Jimmy got off the phone and they scheduled their day. Willie wanted to try to finish the big piece he had been working on while Jimmy checked on their window order and picked up odds and ends they needed. Jimmy would also talk to the health agent again about the plans for the new septic system, and then check again with Tommy Rindge about when he could put it in, ground conditions permitting. The soil seldom froze more than a couple of inches around the pond and, during thaws, often the frost went out of it completely. There was a good chance if the Board of Health approved the system they were proposing, that Tommy and his bulldozer and his German shepherd (who always accompanied Tommy in his work, dashed all around the construction site and barked continuously so that by the end of the day the dog was always hoarse) could get the whole thing in the ground by the weekend.
He did not think about the phone call again until that afternoon when he knocked off work on his piece and joined Jimmy at the boathouse. Carpentry was perfect for brooding and mulling things over. Jimmy was not a compulsive talker. Sometimes they’d just play the radio and work. Willie liked talk programmes; Jimmy liked rock. Willie figured he listened to what he wanted all morning, so mostly he gave in and let Jimmy play loud music.
Johnny was probably doing all right. Two pieces sold. Then she wasted the money on flashy clothes. He was surprised how well her paintings seemed to sell. He couldn’t like them, no matter how much he tried. He found them ugly, even messy, full of words and images from ads and street graffiti and parts of bodies or inner organs. Still, he was proud that she stuck to her work and took herself seriously as an artist. At least she knew what she wanted to do in the world, and even if he couldn’t enjoy her work, she did not seem to lack for places to show. She liked Minneapolis and she had been with the same guy now for a year, so maybe she had calmed down some.
She had always worked, during high school as a chambermaid and then as a waitress, during college in a fast-food place, more recently, matting and framing. She was quick, careful and very good. When he thought of her, he always saw her first as she had been in childhood, with her tousled fine light brown hair, her glasses repaired with tape because she was always putting them on the floor and stepping on them. Then he consciously called her to his mind as she was now, too thin, with spiked blue-black hair and contact lenses that made her eyes green, with enormous skull earrings and bracelets like chunks with holes for her arms, short leather skirts and multicoloured jackets teetering on heels that lifted her to his height. It was as if she had made herself up, as he might make a cake out of flour and milk. She had taken a pleasant-looking woman with fine tousled hair and a soft sweet face and created from her a comic book heroine, a costume party dominatrix. Yet he knew that as outré as he found her, she was still Johnny and she was not destroying herself as Susan thought. That was part of her image and her image was part of her success. So far, so good. She always had boyfriends. She always had good female friends too. Johnny was more ambitious than he was, than Susan was, far more than Jimmy. He had a secret desire to go out and visit her and see exactly what her scene was like these days, to watch her be shocking and successful in her world, but he knew that Susan would not go and would resent his going. Sometime when Susan went to New York for more than a couple of days, he would sneak off.
He ventured to ask Jimmy, ‘What do you think is bothering your mother?’
‘She just has the wintertime blues. She’s bored. Why don’t you go to New York with her and stay at Laurie’s old apartment before she sells it?’
‘Because she’s after me to get on with this job …’ He gave the wall a kick for emphasis. ‘And I want to finish off that big piece I’ve been doing. I’m hot on it. Why go to New York? Run into all those sculptors who patronize me. See work pushed I think is full of shit. See young artists who have one little shtick fussed over like geniuses.’
‘I think I’ll go. I have some friends I need to see.’
‘You’d better ask Laurie about that.’
‘She already invited me. To share the driving. I don’t have to stay in her place, I have other options.’
This was the first he had heard of Jimmy going off. He felt slyly pleased, because he then could take the week off too from carpentry and just do his own work. Jimmy was secretive. Suddenly a plan would surface from him that he had surely been cogitating for days or even weeks. Obviously the conversation was over. Jimmy turned the radio back on and they resumed putting up the joists for the bathroom.
He hated the times when he felt Susan was working up her discontent. He liked peace at the core. He needed that. When she was unhappy, he felt guilty. Lately he had been dreaming of the big stairway at home. It rose gracefully in a coil for three flights, a perfect spiral with a many-paned dome of glass set in the roof over it. The house dated from 1820, and the staircase was a jewel of local architecture. Yet in his dreams he was climbing it in a whine of anxiety, up toward his mother who wept upstairs.
When he had that dream, his father was absent from it, his stern just father who was a lawyer – not a courtroom lawyer but what they would call nowadays a corporate lawyer, one with business interests in real estate and timber. His mother was beautiful in a pale blonde lilylike way, with a high girlish voice and the appetite of a dying mouse. Yet she passionately enjoyed hunting. Her father had raised her in the fox-hunting country of Virginia to take fences on a good jumper. There was little of that around North Carolina, to her everlasting regret, but she would go off on hunting trips with Willie’s father and they would return obviously in love with each other again, a love that turned to irritation and silent battles as the intimacy wore off.
