by Laura Brodie
David was the son with whom they sympathized, a young man intelligent but not cocky, attractive but not beautiful. David’s face was somehow more authentic than Nate’s. When the two stood side by side, Nate looked like an artist’s flattering vision of David’s flawed features.
While Nate had ruled his high school social scene, at home he was always second best. His B’s were shadowed by David’s A’s; his election as president of his college fraternity was a bleak lampoon of David’s induction into Phi Beta Kappa. Although Nate had earned a fortune as a Merrill Lynch broker, his wealth seemed obscene beside David’s idealism.
Sarah heard Nate’s car arrive as she stirred a pitcher of lemonade. She smoothed her dress, pinched her cheeks, and regretted, for the first time, the absence of mirrors in her house. Tucking loose strands of hair behind her ears, she opened the front door and was struck by the color blue. Blue jeans, a blue pin-striped oxford shirt, and blue eyes that looked, today, surprisingly kind. Nate seemed to have descended from the clear autumn sky.
“How are you, Sarah?” He brushed her cheek with a light kiss.
“Royal Copenhagen,” she murmured. It was David’s favorite cologne as well.
As she closed the door behind him she saw a silver Mercedes parked at the curb. He had switched cars again in the two months since the memorial service.
She took one of the three white deli bags from his arms. “Let’s eat on the patio.”
Nate had brought a small feast—roast beef on rye, turkey on wheat, bagels and lox, pints of chicken salad, potato salad, herb cream cheese, and tabouli. A few baguettes. Enough food for a week. Was it obvious to everyone that she had been surviving on peanut butter?
She poured two glasses of lemonade, and placed Nate’s on a napkin. “How are things at your job?”
He shrugged. “The market’s a nightmare. I’ve got folks in my office crying, like I’m the one who told them to put their entire life’s savings into stocks.”
Sarah nodded as she lifted a bagel. Compassion was the chief quality that had always distinguished David from Nate. David had an intrinsic desire to alleviate suffering; she had sometimes been impatient with his need to make things right for other people, people who had no care for themselves, or for him. But for Nate, business was business, and if a couple lost half of their nest egg, what could he do about it?
“And how’s Jenny?”
Nate had been dating a blond travel agent for the past few years. He liked to tag along on her trips to the Caribbean, sipping complimentary piña coladas while she assessed meals and maître d’s. The two had seemed otherworldy at David’s memorial service, so tan and healthy, death was as remote as the Arctic Circle.
“We’re seeing other people. She’s in Egypt this week.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” Sarah had thought the two of them might get married, Jenny being the only woman who had ever held Nate’s attention for more than a year. But Sarah could not imagine Nate in Egypt, with throngs of beggars jostling at his sleeves. Impoverished crowds were David’s fascination.
“What have you been up to?” Nate handed her the cream cheese.
For one brief moment she thought to tell him the truth. To say “I’ve been chasing your brother around grocery stores, and searching for him in bushes.” But Nate wasn’t the sort of man who inspired confidences.
“I’m getting back to some of my nonprofits. I told the college that I’d organize their Thanksgiving food drive, and I’m on the board for Habitat. We’re raising money for two new houses that are going up this spring.”
“So . . .” Nate smiled. “What are you raffling?”
Ah, thought Sarah, how well he knew the do-gooder’s annual routine. “You wouldn’t want any of the prizes. There’s a big Victorian dollhouse, a wedding-ring quilt, things like that.”
“The prizes don’t matter.” He pulled a fifty-dollar bill out of his wallet and tucked it under the tub of chicken salad. “Habitat’s a good cause, and I never expect to win.”
She gazed into the face of Ulysses S. Grant, thinking how the cash machines never gave out fifties. Nate must be going inside to flirt with the pretty tellers.
“Have you thought about going back to work?” he asked.
That’s right, volunteerism never counted as work, did it? She could spend weeks gathering food for the poor, but if she didn’t have a paycheck to show for it at the end of the month, what good was she?
