Maggie Pouncey

by Perfect Reader (v5)

  “But what about poor Madame X, who had her reputation ruined by Sargent’s famous painting? It’s not only the written word that can expose or impugn. Artists often make people un comfortable, but is that the worst thing in the world?”

  “Not for the artist.”

  Cynthia laughed. “Your father and I had conversations of this sort all the time, about the responsibility of the artist, and that of the audience. I’d never known anyone to have such a strong sense of the role of the reader, or viewer. For him, observing was not at all a passive act. He felt one could read rightly only if one read selflessly, he saw true reading as a selfless act. He hated the book clubification of American culture—even if it meant more people reading. The ‘What in your own life does this remind you of?’ approach to books appalled him. ‘Method reading,’ he called it. But then, you know all this from Reader as Understander.”

  It didn’t seem the moment to mention she’d never read his famous book. It was Flora’s turn to turn the talk. “How was it, again, you two got to know each other?”

  Cynthia smiled warmly, her eyes squinting as if she could watch the memory play out before her. “Through Turner and Hardy, really. They were our matchmakers, for which I’ll be eternally grateful. We’d known each other for years, in passing, as one does on a small campus, and liked and respected each other. But it was when your father was organizing the biannual Hardy at Darwin conference and he wanted someone to lecture on Turner, Hardy’s favorite artist, and I was already at work on the book. So he called on me. Our research had brought us to the same place at more or less the same time—looking at the English landscape in the nineteenth century—but we came at it from different angles. ‘Different fields, same farm,’ we used to say. We immediately had so much to talk about. We could talk for hours. I’d never felt I had so much to say and so much I wanted to hear from anyone ever before in my life. In our early conversations, I always left thinking, Oh, but we’ve only just begun!”

  There was the royal we, the editorial we, and, here, the exclusive we, suggesting Cynthia and her father were one, not two, a collective, two hearts that beat as one, one is the loneliest number. Had Flora ever had that kind of bond with anyone? Since Georgia? But it was false, such unity a fantasy, wasn’t it? Once Cynthia was off on the tales of their incomparable we-dom, she could not be stopped. Relish, that was the word. She didn’t seem to notice much, but she relished things. In her, Lewis Dempsey had found a rare thing to his breed—their breed—someone who loved life, who was good at it. She did not have to live in opposition to her moods, or in spite of them; no, her temperament allowed, abetted, encouraged life. She was hungry for it. As Flora listened to the stories of truly startling like-mindedness, and learned, through Cynthia, of this new, other father, she comforted herself by imagining she was pulling ever so gently on the two separate ends of Cynthia’s long magenta scarf.

  “The poems helped, too, of course,” Cynthia added, circling back, winding down. “He wooed me with some of those poems. Not that I needed wooing. I fell for him fast.”

  He had wooed her with his poems; she’d known of them for over a year.

  “By the way,” Cynthia said. “I brought along this card. It’s the editor I mentioned, Bill Curtis, his contact information. I haven’t heard from him in a while, so it might be worth reaching out. I’m not pushing, Flora. But in case you change your mind, or decide you want another opinion.”

  Not pushing, no. She slid the card across the table.

  Tuesdays had ceased to be Tuesdays. Her mother had stopped going to the city and so Flora had stopped staying at the President’s House with her father. Or was it the other way around? Flora couldn’t go back to the house and everyone knew without her saying. It was like the house had disappeared from her life along with Georgia. Except it hadn’t disappeared, and her father still had to live in it, and be alone in it every night. Or maybe he wasn’t alone. And her mother wasn’t alone, either. She’d made new friends and now had dinner parties to host or attend at least twice a week. Maybe she’d been right about the loneliness of being the boss’s wife, or maybe she had made it so.

  Her mother was daily life, her primary parent; her father a supporting staff member brought in for special events. He didn’t make the rules or know when she broke them. Flora was a messenger. “Will you tell your father I really need him to sign those papers?” “Will you give this check to your mother?” “Do you know if he’s finalized his holiday plans? It would be nice if I could make some of my own.” “She needs to change the addresses on her accounts—her bills keep coming here.”

