“Dez.” Now he was the uneasy one.
She ignored him. She spread the first shirt over the ironing board. She felt him watching her, her arm slamming forward and back: collar, shoulder, sleeves, back, front, down between each button, so ironically like the Picasso painting she had thought of when Jacob was last here. Jacob. The thought of that kindred spirit a nugget of comfort.
His hand came down softly, briefly, on her shoulder. “Dez, come on. Let’s not fight.”
She twitched his hand away and licked her finger, tapped it to the hot-iron to get the sssst. She wasn’t sure, at first, if he remained standing there or if he sat down on the sofa; she refused to turn around through three shirts, but when she finally let herself peek, he was gone.
What would she be doing, she wondered, if she had not married him, if she had moved her father into the hotel, if she had moved back to Boston after her father died? What would that other self be doing now? There were so many possibilities. To imagine them in parallel with the life she was living made her feel like she was stepping outside herself. It was like getting her bloods each month, and reflecting on the fact that a particular combination of circumstances that would have produced a singular child was gone. A girl or boy, his or her chance at life gone forever. You couldn’t help but wonder who that child would have been. And where all her own other might-have-been lives would have brought her. Every single choice in life offering up a dizzying branching of options.
She heard Asa get up a few times, heard him at the top of the stairs, but she didn’t call up to him, and he didn’t come down, and as the pile in the basket shrank, she began to feel strong, self-sufficient. She opened a window to let in the night air and finished her ironing feeling more wide awake than she had ever felt in her life.
In the studio, she studied the canvas. The tree was good, but she would have to do more with the water. She would have to be patient with it, work toward developing a cascading look of floodwaters. Using the upper end of a pencil cut to a fine point, she dragged through the paint while it was still wet, while there was still a thick pull to it, creating distortion, the sensation of seeing under water.
She finished all she could finish and stepped back, satisfied. Tomorrow she would work on it outside, with the river itself as model. Thursday. Jacob was supposed to come, and she would let him come.
She set her brushes to soak, turned out the light, and was halfway up the staircase when she turned back around. She just had to give it one more look.
A push of the wall switch flooded the room with light, illuminating the easel in a way she perceived with a shock of pleasure—the harsh beauty of the tree dominating the unfinished floodwaters. She took her eyes away for moments at a time so that she could reward herself by looking back and getting the pleasing shock of a fresh look.
The end of a good session’s work was the best feeling. You were still in love; you weren’t yet critical; you could wholly admire what you’d done.
It was late, past three o’clock. Dawn was still a couple of hours away, but already the sky was growing milky. She leaned against the doorjamb and let go, let herself do what she’d never quite dared, but which the quarrel with Asa seemed to permit: to fully wonder what it would be like to be partnered with Jacob, to be able to talk about work while doing everyday chores like folding laundry or stirring pancake batter or sweeping. To have two easels side-by-side, to stay up late while the night air blew the scent of sweet woodruff through the curtains. She carried the fantasy with her up to the spare corner room and crawled into bed with it, imagining exquisite intimacy that took her breath away, made her realize how much she wanted it, made her exhilarated and brave, and determined to do something, say something to tap at their wall of carefully maintained propriety tomorrow.
9
The Buick entered a dream that wouldn’t pin to memory, chugging to life, tires kicking up gravel. Details of the night flooded back, her defiant Jacob fantasy replaced by a grubby sense of guilt and shame. Just a few hours earlier she had truly felt that sleep was not only unnecessary, but an indulgence. That a rift with your husband didn’t matter. Now the happy alertness, the expectancy that normally marked Thursday, was gone.
She climbed out of bed, her limbs dragging like sacks of sand.
She had never in her life, not once—not in school, not at home—woken up after having gone to bed fighting with someone close, and now she felt hollow and anxious. Asa did not usually come home during the day, but there was a chance he would now, after last night, and he couldn’t find Jacob in the house.
