“A better fate than the street portrait painter?”
She smiled again in acknowledgment. “Yes,” she allowed, “a much better fate.”
She stopped there. The silence lengthened. I looked around nervously. In a corner of the room, six unframed canvasses were stacked against a wall. I reached a hand toward them. My eyes begged the silent question. She nodded her assent.
The first was a watercolor of the island. The second showed three forest-wrapped hills that reminded me at once of my homeland. The highest hill was crowned by a mound of standing stones: a cairn, which was a burial, a warning, or a lookout point.
The third frame held a portrait rendered in oils. It was crude and, to my feeble eye, all but talentless, resembling nothing else in the room, but I was certain that Connie Alexander had painted it.
And I recognized the model.
“But this is Keith,” I blurted out in my surprise.
“Oh my goodness . . . how do . . .” She was equally bewildered.
“Where is he?”
She looked upset. “He’s gone. He’s gone away.”
“Now I understand,” she said. “Your accent. I wasn’t listening before. I’m much too fond of my own voice I fear. You are his countryman I now see. Yet your voice has been filtered by years. But you have deceived me, haven’t you? My house is of little interest to you. You must tell me why are you here. Please. And I would ask you to not lie to me.”
“I’m looking for him.”
She looked keenly at me. “But there’s more than that.”
“I’m running away.”
“From what?”
“That’s an excellent question,” I said softly.
ELEVEN
“We often sat here at dusk, watching the sun set on the water,” Connie said. “And I must confess that I had begun to think of the place in a selfish sort of way, as our own private place.”
“Do you have any idea where he went?”
She sighed. “I would surely tell you if I did,” she said.
After the pretense of house showing had been rudely destroyed, Connie and I walked across the road to the beach. We had the place all to ourselves in the early afternoon heat.
I sat against a tree and watched a tight pattern of waves stroke the shore as a small yacht sailed by, far from the shore, closer to the island, soundless, almost unnoticed, the rippling aftermath the only evidence of its passing.
A Milky Way wrapper floated near the surface of the blue water.
Connie found a beach chair and brought it over to sit beside me. Her eyes were distant.
“What do they call the island?” I asked her.
She turned and smiled at me. “They call it Foolishness Island. It’s really too small to justify a real name, but the locals called it that because of the distance it sits from the shore. It looks like an easy swim, but in reality it’s anything but. A very good swimmer can make it, whereas a drunken fool at a beach party will quickly get himself into trouble. Each summer we have a few heroic rescues, and every few years we have ourselves a sad and silly fatality.”
The sand was hot. Connie had removed her high-heeled shoes, and her feet were tiny and bare and impossibly white. I thought again of vampires.
Later we walked out onto the dock.
“The children play here after school,” she said. “The young ones mostly. Their parents tend not to supervise them too closely.” She shook her head sadly. “They are much older than we were, the children, when we were as young in years as they are. They are lamentably aged, by videos, and tabloid violence and earnest morality lessons from Oprah and the like. They’re sometimes more like little adults with their cynicism and their premature loss of innocence. Simple nature bores them terribly. I can often observe them from my front window.”
She smiled a sad smile then.
I thought of my study and the play park close by.
“They are boisterous and impossibly loud. But as the sun sets, their parents finally summon them home. The beach is a quiet and solitary place then, for a short spell, before the fires, and the marijuana, and the necking teenagers. I can usually take my turn then. I choose to sit by myself. I bring a few crackers, a slice of a red apple perhaps, read a letter, on occasion sketch out my next day’s watercolor.” She smiled ruefully. “Oh, I’m really such a fraud, aren’t I? The simple truth is that I as often as not stare at the trees on the other side of the lake for the longest time and lose all sense of time and place. Did you notice the first fall tree over there? That one impetuous fellow has changed his color already.” She pointed across the water. “A week ago it happened. The very first fall tree. If you return near the beginning of October the fall colors peak in this part of the country, and even I must confess it to be a quite lovely sight.”
She lapsed into a silence. Then she spoke again.
“Keith was your friend.”
“We knew each other a long time ago.”
“Were you perhaps lovers at one time?”
It was an unexpected question. “That’s absurd.”
She stiffened at the rebuke. “I’m so sorry. I thought it was perhaps why you . . .”
“We weren’t ever lovers,” I interrupted her. ”We knew each other very slightly.”
“I never considered that Keith was homosexual.” She spoke matter-of-factly. “Although I’m not especially wise in these ways. I was raised in an atmosphere of rigid discretion. I suppose he might have been.”
“I really don’t think that he was.” I cut her off again. “And I’m not either. I haven’t spoken to him in over ten years.”
“He was such a sad and damaged soul.” She fell silent. When she spoke again, it was almost a whisper. “He rose up from the dark water early one night as I sat here in my twilight dreaming. Thin and dripping wet and I thought then, rather a poetic figure. A little lost urchin. A waterboy. He had swum in from the island, and once out of the water he grew quickly cold. I fetched him a towel, one of the grandchildren’s, a brightly colored thing. He was shivering and I wrapped it around him. Without thinking I found myself holding him. I do remember that he shivered in my arms.” She looked at me. “He has the girlish look of a slightly fallen angel. Don’t you think so?”