  As a replacement for Tuesdays at Ponzu, she and her father started taking weekly Sunday-afternoon walks in the changing autumn leaves of the Bird Sanctuary. A path in the woods, nothing remarkable about it, just the usual Darwinian fare when it came to birds—jays and chickadees, cardinals and the occasional goldfinch. The walks were quiet, Flora sullen, her father wedging questions under the tight lid of her withholding. Never important questions, they talked around it, talked about the horseback-riding lessons Flora was taking, lots of questions about horses: Did she prefer palomino or pinto? How were they groomed? What did they eat? How high could she jump? Horseback riding was one thing her parents had promised she could do when they first moved to Darwin, and now she was doing it. She was going to do it with Georgia, but now she did it alone. But what her father did not know, because she didn’t tell him and her mother didn’t speak to him, was that though Flora went to the stable every week, and went to the tack room to retrieve the saddle and bridle, and led her horse, Sandy, from the pasture in his halter, and learned to groom him with the hoof pick and the currycomb, and was taught where to place the saddle pad on his haunches and how to tighten the girth and to coax the bit into his mouth with her fingers, she never rode. During class she stood outside the ring, leaning into the white wooden fence, which left imprints on her skinny arms, and she watched. No amount of coaxing by her mother or Tim, who owned the farm, could convince her to get on the horse. Tim even offered her mother her money back, but Flora liked being there; she didn’t care what the other girls thought, or not that much.

  “You look sad, Flora-Girl,” her father told her, the stupidest possible thing to say.

  “That’s the way I look.”

  “You should be nice to yourself. Be nice to yourself, Flora-Girl.”

  Was her father being nice to himself? Perhaps too nice. Perhaps it was he who should be less nice, less forgiving of himself. He was studying trees, learning all the names, and he loved to touch the leaves, and smell them, and feel the bark—“See how smooth the old beech is? No wrinkles to speak of”—and try to make her guess how old a given tree was, and tell her how one knew a fallen maple leaf from an oak—“Look how much narrower the oak is, as if the fat maple leaf had been stretched on a rack”—stretching his face long and making a funny noise. Flora didn’t laugh. Trees were trees, weren’t they? Shady, buggy, sticky with sap; good for climbing or not, terrifying or vulnerable. Their walks were boring.

  “Sometimes,” Dr. Berry told her, “boredom is a mask for other, less comfortable feelings.”

  But Flora saw nothing comfortable in boredom. She was often bored in the new house, her new bedroom (itself a telling anagram for boredom), with no paisley wallpaper, and instead painted a purple she had matched to Georgia’s bedroom walls so they could pretend they were in the same room even when they weren’t; bored to the point of death. Boredom was a kind of murder. If she died, her parents could be held responsible. So Flora went on the walk every week, never told him no, she didn’t want to go, and she passed messages between her parents like a spy, or a carrier pigeon, and their new routine carried them along, and she could only imagine her father found their outings as miserable as she did, but they never mentioned it.

  16

  Visitations

  WEEKENDS THAT WINTER, Flora stayed at Paul’s, stuffing her schoolbag with underwear, her toothbrush, a fresh shirt or two, a
nother pair of shoes, maybe. It reminded her of packing for her father’s after the divorce, as though Paul and her father’s house now shared custody of her. One never had the right things. Something critical always left behind. Larks went, too, though you could tell he was reluctant to be so long away from his post by the kitchen window—what if he came home, after all this time, and Larks wasn’t there to greet him? But Larks had little choice in the matter.

