The Middle Kingdom

by Andrea Barrett

  But he was strangely calm. ‘There,’ he said, pointing at the finished painting with a brush. His face was green; green paint matted his chest hairs and pooled in his navel. ‘Look at that.’ The painting was wildly schizophrenic, my obsessive, overlapping boxes crowning his flares. ‘That’s us, Grace,’ he said. ‘You and me. How did we get this way?’

  I stood staring at him, open-mouthed, and he leaned forward and drew green circles around my breasts. ‘I used to want to draw you,’ he said bitterly.

  One of the Swedenborgian accountants took me in. His wife made up a bed for me in their spare room; his children, blond as dolls, were unfailingly kind. I stayed with them for four weeks, while I got myself a lawyer and started divorce proceedings and decided what I wanted to do, which was to go back to Massachusetts and finish school. I called the university admissions office and wheedled my way back in; I filled out forms and applied for loans. I worked overtime at the accountants’ and tried to save some cash, and I didn’t go back to my apartment until the day I was ready to leave the city for good.

  I went in the heat of the day, hoping Randy might be asleep, but he was wide awake. The apartment was littered with paintings and he was working on a new one, the stereo still blaring and him still not wearing any clothes. He was drunk that morning, not because he’d started drinking early but because for him it was still night. How long had he been awake? A week? A month? How long since he had eaten anything? All the paintings were blue and green.

  ‘You’re back,’ he said, when I walked in. ‘I knew you’d come back.’

  ‘I’m leaving,’ I said. ‘Going back home. I just came to pick up some things.’

  ‘Coward,’ he said, jabbing his brush at the canvas. ‘Drone.’

  He kept painting as I carried armfuls of clothes and books down the stairs. When he saw that I was almost done, he wrapped a towel around his waist and followed me to the sidewalk, lugging the painting we’d made together.

  ‘Take it,’ he said, ignoring the fat women in house-dresses who pushed their chain forward on their porches for a better look at us. ‘You ruined it. I don’t want to see it.’

  ‘You take it,’ I said. ‘It was your idea.’

  He tried to shove the painting into the front seat. The frame on which he’d stretched the canvas was bigger than the tiny car door; anyone could have seen that the painting would never fit. I got into the driver’s seat and started the engine, but Randy kept pushing at the painting.

  ‘Take it!’ he screamed.

  He drew back and aimed a kick at the bottom, shattering the stretcher frame. I pushed the broken painting out of the car, pulled the door shut, and drove away.

  A White Picket Fence

  When I came back to Massachusetts in the early summer of 1979 – hurt, discouraged, looking only for a haven – what I noticed first was the white picket fence framing the green yard that sloped around the nicest house on the village square of Sunderland.

  The fence had a sign on it that said ‘Room for Rent,’ and a room was what I needed. A place to lick my wounds, look over what had happened. Figure out what I’d done wrong. Outside the fence was the town’s main street and a leafy square marked by a pink gazebo and a granite statue of a soldier; inside was that white house shaded by old trees, stately and calm. I looked at that house and thought it was just what I wanted, just where I needed to live. Square. Solid. Respectable. I lifted my eyes to the second floor, admiring the shutters, and a woman threw open a window just then and started shouting and tossing things into the air.

  Red, green, black, pink, lilac, aqua, lemon. Soft bits of fabric – stockings, leotards, skirts, and scarves – spun and drifted and fell silently to the ground. Soft-colored dancing shoes with elastic straps across the insteps. ‘You shit!’ the woman screamed. For a second I thought she was screaming at me. ‘Stand there like that – why don’t you say something?’ She threw more shoes, more delicate clothes. They rained down on the man below her, who was standing so still that I’d almost missed him.

  ‘Eileen,’ the man said quietly. ‘Do you have to make a scene?’

  I stood just outside the fence, leaning on the black Volkswagen in which I’d fled Philadelphia. As I watched, the woman tossed out a white fur jacket, a long red dress, an emerald hat with a wide brim. A flashy dresser; perhaps a dancer from the look of all those slippers. She postured at the window as if aware I was watching her.

  ‘Asshole!’ she shouted at the man below her, who had his back to me. ‘Prick! Stupid, self-absorbed piece of stone!’ She threw out an armful of silky underclothes and slammed the window shut.

