The Fountain of St. James Court; Or, Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  She paused to look at fish swimming in a small rock-lined pond. Even the fish in their orange and gold scales seemed dressed for autumn. Often cats perched there watching the fish, too. Kathryn had her favorite fish, a white, angelic one with a long, transparent tail. But there was something to be said for the brilliant red-orange fish, too, scales bright as jewels, reflective. The fish flinched when the point of a fallen maple leaf dimpled the surface of the water and settled there, flatly, to float.

  There was Daisy’s cat Lillian, a walking puffball, like the cat Humphrey had had to leave behind in Atlanta. Marie Antoinette would have liked Lillian; she might have used the cat to powder her face in a whimsical moment. Kathryn imagined Daisy’s quick laugh at such an idea, and the light that would flash behind her brown eyes. She wished she would see Daisy now. Daisy had sent her an e-mail message, but in her effort to finish the first draft she had postponed answering.

  She rounded the west end of Belgravia and started eastward, past the house with the split double door, bronze fox heads on each against the red paint of the doors.

  Without once discussing it, Daisy and Kathryn agreed about certain assumptions of value: the fragility of every life, for example. Nonetheless, Daisy was unremitting in her moral judgments. Anyone who hurt another person was evil. But who knew the extent of extreme provocation? Ryn was more equivocal. Who knew the torment adolescents suffered from bullying? Ryn thought of her own Humphrey, his difficulties in high school where he was teased and bullied. Sometimes, as an adult, he bullied her a bit, verbally. But Humphrey had lived through the hard school days, though sadly another boy had not. What a tragedy that the two boys in the same high school had not known each other, could not have taken comfort in their sameness. At the university, Humphrey had found his own energy, freedom. I just realized, he had told his mother, my name has the word “free” in it.

  She had felt proud of him. But how to keep him safe? From HIV or AIDS, from violence even within the community, from hatemongers among the straights, from predators, diseases, or accidents of any sort? She was thankful he had a stable partner, and they had been married by a Unitarian minister.

  There in her tiny yard on Belgravia Court was a neighbor who always chatted with Ryn at the Fourth of July picnic on the green, whose name she could not remember. “Beautiful day,” the woman said and smiled.

  “Really lovely,” Ryn echoed. Ryn thought the neighbor might be a nurse; she might have known Mark professionally. Ryn was glad the woman had not asked about him.

  Before marrying #3, she had tried to express hesitation: married people take each other for granted, she had said. But he had insisted it would not be so. She had wanted their happiness, and he seemed more stable than #1 or #2. The fact that he was an admirable neurosurgeon, well respected in town, had appeal. With lovely eyes. What person, lying on the operating table, might not have looked up into his gentle brown eyes, at the last moment before the anesthesia set in, and felt some form of love?

  She missed his large, warm body at night. My heater, she had called him affectionately when she cuddled up to him. Six and a half feet of him. And his soft, curly hair, such a pleasure to touch. She had always wished her own hair was curly; in Mark she had had the curls vicariously.

  But often, like many eminent men, he was oblivious to anything but the needs of his own ego. Like Woolf’s Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, he needed constant praise, doting admiration. The young interns gave him a lot, but it was never enough. She had banked on his loyalty, his integrity. Of course he was tempted by the young female interns in surgery; their lovely eye makeup visible over their surgical masks must have been alluring. She was still proud of the years of his loyalty, even if it had turned out badly.

  Book had followed book: that was the problem. At parties, people soon wanted to talk to her instead of to him. After one party he had complained bitterly that a woman had said, “Surgery? How gruesome!” and turned away. She had promised him not to talk any longer than politeness dictated to anyone who brought up the subject of her own work. At that time, he had been loyal, and so would she be. They would grow old together.

  Eventually she noted he had no patience with any illness she might have. He left the house as soon as possible whenever she was sick. Perhaps it was natural that he tried to avoid carrying germs to his patients, she had tried to persuade herself. Perhaps her little indispositions lacked the drama to make them of compelling interest. She felt shunned. At parties, or even at a restaurant, if anyone else was in the room or at the table, he never spoke to her or even looked at her. He wanted to erase her.

