SHE HEARD ED’S HEAVY FEET POUND SLOWLY up the porch stair and thought, he’s still brooding, still lumbering about in a daze. She smirked, thinking, you would expect a man his size to have more fortitude, but he never had much of that, he has a definite courage in his writing, you have to give him that, but he’s got no stomach for life’s little difficulties.
She sat herself upright, put fresh paint on her drying brush, forced and held a smile to perhaps erase the frown she felt there.
The ancient planks of the porch groaned under his ponderous walk. The board they used to call the grouch gave a shriek of damnation. Ed cursed it right back, as he had a thousand times before, but half-heartedly, probably not even knowing he’d done it. He paused outside the door and sighed, characteristically not aware of how loud and how obvious he was.
Then he appeared in the doorway of her studio, his big shoulders sagging.
“How’s the weather, dear?” she asked brightly.
“Still fine,” he said.
“That’s good,” she said. “You won’t have to stay cooped up in here all day.”
“You ought to get out too,” he said.
“Maybe later. I want to work some more.”
He was nibbling a grass stalk, a male habit she had always found annoying. Furthermore, he had not showered or groomed himself lately. His hair was stiff and ludicrously awry. The gray stubble of his beard — it had startled her when she first saw it — made him look older than he was. She shook her head, thinking, boy, was I lucky to be rid of him.
“I don’t get why you want to paint today,” he said.
“I guess I just like finishing things I start, dear,” she said.
He turned so he was facing outdoors. He stopped nibbling and let his head bow. He gave another of his full-chested sighs.
Boy, what a ham, she thought.
She smiled — bemusedly, she imagined — and put a touch of paint to the canvas. It seemed to wick the painting into her, after hours of willing it to happen and failing. It filled her and became a complex sensation, a bodily knowledge of the shapes and distances, the balances and tensions, the places still whispering their need for specific color. And almost at once the artwork began to flow the other way, out of her and into the painting, filling and shaping it, bringing it closer to the point where she could say, I did it, it’s finished, today I did something fine.
When the concentration flickered, when she felt the world for a moment, she noticed that Ed was gone. But of course he would not still be there. Time never really stopped. In a matter of seconds the tranquility ebbed from her. Her painting arm was the last to know it, hovering with no clear purpose. She slumped in the chair.
Outside, the wind was blowing, masking other sounds — if there were any. Maybe everything already knew, the animals, the birds, even the insects. Perhaps the whole hilltop, the whole countryside, was brooding like Ed. But she was damned if she would take it that way. I’ve never been a crybaby and I’m not a crybaby now, she thought.
But she knew she would not get her focus back immediately. And she knew herself too well to force it. She had painted too much and fought an unsettled mind too often to deceive herself on that note. She knew what she could do and what she could not.
She listened to her grandmother’s pendelum clock laboring across the room. Nick, it went. Nick. Nick. It seemed to report each second just a little too late, as if after so many human generations and households it were finally getting tired. Tired of everything, she thought. Certainly tired of us. But that was the way it had worked when Gail was a girl, too. Always barely making it. But never failing. It would keep time that same scratchy, precarious way forever, she thought, if there were someone to keep it company, to keep lifting its black weight.
Several times now the clock had hypnotized her. She would discover her painting hand in her lap and realize she’d been sitting inert, saying in her mind, nick…nick…nick…nick. And she didn’t know if minutes had gone to waste, or hours. As if she’d been counting, but with only one number: one…one…one…one.
If we could only break the rules a little, she thought. If we could make each second last a harmless bit longer than the previous one. That’s all it would take. A second stretched to a minute, a minute stretched to an hour, an hour to a month, a year to a lifetime. With just that little change we could stay here forever, finishing everything we’ve started, fixing everything we’ve ruined, making everything good.
Nick…nick…nick…nick, she thought, trying to accomplish it, like the afternoon as a girl when she’d tried with her will power to make a pencil roll. Her mind still felt the bruise of it, of trying to believe something she couldn’t. No! No! No! she told herself. No pretending!