  I was close enough to hear the man sigh. He was very tall, thin but slack around the middle, and he stood in the drift of bright discarded clothes like a tree by the riverside. He was close enough for me to see the pale skin of his back where his shirt had untucked itself. I walked a few steps closer to him and rapped my knuckles on the fence.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said, as softly as I could.

  He whirled to face me. ‘Who are you?’ he said. His high forehead was creased with unhappiness. ‘What are you doing here?’

  I knew it was a bad time, but I couldn’t afford to wait. ‘Your sign?’ I said. ‘You have a room for rent?’

  He straightened himself and walked over to me, an aqua slipper in his hand. I rested my hands on one of the fence posts. He held onto two of the slats. Him inside, me outside, the fence between us; the sun burning on our shoulders. The day was very warm. ‘Who are you?’ he said.

  ‘Grace Martone,’ I told him, sticking my hand over the fence. Quickly I corrected myself. ‘Grace Doerring.’

  He ignored my hand. ‘Which is it?’

  ‘Doerring. Grace Doerring. I just got divorced.’ Of course I wasn’t, yet, but I’d filed the papers before I left Philadelphia and so that felt true enough.

  He shook his head. ‘You’re still so young. My wife …’ He turned toward the house, but the woman at the window was gone.

  ‘That was your wife?’ I asked.

  ‘That was,’ he said. ‘Is, was … hell.’ He stuck his hand over the fence toward me. ‘Walter Hoffmeier,’ he announced. ‘I suppose you want to look at the room?’

  I wasn’t so sure anymore; I didn’t think I wanted to share a house with this man’s wife. ‘I’ll come back,’ I said. ‘Maybe in an hour or two, when things have calmed down – I’m sorry, I wouldn’t ask at all, but I really have to find a place to live today.’

  He shook his head, his eyes fixed on the statue in the square. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. His voice was quiet, abstracted or resigned, I couldn’t tell which. He unlocked the gate and held it open for me, his manners as formal as a butler’s.

  I stood outside. ‘Really,’ I said. ‘I’ll come back.’ The scene reminded me all too much of how I’d left Randy – dramatically, publicly, all the neighbors watching. I didn’t want to get caught in this.

  ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Come in. It’s so strange, you’d think she’d toss my things – she could have just packed up her own. Why do you think she did that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘So come in,’ he repeated. ‘Look at the room. She won’t act so crazy if there’s someone else around.’

  I stepped inside the fence. The flagstone path was cool, shaded by a pair of tupelos. The front door was old and made of oak; it was also locked. Walter stood with his hand on the brass knob, turning it again and again. ‘Really,’ he muttered. ‘Really.’ He turned to look at me. ‘Come around to the garage,’ he said. ‘I’m sure the kitchen door’s open.’

  Eileen had either forgotten the kitchen door or had failed to reach it yet. I heard her upstairs, slamming doors and drawers.

  ‘We usually rent the extra room to a student,’ Walter said, as he led me through the kitchen and the living room. The walls were tan, the upholstery beige, the curtains cream; suburban good taste overlaid with filth, which somehow, even then, I suspected had come from Eileen. I couldn’t b
elieve Walter was showing me this.

  ‘I am a student,’ I said, trying to fix on what was important. ‘Or I will be this fall. I did my first two years a while ago and now I’m going back.’

  ‘Oh?’ Walter said. He stood at the foot of the stairs, perhaps afraid to go up. On each step was a pile of magazines: first Scientific American, then Science, then Nature, then more I couldn’t see. And yet he struck me as a man who, in better times, would have filed them in matching binders.

  ‘That’s right,’ I said, with more firmness than I felt. ‘My student loan came through, and they’re giving me credit for all the courses I completed. All I have to do is find a summer job and some part-time work for the fall. And a cheap place to live.’

  ‘You don’t have a job?’ he said.

  ‘Not yet.’

  He picked at the chipped stair railing and listened to the noises above us: crash, bang, rustle. He shook his head. ‘That woman,’ he said. ‘Can you cook?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, caught by surprise. ‘I was married for almost three years.’

  ‘Do you like being outside?’