He was the youngest of three. The oldest was a sister Elinor; then his brother Ted and after a space of seven years, himself. Elinor was already at boarding school in the earliest coherent memories he retained. He was the baby, but Mother was his responsibility, making her happy, distracting her. He was in college before he understood her mood swings were caused by drinking. Mother was a quiet functioning alcoholic, and all those headaches and naps were simply when she passed out or was hung over. He felt as if he had escaped her, barely, and only because he had quarrelled with his whole family when he was smitten by conscience as by a passionate affair and drawn into the civil rights movement. Once he had fallen in love with Susan, he interposed her between his mother and himself. He had never again seen his mother alone from the day he married Susan.
That did not mean that Susan did not sometimes make him feel just as trapped, as entwined in her rampant needs and moodiness. He would dream then of that beautiful staircase, the huge sculptured spiral of his parents’ home that had first taught him about space and light, but instead of the pleasure he had often experienced in its perfect proportions, he was climbing it toward trouble he could not handle, toward guilt, toward a sickening sense of loss and confusion. Then he resented Susan.
He did not want to pay attention to her just now. He had a show scheduled for August in the co-op gallery in the village, and he needed a good breadth and depth of work. He wanted to concentrate on the shapes he could feel in the back of his mind. He wanted to stare at his tools and let his mind move on space sketching out the spidery tensions of metal he would create. He wanted to fix paper against metal. He wanted to finish the work on homelessness he saw as rags and bones and cement.
Let Dinah deal with Susan’s problems just now. Why not? They were always claiming to have some special understanding. Let them understand each other, then. He could not give up a week and risk a lesion of energy by going to New York. It might be exciting for Susan, but it would depress him. He liked to go to New York with a successful show under his belt, a piece sold in St Louis or San Francisco, an interview calling attention to his work. Dinah was flying. With her new commission, she did not even need the boathouse job. It would have gone far more quickly if she were working along with them too. She was an excellent carpenter and almost as strong as Jimmy. He enjoyed working with her because they were companion-a
bly silent, as he often was with Jimmy, but they also discussed news, the political situation and debated issues in their respective arts intensely and excitingly. It was as good as a talk show. It passed the time and stirred him up so that often afterward he had good ideas, even if the shapes that formed had little to do with whatever they had discussed.
He understood why she wasn’t helping renovate the boathouse, but he wished she would change her mind. If only the commission could be delayed for six months or if something would come up so she would work with him. It made for some of their best sex, those afternoons in somebody else’s house, although of course with Jimmy … Still Jimmy ran errands often enough. The smell of sawdust roused him now to no end. Dinah wasn’t there.
Chapter Twelve
LAURIE
Laurie couldn’t decide if she hoped that Susan would accompany her and Jimmy to New York, or if she would prefer Susan stay home. Laurie was a little nervous at the idea of travelling with any man; but Jimmy she had known all her life and who her own age would she be less afraid of? Always he had been there summers, skinny freckled tagalong, the kid she could always fall back on when better company failed, and here he was playing that role again.
Susan could be relied upon to help her pack up and would protect her from the shadows in the apartment, the fear she had that she would step into it and again find his, Tom’s body. Oh, she had seen the coffin but in her mind he was still in their bed, where she certainly had no intention of sleeping. She had slept at Daddy’s apartment from that dreadful night until she had left the city. Installing Susan in the apartment she had shared with Tom would reduce its menace, but perhaps Jimmy alone could do that.
The real reason she was uneasy about Susan’s coming was that she liked Susan to stay where she belonged, in that vacation world where she was the warm, understanding and beautiful summer mother, not thrust into New York amid her friends and the people she had worked with and the galleries that would not show her and her real angry alcoholic mother in Queens. Susan was too fragile to penetrate the real world where Tom had died mocking Laurie and where she could not survive at present. Furthermore, Susan would expect Daddy to take her out and fuss over her. Laurie doubted he really longed to be hobbled with a guest from the country looking for a New York vacation; if he had time he could spare, she needed it herself.
All week she swang back and forth between wanting Susan to come to make packing easier and wanting Susan to stay here where she belonged, for the cross-patching of her worlds made her uncomfortable. Jimmy did not cause her the same distress because he had left the summer world, if not for New York, at least for some destination people did go off to. Seattle was at least a place of second level reality, like Chicago and New Orleans and Houston. It was respectable if not outstanding.
In the end, just she and Jimmy went. She drove as far as New London before she let him take over, but then he was competent. She resolved to let him drive more of the way on their return. They played the new Sting on the tape deck and gossiped about local kids and kids who used to visit her and what had become of them all, were they gay or straight, had they made it in some way, were they married, had they a baby or had they gutted themselves with drugs or settled someplace. He had picked up volumes of local gossip, especially considering the short time he had been back.
The only time he annoyed her was when he started to call old friends of his in New York. He seemed to think the car phone was a toy. The truth was, she didn’t really need it. Daddy was on his all the time. He had decided that it was a safety feature for a woman, and so he had had it put in, but she had not used it yet. Jimmy’s response to it was a little embarrassing and she did not care for his tone with the two women he called, flirty and familiar. Perhaps he sensed her disapproval, for after the second call he said no more about old friends and ignored the phone.
