“Well, I thought you’d be a bit more sympathetic, a bit more understanding about what a wife can just know—without having to have a courtroom full of evidence …”
I was beginning to wish I’d had a drink. Being sober and rational was not necessarily what this discussion called for.
“Look, a little evidence would help a lot. A sighting at Area with a twenty-year-old secretary or a chorus girl—then you might have a problem—”
“That’s not my idea of a problem!” She gave me the haughty flip and told the waiter to bring another gimlet. “If he wants to sleep with some little tart on the side, I’m grown-up enough to handle it. I’m not making my point, Belinda. I said he’s fallen in love. Not that he’s screwing some nonentity. Screwing nonentities calls for a telltale bit of physical evidence. Falling in love messes up a man’s head in telling ways, and that’s what’s happening to Harry. That’s why I’m worried—no, I’m not worried. I’m … something else. It’s not worry. It runs a lot deeper than that.” She took a deep sip from her fresh gimlet and looked out at the flowers. She looked wistful now. It was amazing the range of emotions she could put on her face without any noticeable rearrangement of her features. I think it was in her eyes. So dark, so deep, with a faintly mad quality when she wanted it there. She had a tendency to speak without really opening her mouth, through her teeth. Like Gloria Steinem. Like Gloria Steinem she was very bright, but unlike her she had chosen never to make a life for herself beyond being Harry Granger’s rich wife. She liked the life. She’d never been one to complain. Maybe that was why I didn’t entirely discount her fears about Harry. She didn’t cry wolf. It just wasn’t like her. So maybe Harry was up to something, after all, though I tried to convince her it wasn’t true.
She watched me from behind those deep dark eyes and then impulsively hugged me, as if to say: I can see through you, my dear, but thanks for trying. …
Chapter Three
I WORKED LATE THAT NIGHT but by five o’clock the next morning I couldn’t sleep anymore. The temperature hadn’t gotten much below eighty during the night but now there was a breeze and I couldn’t bear sleeping through it. I took a shower and stood naked in the middle of the loft with only the beginnings of the morning light from the street. I felt almost human. I wasn’t sweating. The oscillating fan on the divider which partitioned off the kitchen area blew at me. I put a Stan Getz tape in the deck and stretched out on an upholstered wicker chaise and watched while the onset of daylight revealed the canvases all around me.
And I saw this Belinda Stuart creature I’d been painting for the past two years.
She was a tall woman with a fair complexion and high, wide cheekbones, a flat forehead: a serious, almost somber face which at thirty-nine retained still a few clues to the pretty little girl she must once have been. Dark blond hair which had once been flaxen, now held by the ancient headband dating from the sixties, hair now tucked behind her ears, hanging straight almost to her shoulders. A straight, conventionally Waspish nose, a long upper lip and a wide mouth, long legs and narrow hips not much wider than they’d been in the old days at Mount Holyoke.
Her appearance was somewhat deceiving since she radiated in the remote features a very now air of self-discipline, self-possession, and lucidity that can so easily strike others as a trifle daunting. She knew that people frequently took a look or two at her and concluded that she was impervious and invulnerable.
Somewhere in her I saw that she was at least as prey to the uncertainties and insecurities of life as anyone else. But not even Jack had ever grasped the truth, Jack who had seen her at the bottomed-out lows and had the best reasons to want to understand. Not even Jack.
Perhaps the eyes were what stood in the way.
There was something in the impulsive, challenging pale green eyes that made you wonder what she must have been like as a girl, twenty years ago, just discovering her own femaleness and its powers. Men who paid attention to such subtleties were bound inevitably to speculate about what toll that challenge must have taken on herself as well as on others, what hearts might lie broken in the wake of those eyes.
Brazen eyes, that’s what Sally had called them.
So much for thinking about yourself in the third person. Maybe it wasn’t altogether healthy to paint pictures of yourself for two years. Inevitably you wound up thinking about yourself too damn much, and that was something I’d never before been interested in doing. Well, it was too late to bellyache about it now. I’d never been one to look awfully closely at things, at life, at relationships. Sally used to tell me I’d missed a lot.