  As a volunteer, he liked to go to jungles in Central America to operate. He did all kinds of surgery, not just brains, there: cleft palates, clubfeet, cysts. The unusual settings added spice to the routine, he said. He liked to serve without boundaries, and the nurse from Guatemala who lived on the Court encouraged him to visit her country. One day in the jungle he realized he was looking into dark eyes he could not deny. Someone who said she would tutor him in Spanish, show him a pristine waterfall, the elusive quetzal of the dangling tail feathers. Her body. A mole that worried her. It was not really sex, he had said, but we touched each other. She cared about my feelings. We could talk in Spanish. She was the one who started it. Not his fault. When they returned to Louisville, she had asked him to look at the mole again.

  Ryn almost chuckled; she shook her head knowingly from side to side. Then the idea lost its humor. She sucked in her gut and lifted her head. While she walked, she ought to work on her posture.

  Yes, Ryn admitted her failure. Her loss. Failures, losses.

  After the divorce, they had tried to remain friends, but ultimately he withdrew. Too painful, she knew. She didn’t blame him for that. At their last supper, he had talked for seventy-five minutes about what he had been doing. She had asked questions; she had wanted to know about his recent travels, the difficult operations he had performed. She had always liked hearing him speak the Latin names for the parts of the brain; it was a kind of poetry. Dessert was over; she had asked her last question. She looked at the smear of chocolate, dollops of meringue, and crumbs of piecrust left on her plate. Leftovers. He had scraped his clean.

  “How have you been?” he asked nervously.

  “I enjoyed seeing my brothers,” she said.

  “How are they?”

  His questions dwindled. After five minutes, he announced that he needed to go.

  It had been that way for a very long time. For him, seventy-five minutes of focused chatter; for her, less than four. He wasn’t interested in her; sharing something of his life with her was an act of generosity on his part. In his own mind, he was not responsible in any significant way for any injury inflicted on anyone. Everyone made surgical errors at times, but for Mark there were always mitigating circumstances. It was a mental habit he carried from the operating theater into his life; he was never really accountable for causing serious damage.

  Had she wanted that last post-divorce dinner with #3 to be a disappointment? Had she made it happen that way to reassure herself that it was not merely Mark’s infatuation allowed to go too far but the whole quality of their own relationship that had made the marriage a kind of death to her spirit? Yes, she probably had. “You deserve the loneliness,” she said to herself. She muttered the sentence out loud, with a stern German accent: “You deserf the loneliness.”

  You deserf the rudeness. An eminent professor, the guru of James’s (#1) philosophy department, had spoken unpleasantly to a visiting lecturer. Well, the visitor had said, I don’t know if I want to answer a question couched in such rude terms. The reigning professor had leaned forward and hissed into the face of the university’s guest, You deserf the rudeness.

  How James as a graduate student had liked to play that role, grinning impishly; how he relished the German accent, the professorial authority that was never to be his, despite his brilliance.

  The universities never divorced her, never disappeared into the g
round. They promoted her, raised her salary, expressed appreciation, sometimes gave her honors unsought. She supposed many of her colleagues took refuge from the stress of academia in their marriages, but she had found stability in teaching, in her students, open and eager, when life closed down on her. (She passed the façade of Daisy and Daniel’s house, its lovely French windows behind wild rhododendron shrubs.) They were the exception among her friends, long and happily married, their children, likewise; they were now blessed with young grandchildren.

  Here was the pink palace. A tall, turreted building painted long ago the color of Pepto-Bismol, where St. James crossed Belgravia before continuing to busy Hill Street. The three-story, towering house had once been a Victorian men’s club—cigars, newspapers, business suits, probably prostitutes. During her tenure on the Court, she had liked two gay men who used to live there, both of them smart and sweet, full of friendship freely offered. They had been kind to Humphrey, like older brothers, when he was in high school and most in need of friendship.

