Five Questions

by Kitty B. Florey

  • • •

  Looking back at that spring when I found Kathleen, it seems to me that every day was sunny. That can’t have been true, but still I think it was a particularly mild season. The snow that was banked along the roads melted swiftly, the daffodils in the parks bloomed ahead of schedule. Tulips appeared on the front lawn of my apartment building, and I knew that across the river at Alec’s the deep purple ones I had planted would be in flower. But I was without regret; I felt completely detached from that life.

  What struck me when I went out for my daily walk was how different the city had become. For years I had walked in Boston and in Cambridge—as a clumsy pregnant girl navigating the icy streets, as an art student consumed with love and ambition, as a melancholy wife doing her perpetual errands. Now everything was subtly changed. The pewter-colored river, the trolley tracks, the clutter of shops and cafés, the broad avenue I lived on, the trees in new green leaf—I saw all this as I never had before, through the eyes of a single, middle-aged woman with a grown daughter. I felt both older and strangely youthful. One of the things I took pleasure in was buying presents for Kathleen—small, silly things: a book of cat cartoons, a bunch of paper roses, a straw hat the same green as her eyes. Some of these things I would probably never give her, but buying them made her more real to me, and saying to a bored clerk, “It’s for my daughter,” made me want to laugh with the strange, unaccustomed satisfaction of it.

  For her birthday, Kathleen and Nick drove down to Boston, and I cooked dinner for them—my father’s fried chicken, my grandmother’s potato salad, my mother’s lemon pie. In May, they went hiking in the White Mountains; they sent me a postcard: “Mud!” it said, and was signed, “Love.” I learned that Kathleen had sung alto in her college chorus; that her handwriting was a daintier version of my mother’s clear script; that she got sick on shellfish, loathed pumpkin pie, adored Indian food; that she longed to travel to Greece, liked the ballet, was afraid of water and bad at math.

  Those spring days seemed to me the beginning of a truly good life—one that was vivid and rich and delicious, that bore hardly any resemblance to my time with Alec—the life I had denied myself for most of my adult years. Since I left Patrick, I had never lived anywhere that wasn’t lonely in some way: Now it really did appear that the loneliness was over, the gaping black hole was filled. There were mornings when I woke in my new apartment and had trouble placing the feeling that came over me. I would lie there puzzled while the spring light washed over me from the window, and then I would sit up with a start and burst out laughing: It’s happiness at last, you ninny. Happiness.

  And then, one aimless evening in May, flipping channels, I paused at a PBS program I sometimes watched when I couldn’t sleep—Midnight with Jack Skelly—and saw the tail-end of an interview with Patrick Foss.

  Patrick. I heard his voice before I looked and confirmed who it was. I would have known his voice anywhere, the elongated vowels, the quick deep laugh, the Irish lilt at the end of a sentence. . . .

  I left my chair and dropped to my knees in front of the set. Patrick. I was almost afraid of what I might see. He was older, of course. And he was a bit stouter: Like Mark, he had gone from raw leanness to a comfortable substantiality. I had known him as a boy; he had become a grown-up, with lines around his eyes, gray in his hair, new gauntness in his cheeks. He didn’t look like the suave man in the tux, but he didn’t look like my old rough Patrick, either.

  “To me, oddly enough, it’s an event that’s already over,” he said.

  “How do you mean, exactly?” the interviewer asked him, peering over his spectacles. They were sitting in two armchairs, and Jack Skelly was sprawled comfortably, ankle resting on knee, holding (absurdly) a pen which he jabbed into the air when he wanted to make a point. By contrast, Patrick, hunched on the edge of his chair, looked tense and ill-at-ease—a look I remembered well. It was the way he looked when he wanted to be somewhere else, when he was bored. He never seemed arrogant or patronizing or impatient in those situations, just unhappy, like a puppy at the vet. Watching him, I knew he had agreed to the interview under duress, and that he wanted only for it to be over.

  “After all,” Skelly went on with a little laugh. “The exhibit hasn’t even opened yet.”