Late into countless college nights Sally had tried to explain her facts of life to me, but I’d never proven a very apt pupil. She had told me that I’d apparently come equipped with a set of psychological blinders to protect me from the rest of the world and its reactions to me. She always told me I was just Belinda wanting to stay that way, but I was bound to learn that was a hopeless goal, an impossibility. And I hadn’t known what to say because I hadn’t known what exactly she was talking about. Life had seemed basically simple to me then.
I had possessed an ability to focus my attention on my purposes, determined to attain them. Sally understood about my single-mindedness, whether it came to doing well in my studies or reading all of C. P Snow or making Jack Stuart a good wife. She understood about the psychological blinders and maybe she had been right.
Maybe without my blinders I’d have been able to see what was coming. Maybe. But then again …
Maybe not.
The next time I paid any attention to what time it was, my back was stiff from working and I looked at the big clock on the brick wall and saw that it was four o’clock and the day had been used up. Through the skylight I saw that the sun was gone, replaced by purple clouds. I had once put a great deal of effort into painting clouds. Turner’s clouds with the burnished sunlight behind them were breathtaking, but it was Constable’s way with clouds that I’d found irresistible. The clouds scudding across Salisbury Plain, Stonehenge looming with a swipe of rainbow faded to gray behind it. Finally I’d had to give up the quest; clouds weren’t for me. I never managed one that struck me as the real thing. And these purple ones were plainly impossible. I gave a little prayer for rain.
I wiped the sweat away from my forehead and eyes and took a long look at the painting I’d been working on all day.
Six feet by eight. A woman’s ear, an earring made of a single multicolored African bead, hair tucked behind the ear, the delicate bit of temple where the strands of hair magically begin. I couldn’t define it but I recognized a pervasive eroticism in the depiction, all psychological rather than anatomical. It was rendered with total attention to realistic detail, as if seen under a gigantic magnifying glass.
It wasn’t my ear. It was this other Belinda Stuart’s ear. More real than the reality.
It all came down to connections. Carlyle Leverett who owned the gallery had been a classmate of Jack’s at Choate. They had known each other at Harvard. And it was natural that Carl, having seen my work and—miraculously—having liked it, brought his boyfriend around to see it. That had been several years ago and the boyfriend was the critic Paul Clavell. When I’d exhibited with a group of other painters at a bar in TriBeCa, Clavell had made a point of writing a piece about the show in New York. He had written some nice things about my work and I had thanked Carl. “I only got him there, Mugs,” he’d said. “After that the paintings were on their own. Paul’s favor was going to the bar and looking, that’s all.”
Together they had urged me on, bullied me when necessary, pushed me into growth and change and the development of a vision which was, for better or worse, at least my own. There were blind alleys and catastrophes but they kept at me and finally last winter I showed them what I’d been working on.
Clavell sort of reeled back at the size of them. All huge canvases. All bits and pieces of the nude painter, pore-by-pore detail. He immediately began to think like a critic. And he w
rote another piece for an art quarterly in which he told of the development of a painter. Me. He wrote that he was struck by the painter’s state of mind, the extraordinary ability to center upon herself to the exclusion of all else, the magnification that lent a surreal dimension to each piece.
Leverett began badgering me about the one-woman show. He even had a name for it, he said.
He would call it Belinda’s Belindas.
When I looked at the canvases, all I could see was an embarrassing, almost pathetic vulnerability, and some days I would have given anything never to have painted them, never to have felt the imperative to paint them. Anything.
Clavell called the collection “alluring. Clinical and poetic, simultaneously. Startlingly, unquenchably erotic.”
Clavell spoke of “the utter innocence of existential egocentricity.”
Maybe it was true. It was hardly flattering.
But in the end it was pure criticspeak.
The point was, I was still Belinda. As I’d always been.
