The Ocean House

by Mary-Beth Hughes

  The small sketch of a woman’s breast, the dark dip of an underarm, so, out of the frame the woman’s arm was above her head, her body open. Five by seven inches. Owen slipped it into a pink plastic cover, like a kid’s last-minute book report. No glassine. No crate.

  The problem was the layover. In Paris, Hadley couldn’t help himself. He dug the sketch out of his briefcase and brought it to dinner at Chez Rene to show his old friend Anne Wade who knew everything about art. She gasped and said, Under no circumstance was he to take this a step further. He must surrender it immediately. She’d find out how and to whom, so nothing could hurt him, and as soon as she knew, they’d proceed.

  I leave the drawing with you, then? said Hadley.

  Oh, no.

  They kissed each other several times before parting. In the morning, Hadley’s head was like an anvil and he was suddenly ready to be home. Awaiting the two o’clock flight at Charles de Gaulle, he had an inkling that to carry the drawing in his briefcase was a mistake. In duty-free he bought a small bright-pink roller bag embossed with the Eiffel Tower in glitter and filled it with souvenir T-shirts and slipped the drawing inside. He wrote “Cecilia” on the ID card and dragged it behind him onto the plane with his duffel wobbling on top. First class was nearly empty, and he slept for most of the Atlantic, but when he woke up, he needed remedies for the terrible head, the aching eyes. The flight attendant was obliging and funny. They arranged to meet for drinks in the city. When they landed, she helped Hadley wrestle the pink thing out of the storage compartment. He looked at it sheepishly and said, Would you mind?

  I’m sorry. I really, really can’t, she smiled. You know that.

  But she pulled the sparkly pink bag right through customs anyway and left it for him by the luggage carousel.

  Once they were on the Belt Parkway, Hadley finally asked Boris: Did you get it?

  Couldn’t touch it.

  Was it a tip? Something like that?

  Yeah, said Boris. The tip.

  And Hadley understood what had happened. Anne Wade at lunch in Paris, telling the important friend, the useful friend, the one who would guide the drawing to safety. She’d talked all about a missing Derain sitting this very minute in a briefcase on Île Saint-Louis. And then she’d picked up her cell phone to tell Hadley the good news. But he was already gone. And Anne Wade could be such a stickler.

  Call Belinda or Lindsey. Anyway, she’s something at Oppenheimer.

  Don’t think about it.

  No. Hadley looked out and watched the curving swath of the sparkling choppy water, the extravagant sweep, the arc of the Verrazano rising far ahead. Then he closed his eyes, put a hand to his forehead. Owen was a prick. The woman, Belinda, Lindsey, was a toy, nothing. It was the gesture, the extravagance, the danger—for Hadley, that is—that’s what puffed him up. It troubled Hadley to know this. After all these years, his brother sometimes seemed like something sticky wedged against his spine. Unseen. Still moving him. So, who called them off? Owen?

  No.

  So?

  It was my mother.

  Hadley laughed.

  He didn’t want to go into the city just yet. Too much nonsense waiting there. While he was in Hong Kong, a newish girlfriend, Petra, had thrown his good pal Lonnie out on the street for no reason. Out of Hadley’s place, as if she lived there. And his old girlfriend, now friend, Keko, was threatening violence if he didn’t levitate—levitate? he smiled—the German menace out of their life immediately. Their life. Hadley laughed to think of her. All that lush jealousy. It was something he enjoyed. Maybe even cultivated. Boris looked back at him from the rearview and smiled. Yeah, funny.

  The traffic was beginning to choke up. Friday, late afternoon. Everyone eager to leave.

  Lonnie would sort himself out, like always. And Petra? Did she deserve the word “menace”? Sometimes she did. He called her Peanut and Pet and then he forgot her name entirely but only when he was very tired.

  Let’s head down to the shore, said Hadley. The bridge is right there, for godsakes. It’s lousy here tonight.

  No, no, no, no. Come on! Don’t be crazy.

  9.

