felt, was my painting. It still seemed pointless much of the time, but it was what I did. For most of my eighteen years, it had been a major part of my identity. I wanted to learn how to be a better painter. I wanted to meet other artists and see the world. Without a brush in my hand, I was lost.
• • •
Patrick was firmly set in the sculpture track, and I was a painter; except for an art history class that fall—before I even knew who he was—our paths seldom crossed at school. The sculptors worked in basement studios, in a deafening roar and rattle of machines—saws, grinders, sanders, welding tools. I worked in a top-floor painting studio, where light poured in through the windows and the view was of trees and sky.
Patrick and I met, finally, late one spring afternoon when I was walking home to my little railroad apartment on Queensberry Street, near the Fenway. I was carrying a heavy roll of watercolor paper tied up with twine. My friend Jeanie Volovich and I had placed a bulk order from an art supply catalog, and had had the paper delivered to her place on Boylston Street. At school, I was working in oils, but when I came home I painted watercolors for fun at my kitchen table.
The paintings were chaotic, formless, not very good. They pleased me, though: the chanciness of watercolor challenged me, every painting was an adventure. I would come home from school, set up my watercolors, and paint—quickly, loosely, without thinking much about it—whatever happened to be on the table in front of me: a box of Wheaties, the gas bill, a stack of books, last night’s dirty dishes. I thought sometimes about the watercolor still lifes my mother had painted when she was young and hopeful. I had no clear memory of them, but I was sure both my parents would have hated these flawed, messy attempts. And I suppose it’s obvious that that was one reason I liked them so much.
On the day I met Patrick, as I was struggling down Boylston with the roll of paper, I had to stop and rest. I set it on a bench and plopped down beside it, sweating. It was a warm March day, unseasonably beautiful for Boston. I leaned my head back and raised my face to the breeze. Then a voice asked, “Could you use some help with that?”
I opened my eyes: Patrick. I recognized him, though I didn’t know his name. I wasn’t in need of help—just a rest—but when I looked up at him it was as if something fell into place in my brain, or in my heart. Something that had been muddled and confused became simple, orderly. I looked into his tawny-gold eyes and said, “Yes, actually, I could. In a minute.”
He sat down beside me. “You do watercolors.”
“Sometimes. Mostly I work in oil.”
“You’re at the school, are you?”
“Yes. First year.”
He nodded. “You look a little familiar.”
This made me smile; he obviously had never noticed me. I told him we had been on the elevator together once, and he hadn’t said a word: just looked like he was having a busy life in some other world. He laughed. “I was probably thinking about lunch. Or about whether I could afford to invest in a new fishtail gouge.” He held out a hand. “Patrick Foss.”
I took it. Bony fingers, a grip just short of painful. “Wynn Tynan,” I said. “You’re a sculpture major?” I knew perfectly well that he was.
He nodded. “Right now, I’m working in wood, but my great love is welding.”
My great love is welding: Only Patrick could make that statement without either irony or self-consciousness. I liked the way he spoke—with a lilt at the end of a sentence. “What’s so lovable about welding?” I asked, to keep him talking.
He took the question seriously. We talked welding. We talked watercolor paper. We talked professors and classes. He told me he had an academic scholarship that paid his tuition and rent. I was impressed; scholarships were famously hard to come by at that school. He also worked part-time, welding in a machine shop somewhere in South Boston. We asked each other a million questions. I could have sat there in the sun and talked to him forever, but before we knew it, the sun was fading, and we were still sitting on the bench with my roll of paper between us.
We walked to Queensberry Street, Patrick carrying the paper over his shoulder as if it were a roll of gift wrap. “What floor are you on?” he asked me at my door.
“Fourth.”
“Walk-up?”
“Unfortunately.”
He bounded up the stairs ahead of me, and when we arrived at my apartment he leaned the paper carefully against the living room wall.
“Thank you.”
He was staring at my fireplace. “This is a great apartment you’ve got.”
“The fireplace doesn’t work, of course.”
“Well, but—look at all the space.”
I looked around. The living room was barely big enough for my ratty Salvation Army sofa and a rocking chair and a bookcase overflowing with junk. Beyond it was a glimpse of the tiny, cluttered kitchen.
“I live in one room,” he said. “One empty room, mostly. It’s got a bed and a table and some twisted old hunks of metal, but that’s about it.”
I had a vision of poverty, passionate dedication, an attractively wild-eyed fanatic living in a hovel—like something from a film about artists in turn-of-the-century Paris.