  I didn’t know what he was getting at. ‘How do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘Outside,’ he said impatiently. ‘Plants, animals, rivers, fish – you know. The woods. Camping. Have you ever slept outside?’

  ‘Once or twice,’ I told him, stretching the truth.

  ‘Maybe we can work something out,’ he said. And with that he turned and started up the stairs, leaving me to follow. The master bedroom was at the top of the stairs, with Eileen inside, wild-eyed and furious and muttering to herself. She wasn’t crazy – I knew how crazy looked – but she was pissed. Her drawers were open and her closets were empty, stripped of the things she’d thrown from the window. Eileen was pacing back and forth and trying at the same time to fix her hair and do her face. She had a tube of lipstick in one hand and a hairbrush in the other. I was standing in the hall behind Walter, and so she didn’t see me at first.

  ‘… and I mean it this time,’ she was saying, either to Walter or to herself. ‘This is it, this isn’t like the other times, I’m not coming back this time. I’m going to Boston. I have a lawyer. I have a life. I’m not putting up with this shit anymore and there’s nothing you can do …’

  She broke off and looked over Walter’s shoulder and then pointed her lipstick accusingly at me. ‘Who are you?’ she asked.

  I wanted to see how Walter would manage this. Quietly, he said, ‘She’s a student at the university. She’s come to look at the room.’

  Eileen pushed him aside to get a better look at me. ‘Your student?’ she asked, eyeing me up and down. I let my stomach out and dropped my chin so that a fold of flesh appeared below my jaw, knowing I wasn’t a threat to any decent-looking woman. Eileen’s face relaxed.

  ‘No,’ Walter answered. ‘She’s just an undergraduate. She’s majoring in – what did you say you were taking?’

  ‘Early childhood education,’ I said vaguely. ‘Or maybe art education, or maybe art … that’s what I used to do. Art. I thought maybe I’d try teaching art to kids …’

  I was nervous, I was rambling. Walter cut me off. ‘Whatever,’ he said firmly, and then he turned to Eileen. ‘You’re really leaving?’ he said. ‘Again?’

  ‘For good,’ she said, pacing the room as she drew on a pair of angry red lips. ‘Absolutely permanently for good.’

  ‘Fine,’ Walter said, with the first trace of anger I’d seen him show. ‘Fuck yourself. Go. You’re crazy if you think you can jerk me around like this again – I’ve had it.’

  ‘I’ve had it,’ Eileen said, mimicking Walter’s tight, trembling voice.

  Walter clamped his teeth together and turned and headed down the hall without another word. I stared at his back – was that it? Surely he meant to do something else. Randy – even Randy – had painted my breasts green, and although that hadn’t been an attempt to keep me at least it had been a response. Eileen looked up and caught me watching Walter. Her hair was cut in a shag and she was dressed like a student, but I saw in her face that she wasn’t so young. Thirty, thirty-five – she had a fan of fine wrinkles around her eyes and her neck was gaunt. She picked up a purple satin pillow and clutched it to her chest. ‘Trot after Walter, fat girl,’ she said, waving me away.

  I blushed and did as she said. Walter stood at the end of the hall, waiting patiently at a door set perpendicular to the others. When I reached him, he opened it.

  ‘The room’s above the garage,’ he explained. ‘So it’s a little cool in the winter, but I’ll give you a space heater and an electric blanket. The other students have liked it fine.’

  I shuffled past him and looked in. My room – a narrow bed covered with a rose-print quilt, a desk, a chair, a reading lamp, a closet, and a small counter with a hot-plate and a sink. Cream-colored walls that sloped toward the roof and a worn hooked rug worked in faded pinks and greens. My room.

  ‘There’s a bathroom next door,’ Walter said. ‘We don’t use it. The hot plate is only for boiling water, but you may use the kitchen downstairs, within certain guidelines. We – I – travel a lot, and you’d be expected to look after the house when I’m away. That’s why we rent this.’

  I was faint with hope, giddy with desire. I wanted this room more than I’d wanted anything in years.

  Walter ticked off the rules on his fingers. ‘No loud music,’ he said. ‘No male visitors. No visitors at all when I’m away. No smoking. No drugs.’