That forbearance pleased her. Tom wouldn’t have responded to her disapproval by ceasing something; he would have proceeded twice as furiously. After all, it was her car, and she was allowing Jimmy to stay in the apartment she was unloading next week. She was rarely in a position of power vis-à-vis anybody, and it was rather pleasant to feel that Jimmy was on her sufferance and aware of it, from the way he guarded against her annoyance. She realized she had had a normal thought about Tom just then, not illuminated with that ghastly hindsight of disaster like lightning flashing to show the action in a horror film. For weeks she had not been able to remember her husband except in the rictus of his savage end. Now she had had a casual domestic memory that humanized him again, and she was silently grateful.
The answering machine in her apartment was full of messages, most for her but some for Tom – including weird communications she assumed had to do with cocaine. Hers were from friends or acquaintances who had heard and were being nosy. Three of the messages were from Rick Hobbs, whom she had gone out with before she met Tom. It was startling to hear him pushing her to see him. It had not struck her she was single, and there was Jimmy leaning on the marble counter that smelled chlorinated from the cleaning people, listening to the voice of Rick, the last man on earth she felt like seeing.
‘Is that an old boyfriend?’ Jimmy asked.
‘How did you know?’
‘The proprietary way he asked after you. Someone you care about?’
‘We had a ghastly relationship. We formed this nasty dependency of mutual weaknesses.’ Now why was she telling him that? He would think her completely neurotic.
‘He sounds like he wouldn’t half mind having it back.’
‘Just from three messages?’
‘Persistent, too. You have to figure out if you’re interested.’
In dismay she sat on one of the uncomfortable barstools that were the kitchen chairs. Was it all starting again, that high tension scene of dating and trying to meet men who weren’t gay or married or serial killers? She wasn’t safe, she wasn’t married and above the fray. ‘I’m not! There’s nothing to figure out.’ Again she envied the woman of an earlier epoch whose husband had died in similarly violent and disgusting circumstances simply withdrawing into a convent – not a harsh one, but one for gentlewomen for whom the world had become a bit much. Retiring with her lap dog and her lady’s maid, never having to run a house or think about men again. Not to have to worry about weight or hair or skin or ageing or whether some idiot liked her. She had lost years waiting for someone to call who never did, hanging around, not going to a movie, not going out to eat, not going for a walk, because suppose he called and didn’t leave a message or called and, when she wasn’t there, went out with someone else. The parties she politicked to be invited to because some particular he was reputed to be about to put in an appearance; or worse, only that some eligible man might conceivably appear.
‘I can’t wait to get back to the Cape,’ she said fervently.
He smiled slightly, leaning his braced arms on the counter. Susan, when she came to New York, was always voluble in her admiration for the way they lived, for Daddy’s and her apartments and the furniture and the artworks and where they dined and where they shopped, a sort of chorus of enthusiasm at each demonstration of their taste. Jimmy seemed to take it all for granted. She realized she had no idea on what level he had been living. The restaurant that had failed might have been a neighbourhood beanery or Seattle’s finest classic cuisine hot spot. If the car phone had made him look naive, he seemed quite in stride at present, asking her if she wanted him to fetch take-out so that they could get started on packing her up.
‘Oh, I didn’t know you were going to help me. That’s awfully sweet of you. I thought you were just coming along for the ride.’
‘I wouldn’t desert you. I’ll have a good time anyhow, don’t worry about me. I don’t require worrying about. Would you rather just go out to eat?’
‘I think I would. There’s an art deco diner just near here I’m fond of …’ She stopped cold, realizing at this time of the evening people she knew would be there. She glanced at Jimmy.
Certainly he was handsome enough to provide a reasonable escort and his presence would protect her. But could she really face acquaintances?
‘If you don’t want to run into people you know, we can go downtown and eat Chinese,’ he said. ‘That should be safe.’
She was startled again at how he read her face. ‘Let’s do that.’ He was right. She did feel safe as they set out for a cab – she had left her car in the garage under Daddy’s building, as parking was impossible on her street. She would not have to face anyone yet. When she returned to start packing, he would be with her.
That evening at ten he walked her to the corner and put her in a cab so that she could spend the night at Tyrone’s. Daddy wasn’t home yet, but she had her own key, and Celeste had made her bed for her and turned down the corner of the coverlet. Shortly after she had got into bed and started reading Artforum, Tyrone came home. He checked in with her, kissed her good night. In the morning he had gone to work before she was up, but he left a note on her breakfast plate.
Dearest Laurikin,
Keep your chin up and march on through this week. If Jimmy is useful, let him stay there, but if you feel crowded by him, we can put him in a hotel. Not to worry. Now remember, only remove the personal things you are concerned about. We have movers scheduled 8:00 a.m. Friday to clear out everything. They will do any gross packing required.
Love, Daddy
When she arrived at her old apartment, Jimmy was out. Never mind. Why should she feel disappointed? She could go through things ever so much more quickly and efficiently alone. The movers had dropped off piles of boxes. Last evening, Jimmy had taped up a row of them for her. Yet she felt exposed as she went up to the bedroom. She imagined that she could smell death, but what it really smelled of was Jimmy’s after-shave. She felt all the discomfort she had anticipated. After fifteen minutes of not quite doing anything, she ran back downstairs and decided she would go through her old desk.