But that afternoon, after the day’s work, with Sally’s fears of Harry’s loving another woman banging around inside my head, with the unthinkable idea that possibly both our marriages were coming undone lapping at my feet, I remembered Clavell’s observations and I must have had an inkling that deep inside my life some kind of overwound mainspring was beginning to tear loose.
I was still praying for rain when the telephone rang. It was Harry. I’d halfway been expecting the call. It was sure to be about Sally and her accusations of infidelity. We went back such a long way, Harry and I, even longer than Sally and I by a few weeks: he always turned to me when there was any kind of a problem with Sal.
“Well, how are you, Belle?” Harry was the only person who had ever called me Belle.
“Nothing worse than an incipient nervous breakdown over my work, such as it is. Why aren’t you deep in rehearsals?”
“Dinner break. There’s a dress tonight. I can’t eat any dinner, can’t hold anything down.” He laughed weakly.
“I don’t believe that. It’s not the Granger Touch. I believe your image—”
“You should know better. Of course, I wouldn’t admit it to anyone but you. Look, I want to see you. We’ve got to talk.”
“Mmm. I think I know what’s on your mind.”
“Really?” He sounded surprised. “You mean you’ve talked to him?”
“Him?”
“Yes, him. Jack. You remember, surely? Jack Stuart, your husband.”
“Don’t be snotty.”
“Belle, please. I’m not being snotty. I want to talk to you about Jack.”
“What in heaven’s name for?”
“I’m worried about him. No, more accurately, I’m scared for him. Or about him.” He was getting impatient with me. “Anyway, how about tomorrow? Lunch?”
“Can you hold it down?”
“Very funny. I’ll know after the dress tonight. Come by the theater at one, okay? Stage door.” He laughed nervously. “What did you think I was calling about, anyway?”
“I don’t know, Harry. It doesn’t matter. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“That’s a girl. I’ll tell you a joke and make you laugh.”
Chapter Four
MAYBE I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN Harry’s concern had to relate to Jack. They had been inseparable for so long. Together, best friends, they had formed the nucleus of the Ruffians at Harvard. Harry had conceived the idea of the club, had taken it first to Jack. They had so much in common, beneath their surface differences. So much they could never share with the women in their lives.
In Harry’s mind, Jack and I had always occupied our own compartments, even if there was a connecting door. Jack had doubtless confided a lot about our breakup to Harry and now Harry was going to try to start building a bridge between us again, proving once more that this marriage could indeed be saved. I wondered if Jack had told him about our last time together. I doubted it … but then, they were brother Ruffians and men, and who knew what went through men’s minds?
Jack had come by the loft a week or so ago. He managed to keep forgetting to return the key, and in a way I didn’t blame him, though the idea that there was another key out there besides Sally’s made me nervous. He was living in that little apartment in the East Eighties, yet he retained ties, emotional and material, to the loft. Lots of his possessions remained behind, boxed up, and every so often he’d show up and cart something away.
That night he’d come by ostensibly to change the locks, which were frail and looked easily forcible. But it turned out that he’d forgotten the tools and what he really wanted to do was talk—talk about moving back in for a trial spell and “getting to work on this marriage, kid. We’ve got too much tied up in it to just let it go poof. Come on, Belinda, sit down, have a drink, let’s talk about it. For Chrissake, put down the goddamn brush, relax a minute, and talk to me.”
“I didn’t ask you to leave,” I said. “You thought it was best. Okay. Now I’m not asking you to come back, and this time it’s a two-person decision. There’s no point in forcing it, no point in just yo-yoing back and forth.” I set the brush down, stood back from the table, and mopped away the perspiration with a towel. “You’ve got to give me just the tiniest break,” I said, trying to smile and keep it light. “You know I’ve got to have these canvases ready for the show. It’s important to me, honey, as important as your writing was to you—”
I heard the mistake I’d made but it was too late, I couldn’t get the words back. It was hurtful, a barb he hadn’t deserved, and he’d never believe I’d meant nothing by it.