  ‘No problem,’ I said. ‘All I want is a quiet place to work and sleep.’ I took a breath and asked the big question. ‘How much?’

  ‘Depends,’ he said.

  ‘On what?’

  He looked down the hall. Eileen had finished stomping around and was headed for the stairs, her purse and her purple silk pillow under her arm. ‘She’s leaving,’ I pointed out, thinking, Go. Go after her. Do something.

  ‘I know,’ he said. He crossed his arms over his stomach, holding his elbows in his hands, and when I looked at him quizzically he shook his head. ‘What am I supposed to do?’ he said. ‘She’s crazy. She hates men. This is the fourth time she’s taken off, and I hope to hell she stays away this time. You can’t imagine what it’s been like, living with a loony-tune who blames you for every goddamn thing in her life. That women’s group of hers, they’ve got her so twisted around she thinks I’m the anti-Christ.’

  He sighed and ran his hand over the back of his head, where the hair was just beginning to thin. We stood there in the silence, looking away from each other and listening to the house empty itself. We heard the front door slam, the click of heels down the flagstone walk, the soft rustle of clothes being gathered into bags. The fence gate creaked, opening and closing. Walter parted the white curtains and stared out the window until the car below started and drove away.

  ‘She did it,’ he said, his voice full of disgust. ‘She’s gone. Good riddance.’

  ‘I have to go too,’ I said nervously. ‘I’ll call you later, maybe, and we can talk some more about this …’

  He sighed again and squared his shoulders, and after a minute more he turned to face me. I couldn’t tell if the lines in his face were from pain or age. ‘I’m going to need some help here,’ he said. ‘Cleaning, laundry, perhaps some shopping and cooking. Would you be interested in doing that in exchange for rent?’

  It was too strange to be true. I knew I shouldn’t have seen any of this, shouldn’t be in this house, but I had hardly any money and no other place to live. I leapt on his offer before he could change his mind, before I could think what I was getting into.

  ‘I’d love to,’ I said. ‘I’ll keep to my room, you’ll hardly know I’m here, and whatever I find for a summer job won’t get in the way of the housework.’

  ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Move in whenever you want.’ He reached down and straightened the rose-print quilt on the bed, which was already perfectly taut.

  A Curtain Lined with Bats

&nbs
p; I spent most of that first summer at Walter’s house alone.

  Walter and his herd of graduate students stayed at his research station at the Quabbin Reservoir, collecting numbers: how many yellow perch lived in a certain part of the reservoir? How many trout? How many bass? How many square feet of algae, how deep the mud, how warm the water, how high the levels of pesticides, organophosphates, dissolved oxygen and nitrogen; along the shores and in the surrounding woods, how many rabbits, voles, moles, shrews, hawks? Each member of Walter’s team was tracking something, and all of them generated numbers. Walter brought the numbers to me.

  I was working for him – my title was ‘Laboratory Assistant’ and he’d arranged to pay me for the summer from his research grant. Once or twice a week, he drove the twenty miles back from the reservoir to pick up some clean clothes and drop off his raw data. I didn’t understand his work, that first summer, and I blinked vaguely when he explained how he hoped to feed all his data into the university computer and build a simulation model of the reservoir’s ecosystem. But I didn’t have to understand. All I had to do was to transcribe the data he brought me each week onto index cards and careful graphs. Walter praised my neatness and accuracy and I was neat – I had my Rapidograph and some lettering templates, and the graphs I made were better than he’d ever had.

  When fall came and I started school, Walter encouraged me to study biology rather than art. ‘You already know how to draw,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you learn something new? You have a real flair for biology.’ I was so lonely then, so eager for praise from anyone, that I took his advice. I took general zoology, introductory chemistry, and botany my first semester; when spring came I took genetics and physics and math. The work came easily to me, more easily than I expected, and by my second summer I was beginning to understand what Walter did. My hard work was repaid, then – Walter asked me if I’d like to join the summer team at the reservoir. This was an honor, he let me know; I’d be the only undergraduate there. And because the two of us had shared a house all year as innocently as siblings, sticking to our separate rooms even though I cooked, cleaned, did laundry like a wife, I didn’t think to question Walter’s motives.