“Can you stay for dinner?” I asked.
He accepted with an alacrity that I found flattering but that, I soon realized, was very likely a need for free food. I didn’t care. I just wanted him to be there, sitting on the kitchen windowsill while I threw dinner together. Behind him, the sky was turning purple, the lights came on in the apartment building across the way. Patrick’s face was bright; his eyes gleamed. He wore a blue denim shirt under his old black sweater, faded jeans with the knees out. I wished I could paint him.
I listened while he compared the merits of European and Japanese chisels. I had never heard anything so interesting. When he asked, I told him about the odd, slapdash watercolors I was doing. I was too unsure of them to drag them out, but he looked at a stack of sketches I had done on one of my weekends home in Maine, and then we got talking about growing up in small towns. Patrick was an orphan who had been raised by his bachelor uncle somewhere in the wilds of New York State. From the time he was a kid, he had worked in his uncle’s salvage yard.
“That’s where I got my passion for metal,” he said. “It was a paradise, that place. Ten acres of the stuff, surrounded by a fence made of corrugated tin that was so beautiful—so old and weathered—that I just wanted to cut hunks out of it and hang them on a wall somewhere. You wouldn’t believe how many colors there were in that fence. It’s still there—I wish you could see it!”
I wished I could, too. If I had had a car, I would have insisted that we jump right in and drive all night until we got to his uncle’s place, wherever in hell it was.
“What about you?” he asked me. “Tell me about where you’re from.” He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. I told him about West Dunster, about my grandmother in Greenwich Village, about my father’s toys and my mother’s photographs and Dead Duck. He wanted to know everything, and he wanted to tell me everything. Conversation with Patrick was like a badminton game with a dozen birdies flying through the air. When we sat down to dinner, he smiled at me and said, “On top of everything else, you can cook, too!”—and I was gone: That quickly, I fell in love with him.
What was it? His rough, Irish-and-German almost-handsomeness? His long, skinny body that contrasted so beautifully with his round, boyish cheeks and full mouth? Or was it his voice, deep but oddly musical, with a hint of Irishness about it—a legacy, I later learned, from his mother and his Uncle Austin, both born in County Cork. Or maybe it was the dreamy look in his eyes when he told me about his uncle’s place, and how he used to prowl it on early mornings before school, looking for rusty mufflers and wheelbarrows and bits of machinery, piling them up in a corner of the barn until he could turn them into sculpture.
“What
I loved, Wynn,” he said, “was taking all that ugly junk, all those rusty old pieces of people’s lives, and transforming them into something beautiful—something with form to it, and meaning. Making beauty from ugliness. It always seemed to me like magic!”
I loved his enthusiasm, his complete freedom from the need to appear cool or sophisticated. He made me think about things I had never thought about before. That evening, over dinner, he quoted something Tolstoy had written in his diary: An artist’s mission must not be to produce a solution to a problem, but to compel us to love life in all its countless and inexhaustible manifestations. He recited this, ducking his head a little in embarrassment, and then he looked at me and asked, “Do you agree, Wynn?”
Did I agree? Did I agree with Tolstoy? I had of course read War and Peace (skipping the battle scenes) and written my flimsy paper on it, but I had never thought about Tolstoy, never asked myself what the artist’s mission was. Hesitantly, I said, “Yes, but sometimes maybe you can’t do the second thing until you’ve done the first thing.”
Patrick leaned toward me. “That’s a very good point,” he said. “You’re right, of course. Sometimes I get so carried away that I just—” Then he interrupted himself. “But I still think it’s really important, what he said. I think we have to keep that in mind all the time, Wynn. Don’t you?”
Or maybe it was the way he said my name, in that confiding, intense, deep voice of his—my name as I had never heard it, with the vowel sound prolonged as if it were a syllable in a song.
Whatever it was, I loved Patrick Foss from that very first evening, when he sat opposite me at my kitchen table eating a dinner of Minute Rice and canned tomatoes—the only food I had in the house. His vivid presence filled the room. For me, he filled the city. After that evening, Boston meant Patrick to me. Even now, to this day, the word Boston conjures up a complex series of images, and in spite of everything that has happened to me in that city over the years, most of those images are of Patrick. He sits opposite me at my kitchen table. He strides down Huntington Avenue, talking, and over his shoulder is a weathered wooden beam that he salvaged from a Dumpster. He frowns over the sketches of my father and the cats and the Maine landscape, and makes comments that change my art, my life, forever.
Five Questions Page 6
