She stood, desolate in the middle of the living room, fighting back the need to weep. She nodded her head, and then recalled how he had pressed his face close to the two canvases when he had signed them for her. She clenched her hands into tiny fists and felt a rash of cold clammy sweat break out across her body.
“I understand,” she said.
“So you still want to sit for my painting?”
“Yes, of course.”
Blake was relieved. He bowed his head and for many moments just peered down at the rug-covered floor. When he looked up again, his face had changed, becoming somehow vulnerable and wounded. His eyes had the empty hollow cast of dark despair, as though he had stepped into a deep shadow.
“Sometimes,” he said softly, “I close my eyes and imagine what it will be like.” There was a whisper of anguish woven between his words. “I try to walk through the house with my eyes closed, groping for the walls, stumbling over pieces of furniture…” he shook his head suddenly overcome by his embarrassment, and turned blinking to stare out of the window.
Connie felt the yearning need to go to him, but she sensed that was not what he wanted. She stood very still and stared his broad back, watched the rise and fall of his shoulders as he took deep breaths.
“I don’t know what I’ll do about Ned,” Blake seemed to be speaking to the distant ocean. “I know it’s going to happen – I know I’m going to be blind one day – but I just can’t seem to come to terms with it, or prepare myself.”
“It might not happen for many years,” Connie offered in a consoling whisper.
Blake turned. “I wish you were right,” he said and fought to keep self-pity from his tone. “But it’s coming, Connie. I can sense it. One day in the near future, I’m going to find myself alone in a world of darkness that I can’t ever truly be prepared for.”
26.
Sunset came as a sudden surprise – they had talked through the afternoon, and it was only when Ned rose from his bed, stiff through his hind legs, that Blake seemed to recognize the painted riot of color that was spread across the setting sky. The big dog stood quietly waiting. Blake went through the kitchen and disappeared for a moment. When he returned he had a single red rose in his hand. He looked solemnly at Connie, torn for just an instant.
“We’re going down to the beach,” he said quietly. “We go there every day at this time. You’re welcome to come along if you like. It’s just a moment Ned and I share… but if you’re going to be staying here,” his voice trailed off to a toneless whisper, “you might as well know.”
She followed them down to the beach, watching man and dog walk slowly across the sand and down to the water’s edge, keeping her distance, leaving them to the intimate bond that seemed to drape around the two lonely figures like a cloak of grief.
It was cold. The breeze off the ocean was frigid, and the ocean without a blue sky above it had begun to turn slate grey as the waves rolled hissing and rumbling towards the beach. Connie wrapped her arms around herself and hugged her shoulders. The wind tugged at her hair and pulled errant tendrils from the bind of her ponytail.
She stood in silence and saw Blake lift his face to the tangerine clouds, stained by the bleeding color of the sun’s last light. Then he lowered his head to the rose, kissed the crimson petals, and waded into the surf until the white water was dashing against his knees. He threw the rose beyond the breaking line of the first wave and then came back to the sand and stood sadly beside the big dog until the tide drew the rose away, into the ocean’s icy embrace.
Blake stood stiffly, reached a hand down for the dog and patted the Great Dane’s head. Ned barked once, then fell silent. The sounds of the ocean seemed to rise and then softly sigh.
It was almost dark when at last they turned away from the sea and came slowly back up the beach. Connie noticed Blake’s eyes were red rimmed and swollen.
27.
“If there is a God, I believe he is a vengeful one,” Blake said slowly. He was seated at the small kitchen table, with Connie sitting quietly across from him. Between them were the remains of cold meat slices that had been eaten in strained gloomy silence.
Connie looked up into Blake’s face with an expression of surprise.
“What do you mean?”
Blake rose slowly from his chair, took the plates to the sink, then began pacing. He was frowning. Connie watched him as he took carefully measured steps like his feet were moving to the beat of some thumping sound echoing in his mind. The night suddenly became still, as if infused with an eerie heaviness, so that the only sound seemed to be the dull press of Blake’s shoes on the old timber floorboards.
Connie followed him with her eyes, twisting in her chair as he prowled the living room floor. He reached out absently and ran his fingers across the spines of the paperback novels on a bookshelf and then stopped at last, somehow dark despite being lit by all the blazing lights throughout the house. He sighed, and Connie sensed that at last he was ready to talk. She leaned forward attentively with her elbows propped on her knees and her chin cupped between her hands. She sensed the need to stay silent – to listen without interruption lest he lapse into silence, and yet, despite herself, she wanted to spare him the pain of explanation.
“Blake,” she said in a whisper, “It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me anything if you don’t want to… if fact I think I already know what you have been trying to say.”
Connie had always had an inkling of the dark tragedy that had changed his life, she realized – some preternatural sense, drawn from the paintings she had seen with the beautiful young woman, and his sudden decision to stop painting, to disappear from the world. She rose slowly, but kept her distance, not wanting to intrude, but needing to reach out to him with her understanding.
“Somewhere in your past, you lost the young woman you loved, and she was your muse. It’s the reason you gave up painting, and it’s the reason you go down to the beach each night,” Connie’s eyes became solemn and sad for him. Her face was very pale, her lips trembling. “She’s the woman in the paintings I saw.”