“I’ll probably get back to some teaching next fall. I was scheduled to cover some British surveys and freshmen comp classes this year, but I passed them off to a colleague after David disappeared. I thought I’d take a year to figure out what I want to do next.”
“It’s important to stay busy.” His words were automatic.
Sarah shrugged as she wiped crumbs from the corners of her mouth. For her, keeping busy had never been an antidote to grief. She had tried it, after her second miscarriage. She had doubled her course load, turning to Shakespeare and Wordsworth for consolation. But she had been impatient with the students—their preference for Jim Beam over James Joyce. How careless they were with their precious lives.
So now she had taken the opposite course, allowing herself months of seclusion and contemplation—just what Nate would deplore. How appalled he would be to know of the many hours she had spent over the past few weeks, lying in bed reading and reminiscing, her movements slowing to the pace of a sloth. For the rest of their meal she ate in silence, barely attentive to Nate’s economic forecasts as she watched the unraked leaves lift and twirl throughout the yard. One last swallow of lemonade, and she put her napkin on the table and slid back her chair.
“Let’s start with the clothes.”
Inside the bedroom Sarah gestured toward the closet—“David was about your size”—but of course it wasn’t true. David and Nate were the same height, and in college their bodies might have been similar, but Nate belonged to a gym and kept his muscles as taut as his face, while David, a weekly squash player, had never chosen to battle the half inch of flesh that sagged over the top of his swimming trunks.
Nate did not mention this as he entered David’s closet. Jackets hung to the right, shirts and pants to the left; shoes were neatly stacked on shelves. “Have you been through these yourself?”
Yes, she had set aside the items that were sacred: two oxford shirts that still smelled of David—she had slept with them in the early days of his absence; a favorite sweater she had bought for his birthday; a leather jacket from college; the tux he had worn for their wedding; a cashmere coat from a trip to China—he had been so proud of the bargain.
“Take anything you want. Whatever’s left will go to Goodwill.”
She left him standing in the closet under a skylight while she walked to the dresser and opened the second drawer. From beneath David’s socks and underwear she removed a cedar box, lay it on the bed, and opened the lid. Here was David’s small collection of jewelry, filled with items more sentimental than valuable: the pair of silver cuff links she had given him for Christmas, his ring from Williams. She put it on her index finger and held her hand away from her face. Through her spreading fingers she glimpsed Nate in the closet, pulling off his shirt, his muscles rippling like piano keys.
She turned back to the jewelry. She would keep David’s Phi Beta Kappa key and the silver dollars he had collected as a child. Nate could have all of the extra tie clips, cuff links, and the gold pocketwatch that had belonged to their father. Beneath the watch she found a scrap of red silk, and unfolded a small treasure. Turning toward the closet again, she held out a gold ring and was about to speak when her breath caught in her throat.
David was standing there, smiling at her. He looked as he had ten years ago, gray hairs returned to black, dressed in the dark sport jacket and light blue shirt that he always chose for special dinners. As he stepped toward her, reaching for the ring, their eyes met, and suddenly his face was swimming, changing into Nate’s, standing there in her husband’s clothes. Nate�
��s fingers touched hers as he took the gold band.
“Dad’s wedding ring,” he said. “I’m glad David took care of it.”
He slipped the ring onto his empty wedding finger, then held up his hand for Sarah to see. “The shape of things to come?”
Her heart was still pounding. “The clothes fit you well.”
“I think I can wear some of the shirts and coats. I don’t like sweaters much, but maybe this one.” Nate pulled out a dark blue woolen sweater, handmade in Scotland. Excellent choice. She could see his expert eyes assessing David’s wardrobe, settling on all that was best, and determining that most of it was not worth keeping.
“There are some ties you should look at.” Sarah rose from the bed and walked into the closet, her left shoulder brushing against Nate’s chest. “A few of these also belonged to your father.” She pulled down a brass tie rack.