  And now that she thought about it, why not? Lobsters. A place on Ocean Avenue sometimes brought them down from Maine on Fridays. She just might get lucky. She’d get a one-pounder for each of them and then a big fat one to make lobster salad to send back to the city with Cece.

  What was the very worst thing Jill Marks had said? What had been most insufferable? She wished she could call Owen right now and say, Oh, you wouldn’t believe! And the thread that stayed alive would tighten and knot to hear him. Hear him dismiss her slipping, wading into the thick dark past. Then he’d rush right off the line. Busy. He wrote to her but not often. She’d received a postcard around her birthday. Fifty-nine this year. How did she already know he’d forget sixty? But the image was a woman, a redhead, by Derain. Something rare and gorgeous was all the card said, but of course she knew his handwriting. Once her mother had asked her—but this was during the last, batty phase—she’d asked: How was Owen in bed? Faith had guffawed, then said to her own surprise: Not great. Well, you always had Hadley for all that, said Irene. Not a bit! said Faith. Not once. Are you crazy? But Irene was not crazy.

  Every once in a great while, Hadley still showed up in some rattrap of a town car, a thug of a driver at the wheel. Last time she’d felt him coming, almost a premonition. She was in the yard, thinning the cosmos seedlings she’d planted around a downed tree. A bit of fluttery pink to mask a raw stump. She looked up and saw the hideous car, this time a hornet-green color, and she walked right up to the end of the drive and stood, straddle legged, with a spade tight in one fist.

  Hadley nodded at her from the back seat, one bump up of his famous chin, exactly the same. He had the decency, she thought later, not to smile. The car continued down the road. And that was that. That would always be that. What was insufferable? All of it.

  But when Cece was a baby, when the summer was high and hot, the ocean was in the air all the time, like something to touch, Faith lay out naked in the yard on the grass, with the baby on her belly in the dead of night and watched the stars. Neither could sleep. Cece gurgled and sputtered, and Faith patted her tiny back, her rump. Faith’s belly still as squishy as a jellyfish and Cece paddled and swam. The two of them on the warm grass under the stars. The screen door creaked opened—she thought it was Owen—but it was Hadley who lay down beside her and put his mouth to her cheek just to taste her, just the once, and then he rested there beside them. Every once in while he hummed.

  How the Poets Learned to Love Her

  In the middle was the horror of her sister’s death. Her younger sister had been a thoughtful woman. Kind to their mother. Or was it a stepmother? But when she was alive a secret disappointment because she hadn’t amounted to much. It was embarrassing. Though once someone crosses the threshold of forty—and here there’d come a shrug—and the poets, who thought this “older” sister interesting, bracing, refreshing, and so young, shrugged, too, and smiled. What did they know about forty. They were facing bigger thresholds, unimaginable.

  This bracing, refreshing sister, married now to their oldest friend, was good at provisions. That’s what her husband said, procurement. The old poet called her Madame, which was sly and sexy. But he confided to the other poets, when she was out in the kitchen, whipping things up, that she wasn’t interested in sex. Not like he was. Not at all.

  But she told them when her younger sister’s marriage of only a single year fell apart, to a woman brought home only after the wedding—so, there were many surprises—the mother or was it a stepmother had made it very clear what she thought of this jowly person with the greenish hair. No need to speak. No discussion. After that single visit home, the new spouse, Priscilla, wept all the way back to Memphis.

  A few weeks later, the younger sister returned alone to the
house where they’d grown up in Long Branch on Honeysuckle Lane. The stepmother—it was a stepmother, a Ruth no less—still lived there, her home décor practice conducted in the paneled den where the girls had once watched westerns on the television, lolling on the sofa, on the floor. With snacks. The younger sister was that spoiled, that loved as a child. Maybe even a bit more than the older one. The stepmother, who now closed the louvered doors for her clients, had loved the younger one best, they felt sure. Though the surprise spouse—weeping Priscilla, the old poet dubbed her—had other ideas.

