A Mind of Winter

by Shira Nayman

  There were other schisms too.

  On the third of my late-night vigils in the darkroom, where I was working on putting together my exhibition and writing the essay that would go into the catalog, I was startled by the sound of the door handle turning. Instinctively, I gathered up the proof sheets spread across the bench and covered them with my arms. Looking over my shoulder, I saw the surprised face of Oscar.

  “Why, Marilyn,” he said. He was holding something in his hand, what looked like a leather-bound notebook. “I see you’ve discovered my darkroom. I’m glad someone is making use of it.” He approached the counter. “What are you up to?”

  I looked down at the bench. Beneath the crisscross made by my arms, I could see the angular stubble-covered head of a girl and, below that, the corner of another picture: striped pajama-ends dangling six or seven inches above the ground and the twig-thin ankles of a man. I slid a sheet of paper over the top.

  “Oh,” I said lightly. “Preparing something for an exhibition. And you? What brings you down here?”

  Oscar glanced at what I could now see was a portfolio of some kind. When he looked back at me, there was sorrow in his eyes, though he tried to mask this with an unconvincing smile.

  “Actually, I had in mind a little project,” he said casually, his tone as unconvincing as his smile. He opened the cover of the portfolio and gingerly pulled out two photographs, medium-sized sepia prints. Each had several creases running both horizontally and vertically, suggesting they had been folded into small squares. He smoothed them down on the countertop. Portraits, flamboyantly signed in the lower righthand corner in white ink.

  The larger of the two showed a formally posed family: a woman with pale eyes and light hair and a gracious smile—Oscar’s mother, I supposed, her face a female version of his own. Beside her, a gray-haired man with a slender nose, his expression an unexpected mix of roguishness and duty. On each side of the couple was a child; both had the woman’s pale eyes, and while the boy, the young Oscar, had his mother’s light hair, the girl’s curls were dark. The second picture was a close-up of the woman. Here she was less guarded, her lips slightly parted, something almost too direct about her gaze.

  “I want to restore these,” Oscar said.

  “I’m just the woman for the job.”

  Oscar shook his head. “I’d like to do them myself.”

  When Oscar came to the studio again the next evening, he brought a newspaper, folded into a narrow column to fit into his jacket pocket. I could see a fragment of headline: something important, the letters larger and bolder than usual.

  “I’ve brought you some tea,” he said, setting a silver thermos down on the countertop. He sat on the metal chair beside me and pulled out his newspaper. I turned back to my photographs.

  He seemed to read every page completely through from top to bottom, judging by the long lapse between each rustling turn. Some time must have passed, for when I next looked up I saw that Oscar had finished reading his paper and had lain it on the floor by his feet.

  “How is it coming along? Your work on the exhibition,” he asked.

  I took off my glasses and rubbed my eyes, which smarted from the long hours of close work. “I’m focusing on the catalog now.”

  Oscar’s eyes were ringed with weariness. He pointed to the thermos. “You look like you need it,” he said. “It’s probably still warm.”

  I nodded. Oscar rose and poured tea into a clean beaker he removed from the cabinet. I peered down at the shiny surfaces of my prints. Without my eyeglasses, the shapes swam around, bearing little relation to one another. The composition of one—a photo taken by a colleague—caught my eye, seemed, for a moment, beautiful. But for their striped garb, I could almost have believed the people in the series before me, crowded together in a large barnlike structure, had gathered for some social event—a party, perhaps, or a country dance. I was tempted to say, A dance, Oscar, they’re photographs of a dance. I said nothing, replaced my glasses on the bridge of my nose, and picked up my beaker of tea.

  Oscar lifted his own beaker and raised it toward mine. “To your exhibition,” he said.

  There was nothing for it but to raise my beaker and smile back.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Such sashays of weather: stretches of scorching heat; dank moody spells that set the air above the Sound to festering; sudden brief downpours that freshened the lawns. On one rainy night, Barnaby slipped me a note at dinner. The Blue Suite? After midnight … The rain.