“Yes.” He laughed. “The fat ones.” But again he was fingering fabrics, reading tags, assessing value.
She had to escape this air of acquisition. “I’m going to get a box.”
Downstairs in the basement Sarah settled onto the sofa and closed her eyes, struck by how Nate had looked like a beautiful young David. Again he leaned toward her, reaching for the ring with those immaculate fingernails. When she opened her eyes, she was confronted with all the leftover furniture that could accumulate in seventeen years of marriage. A pullout couch, a minifridge, old lamps and end tables, a TV with a twelve-inch screen. In the corner by the window, a large white bookshelf was stocked with paints, pencils, chalk, a portfolio of drawings and watercolors, and strips of wood that David used to hammer into frames. An easel leaned against the wall, and to its left, a long bin overflowed with oil paintings.
Sarah walked over and began fingering through the portfolio. In college David had experimented with charcoal drawings of nude women—sleeping, bathing, stretching. She had never known the models, never asked for their names; they were probably the fleshy product of a young imagination. By the time he reached medical school, David had been embarrassed by his pages full of breasts and buttocks. He had switched to watercolors of elderly men, the paint running down their cheeks in folds of flesh pulling earth-ward. Sarah held one at arm’s length—a black man at a bus stop with drips of paint carving veins into his neck, his coat a bundle of wrinkles.
She had fallen in love with David during his watercolor phase. There were both living in New York. He had been finishing his first year of residency at Columbia just as she was wrapping up her senior year at Barnard, and they had met at a reception following a poetry reading. She couldn’t recall the poet’s name—they passed through Barnard in an endless processional—but she did remember her first glimpse of David, alone at the far end of the hors d’oeuvre table.
She could always tell when a man was watching her, ever since her fourteenth birthday when she had “blossomed” (her mother’s word) from a knobbly stalk into something rounded and soft. Overnight she had become an object of male assessment, a fact more annoying than empowering, because too often the eyes that followed her belonged to old men, or ugly men, or men with anxious faces whose only pleasure seemed to rest in the ability to stare. And so she was relieved, on that evening in May, to glance down the table and find that this particular gaze came from a young man in his twenties, neatly dressed, even handsome, who grinned when their eyes met.
She remembered David’s opening line as he walked over. “Toddler food,” he had said, nodding toward her paper plate filled with red, seedless grapes and Cheddar-cheese squares. With hand outstretched he had introduced himself, saying how much he enjoyed Ted Hughes (that was the poet, how could she have forgotten), and would she like to go with him to the café across the street where the food was much better?
Sarah had never before encountered such unabashed confidence. All of her college dates had been sweet, bumbling boys with apologetic gestures. But David was a twenty-six-year-old vessel of optimism, arriving on the scene at the perfect moment, because she had been slouching toward graduation with her habitual dread of endings, on the lookout for another well-worn path to tread. She hadn’t expected that path to include a man—at least, not so soon; it violated the Barnard creed. And yet here was this handsome doctor in training, emerging like her private Polaris, and yes, she would follow him to the café, and back to his apartment, and on to whatever promised land his gods had foretold. Four months more and they were living together; another year and they were married.
She supposed it was foolish, to have gotten married so young. If she had lived on her own for a few years, she would have been more prepared for her present solitude. But two things in life could never be scheduled—love and death. And anyway, the foolishness of her youth was happier than all the calculations of her middle age.
Sarah put the portfolio down and moved on to David’s recent work in the bin, oil landscapes with fuzzy boundaries between trees, river, and sky. Here were the Blue Ridge Mountains that stretched east of Jackson, fold after fold of purple and gray. And here was Stuart’s Pass, cutting through the Alleghenies that slanted in the west. None of David’s work was abstract; one could always say with certainty, “Here is a cliff, here is a chimney,” but everything was subject to motion and change.
She stopped at a painting of a dark-haired man in his forties—David’s only self-portrait, and not his best work. The features were correct, but the mouth lay flat and empty. Only the eyes were alive, challenging her with a slight sense of humor. Staring into them was like opening a porthole on a sinking ship.
