So I sighed. I gave the meadow a last once-over. A magical spot it was, absolutely.
And then the sky went a shade darker and the big empty place began to seem kind of creepy, so I hied it the hell out of there.
Incredibly enough, our heroine was still locked up and malleting away when I got back, lamplight now seeping under the studio door. But then, just moments after I came in, she seemed to give over. I heard other noises briefly as I replaced her wildflower book on the shelf – sweeping maybe, and some heavy piece of furniture scraping the floor. And then the bolt thunked back, the door opened a little. She slipped out, and with her back to me, shot the bolt home once again.
Christ, what was she building in there, a vampire? Whatever it was, it had sure drained her. All that morning’s vim was history. She looked limp and weak, her tan a thin layer over sunken cheeks and deep pallor. And she seemed irritated to see me waiting for her, as if I were one more problem than she could tolerate today. This is the woman who wrote those letters to me, I thought.
‘You okay?’ I said.
‘Tired.’ She tried to smile, brushing her hair off her forehead. ‘Why don’t you pour yourself a drink while I make dinner?’
‘No, that’s all right.’ I was a purified, natural man now, see; no more booze. ‘Well, on second thought, what have you got?’
I had a beer, leaning on the kitchen rail with the bottle. Watching as she shuffled wearily from refrigerator to stove. She made Spanish omelettes, pretty expertly it looked like. I’m attracted to domestic women, and the sight of her cooking fueled my warmth for her and my vague fantasies of escape.
I told her how I’d gone to the meadow, which seemed to brighten her up a little. A few times as I described the experience, she lifted a smile to me and said, ‘Yes. Yes.’ But then she’d sink away again, and go on about her work without speaking; blinking with exhaustion sometimes, or coming to a stop for a moment, forgetting what she had meant to do.
She was silent for a long time too as we ate together at either end of the rude wooden table. I was pretty much out of conversation myself and there were longer and longer lapses: the sounds of metal forks on clay plates, the miserable concentration on grains of rice and scraps of egg, the steady traffic of frogs outside and the crickets between the floorboards. All depressing as hell, because I wanted so much to be with her, to feel close to her, not to be alone.
Finally, and with an effort I think, she raised her face. But she regarded me none-too-pleasantly and her voice was hollow and wry. ‘So?’ she said. ‘Are the police after you?’
I nodded. ‘I would think so, by now.’
‘You’re not a murderer or anything, I hope.’
‘No.’ I leaned back heavily in my chair with a second bottle of beer. ‘Just a scumbag basically. Overlooked some minor political bullshit, took some illegal gifts, cheated on my wife. You know the routine. The screws want me to rat on Bugsy and Big Al.’
‘Uh huh. And will you?’
‘No.’ This is what I had decided in the meadow. ‘I actually hope they nail the bastards. But I’m not turning them in to buy out of my mistakes. Ricco squeals on no one.’
She kept up the sardonic tone, but I could see she was suffering in those live-wire eyes. I hated this. ‘Will you have to go to jail?’
‘I don’t think so. To be honest. They haven’t really got that much on me. I didn’t do that much. They’ll just lean on me, make sure it all gets in the papers. And I’ll be disbarred, probably.’
‘What about your wife? What’ll she do?’
I shrugged. ‘Forgive me, I would think. I couldn’t bear that. I’ll have to leave her.’
‘Do you love her?’ I didn’t answer. ‘Ah, you do,’ she said. ‘She was made for you. You adore her.’
She was studying me with unnerving directness, so I studied her back. High cheeks, deep eyes, thick lips and a beakish sort of nose, all intense and overpowering. Not beautiful. It was her energy that made her so desirable, I figured. Or maybe the beer. I sure wanted those cut-offs gone just now; I wanted in between those muscular legs of hers.
‘I do have to call her,’ I said.
She gave a tired snort, sitting back from her empty plate. ‘You’ll have to take the truck into town. My phone’s been cut off.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘This morning. About ten minutes after you called me.’
‘Because of money?’
