by Joan Barfoot
Her pageant speech wasn’t wrong. Music does save; or at least it reflects. Not necessarily “Yesterday” which is what’s playing on the oldies station she listens to. “Yesterday” is just ironic, in the circumstances. It’s followed, though, by a bouncy old Neil Diamond tune about a Kentucky woman, and Beth closes her eyes and sways slightly. She has never been to Kentucky but has met girls from there, and has a recollection of long white dresses and long white teeth and voices with soft vowels and hard tones.
She has met girls from all over the place and, except for the soft vowels, they are in memory mostly like the Kentucky ones, all long white dresses and teeth, and sharp smiles, and cool scrutiny behind warm eyes like gas fireplaces, not the real thing. In that world of women, behind-the-scenes voices were pitched high with hostility and ambition; conflicting scents of nail polishes and hairsprays and perfumes, perspiration and desire, were probably what sometimes gave Beth and her mother bad headaches. “Don’t ever forget,” her mother warned, “those girls are your competitors, not your friends. Don’t trust anyone. But always smile, and be as pleasant and nice as you can.” Not, she meant, to be an actual smiling nice person, but because “meanness shows up in the face, even if it’s not right away. You can see that already in some of the girls.” That was true. A sort of over-the-hill, lost-opportunity narrowness grew in some faces.
Beth’s mother intended to capture opportunities just the way Beth captured titles and prizes. Beth’s mother spoke of fashion house runways, of international competitions, even of movies in a gloriously approaching future. What luck for Beth to possess not only beauty but a mother who could dream up couturier runways, magazine covers, travels in Europe. “You have the features,” she said, running fingers over Beth’s cheeks. “These are magazine-cover bones. You have a fortune in your face, we can go anywhere, you can accomplish anything we decide on.” Accomplish? The word jarred, began to sound like something vaguely hard and opposing.
That was a long time ago. Soon Beth will be thirty. Sometimes she can nearly feel her blood close to the thin surface of her skin, heating and bubbling. The first time she sat with Nora in this kitchen hearing Nora’s visions and plans she felt that, and now she feels it again. Because there will be new visions and plans, made necessary, if contrary to his desires, by Philip.
And what were Philip’s desires? Not Beth, and not death. Oh, that’s funny, that rhyme, she is clever sometimes.
She has a suspicion, however, that his desires did include Sophie. She has noticed his eyes following Sophie now and then with a particular light, and recently there’s been a straightening, some sharp alteration in Sophie when Philip came into a room. Sophie is efficient but she is not trustworthy. It is Beth’s belief that Sophie has witnessed such atrocious brutalities that her soul is toughened against more ordinary sins.
There’s some of that in herself, too.
Nora was a godsend. These sorts of miracles seem random, but also intentional. They can’t really be both, can they?
At an art show opening, Beth noticed a short dark-haired woman in black trousers and a pale blue, loose blouse, staring and staring at her. Which was fine. It’s more or less Beth’s one great accomplishment, what she was trained for: being noticed. The show was a sculptor’s for whom Beth had done a little modelling with results, she was interested and pleased to see, that were reasonably unidentifiable. There was a good crowd, lots of perfumes and glittering eyelids, bald heads and beards, different shades and complexions and voices. Eventually Beth felt Nora, whom she did not know then to be Nora, angling more directly towards her. “Hello, excuse me, you’ve maybe noticed me watching you, but—are you a model, by any chance? Or”—that quick, now-familiar, lilting uptilt of Nora’s lips—“would you ever consider being one?” Beth pointed towards a looping, arced bronze the height of a man’s hand. She was at the time modelling, yes, not only for this particular sculptor but for trade shows and catalogues, for minor fashion shows, for minor art schools. She offered bendability as well as beauty, her body amenable to being twisted and flexed in many shapes and directions. She could hold difficult poses. Nora nodded and smiled and Beth saw they did not need many words.
Nora said she was a painter who incorporated other materials into her work. She said she had roughly in mind a series in which, it had struck her from across the small crowded gallery, Beth might feature perfectly. Oh, and she introduced Philip. “My husband.”
