Lake Life

by David James Poissant

  “I can let him off with a warning,” the officer tells Thad, “but there will be paperwork.”

  Their conversation is cut off, though, by a crunch and a cage-rattling thud. Michael turns to find a bloodied Ed facedown on the cell floor. The floor is concrete, and Ed’s face, when he lifts it, has the look of a face that’s just hit concrete. He spits teeth, his mouth a harmonica of curiously well-spaced holes. A moan escapes the holes, and it isn’t long before the moan turns to roar.

  “Oh my God,” the officer says. “I’d better get a dentist on the phone.”

  Of all the people he’s been messing with all day, Michael suddenly feels sorriest for the police officer. Probably he took this job to help people, to stem the tide of hurt that floods the world. Only, no matter how hard he tries, no matter how many lives he saves or drivers he lets off with a warning, the tide, relentless, will return. Every night another Michael, another Ed, another puddle of blood and teeth to be mopped up.

  The moaning grows in decibel and depth.

  “Forget the paperwork,” the officer says. “Just go.”

  Michael wants to say he’s sorry for his attitude, his unkind words, but apologies don’t come easy, and he lets Thad pull him across the station and out the door, Ed’s screams amplifying into the evening air.

  The sun is going down. It’s twilight, or else it’s dusk. Michael’s never known the difference. They get into the car, but Thad lets the key hang in the ignition. He rests his forehead on the steering wheel. In time, his head lifts, and Michael sees the dilated pupils, the bloodshot eyes.

  “Holy shit,” he says. “You’re stoned.”

  Thad turns the key. “I can’t believe you made me drive to a police station, argue with a cop on your behalf, and now I have to drive you home. Next time you drink too much, I leave your ass in jail.”

  “I didn’t drink too much.”

  Michael pulls the visor down and assesses his face in the mirror. His lip is swollen, jaw purpled from the bartender’s punch. He wiggles a back tooth, newly loose, with his tongue. Michael flips the visor up. He can’t look at himself.

  “You left me there for hours,” he says.

  “I was afraid to drive. I’ve never driven high.”

  “I’ll drive.”

  Thad laughs, the laugh delicate with contempt. He backs out of the parking space. But he takes too long getting the car out of reverse, too long turning onto the main road.

  “Seriously,” Michael says. “I can drive.”

  “You’re drunk.”

  “I’m not.”

  Thad smacks the steering wheel. The car veers left, and he wrestles them back into their lane. “If you’re not drunk, why were you in jail?”

  “It wasn’t jail. It was a holding cell.”

  “Why were you in a holding cell?”

  “Because I wouldn’t blow into the Breathalyzer.”

  “And, if you’re not drunk, why wouldn’t you blow into the Breathalyzer?”

  “Because the Breathalyzer would say I’m drunk.”

  Thad’s head turns, and Michael watches the road for both of them.

  “Do you know how dumb you sound?” Thad says.

  “Don’t call me dumb,” Michael says. “And watch the road.”

  They’re quiet, then. It’s ten miles to Highlands, another ten to the lake, but these are winding mountain roads, treacherous under the best conditions. At Thad’s speed, it could be an hour before they’re home.

  Out the window, trees creep by. They crest a hill, then they’re on a straightaway, past walls of rock dynamited to make room for road.

  “You’ve got to stop drinking so much, Michael.”

  The flash of being found out turns Michael cold. Thad he threw up on. Thad was his one phone call. Kind of hard, now, hiding it from Thad. But the longer Michael dwells, the more he wonders just how well he’s hidden it. What if he is a drunk? What if he’s a drunk, and his whole family knows?

  “If you have to drink,” Thad says, “just don’t drink and drive. How would you feel if your drinking ended someone’s life?”

  He wants to say he knows exactly how he’d feel. Two days ago, had he not been hungover, had he swum a little faster… Except there are too many trees, too many branches whizzing by. If he opens his mouth to speak, he might be sick.

  “Pull over,” he says. Pine trees pirouette down the road. His head itches at the thought of vermin swarming his scalp. “Pull over, please.”