Blake looked haunted – a ghostly apparition that stood unmoving, with his features somehow blasted and eroded by the sudden heart wrenching pain that welled in his eyes. He stared at Connie, his gaze seeming to pass right through her, as though he was peering emptily at another time, another place.
“I have been given two gifts in my life,” his voice was raw and rusty, somehow detached from the man himself. “Two great loves. The first was painting. The second was my daughter, Chloe, who died when she was just six years old.”
Connie froze. An icy pall draped itself over her so that she could not breath, could only stare in horror.
“She drowned on that beach,” Blake said, his voice beginning to break into soft chokes as he fought back the sting of burning tears. “She drowned five years ago.” He moved away as though seeking darkness, his eyes suddenly haunted by the nightmares of his past. The timbre went from his voice until each word was flat and listless, devoid of color or emotion.
“When I was making my way through the art world – before I broke into the major galleries – I met a girl and we moved in together. We weren’t in love, we were just comfortable with each other’s company. Then, by happy accident, my daughter Chloe was born and my career began to take off. She was about to start school when I held my last exhibition in New York. We decided to move here. I wanted to be by the sea, I wanted to draw daily on the inspiration of the ocean for my next collection of paintings, so we came here to Maine, bought a dog, and I began painting for a show that would never happen…”
Blake moved like a shadowy specter, the light in the living room now directly over his head so that the strong broad of his brow turned his eyes into dark hollow sockets.
“One day I was working in the studio. Ned was still a pup, and he was curled up in a corner. The woman,” he could not bring himself to mention her name, “was on the beach with Chloe, playing in the surf line. It was sunset…”
r /> He couldn’t go on. He just fell silent for long moments, the tragedy of that moment playing over and over in his mind like an unimaginable nightmare. He heard the screams, the cries of panic and horror and then saw himself again running blindly through the house, his face white with shock, stumbling down onto the darkening beach with Ned at his heels. He saw the woman, her head buried in her hands and then realized…
Blake had blundered into the surf, screaming for Chloe, thrashing amongst the waves sobbing with fear, crying out until his throat was hoarse, until his legs could hold him no more.
“It’s why Ned and I go down to the beach at sunset and send a rose out into the sea,” he said at last. “And it’s why Ned goes every night to sit and wait on the empty beach until the sun comes up. He’s waiting for Chloe.”
Connie was crying, her face slick with heartbroken tears that fell like rain from her cheeks. She felt a choke of emotion in her throat so that every breath was a sobbing gasp. “The light house…” she said softly in understanding.
Blake nodded. “I leave the lights on, because I want Chloe to be able to find her way home, to find her way back to me,” he said helplessly.
“But the woman in the paintings?”
“Chloe,” Blake admitted. “I took five paintings and I added a beautiful raven-haired young woman to them. It was how I imagined her – how I pictured she might look if she had ever grown up. I sent the paintings out into the world in the hope that one day she might see them, see herself in one of my paintings and know that she was remembered… and loved…”
Connie felt broken – utterly destroyed. She could not stop the tears that burned in her eyes. Never had she imagined this man had held so much sadness within him, coveting it and holding it so close to him that like a destructive fire, it had burned away his heart and soul. She took a tentative step towards him, but Blake seemed to flinch from her. She stopped, went quiet again, sniffing back more tears and aching just to take him in her arms so that he could weep without shame, without reserve. Her lips were apart, quivering with grief.
“I thought God was vengeful,” Blake said. His shoulders were slumped now, his shape made gaunt and shrunken. He cuffed brusquely at tears that shone on his cheeks. “I thought I was being punished for not appreciating Chloe enough, not loving her enough, not being a good father. He took her from me because I was immersed in my art.”
He heaved a deep shuddering breath that was the sound of impossible sorrow.
“After Chloe drowned, I could never paint the ocean again. The sea had given me a career, and then she had turned cruelly on me and taken the life of my daughter. So I gave up my art, and turned my back on the world. And now it seems that once again God has come seeking revenge. I have ignored my gift, and as punishment he is making me blind.” Blake seemed to slump at the cruel irony of fate, and at last fell silent, spent and grieving, like the pain poured from his soul in an open wound that could never be healed.
Connie took another step closer, and this time he did not flinch, did not move away.
“You can still paint.”
“For now.”
“And you blame God?”
Blake fell silent again. He glanced at Connie, but couldn’t hold her gaze. He fled to the window and stared for a long time out at the shadows of the dark night. He was shaking his head slowly.
“Maybe I didn’t love Chloe enough,” he said so softly, the words so tortured that Connie barely heard him. “Maybe I didn’t appreciate her, or cherish her. Maybe I stopped deserving her… and so she was taken from me.”
“Do you believe that?”
“I don’t know,” the words were wrung from him. “But if it was because I failed her, and if I’m going blind because I turned my back on my gift in the same way I didn’t appreciate Chloe, then I need to find a way to square my soul, find some peace.”
“The portrait?”
“My salvation,” he said with the sudden conviction that could only come from desperate, despairing belief.