He was a large man who looked as if he might do large things. “Are you an artist as well?” Beth asked politely.
“No chance.” It was the first time Beth heard that barrelling laugh. She had no idea what he’d found funny.
That laugh of his—it was too large in the confines of this house. It wilfully, deliberately, drowned out smaller voices.
Not any more.
The music on the radio stops, news begins. People are injuring each other in several horrible ways in several parts of the world, which is unpleasant. Beth is turning the thing off just as Sophie arrives in the kitchen looking sad and ferocious, both. “God damn it, Beth, music? Do you think that’s respectful?”
Respectful of what, death? Philip? Oh, but maybe of Nora. “You’re right, I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking.”
Without fury the air, the power, go right out of Sophie, and she’s left just looking sad. That’s interesting. Even her hair looks subdued and her eyes are shadowy. Shock affects anyone close, and just how close was Sophie to Philip? She has already thrown up. Beth steps forward, places her thin fingers on Sophie’s arm. “Can I get you something? Come on, come sit down.” Sophie flinches, but Beth tightens her grip, pulls Sophie to her chair at the table. She pats Sophie’s hair, not stroking and soothing the way she did with Nora, or when Sophie was heaving on to the floor. “I’ll make tea.”
It takes a few minutes, but “This is for comfort and courage,” she says, placing a cup in Sophie’s hands. “It’s bitter, but if you drink it down fast, you’ll feel better.” People trust Beth on this subject at least. Sophie sips, she makes a moue of distaste, but then she does drink it right down. “Are you very sad about Philip, then?” Beth dares to ask. “Are you grieving, are you distraught?”
Those are big words. Sophie sits up straight and looks a lot more alert. Which is good. With her wits about her, Sophie can resume her duties and chores, and Beth can concentrate on being helium-hearted and hopeful. It’s amazing how a person can be jolted awake by a scream, that sound of awful distress, and a few hours later be aware of so many unforeseen and quite joyous prospects. Life is full of surprises. Beth’s mother used to say that, although generally on unfair, unhappy occasions, such as when Beth came in second or third runner-up.
“No,” Sophie says slowly. “Just tired. A lot of people to talk to.”
Beth wonders how long Nora will sleep.
Nora’s an expert in things that aren’t visible. Which must be why, despite Sophie’s bright springing-up hair and abundance of flesh, Nora has never done a painting of her. It must be why she found Beth instead: because Beth’s power is untouched and private, all under the skin, not out on the bold, uninteresting surface like Sophie’s. What Nora works with are the ways light can hit skin, textures can be molded and formed, bones can be reshaped. Which shows that even though Nora may not always know what’s going on right under her nose, she must be good at discerning the grave depths and mysteries lying beneath. And that must be what makes her an artist, and why she chose Beth: because she knows things about Beth; even though in particular ways, and this is a good thing, she really knows very little at all.
Five
Nora was faking with Beth, she is not sleeping. Among the many, many things on her mind is, what the hell was Beth’s lingering, swaying embrace about, not to mention that excessive stroking of Nora’s forehead? Some misplaced and transferred passion for Philip? There was something … lascivious about it, unnerving, and quite soon unpleasant.
Also surprisingly bold. Beth wafts about all skin a
nd bones in her long floaty dresses, her only discernible interest her boring curative teas, so quiet and malleable that even Nora, who has spent many hours bending her this way and that, has to agree with Sophie that Beth’s still waters run more stagnant than deep. Life does not thrive in her depths, nor flourish at her shores.
So that was weird.
Of course, sexual responses to death are not uncommon. However clumsy, they are at least defiant, insistent gestures of life, and in fact Philip’s arms holding Nora after her mother died led slowly, then furiously, to just about the most rampageously lusty night of their lives, a wildly free and fervent display of thrusting tongues and threshing limbs and powerful assertions of one sort or another.
But still.