  “Pull over where?”

  “Please,” Michael says, and his door’s open before the car’s slowed to a stop.

  Then everything is out of him, the morning’s moonshine, the wine, the cheese. It isn’t pretty, and he hangs from the open door until he’s sure the awful’s out of him.

  He wipes his mouth, sits back, and shuts the door.

  “Tell me again,” Thad says. “Tell me about how you’re not a drunk.”

  33.

  Beyond the window, the sun is up but sinking fast. Soon, the sun will hit the water and smolder, a chemical spill, orange and pink and blue across the bay. Diane’s seen it a hundred times, and every seeing steals her breath. That tuck of silver water into sun, the water rainbowed like the wake a gas leak leaves behind a boat—this never stops being beautiful. She gets Monet. He has her heart. Haystacks and castles and water lilies, again and again, each one transformed by time of day. Even puddles, from the right angle, display a certain magnificence. Given enough light, Diane’s convinced anything can be beautiful.

  She watches the lake. She’s trespassing, standing beside Thad and Jake’s bed. The bed is unmade, pillows dented where their heads have been. She’s alone, Richard fishing, the others gone for the day. This morning, she changed Michael’s bandage, cleaned his wound, and he left, saying only that he’d be in Highlands if she needed him.

  She’s in this room because she’s lonely, bored. The bag at the center of the bed, she didn’t even have to open it. The bag was half-unzipped when she came in. She touches the bag. Jake wouldn’t mind.

  Of course he’d mind. But she’s too curious to care. In two years’ time, Jake has never once shown her his tools, what brushes he uses, which paints. She’s never asked. She wants to be respectful, wants to avoid the questions he must get constantly from amateurs and the aspiring alike. But she has so many questions! And what good is it, knowing a master of the medium you share, if you can’t ask him for help?

  But she’s Diane. And he’s Jake. He’s famous. Unlikely he’ll ever show her the respect that she shows him. She knows this. She also knows you can’t lose the respect you’ll never have, so she pulls the zipper and opens the bag.

  The brushes inside are good ones, not the cheapies she buys at Michaels or Jo-Ann when they’re on sale. Even the ferrules on Jake’s brushes are spotless, which means they’re new or he’s fastidious in his cleaning. She turns the bag over, and paint tubes tumble onto the bed. Something catches in the bag, and she dislodges it. After a minute’s unfolding, she sees it’s an easel, the travel kind composed of hollow poles like tent pegs threaded with bungee cords.

  Jake’s canvases, shipped in advance, lean against one wall. They’re each the same size, 20 by 24, small for Jake, but fine for what she does—perfect, actually. There are two of them, still blank, and it’s been three days. How long are Jake and Thad staying? Another day? A few more at most? No way, at this rate, Jake will use both canvases. At least, this is what she tells herself as she assembles the things she’ll need.

  There’s a palette, but that feels personal, too much Jake’s. She’ll use a plate. She likes the way paint mixes on china, anyway. How it swirls, gloss-greasy. How the china seems to sway with the paint, whereas wood feels like it’s pushing back.

  There must be twenty paint tubes. She picks a dozen, then puts back four. Probably she can get by with eight. There’s a smock, which she shakes out. It puffs and swells, new and white, geometric with the lines of its folding. She spreads the smock over the bed, but it
won’t lay flat, the way a road map won’t flatten no matter how many times you run your hands over it. This, too, feels like too much. She has old shirts. She’ll wear one of those.

  She feels a kick.

  Not really. Too soon for that. Phantom kicks, they’re called. She’s felt them before, worried, googled it, relaxed.

  She puts on an old T-shirt, finds a plate, then carries everything down to the dock. This takes two trips, which takes too long. The sun hasn’t set, but a crop of clouds is moving in, and now the light is wrong. The water’s lost its shimmer, yielding to a gauzy haze.

  A pair of blue Adirondack chairs are stationed on the dock, and Diane arranges Jake’s paints in the lap of one of these, then marks her plate with all eight colors. She faces the easel toward the sun, away from the site of Friday’s tragedy. She still can’t bring herself to look in that direction.

