Folly (11 page)

I will freely admit that the first few days were hard. Very hard. Partly that was because of coming cold turkey off the meds, and yes I heard voices and yes I saw ghosts out of the corner of my eye. And when Ed De la Torre, the man in charge of bringing my mail and keeping me supplied with bread and propane, first appeared last week he startled me quite badly. Fortunately, he spoke up rather than tapping me on the shoulder or—well, nothing happened, and Ed now knows to give me fair warning.

Actually, you’ll be pleased (I think) to know, the reason I didn’t hear him coming was that I was completely wrapped up in building a piece of furniture. That’s right, although what Gloriana, my New York gallery owner, would make of it I can’t imagine. It is, to put it in its most pedestrian terms, a driftwood-based workbench, but it is actually a far more intriguing medium than I would have imagined possible—the pale driftwood rises up out of the earth (it’s sitting on the open ground under a tree—yes, and just think what Gloriana would say at that! Although come to think of it, MOMA might be pleased at the
plein air
concept). Anyway, the branches rise up like a thicket of waving arms, intertwined to support each other and the heavy slab of the top. And you know what that top is? The front door of Great-uncle Desmond’s house, which turned up in the ground-clearing process. The door is solid cedar, which explains its longevity, and badly charred and full of nailheads or something on what used to be the inside, but I turned that side down, planed down the good side (removing the door latch first, naturally—this is a workbench, not a work of conceptual art), and it really is a remarkable piece of usable sculpture.

And the very first thing I did with it was to unwrap one of the glasses you gave me and set it on the middle of the bench, full of my first wine on the island. Magnificent. I even took some photographs of it—I’ll ask my granddaughter Petra to develop them and send copies to you, after I’ve finished the roll.

The table took up the better part of a working week, a ridiculous waste of time considering that I’m living in a tent and winter is only six months away, but it served its function, a restorative one you could say, reminding me of who I was before (a person you never knew, but may have glimpsed) and allowing me to focus on what exactly I am doing here, restoring this wreck of a house.

(Do you notice, by the way, that this letter is heavily laced with
what my old junior high English teacher would disapprovingly call run-on sentences? Think of it as stream-of-consciousness at work, a continuation of our sessions. Better you should think that—bill me, even, for reading this!—than just think what lousy grammar Rae Newborn has.)

One bit of business. You may be—may already have been—contacted by my local sheriffs deputy, who came growling up (his boat, not him—everyone zips around here in a most amazing variety of water-craft, most of them powerfully engined. Sort of like a wilderness Venice. In fact, my island being in a quirky twist of current, when—not if, but when—I finally give in and get a boat, it’ll have to have a big motor. Your secret Freudian side can make what it will of that statement). Where the hell was I? Oh right, the deputy. Bobby Gustafsen, a real sweetheart of a man (Oho, says Dr. Hunt; Oh no, says Ms. Newborn: a much married, father-of-twins sweetheart of a man in his early thirties) who eyed me warily as if I was about to leap at him. Deputy Gustafsen came by, mostly to make contact with a new resident (it’s that kind of a place, despite the watery distance between neighbors) but also to bring me a photo my local department down there sent him, asking if I could identify the man as one of my attackers. It didn’t look much like either of them, but it’s nice to know the department down there hasn’t written it off completely. Anyway, I gave him your number, as a character reference more than anything. If he calls, reassure him that although I may occasionally imagine little green men, in this case they were just a pair of human (?) creeps. Scumbags, as Sheriff Escobar called them, and I can only thank God yet again for my neighbor Joseph, not only for happening along when he did,
and
being willing to intervene, but for simply being able to back me up: that on this one occasion, despite all my false alarms and fantasies, I wasn’t hallucinating, and I didn’t beat myself up. If Joseph hadn’t come, you and I would still be having our thrice-weekly sessions and I would have long since come to believe that those two bastards were every bit as incorporeal as the eyes at my windows and the footsteps on my deck.

Instead of which I am here, I am working, breathing a whole hell of a lot of fresh air and eating vast quantities of fairly monotonous but terribly healthy food, and at the end of the day I’m far too tired to listen for voices in the tiny waves that brush on my rocky beach or to look for eyes watching from the rapidly leafing-out bushes around my tent.

So, dear Dr. Roberta-my-shrink, let your mind cease its fret over this wayward and unreasonable client—-for the moment anyway. It is all proceeding in the right direction, and if I slip, if the voices begin to reemerge in the night, I promise I will resume my meds. Much as I love you, I am becoming attached to my hundred-fifty-acre rock, and I would not wish to trade it for the pale green confines of the hospital. Except, perhaps, for the relative comfort of the beds.

With hopes for your physical and spiritual health (for of the mental, I have no doubts) and with all affection
,

Yours
,
Rae Newborn

Not too many lies in that letter, Rae thought that night as she addressed the bulky envelope (aside from the impossibility of resuming meds when they lay on the ocean floor). No need to lie, really, and best not to if she could avoid it.

She picked up the glass of wine, the glass so delicate as to be ethereal, and drained the last swallow of California Merlot. The Hunter’s farewell present—a gift that could only have been from one friend to another rather than from doctor to client—had been two of these lovely long-stemmed things; a pair, the psychiatrist had told her firmly, not so that Rae could save them until she had a guest, but so Rae wouldn’t be tempted to leave them on the shelf in the category of Things Too Precious to Use. If she broke one, well, she had a replacement; if she broke that, well, it was only the surviving member of a pair.

Like much The Hunter told her, there seemed to be a number of levels to the explanation, but Rae suspected that deep down, this petite, urban, Armani-clad woman couldn’t bear to picture her client swilling down wine from a tin mug as she crouched by the fire, a horny-handed daughter of toil. Wilderness might be unavoidable at this point in Rae’s life, but Civilization must not be abandoned completely.