She had taken Ed back. He had called and said, I’m sorry about everything, if we could just try one last time. She had said, what about Ginny? Skinny? Oh, Jenny. Yes, where is your drunk anorexic would-be covergirl now? She left me, he said. I haven’t seen her for over two years. Well why did you wait until now, she asked. You know how the job is, he said. But no, it wasn’t just that, I didn’t think you’d want me, didn’t think you should want me. Well what makes you think I’d want you now, she said. Please, Gail, he had said, this is the last time we can try.
She had said, come if you want, but I’m not changing for you, I’ve got my life working, I’m not going backwards for you.
He was there in less than 24 hours. He came with a suitcase. He didn’t even bring his writing things. I’ve got everything I’ll ever need now, he had joked bitterly.
Please, she had said.
He had made it clear he was there to apologize and atone. He forgave her and hoped she could forgive him also though of course she had much more to forgive. She said it was both too soon and too late for that. He could do what he wanted while he was there and they could be civil to one another, but if he was going to badger her for more than that he would have to go away.
For two weeks they’d been perfectly civil. She was perfectly cheerful every day and she had finished three paintings, easy ones but as good in their way as she might ever hope. His return had given her that, at least — shut her in with her art by giving her something to shut out. He had moped. He watched a lot of the news reports and ceremonies. Once when she caught him crying she said, it’s morbid, it’s like throwing yourself an early funeral. He said, some of us have a heart. Spare me, she said. But she had never seen him so grieved. It stung her to be cruel to him, and that made her even angrier. He deserved cruelty. She deserved revenge.
She had felt the horror and grief of it, too, but somehow she had kept it distant. She had painting to do. She had always said she painted for the satisfaction and not the money or recognition, and not even for others, and now she was proving it.
She was glad he had come. She had been too generous in the divorce. She could have demanded the house, but instead had bought his share. It was satisfying to know that his marriage to Jenny hadn’t worked, but it did not fully compensate for her suffering. He had made her feel worthless. She had wasted the last years of her youthful beauty in a stupor of sleeping pills and self-loathing. For a long time she had stopped painting. She was glad for a chance to even the score.
Until yesterday she had been fine. Then, in the middle of the day, her concentration had started failing. She had to fight a panic that this painting, the only one that mattered now, would not get done. Then she had her first nightmare — they said everyone was having them now. In the dream, Jesus came to save the world but got disgusted and flew off to a different one. Now she had been sitting in the studio since sunrise and had trusted herself to apply paint only that once — when Ed had come in brooding.
I have to finish it, she told herself. I have to to do something good today.
She looked at the clock and saw that it was almost noon. When she looked again, two hours had passed. Her paintbrush was on the floor. Her mind was thick with drowsiness. No! she said aloud. No!
She stood up, paced quickly to flush the cobwebs and fear from her mind. It had not been the clock’s trance this time — those were just minutes. This was hours. She could not believe she had let herself nap on her last day to finish it.
She went to the kitchen to see if any cold coffee were left from the morning. In the carafe was black lava. “Damn him!” she said aloud, switching the coffee maker off. She heated a mug of water in the mircrowave and stirred brown crystals into it, what Ed called “Isn’t Coffee.” It will have to do, she told herself. It’s fine. I don’t remember to drink it anyway, once I’m painting. And I will be painting. She marched back into her studio.
But standing back from it, she saw that it was doomed. In her burst of work that morning she had managed to very skillfully and beautifully put shadows into all her trees and grass and clouds where light should be.
She had not done something that amateur since her first year of art school. She had felt she was working as well as she could work — and somehow this had happened.
She could paint out the mistakes, she could press herself into a sprint, she had shown herself a hundred times that when she really wanted to, she could work like —
But yes, this time was different. Yes, this day was different. She set her coffee on the work table, got into the coat closet, and cried.
WHEN ED CAME IN, SHE WAS washing dishes. “I can’t believe you,” he said. He was nibbling a dandelion stalk, systematically flattening it like he did his soda straws. It was his straw nibbling, in fact, that had first attracted her. It seemed to confirm what she’d been told, that he was full of creative energy, that inside his beefy linebacker’s body was a restless, thinking spirit. Which was true. But she had gradually come to know that his fidgeting could also be a symptom of his weakness, his indecisiveness and worry.
“We each have our way of going through life, dear.”
“I wish you’d stop the ‘dear’ business.”
“If you’d like.” She was smiling. She had put on a flowered shirt and brushed her hair into a ponytail.