  Like her own house, the pink palace was one of only a handful of homes that had private swimming pools out back. She knew her pool should have been already covered for the coming winter. She was paying for a lot of gas calories because just maybe Yves had said, over a month ago (had he forgotten?), he would like to go for an autumnal swim in well-heated water. For many days, she had patiently delayed her writing to net out the yellow cottonwood and brown oak leaves floating on the surface of the water. Once waterlogged, the leaves sank to the bottom and turned black. Left uncared for, the pool could probably turn into a bog in just one season.

  A happy couple were carrying groceries just ahead of her and having their own intimate conversation, glancing at each other as they spoke. Would she want to say to them: I finished the first draft of my novel; I’m at loose ends. What’s wrong with me, divorced three times? How do you two do it? Would she just blurt out something inappropriate if she paused in her walking?

  The woman, pretty and intense, Ryn now recognized as the daughter of a well-known sculptor, now deceased, and an artist herself; her partner, white haired, keen faced, and dashing, was a psychologist. Ryn wondered what it would be like to sit in his office. Yes, I truly enjoy my work. My writing, she would say, and he would ask if she felt compelled to write. I wish I did, she would answer honestly, and he would look at her a bit quizzically.

  Failing to fall asleep at night, when quite young, sometimes she entertained herself by asking, What was I just thinking? And before that? And before that? She pictured a literal train of thought where each subject was represented as an open gondola carrying a load of details. She would ask herself what had linked the cars; how had one thought led to another; what was the spark in one thought that caused another to flare. She could trace the line of thought back to five or six subjects; never more, not even when she tried to keep a running tally as she waited for sleep. It interested her, the private movement of the mind.

  Now she had rounded the east end of Belgravia Court; she looked across the grassy median again at the magnificent châteauesque house with a double staircase, each side scrolling down with a slight twist to the sidewalk; it was as much a sculpture as a functioning staircase. A breathtaking façade. Yes, she had taken Mark for granted, focused too much on her writing, her students, her friends, but she had not betrayed his trust.

  When she had published her first slender book, she had looked at a basketball stadium filled almost to capacity with eighteen thousand fans and thought, If only each one of them would read my book. (Only a thousand copies had been printed.) She had thought it impossible to have as many readers as spectators at a single college game. But now it was many multiples of that. Not a university stadium full of readers, but a whole city’s worth, and more.

  When her breakthrough had come with her fifth book, she had asked the university president to introduce her at halftime at the basketball game. A person of true generosity, he had done just that, with only a slight glimmer of curiosity about her request in his nice eyes.

  Taking her October walk, she laughed at herself and felt lighter. No need to be gloomy. She exchanged a friendly nod with a tall African American jazz pianist who lived on Belgravia. No need to think of the past, or of marital failures. Late last night, she had finished the draft of another novel. Next she would meet Peter in the park. She wondered if Peter had heard from Humphrey, in Sweden. If Humphrey were here, she and he would celebrate her completion of Portrait together.

  PORTRAIT

  FROM THE BOULANGERIE Maman has brought brioche with pleated sides and a glazed pouf. I almost want to paint the large brioche, it looks so delicious and its colors so rich. But is the crust a bit too brown, a bit too much black suggested? Black is not a good element in bread, though it may make the tip of a tart oozing cherry fruit seem more real in a painting, which is a funny idea, for what can be more real than real?

  The odor of escargots baked in garlic fills our house, but I am more enchanted by the vegetables in the fish stew, the aroma of cooking onions, celery, and carrots. We are preparing for a large dinner party of Papa’s interesting friends. The table has been enlarged by placing wide boards across it, and a lovely cloth over the boards. All of Papa’s interests will be represented by the presence of our guests from the literary, philosophical, musical, and artistic worlds, even a scientist who studies the movement of fluids. The fowl will have a mushroom and truffle stuffing, with dried berries, and a great pile of haricots verts with slivers of almonds, and many more fresh and delicious dishes. Papa says I’m to have a taste of the wine and sit at the table, being twelve.