  “No—yes—but what I mean is—” Patrick’s speech was halting. He spread his hands: his hands, with their long fingers, the big, flat nails, the bony wrists. “For me, that work is over. You know, it’s inevitable with sculpture like mine, objects that take so long to construct. That the work being—being shown doesn’t really interest me any more. Not—uh—not really.” He paused, staring down at his hands as if in apology, or deep embarrassment. “Some of it was done so long ago—years—years ago. The only thing that interests me is what I’m working on now.”

  “Which is—?”

  I could see him close down, as if a door was suddenly shut. He had never liked to talk about a work in progress—he considered it a jinx. “A new—” He cleared his throat. “A new piece,” he said reluctantly.

  Skelly jabbed his pen into the air. “More copper and steel?”

  Patrick sighed. “Yes,” he said, and I had the feeling he wasn’t telling the truth, that he had in fact branched out into some entirely new material, he was working in plastic, or knitting wool, or old phone books cast in bronze, but he’d be damned if he’d tell Jack Skelly what he wouldn’t even tell his friends.

  “Well, we’re all glad to know you’re still working—still producing after a career of—what?—almost twenty years as one of the art world’s leading lights.”

  Patrick winced, and Skelly beamed at him, waiting for a response but getting only a weak smile. He went on blandly. “So—I want to wish you the best of luck, Patrick. My wife and I plan to be at the opening, and—” His smile broadened. “I know you certainly will be, to receive the good wishes of your many friends and admirers. Thanks for being with us.” Skelly turned to the camera. “We’ve been talking here with Patrick Foss, about the new exhibit of his work at the well-known Taggart Gallery in New York City, opening—” He ducked his head, raised his eyebrows, and gave a sly smile, as if he were about to impart a profoundly arcane piece of information. “Tomorrow.”

  In the few moments before the program’s logo and theme music came on, the camera cut back to Patrick’s face. He was looking in the direction of Jack Skelly, who was apparently engaging in the obligatory post-interview chatter, but for a moment, a brief second, Patrick looked straight at the camera and into my eyes. In that tiny interval I saw him—really saw him. Patrick. His face bore the unmistakable marks of some deep-rooted suffering, and in that moment it was as if everything was written there: his solitude, his dogged pursuit, his impeccable integrity, the simple struggle to keep going. My heart reached out to him, and I was filled with shame: It seemed as if I had betrayed him all over again with my sunny new existence, the carefree happiness that had entered my life. For these few months, I had almost forgotten him.

  Then his face was gone, the program changed, and I realized I was kneeling before the television as if it were an altar, my hands twisted together so tightly I was in pain.

  I felt like some medieval saint who has seen a vision. How real he was on the tiny television screen, how vulnerable and weary and alone he had seemed. And, to me, how beautiful—how noble—how beloved. But I knew I was no saint. Watching him, looking at his hands, his mouth, the broad set of his shoulders—so well-known to me, so well loved—I had wanted to take him in my arms, to knot my fingers into his hair and pull him down to me, to kiss him long and sweetly.

  Oh God, it had been so long, so many years, so much had happened to both of us. In spite of my box of clippings, Santo’s photo, Uncle Austin’s angry revelations—all my obsessive long-distance stalking of him over eighteen years—I was aware that I knew nothing about Patrick. Nothing real. I had never dared to go to New York to see his work. When Alec had to be there, I always made some excuse to stay in Cambridge. N
ow, wrapped up in Kathleen, I hadn’t even known about this show of his new work. What bizarre workings of fortune had compelled me to turn on the television at that moment? And what had I missed? Before I tuned in, had Skelly gotten him to talk about his wife, his children?

  It was a Thursday evening, past midnight. I turned off the set and got ready for bed. But sleep wouldn’t come. When I closed my eyes, I saw only Patrick. When I opened them, his face stayed with me: his dear, gaunt face, his lined cheeks, his burning eyes, the black hair hanging over his wide brow. God—his ears! How well I remembered his ears, small and neatly shaped, with soft lobes. And the way his eyelashes had fluttered against my cheek when I lay in his arms. The hollows where his collarbones were. His smooth, freckled back. His long toes. The blue veins knotted on the soft undersides of his forearms.