I think she considered lying about this. She turned in her chair and glanced at me sidewise. It made me feel my position: this nostalgic fugitive intruding on her years of solitude. But she gave in. She said: ‘Oh, it was on purpose, more or less. Roland’s been badgering me. He’s getting annoyed. You know, he has some big offer to go to Hollywood and score a movie. He doesn’t know what to do with the kid.’
I suppose I wanted to get back at her for the crack about Marianne – before I could stop myself, I said: ‘Maybe you ought to take her, Agnes. Obviously, this shit is just killing you.’
She laughed once, a sound like something falling to the ground. ‘Maybe you should just stay out of it, Harry.’
Tilted back in my chair, I raised my bottle to her. ‘Right,’ I said, ‘that’s what I meant.’
The night had gone colder fast, the way it does in the mountains. Agnes closed the windows while I cleaned up the dishes. She brought in logs from outdoors somewhere and built the fire again in the woodstove.
When I was finished, she was sitting on the couch with a glass of wine, staring blankly at the blaze through the stove’s open door. I sat down next to her. She put her head on my shoulder.
‘Sorry, Mr Har.’
‘No, no.’ I put my arm around her. I kissed the white part in her black hair. I breathed in wood and work-sweat and some feminine shampoo.
‘Evil Agnes mustn’t hold you to her imagination,’ she said. ‘I can’t be much of a thrill for you either.’ She sighed. ‘It’s all just who you are in the end.’
‘God, I hope not. I haven’t the faintest fucking notion of who I am. That’s how I got the shaft.’
She gave a low, appealing giggle into my shirtfront – by which time, of course, my hardon was caught painfully against the crux of my thigh. An intrusion on this gentle moment, but there you are. I looked away from her to cool myself down, concentrating on the melancholy reaches of the room.
And then, as they say, it hit me: what was so wrong with the place. What was so oddly morose and somehow suspenseful, even frightening about it, as if some ceaseless minor chord echoed in its atmosphere.
‘Where’s all your work?’ I asked her.
‘Hm?’
‘It can’t all be in the studio? I mean, you’ve been at it for, like, what? Five years? Seven years? Vere’s da art, Chahlie?’
She raised her face to me sleepily. ‘Oh,’ she murmured. ‘Don’t, Harry.’ She let me kiss her, and kissed me so softly on the lips that I wanted to rend my garments with the unfairness of life and with my desire.
‘I’m finished,’ she whispered up at me. ‘I love you, you know. I’ve always loved you. But I’m finished. I’m already dead.’
It was a little tough to sleep with my hair standing on end like that, my eyes jacked wide open and the tip of my dick somewhere up around my chest. Still, I did manage to doze off around three in the morning, clutching my blanket around my chin on the sofa as the last of the fire died.
It was the clang of the woodstove door that woke me in the morning. Some time near six, with the sky just barely light. I pulled my nose out of the dusty upholstery and rolled over, squinting. Agnes was retreating from the stove to the front door as the fire snorted to life again. She was wearing a thin, ratty bathrobe of green tartan and I could tell, by the flow of her body, that she was naked underneath.
‘Ssh,’ she whispered at me. ‘I’m going for my swim. Go back to sleep.’
I pulled my blanket close around me, glad for the warmth of the fire, and watched through narrowed eyes as she w
orked the wooden door open and pushed out through the screen. I listened to her light footsteps fading on the path into the forest, and then lay watching the orange outline around the woodstove door while the pall of fear and sadness settled over me.
Agnes, though … I was dressed and showered when she came back, and she was full of bright smiles and energy again. Rubbing her wet hair with a towel she carried, her breasts and buttocks printed in water on her robe and she all wifely unconcern. Electrifying it was, though I clung to my self-pity.
She dressed in her bedroom with the door open, while I wandered into the kitchen. I pondered the old-fashioned coffee pot helplessly and listened to the sounds of her tossing her wardrobe around, searching for an outfit.
