“Only for a minute. It will do me good. Jerry always saw guests to their cars.”
Having no choice, unless she uses her greater size and youthful strength to push the older woman back into the house, Kathryn turns with a perhaps humorously despairing sweep of her arm, leaping in black from its cape, and heads down the flagstones with at first firm and then, in the dark, groping footsteps. Hope, who knows each tilt and gap in the walk, takes Kathryn’s arm, feeling through cashmere the other’s tense, resilient flesh, flesh hardened by “working out,” running on pavement; rain, cold and lightly wind-tossed, coats Hope’s face with delectable sensation. Under the beech, the drops are bigger, gathered and released by bare branches. They hit hollow metal noisily; the borrowed automobile, its unpainted fender glimmering, forms a shape in the night less distinct to the eye than to the ear as Kathryn arrives at its side and scratches with her key at the door, which she absurdly locked out of city habit, here on this Vermont hill where seldom more than six cars a day pass. It is an aging cheap car, not equipped to lock and unlock at the squeeze of an electronic remote, as does Hope’s royal-blue Caravan. Oh, she knows that her SUV guzzles gas, yet the space inside, enough for canvases five feet by six, and the exaltation of sitting up so high on the road seem luxuries she owes herself near her life’s end: let the young inherit a depleted world. Methane is coming, and hydrogen separated from water by windmill-generated electric power, she heard about it on the NPR station on a Science Friday.
Under the beech she feels her face flood with an excited warmth of pity and envy, as if encountering in the dripping dark a younger self; when Kathryn turns, having unlocked the door, to say a formal final goodbye, holding out a long white cold wet hand, Hope instead embraces her, though being so much shorter she lands her lips not on the other woman’s cheek but on the bony curve of her jaw. Still she hangs on, relishing this muffled, impatient other body, naked and savory beneath its clothes, warmer than the air: amid the rods of rain, a scent of thick black hair. “Have your life,” she says, in a whisper pushed from within like a shout, “go and have it, dear. It won’t be mine, it can’t be mine, we were all so naïve in a way, thinking we were so important to the world, but it will be yours, your own. Don’t hang back. Don’t let this Alec or any man take it from you.”
Kathryn, rigid for a moment, returns the hug, perhaps more crunchingly than she had intended, and lowers her face enough to promise, “O.K., I’ll try not to.” The peck of a kiss her wet face gives the older woman’s wet face has the stern, statuesque quality her mouth has: hardened by seriousness, by concentration on the effort of an interview, denying itself all but a few smiles. Now it does seem to smile from within the drenched hood of soft wool. The invader says, “Thank you for being so generous with your time, and so frank. Please, you must run inside.”
“Thank you for letting me go on and on, making it real to myself again.” Had she been frank? Too frank? About Dot? About Zack? No matter. So little matters, it turns out. Why do we get so fussed? Hope quits the embrace; she feels the rain seeping through her thick wool shirt to her skin and beyond, into that layer of her where death will one day settle. “Catch your death” was a phrase of her childhood, used by grown-ups of colds, which lurked in the air like ghosts and polio and radio waves. Our African ancestors thought we walked through swarms of spirits and it turns out we are in fact wreathed in invisible microörganisms.
Kathryn finds the door handle of Alec’s car; the dark and rain release the concussive pang of the driver’s side opening, spilling a wedge of light onto Kathryn’s square-toed boots, the patch of ground turning to mud beneath them, some flattened blades of grass here at the lawn’s edge, and a scattering of pebbles each with its sharp projection of shadow, like something Mr. Hartz would have wanted Hope to see. What would he think seeing her, approaching eighty and as blind now as when ten! Not daring to run, she makes her way back along the flagstones, whose placement her feet know by heart, though still she is grateful for the growing visibility as she nears the house’s lit windows. Kathryn’s headlights come on and then swing in the start of a three-point turn, so that the earth beneath Hope’s feet seems to wheel, to tilt on a wave of raking illumination that exaggerates each contour and pocket of shadow in the colorless lawn; it rises toward her like the lunar surface to a moon lander, but subsides as the visitor’s automobile turns farther, changes gear, and heads down the dirt driveway with red taillights blinking like angry dragon eyes. The horn honks once, the headlight cones full of sparkling rain pause and then disappear behind the stone wall at the upper side of the public, macadamized road. Hope has reached the half-dry porch, gives an unseen wave, and lets herself into her house.
