A Winter Wonderland

by Fern Michaels

  Alec hadn’t spent many weeks mourning the death of his relationship with Iris. His new girlfriend, Tricia, was twenty-five, pretty, happy, and a wee bit dense. Not dumb, really, but not bright, either. At least, that was Iris’s opinion of her. Tricia worked in one of the high-priced clothing shops on Exchange Street. Iris didn’t know which one and she didn’t really care to know. The less she knew about Tricia, she decided, the better. She just couldn’t see Alec and Tricia as a serious or successful couple.

  As if reading her mind, Alec said, “Did I tell you that Tricia got a bonus at work? She thinks she might make manager before long if she really tries.”

  “That’s nice.” Iris could think of nothing more to say.

  “Yeah, she’s really happy about how things are going at the boutique. About a month ago she suggested the buyer stock up on some cool leather bracelets from Thailand and they sold out immediately. Tricia really has her finger on the pulse of what women want.”

  “That’s nice,” Iris said again.

  Alec frowned at her. “What’s up with you? You might show a little enthusiasm. Dude, you might even feign some.”

  “Nothing’s up,” Iris lied. And then, she couldn’t lie again. “Except that I don’t know how you can be involved with her.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s just that . . . Oh, never mind.”

  “No, it’s just that what?” Alec pushed. “Tricia’s too young for me? Too pretty, too nice, too fun to be with?”

  “No, no. It’s just that . . . Come on, Alec. You’re a lot smarter than she is.”

  Alec shrugged. “Maybe in some ways. But not in others.”

  “So, what are you saying? She completes you? You balance each other out?”

  “Yeah. That’s exactly what I’m saying. And pardon me, Iris, but you’re not exactly one who should be giving relationship advice.”

  Iris sighed. “I know,” she said. “I’m sorry. It’s just that the last time we were all together, when she didn’t know who Rauschenberg was, well . . .”

  “Hey, not everyone is into modern American art. And she can make pancakes exactly the way I like them and she calls her parents every Sunday no matter what and she gives money to every homeless person she passes on the street. And there are a lot of homeless people in this town.”

  “Yes, I suppose that is all something.”

  “It is,” Alec said emphatically. “It’s a big something. Especially the pancake part.”

  “Sorry. Really.”

  “You’re forgiven.” Alec turned away and began to browse through a stack of Iris’s more recent sketches.

  Iris had the good grace to feel ashamed. Deep down she could admit that her biggest problem with Tricia was that she took up so much of Alec’s time. Not that Iris wanted Alec back—she didn’t—but she had come to rely on his being around when she needed him to hang out watching movies with her or to fix the kitchen sink’s food disposal when she dropped something in it she shouldn’t have.

  Iris watched as Alec handled the sketches gently and with care. He had respect for her work. He was a good man. Still, she had never really been attracted to him, not in a romantic way. But part of the moving on process, she had told herself when she had come to Portland, was to get a new boyfriend. Not a Ben. Not a soul mate. Not even someone with whom she could be truly happy. Just . . . someone.

  Poor Alec. Iris had strung him along for the two years they were a sort-of couple. Maybe she should have come right out in the beginning of their relationship and told him that she had no intention of ever getting serious. But she hadn’t. For that she was sorry. Luckily, her less than honest behavior didn’t seem to have badly affected him. Alec was nothing if not his usual resilient and rational self.

  “Why did you come by, anyway?” she asked now.

  Alec turned back toward her. “Oh, I almost forgot. I wanted to know if you’re interested in hearing a band this Thursday night at One Longfellow Square.”

  “Depends. What are they like?”

  “They’re excellent. You can take my word.”

  “I’m sure I can. But I’ll pass. I have a lot of work to get done by Christmas. You know, I’m hoping all those rich husbands out there will want to buy their wives a one-ofa-kind Iris Karr piece.”

  “That’s a pretty old-fashioned—nay, downright sexist, and might I add cynical—view of relations between husbands and wives.”

  Iris shrugged. “You know what I mean. I have no sentimentality about who buys my work. I have bills to pay. I can’t afford to care where the pieces go when they leave my studio.”

  “Be that as it may—meaning, I don’t really believe you—are you sure you don’t want to hear the band?”

  “Yes. But thanks.”

  “Your loss. I’m told the drummer is really cute.”

  “Who told you that?” Iris asked, stifling a smile.

  “One of Tricia’s friends. You think I would know? Guys are gross. I don’t know what you women see in us. Anyway, I’m off. I have to clean my car. Tricia gets off work at two and I promised her we’d take a drive to the outlets in Freeport. Did you know she’s really good at hunting down bargains?”

  Alec didn’t wait for an answer but left as abruptly as he had arrived. Suddenly, the studio felt very big and very empty and Iris felt very alone. Half of the city was busy having brunch with friends, including Bess and a few other women who were enjoying a meal at Snug, Marilyn’s restaurant. She could have joined them—they had asked her along—but she had said no, which now seemed like a pretty foolish thing to have done. No thanks. I’d rather suffer my own lousy company than share a yummy meal with a group of nice, interesting, and intelligent people.