Besides which, they both knew that wine tasted better from good crystal.

Rae was satisfied with the day’s work, which had seen a finish to the simple task of making a workbench, a task that had so rapidly become something far greater. On the one hand, to have wasted so many days on
the painstaking artistry of the thing, down to the thread of inlay twining up one silvery leg that called forth the clear glistening cedar of the top and tied in the red-brown in the overarching madrone, was as she had told Dr. Hunt, a ridiculous waste of time. She had far too much to do in site clearance and wall raising, to say nothing of water-supply checking and septic-tank digging, to spend four and a half days on a frivolous structure like that.

On the other hand, that very concentration on frivolity was what marked her as an artist and as a person. Drawers joined by tight and tiny dovetails, cabinets with inlay on the inside, for heaven’s sake, hand-forged brass hinges that echoed the design of the piece, and layer after layer of laborious French polish—ridiculous. Unnecessary. As crazy as deciding at the age of forty-two to keep the unexpected baby that would mean giving up, for the health of the child, two years of working with half the glues, stains, and finishes she depended on, and at a time when she was on the edge of becoming Big. But these kinds of decisions were the very center of Rae Newborn. For the first time in forever, she had begun to remember that.

Rae went out of the tent (an action which, after ten days, still raised her pulse, but it was getting easier) to rinse the glass under the tap of her plastic five-gallon water jug. She wondered if Ed would bring the test results of the water sample she had sent to the lab—it would sure be nice to use water from the spring rather than this flat-tasting stuff, which had the flavor of its container. She set the glass upside down on the towel that served as a dish drainer and crossed the dark clearing to say good night to her completed workbench.

Tonight’s quarter moon cast no more light than a candle, but Rae found that if she stood to one side, the glow from the tent was sufficient to illuminate the pale tangle of legs beneath the eighty-year-old slab of cedar. She had been astonished, as the door emerged from the concealing growth, to find it largely intact. The edge resting against the ground had needed trimming, and the hinged edge and part of its inner surface had been, as she wrote the psychiatrist, charred by the fire, but aside from a couple of holes in the inside (coat hook nails? Drilled holes for something mounted there?) the rest was solid. Massive, even. For some reason, it had been hinged to open outward, which she would have thought awkward over steps, but Desmond probably valued the space inside over the convenience. Rae had vacillated between trying to restore Desmond’s door to its place and using it as the bench top, but she
decided she had made the right choice. The past was to be built upon and used, not to be ruled by. She would make her own door, not quite a twin of his, building her new on top of the transformed old. She might even be able to use the original latch, or have it duplicated at a forge.

The bench’s builder ran her palm over the dim surface. The wood was smooth, despite the slight variations left by the plane—smoother certainly than the skin of her hand, which was rapidly resuming its old work-roughened, blistered, cut, and abraded state. Rae rarely sanded a flat surface, preferring the clean, cut finish of the plane to the soft nap left by even the finest-gauge sandpaper—although some woods, and many shapes, called for grit over blade. She even preferred the very act of planing, the all-encompassing dance of motion, the long, slow strokes, feeling the grain of the once-living tree beneath her hands. It was a bit like giving a massage, with every muscle called into play and the body’s weight balanced on the balls of the feet, her whole person working together at the service of the mind’s eye. She relished the slow rip of the steel blade slicing strongly through the wood fibers, and took pleasure in the rain of fragrant curls. She even enjoyed the preliminaries—tuning the plane, setting the blade, honing it to a razor’s edge. All in all, vastly preferable to clouds of fine sawdust.

If only life could be smoothed as easily
, she thought.

Now, however, came the question of the bench’s finish. Oil would darken the wood and leave it duller than a waterproof varnish would. On the other hand, an impermeable finish always looked artificial, riding the top of the wood like the layer of plastic it was, to say nothing of needing to be stripped and replaced every few years—or more often, given this damp climate. What if she—

A sharp
crack
rang out from the hill behind the tent, and every muscle in Rae’s body lunged instantly for shelter. One moment she was meditating on her bench; a split second later she was cowering on the far side of the madrone, her face pressed against the cool inner bark, putting tree, workbench, clearing, tent, and fallen cedar between herself and the source of that broken branch.

It was not repeated. Bile tasting of sour wine crawled up the back of Rae’s throat, her head swam, the old, familiar roaring arose in her ears. She turned and sank to the ground with the tree trunk at her back, dropped her head to her knees, and grappled with despair.

How could a person live like this? she wondered. A raccoon steps on
a dead branch, and that innocent noise acts like an electric prod? It was more than a year since those two bastards had driven up behind her on the road, and in all that time, all those months in the locked ward and under The Hunter’s care, rationality still hadn’t managed to drive a wedge between perceived threat and the body’s response.

Her predecessor here, the builder of Folly, would have known all about the lasting effects of stress, even on a normal mind. The man who had painstakingly assembled that cedar door could have told her how long it took before shell shock began to fade away, before a backfiring car ceased to hit the brain like artillery fire and send the ex-soldier diving for cover.

But then again, maybe Desmond couldn’t tell her how long it took; maybe for him, the visceral response had never lessened. Perhaps that was why he stayed here, far from civilization’s loud noises.

Or was it not just civilization’s backfiring motors and clashing machinery? Did Desmond, too, panic at a mere crackling in the shrubs? Did his poor battered mind, too, read the noise as threat—the Kaiser’s soldiers creeping across no-man’s-land, perhaps? Is that why he had made a door heavy enough to withstand mortar fire?