Before, During, After
Page 23
He came home from the war and was changed, as a lot of men were. Iris would say only that she hadn’t remembered him as being that much older and that things were very different with him. His age had caught up with him, and also he had wounds in the bones of his legs that gave him trouble. He had caught malaria during the ordeal of island hopping in the tropics. And there really wasn’t anything for his kind of trouble in those days—men were expected to get on with their lives, and for a time William Mara did just that. But he had walked out when Natasha’s mother was five years old.
Natasha knew all this.
But of the life her grandmother led with him in those four and a half years, she knew almost nothing at all. It was something Iris simply never talked about because in fact she did not want to talk about Laura, did not want the memory of that loss in her thoughts. Natasha had come to the knowledge of this without actually having it expressed to her. Their talk was usually pleasant and affectionate, but it seldom became personal. This left Natasha feeling at times starved for something other than chatter.
Yet at that age, too, it was good not having so strongly inquisitive a guardian as others she knew.
Now she took a ten-dollar bill out of her purse and put it on the table.
“So,” her grandmother said. “About the wedding. You said you wanted it small. His father and stepmother, his aunt and uncle. Me. Your friend Constance?”
“I said I’d let her know the date. I guess I should.”
“Well, it’s your ceremony, isn’t it.”
“I will. I’ll call her. She probably won’t come.”
“Other friends?”
“Marsha Trunan. Who also might not come. But I really do want to keep it small. As small as possible.”
“Justice of the peace? That sort of thing?”
“It’ll be a civil ceremony, but performed by a priest.”
Iris shrugged. “Well, since Michael’s not preaching anymore, I didn’t think going secular was such an outlandish idea.”
“We sent the marriage notification into the church a while ago,” said Natasha. “Before I left for Jamaica.”
7
That afternoon and evening Faulk spent painting the living room of the house. Natasha and Iris bought some art for the walls—prints mostly, though Iris did choose an original that she found in a local gallery, done by an artist she knew when she worked for the mayor’s office. The artist had gone on to New York and was doing very well for herself there. Iris mentioned this and said that Natasha would have her own work to hang, of course, but the idea was to sell it. The painting was of a girl in a white dress holding a guitar and gazing off into shadows. The light in it was very Sargent-like. Natasha liked it, without feeling that anything of its quality was beyond her.
After they bought the art, they went into a little shop to buy something to wear for the wedding. Iris helped her choose a simple pink dress with small white ruffling across the low neckline and a slender, darker pink ribbon slanting from the waist to the hem.
The two women went to a Thai place for dinner, and Faulk joined them there, splotches of the off-white paint on his jeans. He sat across from Natasha and was full of hope and anticipation as Iris went on about the artist friend and the original she had bought. She brought the prints and the painting out of the protective plastic to show him. He admired it all, especially the original. “It’s perfect,” he said. “But not as good as the work of my future wife.”
Natasha waved this off and made a fuss about showing him the dress. He folded his arms on the table and grinned at her. “It’s glorious.”
“We got it for a song,” said Iris.
They did not talk about the impending war with Afghanistan or what was still going on in New York and Washington. They were preoccupied with the house. It would need more furniture, a dining room set, and another bed for the guest room. He had bought the wood for the bookshelves, and he hadn’t done that sort of thing for a long time, so he was looking forward to it. He would spend all day tomorrow on it.
After dinner, they all went to Iris’s house and drank two bottles of Bordeaux. Natasha lay on the couch, drifting in and out of a soft slumber while her grandmother and her fiancé talked. Iris began telling him about raising Natasha, and Natasha, listening, imagined her mother, Laura, also raised by Iris. Laura, the woman in the photographs. Natasha made an effort to picture her in motion, and soon she was having another dream about Jamaica. She was alone on the bright beach, and behind her was the big shadow of a building, one of the imposing temples of democracy in the city where she had lived, though she could not have said which of them it was. There was something threatening and at the same time sad about the vast shadow of the thing, and then she turned into wakefulness, hearing Faulk’s voice, softly saying it was time to go. He stood there, smiling, waiting. She sat up, feeling the wine she had drunk.
“I didn’t mean to fall asleep.”
“You’re so tired,” Iris said.
In the car, with the cool night air coming in the window, she was fully awake, and she looked over at him, at the features she loved in the light from the street. It had been a good day, and she could sense that the trouble was fading, though the memory of it was still fresh, and, maddeningly, thinking about having it behind her had brought it forward again. A little wave of anxiety rushed over her, and she reached and put her hand on his thigh.
“Want to go in and look at what I’ve got done?” he asked.
They were pulling by the street.
“Yes,” she said. “Let’s.”
He made the turn and parked in front. There was a big rosebush along the fence across the street. She hadn’t noticed it before.
“Look,” she said. “Roses.”
“Wait here,” he told her, and crossed the street. He picked one of the largest of the blossoms, white and cup-shaped and fragrant. Crossing toward her, he stopped and did a slow turn, as though dancing a waltz, and bowed grandly, holding the rose toward her.