  Back in the yellow suite, I took a quick shower, aware of how completely these rooms, in Simon’s continued absence from Ellis Park, had come to seem my own. Then, instead of making my way down to the basement darkroom, I wound through the corridors of the west wing, glimpsing the dripping trees outside each time I passed a window. No one was about: it felt as if we were the only two souls in the house—Barnaby, waiting in his suite, and me, on my way to meet him.

  When he saw me at the door, Barnaby lifted me and carried me into his sitting room, where he placed me gently in the blue velvet chair by the window so that my legs draped over the arm. Beginning at the hem, he slowly opened several of the buttons that ran the length of my green silk dress. He knelt beside me on the floor, slipped his hand through the opening, and caressed my knee.

  I knew, then, that despite his conquistador persona, our affair had nothing to do with conquest. It was a more abstract, less personal matter, though nonetheless deeply felt. Barnaby knew something I had glimpsed only from afar—something sinister, though it was a knowledge he hid; he had been somewhere and did not want others to know. This was not without a certain irony—after all, Barnaby was Ellis Park’s storyteller. But then, perhaps all his talk about tramping through the Himalayas, about steamy Chinese villages and the erotic dances of Tibet, were partly a way of distracting from journeys of another kind.

  “Why do you think everybody stopped coming to your storytelling salon?” I asked.

  “You mean our salon. You were, after all, the star raconteur.”

  “It was me, wasn’t it.”

  Barnaby’s hand, gently stroking, moved up my thigh. “You may have misjudged our fellow revelers.”

  “But they couldn’t get enough of Africa,” I said. “Of hearing about Charlie and his terrible fate, for example.”

  “Darling, that’s precisely what I mean.”

  Looking into Barnaby’s face, I felt a spear of fear unsettling the languid pleasure spreading through me. “But wasn’t that the point of it? I know we were playing around with them—shameful, really. But why were they so put off?”

  Barnaby’s hand was still on my thigh. He paused. “Far-off Africa is one thing,” he said. “Playing the hero, the dangers of Mother Nature. But poverty and a lynching, right here in our own backyard. That’s another matter entirely.”

  What he said made sense, of course, though it also made me feel disgruntled. What was Oscar up to? Why had he created this place, this odd community of shallow people?

  Barnaby turned his attention back to my thigh.

  But Ellis Park was also this. Though I was ashamed to admit it, I knew that I was smitten—with Oscar, with Barnaby, with the house and its goings-on, with whatever grand, mysterious scheme of Oscar’s lay behind it all.

  Barnaby slowly blinked, his eyes hooded; I could see he was swimming in his own pleasure, swimming, disconcertingly, not with me, but away.

  “You have a lot to learn about this crowd,” he said. “Though don’t fret, darling. I hate to see you fret.” He brought his lips down to my thigh, trailed his moving hand, upward, with his mouth.

  * * *

  Things with Simon had oddly improved since he’d stopped coming to Ellis Park—and since, I realized with some confusion, I had begun my weekend trysts with Barnaby. This was another of those schisms: my weekday life with Simon an alternate reality to the Ellis Park weekends with Barnaby. There was something peculiarly centering about it for me, as if this divided self were an expression of
my true nature—and as if some pneumatic balance had been achieved in channeling to Barnaby some of my too-abundant feelings for Simon. I imagine there was some relief in this also for Simon, though we never discussed it, and to this day I do not know whether he was aware of the affair or not.

  I do know that our lives together in Manhattan, Simon’s and mine, became dominated by our lovemaking. Our affection had never been casual but always heated and erotic; now, it seemed that even the most glancing touch fired intensity and we’d find ourselves returning to bed again and again, no matter the time of day.

  A few days before Simon’s departure for Montreal, we abandoned our respective work and spent all our time together, alternating long bouts of raw pleasure in the bedroom with strolls through Central Park and lunches where we talked about our projects, worrying through ideas we were struggling to come to terms with or express.