  Iris busied herself straightening the stack of sketches through which Alec had been browsing.

  When she and Ben were together she had never felt lonely, even when he was out of town or simply too mired in graduate work to spend time with her. It was true. Loneliness had little if anything to do with the presence of someone you cared about. It had everything to do with how you felt about your own company.

  “And I,” Iris announced to the walls, “am pretty lousy company.”

  Chapter 6

  It was Monday, the fifth of December, around ten thirty in the morning. Iris was coming out of the Maine College of Art’s store on Congress Street, a recycled shopping bag filled with new sketch pads in her arms. Ben was coming in.

  Ben smiled and stepped aside. “Imagine running into you here.”

  “It’s a small city,” Iris said, perhaps a bit too sharply.

  “Exactly. Which is why I really think we need to clear the air, Iris. Especially if we don’t want to be afraid of an unhappy encounter every time we leave our houses. I hear from my assistant that we both live in the West End. Like you said, it’s a small city.”

  Iris hesitated. Certainly, Ben had a point, but the last thing she wanted was a collision with the past. She had left her home, her entire life, to avoid such a thing.

  “I could argue,” Ben said into the silence, his voice pitched low, “that you owe me that much, a chance to clear the air.”

  “I . . .” Iris began, but she had no real idea what it was she wanted to say.

  Three scruffy art students dressed in a collection of old combat boots, funky hats, and various massive tattoos, and wrapped in the odor of filterless cigarettes, bustled their way into the store.

  “I said I could argue it,” Ben said when the students had gone. “But I won’t.”

  Iris repressed a sigh. This confrontation would have to happen at some point; she had been dodging it in one way or another since she had first announced her intention of moving to Maine. Common sense told her she couldn’t outrun the inevitable forever. “Okay,” she said. “Tomorrow night?”

  “Good. You decide where we should meet. I don’t know much about the city yet.”

  Iris thought. It should be a place where she would be unlikely to run into anyone she knew. The fewer
people who associated her with the new curator at the PMA, the better. The fewer people there would be to sniff out the past and learn of her shame.

  “DiMillo’s,” she said. No one she knew even vaguely ate there. But the food was good and the staff was pleasant and in the daytime the views were wonderful. “It’s on Commercial Street. Is seven o’clock okay?”

  Ben nodded. “Sure. I’ll see you there.”

  With a small, halfhearted wave, Iris walked on to her studio. Once there she went over to the bank of windows and stared down mindlessly at the passersby on Congress Street. Though the temperature had been below freezing several times since Thanksgiving, there had been no snow yet, unlike the year her mother had died. That winter the entire Northeast had been buried under feet of snow from November through February, a grim, cold blanket under which her mother’s body was “put to rest.” How could the idea of one’s mother abandoned to lie alone beneath frozen ground be of any comfort?

  Bonnie Karr had wanted to be buried, not cremated, though she had requested that the casket be closed at the wake. Iris remembered staring down at the highly polished casket the day of the funeral. She remembered wondering if her father had removed her mother’s wedding ring and the ring Iris had made for her when she was first getting started as a professional jeweler. She had found that the answer didn’t matter.

  People had patted Iris’s arm and taken her hand and some had even kissed her on the cheek. She had tried not to flinch at their touch. She supposed she nodded and maybe even managed to say “thank you” or “you’re very kind” but she had no recollection of saying anything to anyone.

  She did remember, though, the limousine ride from the church to the cemetery, with Ben and her father beside her. For the entire five-mile ride she had been plagued by the macabre thought that the hearse driving her mother’s casket to the cemetery would spin off the icy road and crash into a tree, dumping its precious cargo. The images of this spectacularly gruesome disaster played before her mind’s eye as if on a giant movie screen, loud and horrifying. She had suffered these images in silence.

  The weeks following Bonnie’s death were bleak. The snow turned dirty where it was lumped against the curbs. The world sunk into a mess of bland gray and oily black. A romantic might have said that nature was in mourning for Bonnie Karr. A romantic might also have said that the outer world was a reflection of Iris’s state of mind. Colorless. Empty. Cold.

  Iris turned away from the window. Grief, she had long ago realized, was often raging red and pulsating purple. It was often crowded and it was mostly noisy. And it was usually as hot and searing as a lit charcoal grill.

  But when grief ran away, it left behind a bland and chilly and deserted space.

  She had refused to go to counseling after her mother’s passing. She had, she argued, been preparing for the death for years. She was fine. Why should she waste a counselor’s time and her own hard-earned money?

  And if by moving abruptly to Portland, where she knew no one at all, she had rejected the experts’ suggestions to make no major decisions while grieving and to surround herself with loved ones, then it was because she was not in fact grieving. She was not stuck in the numbness and isolation stages of grief because there was no real grief. Not anymore.

  She hadn’t thought about it for a long time but now, Iris remembered how when she was a little girl and her mother was first sick, she would lie in bed each night and attempt to make a bargain with a God she wasn’t even sure she believed in. “If you make Mommy better, I’ll never complain about making my bed.”