You should have a pet. A cat would kill the birds that come to the feeder. A dog would inflict upon her the oppression of love and a need to be walked, to be fed, to be humored, to be accepted as a fully qualified though frequently puzzled person. After talking so much, Hope feels disgusted with as if after eating too much. Nothing to do but let it work out of her system; it takes days. The thread-thin hands of the mantel clock say seven-forty-seven, a little early for bed, even for her, but her moss-green shirt is wet, along with her hair and Birkenstocks and lint-colored socks, and she doesn’t want to catch her death. Pneumonia is how it happens if cancer or arterial stenosis doesn’t close the deal. When she tries to personify death, she pictures a gallery owner, who always has the advantage, small and humpbacked and deferential as he is. She reaches behind her head and pulls off the candy-colored elastic from the Montpelier five-and-ten that has been holding her gray ghost of a ponytail in place, and absent-mindedly slips it onto her left wrist as she walks into the kitchen, where she vigorously rubs her wet hair over the sink with a checkered blue dish-towel. She unbuttons the wool shirt, heavy with absorbed rain, and moves about in her wheat-yellow turtle-neck, which is wet only at the neck, and with one hand on the marble counter works off her Birkenstocks and soaked heavy gray socks. She boosts up the kitchen thermostat two degrees. She opens the refrigerator, its obedient little light that automatically comes on reminding her of the light that splashed down on Kathryn’s expensive, uncomfortable boots. After contemplation of the meagre fare on the shelves of parallel rods of chrome, she lifts out the half-sandwich that she had wrapped in aluminum foil for Kathryn to take with her but that the girl had snubbed. As Hope unwraps it, glimmers reflected from the crinkling Reynolds Wrap swim unnoticed across the textured composition panels of the dropped ceiling with its inset, rheostatted lights. Snubbed the sandwich, she thinks, snubbed her instant coffee, implied she loved Zack more than Hope ever did, and after all that, a whole day of assault, gave her rather perfunctory thanks. Hope bites one corner of rice-pecan bread, tasting first the sugary marmalade, then the oleaginous peanut butter, and walks down the corridor to her studio, eating as she goes, making crumbs. Feeding the mice. A cat would kill the mice, too, another unpleasantness, bringing the little furry, chewed bodies to her for praise, or to teach her how to kill mice also, as if she were a kitten. Her days of kittenhood are by. Surely, having given the girl a whole day of her dwindling time on the planet Earth, she can give the mice a few crumbs. Mildred Warren is coming tomorrow to clean. Tomorrow is an eventful day—the cleaning lady and a dental appointment in Burlington with Dr. Weiss, a cavity where her gumline has receded from a crown on a bicuspid, exposing the root to decay. Perhaps filling it will take away the bad taste in her mouth, which no amount of brushing and rinsing with Listerine seems to alter. Her mouth is such a patchwork of crowns and root canals and implants, in any earlier era she would have been one of those grotesque crones such as Leonardo in his cool and unearthly way would draw, with one or two teeth left and the profile all sunk in. Poor man, the genius of geniuses, the first man since the Greeks and Romans to dare to look at everything, the body and its bones and bowels and the watery corkscrews of the winds and river currents, but he had never seen a vagina, evidently, at least the one in his notebooks is clearly that of a fem
ale corpse, insensate and agape.