“I’m sorry about all this,” he said, indicating the wreckage.
“It doesn’t matter much now.”
“Why aren’t you painting?” he asked.
“I believe I’m perfectly capable of deciding how I use my time.”
“I just wondered.”
“And what have you been up to, dear?”
“I thought you were going to stop that.”
“Ed,” she corrected herself.
He sighed. “I was looking around the barn. You know that last stall, where we had all that old stuff stored? It doesn’t look like you’ve even been in there.”
“I don’t know that I like you nosing around in my things.”
“Come on, Gail. It’s not your things. It’s our things. I found some of my old records from high school. I’ve wondered where they went to.”
“If there’s anything of yours in there, I had no idea. I would have sent it to you years ago, believe me.”
“I’m just saying, I found these things I thought were gone. Today they show up. Some of my first stories, stuff from when I sold leather in college. I mean, it’s all trash, but — “
“Well, anything that’s been sitting in that stinking barn for ten years is certainly trash to me. So feel free to rummage around in it all you like, if that’s what you enjoy.” She started the sink draining and dried her hands.
“There was some of our first cookware, that old Revlon set. The one with the lifetime guarantee.” He said it as a joke.
“Please,” she said.
“Anyway, look at this.”
“Whatever it is, I’d rather not.” She walked into the living room. She sat in the rocker and closed her eyes. The wood floor moaned and snapped. The leather recliner hissed and then thumped twice in mock protest as Ed — with oblivious force, as always — rammed it into its furthest position. He sank back into the leather and foam, he and the chair both sighing.
She knew exactly how he’d be sitting: his legs splayed, his soles on the fabric, his left arm hooked lazily over his head.
She opened her eyes to confirm it. “I’ve got a headache,” she told him.
“I’ll get you an aspirin,” he said.
“I don’t want any,” she said.
But already he had cracked the chair back into upright position and started to the kitchen. When he returned she took the pill and glass from him and placed them, untouched, on the table beside her. “Thank you very much,” she said kindly.
He gave another of his deep sighs and went to the doorway. “I thought we might barbecue,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“That new grill we got. When we first bought the farm. Maybe you don’t remember. But it’s still in the barn, unopened. I thought we might, you know, get some use out of it.”
She laughed loudly, and kept laughing. He pulled the dandelion stem out of his shirt pocket and was nibbling it. “For heaven’s sake, why should we get some use out of it?” she asked, finally.
He spit a piece into the room.
“Then forget it,” he said.
He lumbered out of the room and into the kitchen. His footsteps stopped, and for awhile there was no sound. Then he started. She knew by the sounds what was being damaged: the oven door, a leg of the harvest table, the cute little vintage television set, the tableware drawer, the china cabinet, and then, at the same time, the terra cotta vase and the big window over the sink. She heard the gripey porch plank, then a series of two-footed stomps, on and on, like he meant to take the house down. The grouchy plank gave up with a cracking yell, Ed finally fixing it good. She almost laughed. She was going to bellow a laugh loud enough for him to hear. His shout froze her. It was partly the roar of an animal and partly the scream of a woman. She shut her eyes and reopened them slowly. She had gotten sufficient revenge.
SHE WENT OUTSIDE AND WAS startled to see how lively things were. The grass, shaggy from three weeks’ neglect, was practically dancing with insect life. The big maple was wrestling wind in its top branches. A migration of small clouds was ripping and regathering northward in the blue sky.
Although she had known it, it struck her like a revelation: she had kept herself inside for all the last week.
How could I, she thought.
As she moved through the grass, panics of insects erupted onto her. Brushing them from her arms and clothes, she crossed to the little barn.
“Ed?” she called. She looked into the barn through its big doorless doorway, as always a little frightened to enter. After three decades it still had a smell of the prison it had once been. She always felt that the outrage of livestock was still in some way present there. They’d found horrible things in the barn — huge hooks hanging from the beams, a club with spikes hammered through its business end, a rope tied into a kind of noose. Ed, silly with the excitement of finally owning property, had hung the loop from a rafter. “In case we can’t meet the mortgage,” he had said. “Please,” she had replied. Typically, he had never bothered to take it down.
She looked for it now, but looking into the barn from daylight was like peering into a wall. “Ed?” she called again. She stepped inside and waited anxiously for the blindness to pass.