She laughed softly, taking it and holding it to her nose. “Thank you, kind sir,” she said.
They went into the house—again, he had trouble with the key—and he turned the light on to show her the difference the off-white paint had made in the front room. He had draped plastic sheeting over the furniture and the piles of books and on the hardwood floor.
“It’s a different room,” she said. “I love it.” She put her arms around him. “Perfect.”
At his apartment, he helped her undress and then gave her a chaste kiss on the cheek and pulled the blanket up to her chin. She was warm, and sleepy again, and she had a small unhappy feeling of relief that he was apparently not expecting to make love. She experienced the mixture of emotion as a kind of sinking at her abdomen.
He got into the bed with her and turned to put his arm across her middle. “See you in the morning.”
“Yes. My love.”
He turned off the light and lay there at her side, thinking about the picture of her on that street in Chicago. Our State Street. Soon her breathing told him that she was asleep. He moved gingerly a little away from her and tried unsuccessfully to drift off. His mind presented him with images of the last four days, and now and then he would doze, only to be jolted awake, as if he were standing on a high ledge and to let go would mean falling from it. He thought of the people who had jumped from the towers.
Finally he got up and went into the kitchen and poured himself a little whiskey. He turned the small television on with the sound set low and watched the news without really taking it in.
She woke to find him gone and saw the light in the other room. Because she loved him, she rose, put a robe on, and went out there. “Honey?”
“Oh.”
She saw that she’d startled him. “Do you mind if I have a little?”
“Sit,” he said. “I’ll get it.”
She sat on the sofa and looked at the spareness of the room. He came back with the drink and sat next to her. “To us.”
“Couldn’t sleep,” he said.
“I was gone. I don’t think I’ve slept that deeply in a while.”
“I kept starting to drift off and that woke me.” He remembered similar nights when he was in the seminary, after hours of study. He would be near sleep and then come bolt upright. Pure dread. He started to tell her about it but then stopped himself. That kind of night was always the product of anxiety.
“I didn’t dream this time,” she said. “I was just out and then I was awake and I saw the light in here. I didn’t want to be in there alone.”
“Didn’t wake you, did I?”
“No.” She noted the concern in his face, the slight crease in his brow. It made her heart ache. “You’re my considerate darling.”
He wanted to make love but decided that it should be her decision. And indeed now he did feel his own consideration of her like a virtue.
They sat staring at the shifting images on the television and sipped the whiskey.
She said, “I have to find something to do to make money.”
“But you don’t have to do any such thing. You paint. I’ll take care of you.”
“You’re sweet.”
“No, it’s what you’ve wanted for a long time.”
“All that time I thought I was saving to go back to France, and I didn’t save a penny.”
He thought of the picture of her on State Street in Chicago.
“Young and dreamy and foolish,” she said.
“And beautiful,” he got out.
A moment later, she said, “Do you think your father and Trixie will come?”
“Probably.”
“I’ll ask Constance, though I bet she won’t. And Marsha Trunan is coming back to Memphis anyway, I think. And then there’s Aunt Clara and Uncle Jack. Which means the senator and Greta.”
“Couple of my old friends, too, maybe. It’ll be large enough.”
This time there was a lengthy pause. It created in them both a pressure to speak.
“I think I’ll have another one,” he said. He got up and brought the bottle back. He was deciding that he might get drunk, since she clearly had no intention of seeking him. Pouring more for himself, he said, “Want another touch?”
“No, thanks, I’m gonna go back to bed when I finish this.”
“It’s so good to know that we don’t have to go away from each other.”
“I know.”
He felt himself bending inside toward initiating things. “Guess that’s why I don’t feel pressed.”
“How ‘pressed’?”
“Oh, you know—that sense that we have to use the time. For instance—just for instance, you know, that we don’t—we don’t have to make love tonight. We can wait until tomorrow, or the next day. There’s no time pressure because we don’t have to go away from each other the way it always was before.”
She understood what he wanted her to do, and couldn’t produce the will to make the gesture. She took the rest of the whiskey, put the glass down on the table, leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, and went back into the bedroom. In the dark there, she wrapped herself in the blankets, curled into a ball, eyes closed, listening for movement from him. She heard the bottle clink against the lip of the shot glass. Off in the Memphis night, a train sounded. Her hands smelled of the whiskey, and she realized it was her own breath on her fingers.
Later, when he came in to lie down, he was careful not to wake her. He told himself things would be all right. It was true that they did not have to hurry or force things. He lay there thinking about the days ahead, when they could take the time to learn all over how to be at ease with each other.