  During the last of those lunches, sitting across from Simon at the diner we frequented, I was aware of a moment of joyous completion; looking into his eyes, eyes that really looked back, that looked deeply into me, I could scarcely contain the goblins of hope leaping about within—that this man, that his love, was mine. The feeling had barely declared itself when it slithered away, leaving behind a bleak little admonition: Never yours, not this man, not Simon; he’ll never give himself, not really, to you. And quick on the heels of this, sitting in that spare little welcoming place, with its orange booths and beige tile floor and waiters we’d known for years, the old ache spilled forth: the knowledge of Simon’s grand passion, the love he’d memorialized in his first novel (for all the world to see). The woman who had shut him out, only fueling the heat of his longing and love, the woman for whom Simon had felt the same kind of bottomless hankering I felt for him.

  “Simon,” I said, trying to hide my misery, the same as I’d tried moments earlier to hide the tideswell of blinding adoration, “it’s your last weekend. Perhaps you’d like to come to Ellis Park.”

  What was I saying? Doing? Did I want Simon to discover what was going on with Barnaby? Did I want to upset the strange balance I’d achieved?

  I peered across at Simon; something about the clarity of his gaze made me want to weep. In that moment, my affair with Barnaby seemed like some terrible mistake someone else had made: what business had such sordid goings-on here, in the crystalline space of my marriage?

  I did, in fact, start to weep.

  “Whatever is the matter?” Such sweetness, in his face, and real concern.

  “I’m worried. About us.”

  Simon leaned over and took my hand.

  “All couples have their ups and downs,” he said with childlike simplicity.

  “I sometimes feel my heart will break,” I replied, unable to stop the tears. I didn’t want Barnaby, not really; I had known this in some way all along. This was the man I wanted.

  It was almost touching to see how awkward Simon seemed to be in the face of my distress, and how foreign to him the language of comforting. A little bewildered, he continued to pat my hand. How different, Barnaby’s enfolding embrace.

  “Of course I’ll come to Ellis Park, darling,” Simon said. I’d forgotten my request and now cringed at the thought of it. “If that’s what you’d like.”

  * * *

  It was disorienting, driving up to Ellis Park with Simon for the first time in more than a month.

  Dinner was a torture. Barnaby was sitting at the far end of the long table. Try as I did to block out his presence, I felt the pull of him and sat in a terror of expectation that Simon would feel it too. He seemed unperturbed, however, calmly eating the salmon fillet I was unable to bring to my lips.

  Simon excused himself after dinner.

  “I’m going to work in Oscar’s library,” he said. “I’ll see you later, back in the room.”

  “I might do some work myself, in the darkroom,” I said nonchalantly.

  “Of course. Work well,” and he was off.

  Not two minutes after he left, Barnaby was at my side.

  “I see Simon has graced our presence again at last,” he said. I was unable to read his tone; he was in full charade mode, which he’d perfected, these last weeks, for the benefit of everybody here.

  “He leaves for Montreal on Monday,” I explained, struggling to maintain the charade myself.

  Barnaby lowered his voice: “I suppose you’ll be joining him shortly in your rooms.”

  “Actually, no,” I said, feeling reckless, looking Barnaby straight in the eyes. I squeezed his hand.

  We took drinks with the others in the front parlor. I then said my goodnights and headed out, by way of the back entrance, to the glass house. Within ten minutes, Barnaby appeared.

  “Marilyn, do you really think this is wise?”

  “I told Simon I was going to work in the darkroom. He’s in Oscar’s library, already off in the land of imagination. There’s nothing much that can distract him from that.”

  I was aware of my own madness, of the seesawing of my mood. Only a few days ago, sitting with Simon in the diner, I had felt aghast at the thought of my liaison with Barnaby. And yet, here I was again, drawn into the power of it. How wrong Barnaby had been that time when he said I was in the business of teasing the truth out of things. On the tatami mat now in the glass house with him, I was aware only of my dissimulation and deceit.