“Was! That’s just wonderful! I still write, if you hadn’t noticed. It’s just that nobody’s willing to publish it … which doesn’t necessarily mean it’s crap!” His face had turned gray and icy. He was losing it and I didn’t want to see that happen.
“You know I didn’t mean it that way, so why make me the villain? What good does it do? All I’m saying is that I’m under a lot of pressure from now until the show opens—it’s just not a good time to expect me to talk about something so important to both of us.”
“God, you ought to hear yourself.” He was shaking a finger at me, smiling derisively. “Why don’t you just tell the truth? Just say it … the only thing you care about are the paintings of your tits and ass—I mean, the ego at work here is breathtaking. To say nothing of all your new friends—that is, men. They’re sniffing around you like a bitch in heat—”
“This is an awfully silly, awfully tired speech.” I turned my back on him, went back to the worktable, fumbled with junk, and tried to stay calm. Tried not to cry. It wouldn’t have been so bad if I didn’t still love him, the way you always love somebody like Jack who had once been strong and had begun to crumble while you watched. “The bitch-in-heat is really beneath you, Jack. You know that’s not me, you know you’re lying. Maybe that’s what’s wrong with your writing. Maybe you can’t deal with the truth. …”
It was a nasty sniping contest. I heard myself and despised myself for getting into it, yet I couldn’t stop. He was jealous both of my work and of my ability to deal with life alone, and I understood—it was the most natural thing in the world. But somewhere things had gone far enough off the rails that we couldn’t get them back on. By this time I didn’t even want to. I just wanted us to stop hurting each other.
He fumed, stomped around the loft, took all the requisite shots at the kind of self-centeredness which would produce such paintings, and told me how that lay at the center of our problems. I listened, trying to busy myself cleaning up my work area.
“Hell, you’re a child, a spoiled child, you’ve never given a flying fuck about anyone else.” He ran through the meaningless litany, as if all the years of happiness and pitching in together on everything had never happened. “You’re a snot-nosed little shit …”
I couldn’t help it: I had to laugh and he laughed too at the absurdity of the whole scene. He found and uncorked a very old bottle of Calv
ados that Carlyle Leverett had given me as a special present from his own cellar. When I mentioned it, Jack was off again.
“My sweet Jesus, Belinda, Leverett? I mean really! Don’t you remember? Leverett was the Official Fairy of Dunster Street! What the hell do you want him sucking around for? My wife’s a fag hag all of a sudden? I mean, what’s going on here?”
It finally came down to sex.
He wanted me, he said he wanted to muss me up, wipe the Serene Highness bullshit off my face. He grabbed me, yanked at the tank top and pulled it down, and I thought: Girl, stay cool, you don’t want anything really bad to happen here.
He carefully touched one nipple while I stood still, beginning to tremble with either rage or fear, I wasn’t sure which. I locked my eyes on his, willing him not to touch me. But he squeezed my nipple, his jaw clenching in anger. He squeezed until I cried out. I looked away but everywhere I saw my own nakedness, huge, overwhelming, helpless. One canvas after another.
“You want to talk,” I said, adrenaline pumping, “about … saving … this? This marriage?”
“I want you,” he said. “Right now. On the floor, right now, right here. Lie down …”
I could barely hear him. It was as if he were talking to himself. There was something wrong with him.
“You’d have to kill me,” I said.
“Sometimes, I swear to God, I’d like to.”
“You’re crazy—”
“Maybe I am, Belinda.” He backed away, miraculously draining tension from the scene. His voice changed, his stance changed. He was Jack again. Or close to being Jack. “I don’t know. Sometimes I want to be inside you so much I think I could kill you, hell, kill somebody. It builds up inside me. Christ, I don’t know … I love you, I want you … then I don’t know, I hate you when you shut me out.” He cocked his head, looked at me from the corner of one dark eye, brushed back the long black hair past his ears. “Sometimes I think I might do something really … bizarre.” He looked around the loft, grinned, licked his dry lips. “What if I took a hammer and knife to your pretty pictures?” He laughed softly.
Guilty Parties Page 2