Do You Take This Woman
1
She’d had four relationships. The first lasted almost five years and was generally supposed by everyone, including Iris and the young man’s rather large Italian American family, to be an engagement. His name was Constantine, and everyone called him Connie. She had met him in Provence, at the end of her first week there. He was a tall, blond, serious boy who loved the beach and had beautiful light blue eyes. He had come to France from his home in California to spend part of the summer with his older sister, who was studying in Provence. Natasha was with him almost continually after their first meeting. When he left to return home, he gave her a ring he had bought in a little store on a visit to Paris. They were together. He was going to get a degree in history. She would finish college and join him. Before he left, they spent time planning things, and one afternoon it occurred to her that she wasn’t having any fun. He could be so somber about things, and all of the history he knew—or, more accurately, what fascinated him most about it—concerned the depredations, the atrocities. He knew about these things in great detail, was nearly fetishistic about them. And of course there was no playfulness in him. They fought all the time. The long-distance relationship they ended up having—he in San Francisco, and then in Chicago, and she in France and in travels through Europe and finally in Washington—seemed better and less stressful than being with him every day, and far easier than the stratagems and antic posing she got from the other young men with whom she occasionally found herself socializing. After college, she wanted to explore and see things and live in other cities, and so when she broke off the “understanding”—as her grandmother called it, probably taking her cue from Constantine’s family—she felt relieved.
There were two other relationships, both full of exhausting emotional storms.
When she met Mackenzie she was several months past the fourth one—poor Constantine again, who showed up from a stint as a history teacher in an American school in Spain. He was seeking her as a wife, and she almost went with him. But over the years she had seldom given thought to marriage. Friends accused her of supposing snobbishly that it was an estate for young women of a certain sociological type. But that was far from true. She was too suspicious of abstractions to take such notions very seriously. It was just that finding a husband had never been a concern, had never been something she sought in and of itself, not even with Constantine. She enjoyed her freedom and the progress she was making with her painting, though she hadn’t sold enough to come near supporting herself. In fact, it was his desire to support her that pulled her toward him that second time. But she refused him again and went on with life. And did not give it much thought. She was adventurous and smart, and the milestones, whatever they would be, would come whenever they would come.
She had embarked on her own study of the great watercolorists, had discovered Xie He, the art historian who lived in fifth-century China; his Six Principles of Art described ideas about modes of expression that had been passed down from master to student since antiquity: The first part of the sixth principle essentially was to know and emulate what preceded you as an artist; the second part was directly copying nature. But she was impatient with nature, with still lifes and landscapes and paintings of barns and lakes and fields and even city streets. She had discovered a feeling for the faces in photographs that did not seem posed so much as staring out, as if the frame of the photograph, its border, were the border of a window someone had simply glanced out on the way by. So many of the pictures she found in the bins in the antiques stores were posed, family members smiling into other sunlight, and the sunlight, of course, looked like a rainy day. But there were also very many—more than she expected to find when she first began to think of them as windows—people who did not really know how to be in front of the new invention. And so the best subjects for her paintings were the old daguerreotypes and sepia plates from the first few decades of the existence of the camera as a means of recording things. And the challenge was giving them color without cheapening the expression.
Once, in Rome with Marsha Trunan on one of their journeys from Provence, they had walked a long hallway inside the Vatican Museums whe
re many sculpted heads were displayed, hundreds of them, human countenances, a lot of them showing the effects of age and excess, rendered with such exactness that you felt the urge to reach out and touch them. It was almost as if your fingertips required tactile evidence that these features were made of stone and not flesh. All the faces looked blind, the pupils and irises the same stone color, and the guide said this was because the paint had worn off centuries ago, and these were the faces of nameless well-to-do citizens of Rome. Marsha spoke about not being able to stop looking at the blind-seeming eyes, but Natasha kept staring at the ears, the jawbones, the pouches under the eyes and the sagging chins, the lips and nostrils and brows. Even the hairlines.
It was the ordinariness of the faces themselves, the people as they were, from antiquity, that fascinated her.
Faces. And in those years she had painted so many, miniatures and full-size ones, and she dreamed about faces and watched them and believed she had begun to discover in her portrayals something she might express about the thousand nuances of human feeling. She kept the work in a big portfolio that she took with her through various au pair jobs, and the year and a half she spent as assistant to a travel writer named Ben Eldridge, who treated her as a student and hit on her and said cruel things to her about her “little works of art.” She even took photographs for him of chapels and doorways and country towns in Provence and in Italy and Turkey and North Africa. And when his wife joined them for the trip to Morocco, Natasha endured his overweening benevolence, like a kind of hopeless bribe for her silence, which she did keep. At the end, she even listened to his wife complain about his general slovenly ways and his uncleanliness.
This was on the journey to Morocco—the last one, because his commission was over. And it was on this last trip, somewhere between Istanbul and Rabat, that she lost the portfolio. Three different airlines, and none of them ever located the large canvas bag it was in.
She spent two grieving months back home in Memphis, and finally Iris got her the job in Washington. It would be temporary, Iris said, and only for the purpose of saving money to return to the south of France. But, withal, it was also an answer to what Iris believed was an unhealthy stasis, since she was no longer painting very much and did not like much of what she did paint.