Wondering about Beth’s embrace is a small matter, though. What’s large, what’s heart-cracking, is Philip as Nora saw him smiling strangely beside her this morning at that cool point between existence and non-existence, still Philip but grown disengaged and remote; and, no middle life between the last and the first, his earliest face, young and broken wide open, grinning and full of interest, in Nora.
If she’d known that last night would be the end of his voice, anger, heat, tenderness, skin—if she’d known, what then? She would have said many more words, and different ones, she would have touched and stroked him, kept him awake rollicking and remembering right through the night. Like Scheherazade, she could have fended off bad ends with stubbornly wakeful tales and vivid, entertaining delights. People forget to do that. She did—him, too, she supposes—and then it’s too late. Now, no more rages and laughter, no more words and embraces, no more Philip rearing over and around her, no more of his fleshy flesh, no more shuddering and groaning and sighs. He used to say, back when they were working to fix up this house, “Come on, take a break, let’s go play in the shower.” She used to say, “Want to go find a forest to fuck in?” And sometimes they would. Now—never again? Her head spins so hard she feels drunk and sick and has to open her eyes. Even if urgencies grow less urgent in time, even if for the most part they are allowed to drift off towards some vaguely imagined, energetically passionate night in the future, they’re not supposed to drift right over the horizon, off the edge of the earth.
Philip’s body, perfectly alive and luxurious yesterday, is being mutilated today.
Nora is absolutely sure of her instructions to Sophie: damned if those villagers, townspeople, should be able to observe him in the perfect vulnerability of his death. Philip wouldn’t have minded—he might even have enjoyed the attention—but Nora minds, and that’s what counts now.
That’s interesting: that it’s only what she wants that counts.
Interesting, and unspeakably lonely.
Here’s a large aspect of grief: something finished, but in unfinished form, as if they were on the phone and Philip abruptly and for no good reason hung up. Half the conversation of her life is suddenly gone. From now on there will be silence at the far end of each sentence. Nora’s regretful body thrusts hard beneath Beth’s sheet—now, now she would pitch herself at him. She is alarmed to hear herself whimper. There is no one but her to hear that sound either.
Is it true he died in his sleep? Or did he waken in panic and pain, trying to flail but failing, desperate to be rescued, unable to waken her beside him, sleeping as she was, as she would have thought, like the dead? He would have been furious, and vastly injured, that in the moment he most needed her, Nora left him to die on his own in the dark.
Or perhaps he just buggered off. Not so different from, say, her father whistling out of the house and into the more expansive world of, according to Nora’s mother, whiskey and the arms of stray women. Can death be a similar whim? It’s not impossible to see Philip, a man given to impulse, choosing on the spur of the moment just to amble into eternity. Maybe he looked at her sleeping soundly beside him, and shrugged, and took off. There was no particular evidence he might be inclined towards that, but her mother always said she foresaw nothing either.
Whatever happened, sleep must be more perilous than Nora could have dreamed, containing far more dangers than even those terrible nightmares of Sophie’s that make her cry out, waking everyone. Too bad that didn’t happen last night. Philip might have been saved. Instead, at some accidental point in the darkness, life turned right over. Fucking Philip, how could he?
Shock, physically electric, shoots straight through Nora’s body, giving fierce, surging notice that every part of her, top to toe, is affected by this. Every part hurts. Were there signs, did he mention last night that he didn’t feel well, was not as sharp as he might be? No, she’d have heard him and asked questions. Beth would have got up from the Scrabble game and made him one of her teas.
Maybe he felt perfectly fine and just fell into bed, fell asleep, then found himself tumbling much further. Maybe there was no flailing, no panic, no rage or injury. No intent either. Accident, happenstance only.
Something happens, or fails to, a moment is gained here, lost there, and the result can be anything: joy, desire, inspiration, tragedy, pleasure, loss. Her first grinning Philip was happenstance also, the endpoint of an earlier randomness which was itself an outcome of triumph.