Funny, she didn’t even want him to come now. In the light of day, her fantasy became timid and shrank away. He’d never made a pass at her, never been anything but decent.
She would have to do what Asa had asked, tell Jacob that his presence had started to make Asa uncomfortable. In the meantime, prevent herself from thinking, stay busy: hang up the ironing, make the beds, wash out the coffeepot and wipe up Asa’s toast crumbs, the spilled jam, scrub the pan he’d used to cook the eggs he would have been glum fixing for himself, mop the kitchen floor. She took a bath and washed her hair and didn’t bother setting it in pin curls, like she normally would on a Thursday morning, but scraped it back into a bun, half a dozen pins to secure it. What mattered in life? Not hair, not New York, not a pointless infatuation.
You want, you want, you want; when you’re so lucky to have, to have, to have.
She was outside and everything was ready—easel set up, colors laid out. But her hand couldn’t quite decide where to start. She couldn’t get going.
Sometimes that was her problem: doing too many chores too quickly to get them out of the way, then being so geared up she couldn’t slow down and focus.
She paced, the grass stubby under her thin rubber soles, the ease of the night before not quite with her anymore. Suddenly there seemed to be so much noise! A constant bird racket and across the river, somebody hammering something, over and over and over again.
She knew better: when artistry seems most elusive is when you must focus, dig deep, and force yourself to think about how to give form to an idea that seems almost too vague to express. The worst thing is to give in to distraction, to chores that need doing, to anything that deludes you into pretending you are so busy you can’t focus on your work. But giant weeds—how had they grown so quickly, with so little rain?—were choking the nascent poppies, silent green pods that would fatten, then split, in a few weeks time, to unfold papery splashes of red and pink.
She found herself weeding the poppy patch, relishing the physical satisfaction of pulling and shaking roots, of dirt packed into her fingernails. She pulled gangly grasses and dried, overgrown stalks away from the raspberry canes, away from the rose border, until her palms bled from the thorns and prickles and then she threw up her hands. Gardening could easily be a full-time job; she would never be able to keep up with it alone. The ice wagon clopped down the drive, and she gave in to the cleaning fit that seized her after Happy Joe set the block into its tray and she saw, with new eyes, how grubby the shelves were, littered with flakes of dried milk, soft mold like a mouse’s fur starting to spread on a Florida orange she’d been excited to get her hands on, then saved so long she’d ruined.
She gave in to a hankering for a cup of tea even though she knew that the idea of a cup of tea—sitting still, calmly sipping—was more appealing than actually sitting still and trying to calmly sip. She didn’t even really like tea, she decided, watching it steep. She sat down with it anyway and spread out the morning paper. All bad news. There were two separate stories about the Dust Bowl “black blizzards” of April, witnesses describing how day turned to night, the thick dust clouds blanketing crops and sending birds and people racing ahead of it. Wet sheets in the windows, both articles said—everyone was pinning wet sheets over their windows to try to keep the dust from getting into their beds, their kitchens, their food, their eyes, their hair.
Wet sheets in the windows, a black sky rai
ning dirt. Her mind began composing an image: left side of the canvas—a cutaway, diagonal view of clapboards. The primary focal point three wet, gray, spattered sheets.
Sometimes an image was enough. It was all about curiosity, in a way. Could you make this happen? Could you do with your hands and a brush what your mind’s eye had already painted?
Can I make that view up through water convey, to the viewer, how frantic the grasping-at-life instinct must be, how precious the air on the other side?
It was enough to get her back to her palette. Then it was bristles into paint, paint onto canvas, over and over, and a good hour went by, maybe two, branches, bark, light, all claiming their place on the canvas and becoming something more than the sum of parts.
When the 12:30 train from Athol blew its whistle, she looked up. Jacob was late, unless the train was early, and the train was never early. Maybe he’s not coming after all, she thought with relief that was quickly replaced by disappointment. Then she couldn’t help but be expectant. She lost focus, putting brush to canvas only to realize she had no real intent, that her mind had wandered, that she had become overconscious of any noise that could be Jacob’s truck coming down the driveway.