  I got out of bed and found the box of clippings: There he was, all I had of him. And yet the tangible reality of him had left me at some point in that long expanse of years. He had been an idea—an ideal. Or—on the nights when I lay beside Alec, sleepless, hot with the terrible need of what I had lost—Patrick had been a feverish dream. Now his reality had been restored to me: He was a person, a man, a living soul who spoke words, who squirmed in his chair, who furrowed his brow and wrung his hands together with anxiety. He looked so much like the Patrick I knew, and yet of course he was someone else entirely. And he belonged to someone else: I hadn’t forgotten that. This Patrick Foss was a stranger to me, I told myself.

  But some stubborn voice insisted that that was nonsense, and that was the voice I listened to.

  I was able to sleep only when, around three in the morning, I allowed into my mind the thought that had been buzzing like a bee on its fringes, the thought I had flapped away but that wouldn’t leave, that was inevitable, that could not be denied: I would take the train to New York and go to Patrick’s opening.

  I said it aloud, impatiently, as if someone had been arguing with me: “Yes, all right! I’ll go.” Then I was able to turn out the light and lie quietly, letting the air coming in the window cool my skin and quiet my brain. Yes, I would see him—see him with his wife, no doubt. But it didn’t matter. I would see him, I would ask his forgiveness, and a door would close that needed to close. Let it go: So many other doors had opened. He would be the last stop on my pilgrimage. I would see him, and then I would get on with my new life.

  Question Five

  Who Are You Now?

  The train traveled through the sunny afternoon—Providence, New London, New Haven, Stamford. I did my best not to think too much—not to rehearse what I might say to him or predict what he might say to me. But I couldn’t keep my mind on my newspaper or on the towns and warehouses and distant glimpses of water that rushed by outside my window. I had slept badly the night before, but now, when I closed my eyes to try to nap, all I saw was Patrick.

  I had dressed with care in a simple black dress, low heels, hoops in my ears. At the last moment I clasped around my neck the beads Patrick had bought me in Mexico—the choker of small blue turquoises threaded at intervals on a silver wire. I wondered if he would remember it. I wouldn’t blame him if he ripped it off my neck and trampled on it.

  Somewhere around Greenwich, I began to calm down. I decided that what would happen when we met almost didn’t matter. The important thing was that I see him. It would be like visiting my old house in West Dunster: Travel to the valley of lost things, see what was there, let it go. I knew I could do that. I had done without it for so long, it wouldn’t be hard. And I had a new life, I had Kathleen. I would be seeing her in Portland for Nick’s birthday party in a few weeks. I consoled myself with this. No matter what, I had my daughter. Still, when I closed my eyes and saw Patrick’s face, I longed for him.

  The train pulled into Penn Station at 5:07 sharp. I made my way through the crowds and out to the street, where I found a taxi. I sank into the backseat and concentrated on looking at New York. I hadn’t been there in so long: the beautiful, grungy, frantic, jeweled city, more magical than ever in the late afternoon sun.

  The taxi went west and sped down Ninth Avenue, then cut over again to take Seventh into SoHo. I paid the driver and got out. It was a beautiful afternoon, and walking would be quicker than driving the few congested blocks to the Taggart.

  I hadn’t been in SoHo since I fled to London. It glittered. The streets I remembered as quiet, even desolate, were lined with shops and thronged with people. And yet so much was the same. The cobblestones were still there, and the massive old iron buildings, and the blue sky at the end of West Broadway framing the looming towers of the World Trade Center. I recognized a gallery we used to go to, a bar I knew. The deli where we used to buy the newspaper was still on the corner, and Patrick had once kissed me as we crossed the street, just there.

  My knees threatened to buckle. I had to duck into a doorway and lean against the wall of a building. Patrick. I would see him in a few minutes, and I was fooling myself if I thought it wasn’t important. The reunion with Kathleen had been a very different thing: she had wanted me to find her. I was well aware that I might be the last person Patrick wanted to see on this occasion. That his only memories of me were hateful ones. He had loved me, and I had walked out on him leaving a few words scrawled on an envelope.