  The note she left for the stepmother was passed around and amended, edited, lengthened by the poets. What the original note said was: Please drink your coffee on the back porch this morning. It was written with a rollerball on a white-lined index card—a combination she liked to use for her work, when she was working. She enjoyed the crisp clarity. The no nonsense. She’d been, lately, a saleswoman of office furniture. It was pressured competitive work, and later the poets would hear from the older sister, a hotbed of drug abuse. Almost an occupational hazard.

  Please drink your coffee on the back porch this morning. So much consideration. The stepmother’s routine—the index card writer had imagined—would only be disrupted for the one day. From the back porch, which overlooked a fenced back garden and was hemmed by cyprus and hemlock and holly—­evergreens dense, overgrown—she was to see nothing but her own backyard. And the sound of the emergency teams, if they were lazy and slow at their work, would be muffled, too. The coffeepot was on a timer. The card writer imagined—the poets were of one mind on this—that her remains would be scooped up and transported far from Honeysuckle Lane long before the coffee began its first noisy percolation. The younger sister’s plan—and the older sister was angry, so angry that for a while her dinners declined—was to lie down on the roadbed in the dark and let a car, or cars, ride over her, as if no one would notice! The streetlights were inadequate to that kind of blackness. Her body would be just another slender line laid down.

  The older sister believed she’d begun shooting drugs the year before the end. This was the central problem, she said. The impetus. Priscilla’s doing. Priscilla wasn’t invited to the funeral. The old poet reported the details of this tiny terrible private occasion to his friends: The stepmother’s chignon fell crooked over the black collar of her dress. Pins falling. His eyes widened, and the poets smiled at him, tracing his thought. The curve of that falling hair.

  There’d been no argument from the priest in Long Branch, at Star of the Sea, about consecrated ground. The sister was buried next to her sainted father. The stepmother made sure of that. But fairly soon after the burial, the old poet’s young wife began distributing her valuables among the friends for safekeeping.

  Why? they asked.

  And she looked at them with tearful eyes, and they were struck dumb.

  The poets were struck, that is, not the wives and partners, the long sufferers as they called themselves in friendly solidarity. The poets saw a change in her, something more likable than her beef cuts and right wineglasses. Yes, she’d changed. And the poets didn’t mention this to her husband—the old poet, their dear old friend—because they knew how that would go. And they didn’t discuss it with the long sufferers either. The ones who had the day jobs and the health insurance. Or with each other, really, for a while. But each poet had his own private experience of receiving a well-wrapped package on a late afternoon. A wintry sunset already purpling the sky. The spruce a sharp and bitter blue. She wore a perfume for these errands. They all laughed when this fact was disclosed later. She smelled like pine soap and a bit of good fucking all at once. It was heady and subliminal until they talked about it. And it made this passing of the brown wrapped package—her jewels? her documents?—more exciting, and it inclined them to secrecy. But the tears and the look in her sad eyes that she counted on them—men who by everything they held dear were sworn unreliable—this is what made them loyal. Very loyal.

  Later they tried to piece it together. A time line. Maybe it really did begin that late winter just after the poor sister’s death, the February with the doorstep packages and the purple light. The sad brimming eyes and the smell of nice fucking under the bushes beside a newly paved road. Maybe that was when their petted, prosaic, and occasionally still bloodred bedmates first became expendable. But not all of them at first. The divide was drawn quietly, neatly. They just didn’t see it.

  The following year their old friend, the oldest poet, had a springtime death and that was right and sweet. The wives, partners, children, friends, fellow poets and artists, they loved him now for his excessive ways. The trysts, the serial negligence, the torqueing devotion to his children, followed always by a sharp rebalancing dose of vicious madness. Yes, they all loved him, because the trysts were long ago. And nowadays would be nothing. Nothing! The negligence, swept up and patched by all the many refractive newer days. The children long grown interesting and durable in adulthood. They only saw his beauty now: his roar was beautiful, his crying unanswerable need something deep and pure. No longer destroying or perverted or blind. They loved him, they surrounded his wide white bed, they surrendered their hearts as they always had to the greatness of his endeavors. This endeavor. All along.