I said nothing.
She spoke softly. “I so wanted to wrap myself around him that night.”
“You painted him in oils instead.”
“Yes,” she said dreamily. “It had been an eternity since I’d painted that way.” She shook her head ruefully. “What technique I ever possessed is now very nearly evaporated. But you know? It came out much better than I expected. A labor of love, perhaps.”
“Were you lovers, then?”
She shook a finger playfully at me. “Tut, tut,” she scolded. “Such an impertinent question. But then I did ask you the very same question, didn’t I?” She paused then. “But how shall I put it? He was young and soft and vulnerable, and I relished the perverse thought of him. I didn’t know him well enough to love him as his own person. He thrilled me. But in truth I could never be less than aware that I was an emaciated shell of a woman twenty years older, and a lot less of a passionate Southern ingénue than I’d perhaps like to be.”
“You very much resemble an old actress,” I told her. But that wasn’t quite right. “Not an old actress. An actress from the past. I faltered. “She was very pretty,” I concluded somewhat lamely.
She nodded slowly. “Miss Vivien Leigh. Did you know that in one of her last films, she played an aging woman in love with the then very dashing and boyish Warren Beatty? It was a very sad film.” She mused, “Perhaps it should serve as a warning to me.”
“I haven’t see it,” I said.
“I can see that I’m giving myself superior airs. I was in truth behaving in a slightly foolish manner with Keith. Perhaps on the surface it appeared u
nremarkable. For a whole week I sat here, each night, at my special time of the day. That wasn’t uncommon. But I was waiting for him. And each night he did come back to me. Sometimes swimming. And sometimes in the old leaky rowboat that sits on the beach. And I waited for him. I asked him once if he was hungry and he said he wasn’t but I was certain that he was lying to me. I made ham and cheese sandwiches and brought them to him and he ate without pausing for breath, so I knew he was close to starving. I don’t choose to cook as a rule, and sandwiches are as much as I can muster. They tend to be messy affairs. Yet he ate them up. He told me he was trying his hand at fishing on the island. He wasn’t especially good at it. He had trapped some too. Rabbits, mainly. He was, he said, a little better at that. But he was still often hungry. I think he was truly terrified also.”
“Did anyone else see him here?”
“I don’t think so. At least not when I was there.”
“Did he come to the beach at other times?”
“I really couldn’t say. He came to see me, and I confess that in my mind I hoarded him most selfishly.” She sounded almost proud of herself then.
“Why do you think he was terrified?”
She looked at me pityingly. “Because he was homeless and cold and hungry,” she said. “Anyone would be terrified in that situation. But I do remember now that we weren’t always alone. A young child came once. It was Beth Sanders. A lovely little thing. She’s my very special friend. I recall that she sat silently with us for a spell, with her little hands primly on her lap.” She smiled at the recollection. “Such an adult pose. Easily the pick of the children around these parts, I’ve always considered her to be.”
“I’ve met her father.”
She smiled at that. “An intense experience I would imagine. Will Sanders is an overly protective man. It happens to those who come a little late to the joys of fatherhood and only produce the single offspring. He’s also quite unhappy.”
We sat in silence for a while.
“Where can he have gone?” She asked softly.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Perhaps he’s just moved on.”
But I didn’t believe that.
She looked hard at me. “You don’t need to lie for my benefit.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I wondered about your plans,” I said. “I really don’t understand why you’re selling your house.”
“Oh that’s simple. It’s the two sets of twins,” she said laughing. “My darling sons have found a condo close to them that they have earmarked for my forthcoming dotage; they and their better halves seemingly share a rosy vision of safe retirement-living for their dotty, frail mother in a community of similarly enfeebled crocks.”
I looked at her.
Her face was deeply lined, her makeup was applied heavily, and I imagined her body beneath the dark elegant clothes would be parchment skin draped over brittle bones. She was without question physically fragile beyond her years, yet Connie Alexander’s spirit struck me as youthful, and as she spoke again she pulled her dignity close to her.
“But I have a secret plan to thwart the little darlings,” she grinned wickedly. “My silly boys surely don’t know this yet, but I have decided to return to New Orleans. The time,” she announced rather grandly, “to go home is surely come.”
“Was Keith a factor in this decision?”
“I must confess that he indeed was. When he left me I felt so sorrowful, but later I came to feel some sense of relief. I was quite close to making a silly fool of myself. Even worse, an old silly fool, and I’m sure you know the saying. What he did was remind me that the years, my years, are advancing. And when he vanished . . .”
“Yes?”
“Well. I did think, if something had happened to him . . . a very bad thing . . . then this place was spoiled now for me. It sounds foolish spoken out loud. Or worse. It sounds old, and so very fearful.”