Hope had forgotten to turn off the fluorescent studio lights since briefly entertaining her interviewer here. Their overhead tubes pour sharp blue light into every corner of the great space, a cold unnatural light she prefers not to paint by; even on an overcast day the northern light as it falls, with its hidden rainbow, through the two high win-herself, dows and the domed Plexiglas skylight, is better, truer. The skylight drums with the sound of rain like a demented man alone in a room talking to himself. She has always been afraid of its leaking but it hasn’t yet, Jerry assured her it wouldn’t when he had this studio built for her. He left her snug. He knew she would be alone again. The space is too big, he didn’t understand that her kind of painting happened in the inches between the hand and the eye, she would have been content to work in the spare upstairs room just as she did in the Flats house until the barn had become hers. Along the walls, behind her, several easels—for she likes to work on two or three paintings at a time, each with its own gray music like harps being strummed in the fog, the gray of graphite and that of pigeon feathers and of silver and stone and dirty soapsuds—canvases lean stacked with their stretcher sides outward, her own, dried and hardened and waiting for their ride to New York and her next show, a retrospective in honor of her eightieth birthday in the year 2002, and a few by her first two husbands, by Zack several scraps of sized cardboard so casually dripped on that she never offered them for sale, in his chaotic way he was a perfectionist and destroyed what he considered failed work, work that lacked the impetus from the Jungian depths, and by Guy a few playful small works, in paper and pastel, one of acrylic and wood and wire and colored paper forming a Pop bouquet interwoven with the words on a ribbon SPRINGS ETERNAL, works given to her at family occasions, anniversaries and birthdays in their seventeen married years. Both men, it occurs to her now, believed that order and beauty must be man-made, achieved by a titanic conscious effort like that shown in the musclebound ’thirties murals propagandizing the tragic vision of humanistic Socialism, whereas she sat at her easels hoping that by modestly holding still she would overhear a music from beyond manly noise. How silly, perhaps. But all the excuses for art are flimsy and fade; what endures is the art itself, the paint keeping intact whatever hope or intention worked for that perilous moment.
She forgot to turn off the lavish lighting Jerry provided and now forgets why she came in here, wet and weary and slightly missing her visitor, that brave, tenacious, aggravating girl, and then remembers: to replace the wall phone on its cradle. She has a machine to pick up messages in the kitchen, but Hope knew she would strain from the living room to hear what they were saying into the device; and it would have been further impolite to make the disconnection there or in the living room and inflict upon her visitor that periodic squawking with which the phone company tries to tell you that your phone is off the hook. Better it squawked unheard in the studio, amid the unseen paintings. The receiver—so much smaller than the old-fashioned ones, which reached from your ear to your mouth as in those old Petty-girl pinups, whereas these new receivers and the flip-open cell phones suggest it is just enough to be in the vague vicinity of the speaking lips, inches to the side, part of the general blurring of attention perhaps, the movies and TV shows where the crucial lines are thrown away with Method acting and the CNN screen tries to give you three news stories at once, talking head and headline crawl and sports score—reminds her, as she settles it back on the upright cradle, of Guy’s old-fashioned pay phones in limp vinyl, limp as Chardin’s dead rabbits, though at the time he was making them she was too thoughtlessly alive to wonder if death was Guy’s intended metaphor, and now he is too gaga, his brain hardening into useless gristle as the medical journals describe, to answer if she asked. Watching herself daily for signs of the same fate, she often wonders how it feels to know less and less and always arrives at the riddle that one does not know what one does not know, any more than a dog understands the superstructure of language and political and economic arrangement behind the human presences to which the animal is so alert, his nostrils packed with layers and tints of human odor. The obvious analogy is with us and the mind of God, we don’t have a clue, or, rather, clues are all we have.