  Weekdays, Flora spent alone. Paul worked long hours, and she had grown to like her time on her own in her father’s house. She now knew the creaks and moans. She’d become expert at building fires and preparing simple, tasty meals for one, which she’d never mastered living in the city, that mecca of plastic and delivery. Fried eggs, sole sustenance of the fall, no longer sufficed. She made stir-fries and soups, salads and the occasional fillet. She spent her evenings reading before the fire on the gold chair, or in the study on the Shaker chair, reading her way across her father’s bookshelves, retracing the silences of his life. How many hours had he spent alone here with Thomas Hardy or Philip Larkin? More than he had with her—his fellow poets a more reliable presence in his life than his own blood. Flora learned she loved Elizabeth Bishop—the poems, the paintings, the letters, the stories; she learned to love the wicked grimness of Larkin. Hardy, though, she couldn’t quite get-why the great appeal? Hardy was still his.

  In spite of the weekend visitations, Cynthia’s question remained: What was the story with Paul? Something more serious between them had seemed to begin with the new year, when he was away in the city visiting the Apostles and his sister. He had called to tell her she was on his mind—but which part of her exactly? And in what capacity? The vagueness of his endearments left too much room for invention, and doubt. But what did she want from him anyway? She barely knew him. Flora hated people who said things like “I met him and I just knew.” Maybe some days you just knew you’d want him forever; other days you just knew what a colossal schmuck he’d turn out to be.

  A few times they went out to dinner and to the movies at the desultory, popcorn-grimed art-house cinema in town, but mostly they stayed in bed, ordering food from the Burmese place downstairs—green-tea noodles and mango salads. Was this to save money, or to stave off the public humiliation of being caught together, or was it simply hard to beat the pairing of sex and Burmese food? Flora wasn’t sure. But it contributed to the unreality of their relationship—if that’s what it was—as if it were a play staged weekly in Paul’s apartment, in which they were both actors and audience.

  Flora slept better the nights she slept in her father’s bed, but there was still the awkwardness of the house’s niceness, and after that first time she never invited Paul back. But Paul did not sleep well in his own bed, either—a double bed his feet hung off of, a lumpen futon couch rendered perpetually prostrate. One night she woke and found him in the other room, with a book in his hands, a finished crossword puzzle in his lap, his eyes strained and tired in the weak overhead light.

  “What’s keeping you up?” she asked him, and he smiled as though she’d made a raunchy joke, but then looked suddenly serious.

  “Waiting for the phone to ring,” he said. “Waiting for my dad.”

  And she climbed onto the chair with him, the crossword puzzle crinkling beneath her, and kissed him. Kissing Paul was one of life’s great pleasures. They could kiss for hours; they were Olympian kissers. When they kissed, what was happening between them made sense.

  His sleeplessness made sense, too, when later the phone did ring, waking them both, the bartender from the pub where Paul had worked years before asking him to come pick up his father and take him home. Flora could hear his voice through the phone. Paul’s father was in no condition to drive, in no condition to be alone.

  “Yup” was all Paul said, and he threw on his clothes without switching on the light—an expert.

  “Do you want me to come with you?” Flora asked him.

  He left without answering.

  In the grayness of the early morning when he returned, she could feel the sharp prod of his resentment against her skin, his silent accusations as he slid into bed beside her, his long body rigid, forbidding. Why did she not have a job? Was all she’d done that week read and take the dog for walks?

  “What are you thinking?” she asked him, hoping he would tell her he was thinking about breakfast or some such mundanity, but he said, “Your dad.”

  He could not understand her secrecy. Why did she want no one to know of the poems? Why wait? If there was an editor, if Cynthia had already done the work of finding him, and he was smart enough and legit and willing to pay money to bring her father’s work to the literary world, why say no?

  “Isn’t it nearly impossible to sell a collection of poems?” he asked rhetorically.

  He pressed: “What do the poems reveal? What makes them so awful?”

  And he was further baffled when she assured him that they revealed little beyond the way her father had felt about his own life. No lifelong habit of closeted relations with male students. No presidential embezzlement of college funds. No Internet pornography ring. No extramarital shenanigans. It would almost be easier if they did contain some shocking revelation, some specific humiliation she could point to and say, There, see that? That’s why.