She turned at a creak of the stairs, and found Nate watching her.
“David did beautiful work.” He crossed the room and looked over her shoulder. “When we were kids he was always drawing—everything he saw—people, plants, things in the house. He said he’d be an artist when he grew up.”
Sarah nodded. “He was still considering it in college. But he didn’t think he could support himself as a painter. Or he couldn’t support a family.”
But there had been no family. No soft-skinned infants. No baby hands with dimples where the knuckles should have been. No orthodontist bills or college savings plans, soccer camp or music lessons. Only an increasingly dissatisfied wife, turning inward.
“I think it was a cop-out,” Nate went on. “People who sell themselves short always use the family as an excuse. He should have stuck with his dreams.”
Of course, thought Sarah. How easy it is to romanticize the life of the artist when you’re driving your Mercedes back to your luxury condo.
“He was a very good doctor.” She flipped past David’s portrait, into more landscapes.
“Yes, but there are lots of very good doctors around.” Nate wouldn’t let it go. “Painting was his gift. He should have kept at it.”
Should have, should have—her life’s mantra. She pulled out a landscape, the view from the back of their cabin. To the right, a fishing pole leaned against the railing of a short dock. To the left, the river disappeared behind a row of sycamores.
“Have you been back to the cabin?” Nate asked.
“Margaret and I went out there the week after the flood. I had a notion that I wanted to lie down on the last bed that David slept in. You could see where he had been the night before, the covers were just yanked up, and the sheets were poking out.”
Nate smiled. “David never liked to make his bed.”
“Yes, so I tucked the sheets under the mattress and straightened out the bedspread. I folded the covers down and fluffed the pillows. I guess it was sort of silly, but Margaret was great. She helped unplug all the appliances and empty the trash. David left a lot of stuff like apples and bread and milk, so we had to clean out the refrigerator. And on the easel there was an unfinished painting of geese on the river. One brush was still soaking in a jar of water, like he thought he’d come back in a few days.”
Why was she telling him all of this? Her shoulders trembled and Nate stretched out his arms, but she held up her palm.
“It’s all right, I’m okay.” She wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand.
“Do you think you’ll go back there again?”
She nodded. There was something appealing about the cabin’s solitary quiet, the retreat from Jackson’s manicured fishbowl. “I’ll have to go back, because I left David’s paintings on the walls, and I’ll need them for the exhibit.”
“I got your note about that. When is the opening?”
“In about three weeks, on the Friday before Thanksgiving. You should be getting a postcard in the mail any day now. Have you ever seen the local gallery?”
“No.”
“It’s not much compared to what you’d find in Washington or New York, but it’s nice enough. The owner, Judith Keen, used to be a curator at the National Gallery before she moved out here. She’s a friend of ours.”
“Acquaintance” was more accurate. Judith hadn’t even known that David painted until she came to the house in August on a condolence call. Normally Judith shied away from locals who pursued art as a casual hobby. They came a dime a dozen in Jackson—retired women who roamed cow pastures with brushes and palettes and folding chairs.
Sarah had been surprised when Judith pitched the idea of a one-man show. The gesture seemed too sentimental for the high-brow curator, with her tight skirts and high heels and blouses all black and white like some sandy-haired version of Cruella de Vil. Her gallery was supposed to be a beacon in the wilderness, and the most David had ever done with his art was to donate a few paintings to local charity auctions. But Judith had oohed and ahhed so much when she saw the paintings in their house, praising David’s use of light, and insisting “I had no idea,” that Sarah had agreed, an exhibit would be a nice tribute.
She put the landscape back into the bin and stepped aside. “Find a few you’d like for yourself. And you should look through these photographs. They’re all from your family.” She lifted some albums from the bookshelves and placed them on the table beside the couch. “Would you like a drink? I’m going upstairs.” Nate shook his head and she retreated in search of Chardonnay.