Her eyes picked out the empty noose, and she sighed with relief.
The door of the last stall was open. Looking into the little room for only the second or third time since they’d filled it she saw a large box blurred and ghosted with twelve years of dust — except where Ed had recently touched it. His big handprints were vivid with color and glossy newness from the first year of their marriage.
She went outside again. The sunlight burned her eyes and she had to force them open. Barbecue, she thought, trying to laugh, her eyes watery. It’s just like him to come up with something so pointless. “Ed!” she called again, trying to sound curious rather than afraid. Sniffing back the sun tears.
She heard a sharp crack in the distance. Her imagination created an image.
“Ed!” she shouted, but still holding back a little. Still embarassed
She hurried towards the sound, into the down-sloping woods, stumbling on a branch, then on another, as if she were being warned — for your own good, turn back. She called his name again, and finally she screamed it, trying to run now. This time she did fall, and as she scrambled to her feet she saw him lumbering clumsily uphill towards her, embracing a load of rubbish from the forest.
She looked at her hands, brushing leaves and dirt from them, and he slowed to a walk. He dropped his load on the leaves, breathing hard. “What’s wrong?” he asked, gasping.
“I fell,” she said. “Like an idiot. Over that stupid little log.”
“You screamed,” he said, his big voice louder than he probably intended. “I thought something was wrong.”
“I just wondered where you were.”
“Where would I be?”
“Down in the woods, I would assume,” she said, too matter of factly.
He narrowed his eyes, trying to figure it out. He looked at her with realization. “Oh, come on.“ He laughed his deep laugh. ”Give me some credit. I was breaking up wood.”
“Okay, okay!” she said. She turned to hide her embarassment. She crossed her arms and picked at the dried paint on her fingers. He began busting up the branch that had tripped her. Without watching, she could see his bulk reducing it to pieces. One crack was again like a gun shot.
“I guess that’s for the barbecue,” she said.
“What else.”
“You’re so wierd,” she said.
“When have I ever not been?”
He gathered his firewood into one arm and with the other grabbed the thick end of another fallen branch. He always takes more than he needs, she thought. He has that weakness, that ability. But then he shares it. You have to give him that.
They walked uphill and onto the level yard, out into the pretty part of it, where the big maple stood. Ed dropped his load and collapsed on the high grass, breathing heavily. “I’m not what I once was,” he said.
“It feels like fall today,” she said. She went alone to the edge of their hill and looked down at the forest and rolling landscape, the handful of other houses tiny with distance, a landscape so lovely and their view of it so lofty they had called their luck in buying this hilltop a miracle. She had painted the view at least a dozen times. Sometimes, in the ten years he was gone, she had told herself the view alone should be enough to satisfy her.
She came back to where he was sprawled in the grass, next to his pile of wood. He was breaking a piece of bark into little bits, and had a splinter of white dead wood in his mouth.
“I’m sorry,” she said, facing the house.
“I know,“ he said. ”I’m sorry, too.”
They both grew still and listened. They heard it at the same time and faced one another.
“Oh my god,” she said.
He stood up. “Why don’t you get some meat from the freezer and I’ll get the grill.”
“Will you need anything else? Utensils? Something to start the fire with?”
“The fire. Okay, what do you have? Lighter fluid? Gasoline?”
“I don’t have any of that. Can’t we just use newspaper or some other trash?”
“Ouch,” he said.
“I didn’t mean –
“I couldn’t care less. Come on. Let’s be creative. Wait a second — vodka!”
“Vodka! I’ll get the cheap stuff — no, I’ll get the Stolie’s.”
“Get the goddam Stolie’s.”
“Okay. And utensils…”
“Get whatever you think. We’ll figure it out as we go. I’ll get the grill.”
“You get the grill. I’ll get the Stolie’s and whatever I think. Do we go now?”
“We go now.”
They ran in separate directions. When she came back to the maple he was dragging the big box across the grass, distributing a little glory of dust with every jolt.
“I’ve got a blanket to put stuff on. Here’s the Stolie’s and…”
“…no matches?” he asked.
“…my dad’s silver lighter…”
“Way better.”
“…and here’s the stupid Book-Of-The-Month Club Automatic Selection.”