  His young widow took a different view. Now the divesting was sweeping, immediate, and large. No more furtive packages in twilight. One of the wives, already questionable, said the body was barely cool before the holy bed was wrapped in decontaminating plastic and standing on end, leaning against the garage doors, out in the drive. A new fresh bed delivered by nightfall. The poets didn’t believe this slander, though the phrase “new bed” bounced by very briefly and was jotted down by one or two to be considered later.

  Their beloved old poet gone from this world, and there was his sad widow, head bowed on the threshold, lifting an arm to point, briefly, over there. Then dropping it again, stuffing both hands in the front pocket of her black hoodie. She was so young, the poets said to one another. It was what they could most read in the gesture. What they could each easily, easily imagine. Of course she needs a new bed.

  One of the wives, a long sufferer, a loudmouth, said, I’ll tell you what I see. Here’s what I think the gesture says: She’d like to take that sweeping, pointing arm and brush it over that entire house, all of it, and make it her very own. Now. Out with the books, the posters, the tributes, the prizes, the letters, for godsakes, the letters. She needs to erase and burn the hard drives. She needs a bonfire—at least—for the videos. A bonfire, a dumpster, a rat-infested garbage heap. A river of shit.

  The poets stared. This particular wife had always been reactive.

  She needs to burn the fucking place down. Get a court order. A bulldozer. She needs a plane to fly overhead and douse the place with a fungicide. And when she’s done—when the place is burned and dug up to the foundations and deloused and disinfected, when it’s no longer a superfund of his depravity­—­maybe then, she’ll have another holiday party. Or give you her secret packages. But don’t hold your breath. See what I mean?

  They did not. Would not. This loudmouth wife was being unkind.

  But like a line or a track was being laid carefully, invisibly, beneath them, the poets—who had long loved the partners, the wives, their earth-stomping dayworkers as much as they loved their own lusty heads in the stars—the poets gradually lost purchase there. They lost the thread. They were pulled in a different direction now.

  All the poets and certainly the young widow ignored the outburst from the loudmouth. But years later, when the poets tried to remember, when they were willing to discuss it, they had to acknowledge, just provisionally—because hadn’t she always been trouble?—this particular wife was the first to go. She had to go.

  But why? Well. They didn’t know.

  Was it the first Christmas Eve? No, the second. The young widow was expected momentarily. They’d made the place cozy and gentle. Soothing
. The poets had each, privately, made a luminaria to light her way along the dark path through the spruce trees. And there they all were, the paper lanterns popping up out of the snow. They’d written a verse or two. Also privately. Secreted in a special pocket. Right at the tips of their wondering fingers. But as the dinner cooled and the fire banked, the luminaria sputtered and the spruce went black, the loudmouth wife stood behind them on the back doorstep where they stood together, waiting, and she said, All of you, inside now. She’s not coming.

  Not so, said the poets.

  Look, she’s not. Why would she?

  They frowned.

  Listen. She took advantage of her husband’s fame. She used his connections, including you. She flaunted his good name, while whispering about the more repulsive aspects of his character. She hoarded his money and kept it from his children. She changed the will. She changed the deed. She changed the name on the final manuscript. She altered the driveway, the front walk, the front door. She took over his office and made it her own. She went to an artist colony because suddenly she’s the writer and took up his board seat, too. Now she’s an expert on artists and writers. Why would she need to come here?

  That loudmouth! She was awful!

  Just a game, sweetheart, and she’s good at it. It was the last of her observations.

  Very unkind.

  Maybe three or four years after the old poet died, the remaining poets received a group email from Italy. The young widow was staying on at the American Academy in Rome. She’d been granted an extension, her work deemed too valuable to let slip away. Her extension was in fact indefinite. She’d been offered the same suite of rooms as B–– And here she demurred. I’m not worthy.

  She’s really not! the loudmouth might have said, but she wasn’t on the thread. No one knew where she was these days. Some of the other long sufferers were gone, too, by now. Discarded. Some were only disaffected.