‘Go on, old Harry, I’ll do it,’ she said, rushing in – in shorts now and an I Lo Vermont sweatshirt – chasing me away. I managed to put some butter and knives on the table, all dolefully. And she made corn bread – fresh corn bread from scratch – chattering the while about the pleasures of the Swimhole. ‘Go down in the afternoon, when the water’s warmer. About three o’clock, it’s perfect. You have to wear a suit then, though, cause all these fucking, you know, tubers and canoers go by,’ and on and on like that. She was very enthusiastic about it.
Breakfast took a long time, more than an hour, first juice, then coffee, then the hot bread when it was ready, and coffee again with our feet up on the extra chairs. She talked about the property and the places I should go and explore while she was working, and it was enviable and charming how much she loved the place. Thinking back on it, I realize she didn’t mention the Valley of Dead Elms again, but I didn’t notice that at the time. She directed me to the Path Through The Pines and Cathedral Ridge and something called the Elf Hollow, and described them excitedly with her black eyebrows hiked up and her hands held open in the space in front of her. I suppose there was a touch of mystic back-to-nature stuff in the way she talked, but I felt I understood it, having been to the Meadow of Wildflowers, and anyway, she was very appealing as she talked, throwing herself back in her chair sometimes as if startled and laughing a lot at her own raptures. I confess, I would have liked to steer her back to this fascinating business about loving me, and even to have shared a comforting groan or two over the impossible situation we were clearly heading for. But her mood would not allow it, and the force of her interests – the force of her in general – was far greater than mine, which I also understood and acknowledged even then in my manly pride.
As we refreshed our second mugs of coffee – and I picked more chunks of corn bread from the pan – she moved from exalting Vermont to dishing New York and its corrupt world of art galleries and theorists. I guess every failed artist sings this tune – that’s what I chalked it up to then – but it did sound awful, especially this business about galleries taking fifty per cent of the sale; I was aghast at that. Mainly, in any event, this was her springboard into her own concept of the enterprise at hand. And talking about this – about art, I mean – made her eyes downright hypnotic with excitement. I couldn’t keep up with everything she said, but the way she said it – it sure did make me want to lunge across the table and kiss her mad and fuck her silly. All right, that may not have been the response she was going for, but it was mine own, and I’ll hold it up to any of the claptrappers who dissect her nowadays and who’d have to run back under their toadstools clutching their various genitals, I swear, if ever she strode back onto the scene. They’ve never come near understanding her, never guessed the half of it, never touched it, committed as they are to their own notions and careers. She was all over the place, all over history, with huge, sweeping, inflexible ideas – the kind you get when you argue mostly with yourself – and a vision that covered mankind from the creation to the night before last. The Holocaust was a big part of it – the chamber doors of Auschwitz being a sort of modern Gates of Hell – and the Gates of Hell played their part and the Industrial Revolution and Newton and Darwin and guys like that – Freud; and the Death of Faith, which had to do, so help me, with her Bible theories, and a general picture of humanity as a single organism, going through childhood, maturity and death eventually, and all the while deluded into feeling that the inevitable cycles and developments of each stage were its own creations and within its power. Artists just needed craft and inborn genius – Craft! Craft! she said, Genius! Talent! – simply to capture nature, and it was nature, not art, that would change in the evolving human mind. That’s the Harry version of it anyway. ‘Abstraction,’ I remember she said, ‘is the panicky reaction to the materialistic revelation of the human form; the discovery of the real body, without magic, without any bullshit about the soul is what sent us into a panic of abstraction. That’s why every new abstract trend is always being described as ‘bold’ or ‘daring’ or ‘shocking’. To hide the fact that it’s all just cowardice and horror really. And the fucking theorists who hold the structure up are just like the Catholic monks except with God taken out of it. The inner systems of speculation outlive their purposes. They just can’t stop stuffing their angels onto the heads of pins. That’s why I fucking hate New York. It’s the new Vatican. It is!’