28.
Connie went down the porch steps and stood peering into the gloom of the night. The wind was gusting, shredding dark clouds across the moon so that the world seemed bathed in a soft glow without edges or definition.
She followed the path down to the beach and when she reached the sand she turned back suddenly and saw the bright lights ablaze in the house – a sad, sorrowful reminder of a little girl lost, disguised by the warm and welcoming glow of a beacon.
Her steps became heavy as she walked towards the lonely shape of the dog, sitting patiently above the high tide line. Ned was black as the night, seemingly carved from the same craggy dark rocks of the headland. He turned, saw Connie coming towards him and recognized her.
Connie dropped into the sand beside the dog and threw her arm up, around the Great Dane’s shoulder.
They sat in companionable silence, the big dog gazing with sad eyes at the blackness of the ocean, and Connie watching the white phosphorous explosions of foam as the waves hissed and dashed upon the shore. She sighed, and scratched her fingers down Ned’s back. He was like a shelter against the wind, an anchor to her worried thoughts that formed in her mind like waves but then burst apart before she could analyze or understand them.
“Ned, what am I going to do?” Connie spoke out loud, her words whipped away on the breeze. “Everything tells me I should go – that Blake’s fallen too deep into his own despair for me to reach him… and yet… and yet I am hopelessly attracted to him.”
She wrapped her fingers around a handful of sand and let it trickle from her grip as if poured through an hourglass. It was like life, she decided as she watched the tiny grains spill like flakes of gold. There was only a handful of time to live life, to savor its joys and disappointments, its agony and ecstasy. She thought about that time slipping her by, and then suddenly instead considered all the sand still in her hand – what remained in her grasp. It seemed to Connie to be the answer she was seeking.
She leaned against Ned, resting her head against his shoulder. She could hear the deep sonorous sound of his breathing, a steady rhythm like the ebb and hiss of the waves.
“I’ll stay,” she said.
She got to her feet slowly, scratched Ned behind his ears and stared one final time out at the empty black void of the ocean. Then she turned on her heel and walked back up the beach towards the house. There was still sand clinging between her fingers to remind her that time and hope were still in her hands.
29.
Blake was standing in the hallway entrance when Connie came through the screen door. He was bare-chested, wearing only denim jeans that were slung low at his hips. He had a towel in his hand, his dark hair curling and wet, and his chest tanned the color of old oak.
He draped the towel over his shoulder. “Did you find what you were looking for?”
Connie felt a flush of warmth across her cheeks and a prickling of the fine dark hairs at the nape of her neck. Her breath caught for an instant in the back of her throat. She wanted to stare, felt obliged to look away – and in the end did nothing except stammer in confusion.
“Pardon?”
“You said you were going to your car to find something when I went for a shower. I was just wondering if you found what you were looking for?” There was no taunt on Blake’s face, no understanding of the effect he was having on her. Connie managed a rattled little smile
“Yes,” she said quickly and found distraction by brushing the sand from her hands. “And then I went down to the beach.”
Blake nodded, going back down the hall towards the bedroom and Connie let out the breath that had strangled in her throat. When he came back he had stretched on a t-shirt, and Connie’s legs were no longer trembling.
“It’s too late now for you to drive back to Hoyt Harbor,” Blake offered. “I thought I might sleep on the sofa again. You’re welcome to the bed.”
Connie frowned. “I don’t want to inconvenience you,” she protested. “You said you h
ad a spare bed?”
Blake nodded and his eyes flicked away, down the hallway in the direction of the studio. “It’s in Chloe’s room,” he said and Connie was surprised that the words were not bruised by the lingering ache of his sadness. “I was going to clean the room out for you tomorrow, while I was organizing the studio.”
Connie nodded, sensed another change in the man, like the first hint of the sun breaking through on an overcast day. There was warmth there now, still watery and weak, but better than the dark brooding clouds. She smiled. “I don’t want to be any trouble,” she said abstractly, but Blake seemed to understand.
“Chloe’s things are all packed in boxes, the closet is empty. I just need to scrape away five years of dust,” then his voice lowered and became filled with meaning. “You’re no trouble. The room is yours for as long as you want it or need it.”
Connie felt herself melt a little in the sudden warmth, and she thought desperately of a way to feed that flicker of life she saw glint faintly in his eyes. They talked about art, its rich history and the movements that had emerged through the twentieth century, until slowly the stiffness went from his voice as she coaxed him with a covert thrill as he began to warm and then relaxed.
“Can you tell me more about the portrait you’re planning?” she asked.
Blake inclined his head. “I want to paint you in sunlight,” he said, and Connie sensed that he was scrolling through images in his mind, visualizing then discarding again until an idea began to firm and he groped towards it. “Near the window sill,” he said. “Some of the most beautiful paintings by the old masters were studies in light. I want to do the same thing – create a painting that pays tribute to the greats of the past, but in a way that makes the work timeless.”
Connie smiled. “I saw a painting like that once,” she said softly, not wanting to shatter the fragility of the mood, nor distract him from his vision. “It was in Amsterdam. It inspired my passion for art.”