  Paul didn’t ask directly if he could read them, but wondered aloud whether it was useful to have multiple readers—readers who could be more objective. He mentioned the fellowship he had received from Princeton but could not accept, and referred again to his friend the Apostle with the online journal, who would jump at the chance to get his hands on the Dempsey poems.

  “You didn’t say anything, did you?” she asked him.

  “No, of course not,” he said.

  She didn’t like the bragging, the name-dropping, the eagerness. Why was everyone so fucking eager, everyone she’d inherited from her father—Larks, Cynthia, Paul, and Carpenter—rendered drool-some, slavering, and toothy at the thought of all that was Lewis Dempsey. Like predators to bones. Obsequious piranhas.

  “How’s your father doing?” she asked, anticipating rightly it would be the end of any conversation between them.

  As winters went, this one turned strange, with stretches of days of sun and balm, days of sweaters and no jackets. The months were mixed up—February a lamb—and Flora let Paul convince her to buy a bicycle. And so they left the black-box theater of his apartment and went to the cluttered local shop where her parents had bought her bikes as a child. She bought an old white Peugeot that made her feel old-fashioned, and she bought a dark brown basket that hooked to the handlebars with leather straps, its very own purse. It was the first item she’d bought for herself in months; life in Darwin, if nothing else, cheap. But when Paul suggested they go for a ride, Flora resisted. Weren’t Saturdays for pajamas? Or matinees? Once out on her graceful bike, though, the whirring of the wheels below, and the eerily springlike smell in the air, she forgot her sluggishness; she was in the world entirely. The riding brought her back. She had loved biking when she was little, the speed and smoothness, the freedom from adults. She’d taken a pride in her bicycles as physical objects, as certain grown-ups love their cars, and had mourned the passing of each one she outgrew, first the tiny aqua-and-white one, the one she learned on, then the tough-looking quasi mountain bike with its black Velcroed padding on all the bars.

  The Darwin bike path—an endless tongue of asphalt lapping up the countryside—ran along the old railroad tracks beside the Bird Sanctuary, where Flora used to walk with her father. No self-respecting New England town was without one. It had been laid back when she was in high school, and such projects had come into vogue, bourgeois recreation covering up outdated industry. At the time, the transformation of the tracks had seemed a grave improvement, the best spot in town for chain-smoking remade into a place for healthy adult fitness and play. But now it comforted Flora with its reassuring flatness, so reliable—a small part of life to be counted on.

&nb
sp; Riding along the path, Flora spotted Esther Moon—her lost friend from high school, Esther of the immortal car—walking a small child along the side. Esther was pointing out some object on the ground to the child, who looked no more than three, and Flora could easily have escaped unseen. She surprised herself by slowing down. Esther Moon, a mom after all. In high school, Esther had been the girl who suffered every known teenage affliction—bulimia, date rape, summer school; she’d been diagnosed with ADD and charged with DUI. At one point she’d become convinced she had repressed memories of her stepbrother molesting her, and had a brief bisexual period. Beyond the drama, though, Esther had been funny and wild and that all-important high school girl attribute, a good listener. Flora had been friends with her, though she’d had a hard time believing Esther’s stories; her list of misfortunes had seemed more symptom than cause.

  “Esther!” Flora called as she came to a stop and pulled over to the side.

  Esther turned, a quiet smile of recognition passing over her face. She looked good, like an architect: in black, with well-chosen boxy-framed glasses, artfully choppy hair. “Oh, hey, Flora,” she said, as though they hadn’t seen each other in weeks or months rather than years. “Good to see you.”

  “You, too!” Flora said. With the bike and the child held by the hand and Esther’s breezy affect, Flora decided against a hug, but then Esther swooped in and squeezed her.

  “This is Lily.” She looked down at the child. “Can you say hello to Flora?”

  “Hello, Flora,” Lily said with alarming politeness.

  “Hello there, Lily.”

  “Hey, you both have flower names, isn’t that cool, Lil?” Esther said. The girl nodded a solemn nod. “What are you up to, Flo?”