  I looked up through the panes of the pagoda-shaped roof, up into the blurry dark of the night sky. Barnaby was stroking my neck, taking me in with eyes that could have belonged to anyone caught in the wet mist of loving a person he hardly knows, full of spirit and longing and fire. Barnaby rolled me onto my back then lay on his side, head propped on his hand, and looked at me. I closed my eyes. I could feel his gaze slowly crisscrossing the length of me, at the same time studied and free. Tiny beads of electricity roused where his eyes fell.

  I reached out; my fingertips landed on Barnaby’s chest. He was as still as I was. The rhythm of our breath slowed until it seemed to cease altogether, and it was not until the room had dissolved in the molten lead space between us that we drew together.

  The night was finally lifting when I opened my eyes. Barnaby lay sleeping in my arms. I looked up at the limp bluish haze of the new day and listened to the early-morning sounds of the woods. I started at the sound of a snap—too loud to be a twig broken by a lizard or alighting owl, and too strong a silence following it. A blur at the corner of my vision, just above the screen, which rose to a height just shy, I’d guess, of six feet. I felt suddenly paralyzed, my eyes moved downward to the place where the blur had been. Under my left hand, Barnaby’s shoulder was a smooth, warm stone.

  There it was again, a white blur above a black shadow. I held my breath; the vision elongated and poured itself into the mold of a face. Two eyes pierced the thing and a pale slash hovered where a mouth would rightly go. I squinted my eyes and the dark form of a tree came into focus, but where the white blur had been was now just a last pocket of night-blood emptying into day.

  When I arrived back in the yellow suite that morning close to dawn, Simon stirred. I told him I’d fallen asleep over my work in the darkroom. I climbed into the bed and spooning, we went to sleep.

  Finally, close to noon, we awoke. Simon dressed and then sat in the chair by the window reading while I put on some light makeup.

  “I was so stiff when I awoke in the darkroom early this morning that I went out for a walk,” I said. “I wonder, did you step out too?”

  “Why do you ask?” I detected a note of scorn in his voice.

  “It’s nothing, really,” I said, fumbling at the back of my dress with the zipper. The heavy, airless feel of Simon waiting.

  “Well, it’s just that when I was walking in the woods, I thought I saw—a face.” The zipper was stuck. I gave it a tug, which caught the fabric, making matters worse.

  “You really think I’d follow you?” Simon asked, his voice glazed hard.

  I stepped out of my dress and put my attention to
releasing the zipper. I stared, for a moment, at the diamond design woven into the soft jersey cotton.

  “Your life is your own,” Simon added coolly. There was something savage in the way he said this, as if he were throwing me away. It was only then that I remembered the man on the beach.

  “You don’t suppose there’s someone spying on us,” I said. “I mean all of us. Here, at Ellis Park.”

  “Why would anybody be interested in trailing around after a bunch of privileged weekenders?”

  “The man we saw on the beach. He looked at me. It was not the look of a stranger. He seemed to know me.”

  Simon picked up the book he’d been reading and flipped through to find his place.

  “People walk on the beach, Marilyn. I wouldn’t make too much of it.”

  Things became terribly muddled. I couldn’t sleep; during the day, I felt dulled, exhausted, and at times confused.

  When I was with Barnaby, I often imagined it was Simon who was so eagerly taking me in. I would store up the pleasure of it, and then look forward to the time when I would again see Simon. On one of those nights—they began to bleed into each other—for the first time, I experienced the reverse confusion, at a party in Oscar’s grand room. I’d been dancing for hours, and I’d had my share of drinks. I found myself thinking it was Barnaby whose arm held me as I twirled to the sliding wet sound of the saxophone, the heat of the other dancers rising around us. The light in the room when I cracked open my eyes was a cold, faded orange. I almost cried out in surprise when I saw Simon’s face above mine, and was even more startled to find his potent gaze filled with longing. There was a moment of terrible confusion, and I felt tears rising in my chest, a child’s hopeless, furious tears.