“It sounds wise.”
She laughed bitterly. “A polite word for fearful.”
Then she turned to me. “But what of you, my noble conflicted hunter? What do you do now? Have I been a help to you?”
I spoke slowly. “I think he’s dead. Nothing you’ve said alters that thought. I think he’s dead and someplace close to here.”
“And do you think he died well?”
“Does anyone die well?”
She nodded once. “Quite so. I suspect that very few do. But was he one of the lucky ones?”
I shook my head. I wanted to tell her that Keith had never been one of the lucky ones. But I didn’t actually know that. I only knew the surface details of his life.
“Yet he loved.” She spoke reflectively. “And he was loved.”
“He had a small child,” I said.
“Yes, I know.”
“Do you have any children?” She asked me.
I told her that I didn’t.
“I can see in your eyes that you regret that fact.”
I said nothing.
“You are married.”
“Is that a question?”
“No,” she smiled. “More of an observation. I don’t believe you’re very happy. Can you lose yourself in Keith’s misguided life? Is that to be your intention? Perhaps you even imagine that finding out the worst about him will make your own life look brighter in comparison.”
“That’s really not my intention.”
“I do so wonder why he came here.”
“He was visiting a friend nearby.”
“It’s just that we’re such a trivial little coven of scared suburbanites. Oh, we think ourselves a little more bohemian because we let our grass grow and we no longer commute, or have our station wagons filled with children or Tupperware. But we only fool ourselves, don’t you think? Inside our timid hearts we are still so many middle-class drones. Keith was a much wilder soul than that. But perhaps he’s sitting alive on Foolishness Island, watching us now, enjoying our drama.”
“He could be,” I told her. But I didn’t believe it.
“Could it be that he came here to die?”
“Did he strike you as someone ready to die?”
“I’m being much too melodramatic and you’re simply humoring me. He was surely sad and tired. But not, I think, ready for death. Not just yet.”
“You don’t think he’s dead, do you?”
“No,” she said slowly. “On balance I would have to say that I don’t. But I do tend to err on the side of optimism on occasion.”
It was now the middle of the afternoon.
We sat for a while longer in silence, until a child’s playful scream split the stillness of the air.
“I think I want to return to my house now,” she said.
The tennis court was empty as we walked across the parking lot.
A mother and her two children had pulled up in a small car. She was a young woman, baby fat, her tightly permed brown hair falling over tired eyes. Her blouse and acid-washed jeans were both a shade too tight. Her children were young, of preschool age, and utterly determined not to get out of the car.
She turned and saw us.
“Hi, Connie,” she shouted with a tired smile.
“Hello Cindy,” Connie replied. “Can we be of some assistance?”
“Do you have a gun with three bullets?”
“That’s Cindy Clayton,” Connie whispered to me. I had guessed who she was, but, not wanting to reveal the extent of the information contained in the Tom Younger dossiers, I said nothing.
I remembered that she had three children.
“Cindy’s teetering on the edge of a divorce and a nervous breakdown.”
I was still contemplating the chosen number of bullets. One for her? Or for the missing child?
“The other little horror must be in some schoolroom pulling the legs from a
live frog. You can’t really and truly want children. You might end up with something abominable like Neil Clayton, the soul and the smart mouth of a sixteen-year-old trapped in a ten-year-old’s body.” She shivered for effect. “He’s quite revoltingly satanic.”
* * *
I walked Connie back to her house, and as we parted she wished me luck. She didn’t specify with what.
As I drove away, I replayed our conversation. I liked Connie Alexander very much. She was by turns mocking and melodramatic, yet, beneath her mannered façade, she was open and warm.
I did suspect, however, that she functioned on the far edges of Handle society and that if there were unpleasant things happening here, she might very well know little of them.
She clearly liked and missed Keith. Was it love? Could I even identify the affliction in others? Since I evidently wasn’t capable of finding it for myself.
I thought perhaps that he had had a beneficial effect on her. She missed him now. But I wondered if love, even a thwarted love, can somehow rejuvenate, because Connie Alexander was simply far too young for her twin sons and twin daughters-in-laws to fuss over, and to lock prematurely away, for safe keeping.
All this was about as prosaic and profound as I was going to get.
I pushed the random-play button on the CD changer.
Mary-Chapin Carpenter told me to shut up and kiss her.
It sounded like good advice.
I drove away from the Handle, past the dirt road to Sandy Weller’s house, and followed the edge of the lake for several miles.
I was looking for a boat.
TWELVE
Had I told Connie that I hadn’t met Keith Pringle in ten years? That wasn’t strictly true. I had seen him the once. It had been five years ago. We hadn’t actually spoken. But our eyes had met, and I think he knew who I was.
For seven dreary days in a February characterized by insistent cold and gentle rain my wife Patricia and I had returned to my home town to visit with my mother, who was then nearing seventy and had suddenly decided to wallow in a newfound frailty.
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