“You know, at any other time…”
“Let’s burn it and say we didn’t,” she said.
One by one he took the items from her arms.
“And a very, very old knife,” he said.
“I should have brought a good one. What am I thinking?”
“This’ll be fine.”
“Okay. Let’s open it.”
They soon had cardboard and paper spread and blowing across the grass and black pieces of metal all over the blanket.
“Problem,” he said. “Requires assembly. Insufficient tools, wrong kind of intelligence. Can’t accomplish.”
“New plan needed,” she offered.
“No need legs, no need dome-thing. Use, uh…”
“Round bottom thing…”
“…big fire bowl, and stiff shiny wire thing, uh…”
“Grate!”
“Yes, grate. Cook on ground, like the grandfathers of my people. Bend knees…squat…ouch…”
“You look like a great grandfather.”
“Old man build fire. Old woman…”
“Get more stuff.”
In the kitchen again she discovered her chest hurt. “I don’t think I’ve run in 20 years,” she told herself, laughing. She found three large steaks in the freezer. She put them on the harvest table, which was tilted now, but still a table. She gathered things they might want — a long roasting fork, a pile of dish towels, a block of cheese, her two best bottles of wine, chocolates, a corkscrew, a carving board, knives, wine glasses, a dictionary, a vase of flowers, a broken china teacup and her pocketbook. She gathered the corners of the tablecloth to form a sack and got the load outside. She dragged it to the maple.
“You never know what you’ll need,” she explained, spreading it all open.
“You forgot the monkey wrench!”
As the logs burned down to coals, the rumbling grew louder. They felt their hilltop shake. Between thunders they heard the cries of animals. The sky was a pandemonium of ripping cloud and shrieking, dizzy birds.
“This was my grandmother’s,” she said. “My aunt gave it to me last year. It’s the only piece of her whole china set to survive that fire, when my mother was little.” She fished two half-tickets out of her pocketbook. “I thought I’d lost these once. My pocketbook was stolen, with two hundred dollars in it, and all my cards. But these were the only thing I cared about. Even the police didn’t find them inside. Do you remember what they’re from?”
“Of course I remember.”
“Of course you do.”
They finished the first bottle and started the second. He set the steaks to cooking.
“I never forgave you for cheating on me,” she said. “In a way I deserved it. I was a bitch, plain and simple.”
“I was a bastard, plainer and simpler. You should have been harder on me. I should have given you the house.”
“The happiest times I ever had were in this house. When we first moved in.”
“A thousand times I’ve thought of you on that ladder, hanging the birdhouse, the whole yard in bloom.”
“I didn’t love you enough. I admired you and thought you were kind and sexy and I was proud to have you, but the only person I loved was me, Ed. And I didn’t even love me that much.”
“I loved work. I loved reporting. I loved chasing stories, working late, the bylines, the feeling I was writing history. What a grandiose pile of crap. At least you did something beautiful. You’re the artist in this family.”
“You never wrote one sentence without integrity.”
There was too much to say. They did their best to say the most important things. Then the second bottle was empty.
She looked at the sky. “You better finish those steaks,” she said. “I’m afraid it’s going to rain.”
“Gail,” he said, pointing. They watched as a deer, then two others, came over the hill into their yard. She covered her mouth with her hands. The animals studied the two humans warily, then walked nervously towards the other side of the hill. In a few minutes they returned. By then other animals had appeared: a fox and her cubs, a racoon, two possums, several squirrels, little creatures in the grass and, most surpising of all, a cow.
“We’re so sorry,” said Gail. “Tell them, Ed,” she asked him softly. “You say it, too.”
But she saw that he couldn’t speak. She felt him almost crushing her.
They went to the edge of their yard again and looked into the valley. Only the tallest treetops still rose above the water. Far across the valley, towards the west, they saw where the ocean was pouring in between two hills. Gail yelped.
“Hail,” she said.
They saw smoke rising from the grass. “Not hail,” said Ed. “Get in. Hurry.”
They turned on the news. “The only thing left for us to do,” said the president of the nation, sitting beside his wife, “is to ask forgiveness of almighty god and pray that mankind, or something better, may yet live wisely on this good earth. May we all —”
“This is fine,” she said.
The man and the woman drew close as the image went noisy and then dark.