But he didn’t come and didn’t come. At one point she slipped into the house to check the clock. A quarter after one. He’d never come so late, never not come without phoning.
He did turn up, an hour later, stumbling out of his truck to deliver the news of Dr. Proulx’s death, a death that was strange, that would have the town talking for weeks.
He found him, he said. Found him in his bed. “Dead,” he repeated, as if she needed convincing.
He had gone to Dr. Proulx’s office to deliver the painting. “Dottie said he was late and wasn’t answering his telephone. She said he was probably caught up on a house call, but I said I’d stop by, make sure he was okay. His car was there. I knocked and there was no answer, so I went in and that’s when I found him.”
Dez was thinking it was sad, but a blessing, too, to die of old age and to die in your sleep, but Jacob was shaking his head as if she didn’t understand.
“He must have taken it to bed last night,” Jacob said, “this rag soaked with ether.”
And that was the unfathomable shock of it.
Jacob explained how after finding him, he’d gone directly to Oberon’s but Henry Oberon wasn’t there so he went to the police station to find Dwight and Wendell. “They said he was upset at the meeting last night.”
“He was.”
“But surely not enough to do a thing like this.”
“No,” Dez said. “Although,” she added, thinking back, “he was acting odd another time I saw him.” She explained how she had bumped into him on the common on her way to meet Abby’s train. She should have paid more attention, but she’d been in a hurry. “He’d been drinking. No question. And that wasn’t like him, especially since it was morning. Ten o’clock or so. He was clearly upset about something.”
No, she didn’t know what. “Still. How does a person do such a thing?” Lie down knowing it was for the last time? What if there was panic, a too-late change of heart?
“Who can say what makes a person do a thing like that?” Jacob reached into his pants pocket and took out a package of cigarettes. He lit one and looked off across the water.
Random memories came: the wooden box of lollipops Dr. Proulx kept on his desk. The silver clasp in the shape of a badger’s claw on his black bag. The flu mask over his face the day he emerged from the sick room, like he must have emerged from countless rooms that terrible fall, telling her that Timon was gone and her mother was not far behind, and that she would have to be brave. She’d wanted to kick him. She’d run crying to Rose, I hate him, I hate him. Aware that he could hear her and feeling guilty then, because really, all he’d ever been to her was kind, and his only son had died too, somewhere on the western front that everyone talked about, and his wife never came out of the house anymore.
From inside the house, the telephone began to ring. “Come in,” Dez offered. Who cared if Asa came home now and found him there? Everything had changed. “Or sit on the porch there, whatever you want to do. I’ll get us some water.”
It was Asa on the line, his own dismay so thorough he didn’t register Dez’s lack of surprise as he filled her in. Since there was no family left to decide the funeral arrangements, Henry Oberon was organizing the details, he said. And a group of ladies were getting together in the basement of the church, to cook for the funeral. “They’ve already started. I’m sure they’d like it if you came in and helped.”
“Right,” she said in a noncommittal way. She would cook something on her own, bring it to the church later.
“Jacob Solomon found him.”
She looked out the window to where Jacob sat hunched on the porch swing, looking down at his shoes.
“Terrible,” she murmured, “what a terrible scene for anyone to discover.”
He was quiet a moment. “Let’s never go to bed fighting again.”
“No,” she said. She never wanted to wake up to that kind of sick remorse again.
Jacob set the glass of water she gave him on the floor without tasting it.
“Do you want something stronger? I can make coffee.”
“No,” he said. “I’m fine.”
He didn’t look fine. His eyes were vacant, fatigued.
“The shock of finding him will stay with you awhile.”
“It wasn’t the fact of finding him so much as it was realizing what he’d done. At first I thought he’d died in his sleep, and that sort of thing is a blessing, really.”