  But nothing ever changed for the better, at least not for long. She had half known all along that it was futile to try to make a deal with a being she could barely imagine. And yet, even at the end of her mother’s life she had still been indulging in magical thinking. If I don’t marry Ben, Mom won’t die. Foolish. And irresponsible. She should have left those emotional and psychological habits in her past.

  A loud crash from the hallway, followed by a string of inventive curses, startled her back to the moment. Iris walked briskly to one of the worktables. No more wallowing in the grim past. It was time to get down to work.

  Chapter 7

  Later that afternoon, Iris and Bess were having coffee at Arabica on the corner of Free Street and Corner Street.

  “So, have you run into that old friend of yours again?” Bess asked when they had settled at a table with their steaming drinks. There were only a handful of other people in the shop at this time, and each one of them was intently engaged with a laptop or iPhone or iPad. “The handsome blond ghost.”

  “As a matter of fact,” Iris said, hoping to sound nonchalant, “I ran into him at the MECA art store this morning.”

  “And?” Bess prompted.

  “And we’re going to get together for dinner tomorrow. You know, just to catch up.” And, Iris added to herself, to clear the air. To answer the questions Ben clearly still needed answered.

  “So, you knew each other well?” Bess asked.

  Iris shrugged. “Fairly well. You know.”

  “No, I don’t know. That’s why I was asking.”

  “We used to be close,” Iris admitted, but would be no more specific than that.

  Bess sighed dramatically and put her hand over her heart. “ ‘Ah, how good it feels! The hand of an old friend.’ ”

  “And who was that?” Iris asked, smiling in spite of herself.

  “It might have been a Bess Wallis, but in fact it was our own dear Mr. Longfellow.”

  “Well, I haven’t shaken Ben’s hand so I don’t know if it feels good or not. Besides, I’m not out to reestablish a relationship.” Certainly not the one we used to have, she added silently, even if that were possible.

  Bess broke in half the raspberry scone she had bought. “Here,” she said, handing a half to Iris. “Now, I’ll take half of yours.”

  They exchanged halves of Iris’s pastry, and Iris nibbled without really tasting. Sometimes, she thought, like right now, in this warm and quiet coffee shop in the middle of a cold and sunny December afternoon, she wanted to tell Bess every little detail, both the good and the bad, about her relationship with her mother, about what it had been like being the only child of a talented and passionate woman. Sometimes she wanted to share with Bess the myriad memories, both the good and the bad, the time when Bonnie had taught Iris how to bake sugar cookies from scratch, and the time when her mother had to be rushed to the hospital in the middle of the night, leaving Iris at a neighbor’s, clutching her stuffed rabbit and terrified. She wanted someone in her new life to know how she had resented her mother’s illness, but how she had also always admired the courage her mother had showed while battling it. And sometimes, but not often, she wanted to confess how she had failed her mother in the end.

  “Marilyn has decided to cook a goose for Christmas,” Bess suddenly announced.

  Iris choked on a crumb of scone, startled. “Oh,” she said. “Okay.”

  “There’ll be plenty for everyone, you know. I’m just offering an invitation. Again. And one of my poet friends will be reading from her new collection. She’s quite good.”

  “All right.”

  “All right you’ll come for Christmas dinner?”

  “No. All right I’ll think about it.”

  “You have to eat. Consider it just another everyday meal.”

  “With a poet in residence?” Iris laughed. “Nice try.”

  Although the truth was that for the young Iris, meals in the company of poets and painters and musicians had been the norm. She wondered now with whom her father and Jean would spend their Christmas this year. She wondered how Jean felt about socializing with her father’s artist friends and clients. She wondered how her father felt about spending time with Jean’s nursing colleagues. She had no clear idea of their relationship. On the surface they seemed a mismatched couple but maybe when the door was closed behind them, they suited each other just fine. She did hope so, even though she had little
desire to find out for certain.

  “Look at my ring,” Bess suddenly commanded. Iris did. The opal was throwing off colors in a fantastic display—orange, yellow, green, purple.

  “That’s pretty amazing,” Iris admitted. “It looks like the aurora borealis. Or like something you might see in a hallucination. Not that I would know anything about that.”

  Bess held up her hand and regarded the stone in another angle of sunlight. “It shoots out color like that sometimes, even when it seems to me there’s not the right kind of light, or maybe not enough light. It has a life of its own, this stone.”

  “Who will you leave it to when you die?” Iris asked.

  Bess dropped her hand onto the table. “That’s a grim thought.”

  “Sorry.” Yes, Iris thought. It was a grim thought. But it’s December and this is when I think about dying.

  “Well, to tell the truth, I hadn’t thought about it,” Bess went on. “I suppose I don’t plan on dying for quite some time.”

  Iris smiled. “Good. Sorry I’m such a downer.”

  Bess reached across the table and patted Iris’s hand. “It’s all right. I know this time of the year is hard for you.”

  Iris looked down at her half-empty cup of coffee. She had only told Bess that her mother had died on Christmas Eve. Nothing more.

  “ ‘The dead are always with us,

  mocking.

  They have the time in space

  And the space in time

  To console

  But not the inclination,

  Or the conscience to compel it.’ ”