Also, wherever she looks there’s a thoroughly lodged, intricate twining between Philip and work, and what happens to that now? Work is what Nora does. What she does saves; saves her, if nobody else. She would even have said, maybe, right up till this morning, that work would be worth any sacrifice; but she would never have meant this one.
At least it isn’t as if Philip’s death is connected in some sacrificial way to her work.
Or—who knows? Awful second thought—maybe it is.
All she has ever meant by sacrifice is choice really, the weighing of one thing against another. It’s not so hard to sacrifice—choose—if desires are clear, and what have Nora’s desires been but Philip and her freedom to work, in that order or not, nothing very dramatic or drastic?
Even poverty, one choice and sacrifice, was not only relative but a circumstance of relative youth. When Nora was twenty-five she was still very poor, as well as distinctly unknown. She was living, barely, above a sandwich and variety store in a cramped apartment where she slept, ate, and experimented with attaching fabrics to canvas, bedecking painted figures with beads and embroideries. She was interested in the relationship of colours and textures, as well as figures and shapes, as well as certain ideas, but no one lives on colours and textures and shapes and ideas. She was beginning to suffer rat-gnawings of desperation, not only financial. Not everyone appreciated what she was trying to do. Her only public mention to that point was in a newspaper review that called her contributions to an artist-run show “vivid and intriguing, but ideologically idiosyncratic.”
Well, thanks.
That was right about when Max and Lily arrived from France via England and opened their gallery. Coming from Europe spoke, she hopefully supposed, of either sophistication or of up-to-the-minute, on-the-edge taste. New eyes, anyway. Worth a shot. Nora walked in with a selection of slides and two of her actual works, then waited anxiously through a two-month silence that some days felt like a good sign, other days not. This was her life, didn’t they know that? Or care? Should she call them? Should she walk downstairs and ask for a job in the sandwich and variety shop, preferably a night shift so she could continue to work upstairs in daylight but also continue to eat? She jumped each time the phone rang. The time was coming, not that far off, when she wouldn’t be able to pay for the phone.
At last, Max called. In his flat, slightly accented voice, he said just, “Come in. Lily and I will discuss your work with you.”
In those days the gallery had one very large room, one lesser one and an office. There were canvases on the floors of each space, but facing the walls, about to go up or already down. Max leaned back in his chair, hands folded over a belly that was capacious even then, and tiny, silvery Lily leaned forward in hers, hands at palms-up rest on her desk. “Welcome,” she said. �
��Tell us about your work,” Max said.
What about it, exactly? They’d had two months to see for themselves. Still, Nora made her little speech, glancing towards Max but letting her eyes rest on Lily, about definitions of art and of craft and her desire to apply both. Because, she said, “I tend to think distinctions between them are basically arbitrary. As far as I can see at the moment, a stitch is as critical as a brushstroke. So differences are more a matter of who gets to decide what is art, not what art actually is.” Did that sound dogmatic? As if her real interests were merely political? “I like to make possibilities larger. I want expansion. Some kind of whole-heartedness.”
“The images,” Max said. “We notice they are primarily domestic. That is your interest, is it?”
“Well no, not really. Partly, but not entirely. Mainly they’re what’s in front of me to work with.” But what would elegant, portly Max, or Lily in her tailored royal-purple silk blouse, know of tiny dark kitchens and pieces of cantaloupe like slices of sun?
“I see,” Max said austerely. Then, “We do think you have promise.” Deadly word, promise. So that was that.
Till Lily smiled, and turned her hands over, flat down on the desk, a silent gesture with the effect of a gavel. “And so we would like an invitation to your studio to make selections and discuss dates for your first show with us. Perhaps not one all on your own at this point but, as Max says, your work has good promise”—not exactly what he’d said, but perhaps what he’d meant, surely his own wife could interpret him accurately—“and we would like to see you well launched and properly nurtured.” Nora felt herself flush, then nearly launched herself across their desks to embrace them; Lily, at least. Max was still scary. A show, even if not one all her own, and talk of nurture implying a long term, and safety—no wonder she practically danced off down the street.