So. The phone reconnects her with the world, with Mildred, who might have been calling to cancel—she is all friendliness, with her valley gossip and gifts of pies and apple butter in apple season and repeated offers of a Labrador puppy almost for free, but she keeps her own schedule, and has a proud streak, treating Hope as an equal she is doing a favor for—and with her own sons if Paul or Piet had wanted to share news or assuage their filial consciences, though they usually called on weekends; Hope is potentially reconnected with telemarketers and fundraisers and alarmists and gossips, with the several other elderly women of the region with not dissimilar metropolitan pasts and predilections who check in on each other, and with those occasional younger voices, eager opportunists or the children or grandchildren of old friends—Jarl Anders’ granddaughter showed up last summer, with his high Scandinavian coloring but Frieda’s thin sharp features and a wispy do-gooding air that was what remained of Jarl’s terrible prophetic transports—or young art-grant hustlers hoping to cash in on even a little attention or blessing from anyone with a slightly famous name from the past. She is plugged in again to all this, though she doubts that the phone will ring now that it is after eight. Turning off Jerry’s excessively bright fluorescent lights, leaving her canvases to darkness and the muttering monologue of the rain on the skylight, Hope feels a weight rolled away, the tall dark girl gone, swallowed by the storm, lost in the vortex now that the damp moment is past when she felt her solid in her arms, like Dot in those faraway days when the infant lay wriggling in her lonely cot on the floor dying to be plucked up and held, and delivered that cold wet kiss that made her stiffen there by the pale car fender; Hope is relieved to be alone but the long interview has left her with the disquieting sensation that the events of her life have been too close together, compressed into a single colorful slice of time rather than unfolding in an organic sacred slow procession of nights alternating with days, phases of solitude and uncertainty and desolation but also of fruitful dreaming, daydreams alternating with stripes of activity, of sociability, dancing invitingly around a beautiful man and spending the energy built up in stymied idleness.
A little laundry room was added when Jerry built the studio wing for her, and in its small space, snug as an ice-cube tray holding two huge cubes, the twin white appliances and shelves of detergent and spare light bulbs and spray cans of sizing and Bounce sheets/feuilles/hojas of fabric softener, Hope drops the wet lumberjack shirt and removes the yellow cotton turtleneck, its soaked neck like a slimy garrote, and her brown corduroys made baggier by being out in the rain, and puts them all in the washer without getting down the orange jug of Tide or touching the controls—the wash cycle would be twenty-five minutes and the drying could take forty or fifty, but if left in the dryer overnight everything gets wrinkled, and she doesn’t want to come down again or be barred from falling soon asleep if the little Spark novel lulls her. Mildred can run a load tomorrow, while she pushes the vacuum around where she pleases and dusts the surfaces that are easiest to reach, never getting the cobwebs around the chair rungs or in the high corners. The woman still smokes, as so many of these “real” Vermonters do, and the rasping don’t-give-a-damn smell in the house reminds Hope fondly of the days when everybody smoked, at the Cedar on University Place or the Waldorf Cafeteria on Sixth Avenue, at the Artists Union loft parties at Sixteenth and Sixth, thick drifts of it, atmospheric effects out of Whistler, fumes of depression and war and reckless artistic aspiration. Hope feels the air on her bare skin, bringing up goosebumps. If any prowler or long-clawed bear looks in the side windows he will get what he deserves, the sight of a barefoot old lady in her underwear—white underpants, the broad un-bikini, un-thong style, and so-called flesh-colored bra, though not the flesh color of Titian or Fragonard or Bonnar
d or Modigliani.
Her mouth feels dry and loose from all that talking. She sucks at her teeth to see how bad her breath is; she can never quite tell. She licks her fingers, still sticky from the marmalade sandwich, and from the breadbox takes out two brittle Carr’s Hob Nobs and pours herself a small tumbler of fat-free milk, first checking that there is enough for tomorrow’s breakfast cereal plus a splash into the mug of tea she carries with her in the mornings into the studio. She sees herself doing this so vividly it is as if the night has already passed. The sense of compressed simultaneity hangs in her head like the cerebral displacement the morning after a night of drinking wine and smoking pot, a kind of sideslipped hangover. For fear of addling their heads, she and Guy quit dope, at least inside the Seventy-ninth Street apartment he did—undoubtedly, as Jeanette Nova maliciously hinted, more may have gone on down at the Hospice than she ever realized, events out of sight like water seepage that finally undermines the foundations of a house—but she and Guy, descendants of radical Protestantism, were alike in distrust of gilding the lily of earthly existence, being alive was itself the trip. In her mind’s eye Zack feels more distant than Guy, a woeful ogre who upset tables and crashed cars, tucked into that far corner of the Island where she had taken him; she should feel close to him since he left clear and dynamic traces of his hand in his drip paintings, but those canvases poured and spattered in a shaman’s dance have become monuments as rigid as those of Egypt, built of blocks of hand-smoothed stone.