Well, we all have our lives, I guess, and our ideas, smart and stupid, are just our emotions made to sound like objective truths. That’s how I see it now, at least, though at the time I had no thought, no clue, that there was anything desperate in what she said, any last plea to the gods or powers for exactly that sort of courage and realism which she demanded from the unable age but in no way possessed. Oh man! was what I thought as I lifted my coffee to my lips once more, as I watched her across the rim where she gestured and railed, her aspect turned to neon: Oh man, would I like to ball her! God! What she is! What she could have been! Christ, what I could have been if I just could’ve loved her long enough to discover … something, myself, anything.
She tapered off in the end and became watchful. Still pleasant and full of beans, but careful of the light, see, expertly gauging the spread of daylight at the cabin windows. My loneliness seeped back into me as I realized what she was waiting for and that she was going to get up soon and go lock herself into the studio again. I tried to keep her talking, questioned her, diddled her vanity, but eventually she set her mug down with a definitive clump and stood from her chair, stretching.
‘The keys to the truck are hanging up in the kitchen,’ she said.
Which was bad enough – because, of course, this call I had to make to Marianne was weighing a ton on me. But when she had unlocked the studio again, and slipped so cautiously inside, and shot the bolt; when the whack and chunk of the mallet and chisel started – to go on, I knew, until the daylight failed – it was worse still. I found that the oppressive sadness of the cabin had been thrice magnified by the sudden absence of her vitality. All that talk, I mean, all that sexy, jazzed-up yammering about art and man’s destiny and so forth – and now there I sat alone at the breakfast table with the birds cheeping indifferently in the pines outside and, around me, the big dark wooden room gloating and cavernous. And empty. Empty.
Where was her sculpture, for Christ’s sake? All that yammering. All those years of work. Where the hell was her art?
I bumped down the dirt hill in the pickup. Over the metal bridge with the campers waking on the banks far below, and a few kids diving off the boulders to the right. I drove the curling mountain two-lane down into Gaysville. Not much of a town. A few gas stations at the edge of the road, a restaurant, which was closed, a few general stores. I bought myself a Times at one of these last and sat in the truck’s cab reading it over. Parked on the slope, I was, of the little asphalt strip outside, in the far slot, next to the old-style glassed-in phone booth. The sun shone through the booth, the phone waited expressionless inside, and the blood, in my throat, in my heart, in my whole body, was as heavy as molten stone.
I was there, in the paper, all right. Front page, a one column lead. Commissioner Vanishes As Inquiry Nears. A good story. The Feds had slipped them everyth
ing. The assessments, the Florida trip, the hookers. Even the connection to Umberman, who was quoted saying he was ‘deeply hurt’ that a young man he’d trusted and supported should have shown himself to be blah blah blah. Well, at least Marianne knew the story now. That ought to have made it easier on me. But it took a long time before I kicked my way out of the truck, and walked heavily to the phone.
It was not at all how I’d imagined – and I’d thought I’d imagined it every way it could be. She didn’t go noble on me, or hysterical or cold. After the first long trembling silence of relief when she heard my voice, she was the same Marianne whom I knew and lived with: we talked it over as husband and wife would, as if discussing a child’s sickness, say, or the loss of a job. Her voice was quiet and measured. She’d been terribly worried about me, she said. Was I all right? Did I have a place to stay? Stuff like that. Charlie was at the park with a sitter, which was a blessing: I didn’t have to hear him babbling in the background. Yes, I thought, this can be borne, I can get through this. It was only later, when I was driving back to the cabin, that I saw the big picture of it, that I had to pull over to the roadside for a moment to pound wildly on the steering wheel and spit curses at my own stupidity and ignorance. It was then, finally, that I understood how much she’d looked up to me and respected me, the way women do when they love you, and how I hadn’t begun to realize that – wouldn’t have believed it if I had – until I’d blown it all. For something. For what? I couldn’t remember.
But on the phone, I just concentrated on getting through. I explained to her what I thought would happen. I tried to make it sound as endurable as I could.
‘Where are you now?’ she asked me softly.
‘I shouldn’t say that,’ I told her, fumbling for a reason. ‘The Feds, you know, they might ask you. I don’t want you to have to lie. I just need a few more days.’
Agnes Mallory Page 23