  Diane takes in the canvas and the plate, scared to begin. Back home, the one or two days a week she gets to paint, she uses acrylics or watercolors, inexpensive and quick to dry. But these are oils, which means they’re pricey, slow to dry and quick to smudge. She hasn’t used oils since she was a student.

  She starts in on the plate and, right away, screws up. The oils are different pigments than she’s used to, different hues. She tries to pull a violet from the cadmium and cobalt, but there’s too much yellow embered in the red, leaving her with paint the color of a bruise. She pulls in some carmine, and, in time, she gets the violet she was looking for.

  When she looks up, the surface of the water’s changed again. Already the lake is less purple, the clouds less pink, the sun lower in the sky. She’s never done a sunset. How does this work? How do you paint a subject that won’t stay one color or sit still?

  She balances the paint-streaked plate on one arm of the chair. She watches the horizon, selects a different brush. She brushes the dry canvas with the clean brush, just to feel the bristles’ riffle and flick. It’s only been a week since she’s painted, but she feels as though she’s never held a brush before, and she sets the paintbrush down.

  Who is she kidding? There’s a reason she teaches elementary school. Those who can’t, and all that. Sure, she went to SCAD, but she’s no great, undiscovered talent. Each time she gessoes a canvas, each time she sinks her fingers into clay, she accepts who she is, how far she’s come, how far she has to go. Some days she makes art. Other days she makes a mess and wonders, What’s the point?

  If she dies tomorrow, not one person will miss her work. Her obituary will call her teacher, daughter, wife. And she is those things. And she’s proud of them. Teaching isn’t easy. Inspiring children, introducing them to the craft, is important work. Still, she wouldn’t mind if her loss were remembered, secondarily, as a loss for art.

  When she dies, what will become of the paintings and pottery filling the spare room and cluttering the garage? Say she goes first. Will Michael keep her work? Give it to Goodwill? Asking these questions feels like asking whether her husband loves her or not.

  She picks up the paintbrush.

  “Don’t do that.”

  Diane drops the brush, which rolls across the dock into the lake. She turns, and Jake stands on the dock, frowning.

  She hasn’t prepared what she will say. In her fantasy, the painting she produced was so good, Jake was too awestruck to scold her for raiding his supplies. At least the first brushstroke has not been made. All she’s done is waste a little paint.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I should have asked.”

  “It’s fine. Someone should get some use out of them.”

  He approaches, pulls a fresh brush from the chair, hands it to her, and she feels like a child caught stealing twenties from her father’s sock drawer, only, this time, her father isn’t yelling but handing her the roll of rubber-banded cash.

  “Just don’t do the sun,” Jake says. “I mean, a sunset can be done, but it’s been done, you know? The sun is like birds. Everybody’s painting birds, all of a sudden. Which isn’t to say someone won’t find a way to make birds or the sun interesting, but—”

  “It won’t be me.”

  “It won’t be either of us.”

  She doesn’t know what comes next. She still wants to do the sunset, but never before has Jake seen her work. Unsure as she is if she can bring herself to paint in front of him, she’s doubly unsure she wants the first thing he sees to be a subject he finds tedious.

  Jake steps away and seats himself in the other Adirondack chair, which seems to swallow him. He’s such a small man.

  She turns back to the canvas, dips the brush in paint, and rips a violet streak across the canvas. The color is too much, a mouth that wants to wail.

  “Diane,” Jake says, “are we friends?”

  She wants to say no. She wants to point out that this might be the longest conversation they’ve ever had. Instead, she says, “Of course.”

  Then he’s up from the chair and at her side. She’s brought five brushes down, and he picks the largest with an angled tuft.

  “May I?” he asks.

  She offers him the plate, and Jake runs the brush through the carmine, then makes a comet’s tail across the dish into the gold. He touches the brush to the canvas and curls a glowing yolk over her violet stripe, then tangles the gold and red into the brushstroke below. It takes all of ten seconds, and when he steps back, Diane sees the horizon before them reflected on the canvas.