  It was that, of course, that haunted me. That I had made him suffer. That I had worried him, stunned him, possibly humiliated him. I had suffered, too. But what had Patrick been punished for? For the first time—really, it sounds amazing, it sounds almost unbelievable, but for the first time—it struck me that I’d been wrong to do what I did. Not only impulsive, or immature, or racked by a misplaced grief, but deeply, indefensibly, selfishly wrong. Things matter, actions have consequences. Marietta had known that. Why hadn’t I?

  I stood in the doorway of a store that sold Hawaiian shirts, shaken by a moral dilemma almost two decades old. I had punished myself by leaving Patrick, the source of all my happiness. But was my punishment worth his pain—pain he had done nothing to deserve? And hadn’t leaving Patrick in that way been even less forgivable than giving up my child? I wasn’t sixteen when I walked out on him; I was a grown woman.

  I had been crazy to come to New York. You can’t go home again. You can start over, but you can’t go back. What’s done is done. And hadn’t I already been through enough to last several lifetimes? I didn’t need to do this. I had my daughter, my life in Boston, my redemption. Why put myself through it?

  I stood there for many minutes, with my forehead pressed to the cool stone of the entry. The crowds bustled by, going in and out of the funky shops, the cafés and galleries, the arty little bars where happy hour was commencing. No one noticed me in the vast, pungent stew that makes up the city, where only something truly extraordinary arouses anyone’s interest. A man wearing a sequined dress and high heels, his long muscular legs in bright green tights, turned heads, and so did a crewcut blonde walking a brace of poodles. A middle-aged woman undergoing some kind of invisible trauma in the doorway of a shop scarcely rated a glance. Thank heaven.

  Gradually I became calmer, but it was the calmness of desolation, of despair. Yes, I would continue on to the Taggart. I had come all this way, and I had to see him. It would be the opposite of the reunion with Kathleen. That had been all joy. This would be—what? My mind couldn’t encompass what it would be. But it would be different.

  I took out my sunglasses and put them on; maybe he wouldn’t notice me, or even recognize me. I didn’t know if I could go so far as to speak to him. Maybe that was asking too much of myself. But I wanted to see his work. And—I realized this with a greedy anticipation—I had to be in the same room with him; I had to be near him.

  I walked down West Broadway to Prince and then the two blocks to Greene Street. The Taggart had been one of SoHo’s first major galleries—a clean, soaring space for large sculptures. Henry Taggart had been considering Patrick’s work when I left New York, and shortly after that I had started seeing reviews of his show
s there in the art journals. I was glad Patrick had been faithful to him.

  On the large plate-glass windows, PATRICK FOSS: METAL ON METAL was spelled out in graceful black type. Inside, the place was jammed. A buzz of conversation wafted out from the open door, punctuated by the occasional loud laugh. Because of the way the walls and partitions were arranged, I couldn’t see the sculpture, and I didn’t see Patrick. I spotted a couple of people I remembered. Henry Taggart’s wife, Suzanne, glamorously elegant, with an austere face-lift. Jim Blair, gray-haired and stooped, who had showed several people I knew at his uptown gallery. Althea Allen, a neighbor of ours on Lafayette Street, all pipe-stem arms and legs, still girlish in a miniskirt. I wondered if Santo would be there, or any of our other old friends. The room was full of beautiful women; which of them was Patrick’s wife?

  I made myself go through the doorway. The noise immediately increased. A young, black-clad man with complicated nose and eyebrow piercings poured me a glass of champagne. I sipped thankfully and took a stuffed mushroom from a tray, then some smoked salmon. I began to feel better. It was just an art opening, after all, and no one paid me the slightest attention. Patrick was nowhere to be seen. I began to think that he might not appear, that the shy, uneasy man I had seen on television didn’t do things like this—and maybe that would be best of all. I would see his work—where I knew the real, true Patrick always resided—but I would not have to face him and his anger, or his scorn, or his indifference. I took a second glass of champagne from a passing tray, ate some more salmon, and looked at the sculpture.