Dez said that had been her first thought, too.
“I wouldn’t have even found him if I hadn’t done the painting so quickly. But then poor Dottie would have found him. It’s better it was me.”
“True. Where’s the painting now?”
“In my truck. What was the point, I thought. He had no family and I hadn’t taken any money. Not that that would have mattered, I just mean—”
“You don’t have to explain.”
“You look different,” he said absently. “Your hair.”
“Oh, that.” Her hand traveled to it, lamely. Why did people always have to do that, touch their hair, when someone else commented on it? The scraped-back look made her face sharper, accented the arches of her eyebrows.
“It’s nice like that. It does something to your face.”
In his own face, she saw there was something she couldn’t quite read. Some kind of weight that she instinctively knew was distinct from the news about Dr. Proulx.
“I was kind of dreading coming here today as it was.”
She set down her own glass, sensing a great tide sweeping under her feet. Sometimes one bad thing followed another, over and over, and there was nothing you could do about it.
“I might be going to New York sooner than I planned,” he said. “I am, I mean.”
“Oh.” It was all her voice could manage. It wasn’t like she hadn’t known this day would come. But it was only May, surely he hadn’t sold all the inventory?
No, he hadn’t, he said. But he had seen a newsreel over the weekend, one that announced the same program Abby had talked about: the Works Progress Administration. The W.P.A. “The ironical thing is, Dr. Proulx mentioned this to me only last week. He thought it would be a great opportunity for me.” A similar, preliminary program in San Francisco had been so successful, the government putting artists to work painting murals on public buildings, he said, that the federal government was developing a broader program as part of the Emergency Relief Act. “You apply and if you’re accepted, you’re paid to paint. To paint. Easel paintings, sculptures, prints. It’s a way to earn money and get back to New York.”
She nodded with the restrained enthusiasm that good news, on the heels of news of a death, dictated, grateful for the excuse for restraint. Otherwise she’d have had to acknowledge how incredible it was to think that the government would act
ually pay someone to create art. Because it was incredible. “But how can you be sure you’d be chosen?”
“I think I’d get it. I’ve got the right background. I could make it happen.”
“But if the government is running the program, all the states will do it, won’t they?”
“There’s going to be a New England division, but getting back to New York’s always been my plan.”
“Won’t you have to be a resident?”
“My aunt lives there. I can use her address to start. I just need to come up with a proposal for my application, a good idea.”
“What about the inventory?”
“Al Stein’s going to take it off my hands. We made a good deal this morning. He gets a deep discount and I get enough cash to leave my mother in good shape for a while.”
“Oh.”
He gazed at her with something that looked too much like pity. Or maybe it was regret. “It’s an opportunity I can’t ignore, Dez. They’re saying we’ll be able to paint what we want. Of course, with the New Deal mentality, they might be wanting things that support patriotism, national pride, but we’ll see.”
Terrible how grief could bubble up like some compound in Asa’s back room. She forced herself not to blink, so her eyes wouldn’t spill. Through the blur, the fleshy middle of his lower lip looked the exact color of the mulberries that birds dropped on the back walkway, and she found herself wondering—anything to keep her composure—how to mix that shade.
“I know you’re disappointed,” he said. “I’ll miss our days, too.”
She was unable to manage a word against the rock lodged in her throat. How could she have thought she didn’t want him here, that she would be fine telling him to leave?
“What am I supposed to do, Dez? There are a hundred reasons to go and the only one that could make me stay is an option I have no right to.”
It was the first acknowledgment of what had been unspoken, and it was too much. She found herself running down to the river, mortified that she was running, that she had lost control of her emotions. She pinched the bridge of her nose to keep from crying, watching the river bubbling and sloshing over rocks and pebbles, like her painting, but not like her painting, which seemed so fine only an hour ago but looked nothing like this, suggested nothing like this.
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