  “Presto,” Jake says. “Sunset.”

  She wants to ask how he did it, except that she just watched him do it. If the seeing didn’t make it simpler, she can’t imagine how the saying would.

  “You make it look so easy,” she says.

  She isn’t looking for pity—she’s genuinely impressed—and she shakes her head when Jake says, “I wasn’t trying to show off.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” she says, but already Jake is setting down the plate.

  “It’s okay. I know I’m a show-off. I’m not even that great of a painter.”

  She’s not sure where these words are coming from. Jake seems sad. Usually he’s cocksure, pleased with himself, or at least pretending to be.

  “You shouldn’t say that,” she says. “You’re a gifted painter. It isn’t fair to those of us who aren’t for you to pretend otherwise.”

  Jake blinks, taken aback, and she wonders how many people in this man’s life tell him the truth and how many tell him what he wants to hear. He could say, No, Diane, you’re talented too, but he doesn’t, and she’s glad. If she’s going to be honest with him, she respects him for being honest with her, too.

  “Why did you ask me if we’re friends?” she says.

  Jake moves to the edge of the dock and watches the water, the sun. She’d like to have his eyes, just for a day. To perceive color and line and light the way he does.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “It just struck me that we have something in common. Thad and Michael have to be here. Their parents call, and they come running. It’s always been that way. But us?” He turns, and the sun is setting at his back. “You and me, we aren’t Starlings. We choose to be here. We can leave anytime we want.”

  “You don’t like them?”

  “I like Thad,” Jake says. “I love Thad. Family’s tricky, though. I haven’t seen mine in eight years.”

  She’s heard the story. Not in full, but enough to know Jake’s father once pulled a shotgun on him, that his mother watched and never said a word. In his family, you can’t be who Jake is.

  “The Starlings can be your family if you let them.”

  Jake laughs. “You mean I should marry Thad.”

  “If you want,” she says, “but that’s not what I mean. I only mean that Lisa and Richard would love you like a son if you loved them back.”

  Jake selects a clean brush from the chair. There’s paint on his hands, a streak on the sleeve of his white linen shirt. She wants to ask why he’s dressed up and where he spent the day, but she must choose her words spa
ringly. She can’t be sure which questions might scare him off.

  “They already love you,” Diane says.

  “I don’t always get that from Thad’s mom.”

  Jake stands before the canvas. He paints quickly, filling in the sky, then moving to the lake below. What he’s after, it isn’t quite the horizon before him, but something bigger, richer, aglow in a wider range of colors than the colors on display.

  “Let me ask you something,” Diane says. “Have you ever asked Lisa about herself?”

  Jake says nothing. He turns his head, but she can’t read his face. Is he ashamed that he’s never taken an interest in Lisa’s life, or is he bewildered, wondering why he should?

  “That,” she says. “That right there is why she’s occasionally frosty with you. You just dismissed her whole life with a look.”

  Jake returns his concentration to the canvas. “I did not.”

  “You did. You didn’t mean to, but you did. And that’s okay. You’re young. But at some point you’re going to be expected to take an interest in the lives of others. Besides, Lisa’s worth getting to know. She’s lived a full life.”

  Jake paints. He pulls color to the canvas’s edge, and he’s not careful about it, the way Diane tends to be. Paint splatters, and he lets it.

  “Would you believe this is the first thing I’ve painted in months?” he asks.

  “I’m sure that’s not true.”

  Another kick that’s not a kick. She should have had a bigger lunch.

  “It’s true,” he says. “I’m all fucked-up right now. I’m too much in my head.”

  Say more, she wants to say, but she doesn’t trust her motives. Is she hoping to help or looking for companionship in her self-doubt?

  “I can’t believe I just told you that,” he says. “I haven’t even told Thad.”

  The sun is setting fast, and Jake hurries to capture it, jostling the easel, bumping the canvas with his hand. He’s so careless compared to her, yet somehow his work comes out so much better.

  “Sometimes I think it’s God,” he says. “I know that’s silly.”