  “Jesus went about his father’s business when he was twelve,” Papa declares.

  My mother glances at him with a slight hint of reproof in her countenance, for she is very pious, more so than he. She does not think any human should be compared to Jesus.

  “I only meant that twelve marks the coming-of-age,” my father explains.

  Étienne will not be at table but he will be present as people gather and he will greet them like a little page boy. I have a new skirt with vertical stripes, thin black velvet dividing thin stripes of many colors, like a dark rainbow, including deep mahogany, dark blue, maroon, and other deep colors. Maman and I will sing a duet just before dinner, and we will each play the guitar as well, as accompaniment. And the first guest is at the door!

  People gather and gather till the room is filled with so many different fabrics that we are rather like a washtub, but I don’t mean that, only that the room is a confusion with a great swirl of patterns and shades. Étienne is still so slight that he slips around the dresses with ease and people are often surprised to see him appear and then very pleased, for he smiles and is not the least shy but always has a compliment or comment that is sincere and interesting; in both face and gesture, he is beautiful. I feel that I behave very well, too, with similar glad manners, though my conversations are somewhat more extended since I am older. Sometimes I catch Maman’s eye, and she shifts her gaze toward a particular person, and this is a signal that I should not prolong the conversation but approach someone else. It is very helpful because sometimes when conversing with adults, I am very interested but it is more difficult to tell if the other person is being merely polite or wishes to continue. I should very much like to have a salon and give such parties myself when I am grown.

  I am only a little nervous when it is time for our duet. “Let your heart be light,” Maman says. “No one here has so nice a voice or so true a sense of pitch as you. Give yourself to the music.” And then, bolstered by her praise, I understand how true her advice is: there is nothing to fear because I love the music and I love singing with her; I give my guitar a little strum, and I think of the shape of the music almost as though it is a shape and color I have not yet painted, and I enter completely into that world which is invisible and made purely of tones and rhythms. In this song the words almost don’t count, but sometimes they do.

  Papa looks down modestl
y while we sing, but as soon as we finish, his face uptilting is radiant, rosy, like the rising sun. His glance encompasses the room: he is very pleased and his eyes rest on us with complete satisfaction. Then we all move to the table, which is loaded with beautiful food, savory and colorful, and there is the brioche with its golden-brown glazed dome, and it seems a special friend, though a little overdarkened.

  Even eating has its own rhythm and its own sweet sounds of silver utensils and china plates, and there are waves of aromas, characterized most often by the creamy fish stew. When Maman stirs the stew with the big ladle sometimes a curve of celery rises up from the broth, or the orange of a carrot round is visible in the milky liquid, or a chunk of fish. I have always admired the large size of the soupspoons, so important, at each plate, and I happen to watch as Maman sips from her spoon and then puts it down. Very daintily, she removes a slender fish bone from her mouth and places it on the side of her plate.

  At that very moment Papa begins to cough and sputter. His face grows red, and everyone looks concerned. Maman breaks a fluffy piece from the brioche, and he takes it into his mouth, chews rapidly, and swallows. When eating fish, always have bread at hand, she has cautioned me. We watch, concerned.

  Finally Papa says, “There, there, it’s only a tiny bone, let us be anxious no more,” and he tells a joke that makes us all merry again, but I notice he does not remove the bone from his mouth.

  AFTER THE GUESTS HAVE LEFT, I ask, “Papa, did the fish bone go down?”

  “No, dear child, it is still lodged, but probably it will go down while I sleep.”

  “But are you not uncomfortable?” Maman asks.

  “Well, you could look in my throat. If you see it, perhaps you could contrive to bring it out.”

  The specially engaged waiters are still clearing the table of remaining food; all the fish stew has been consumed. Papa sits down and opens his mouth very wide. It is almost comical. But Maman sees nothing.