Luck (15 page)

It’s not impossible that Lynn enjoyed becoming, for a time, a ripper, a hurler, a hisser, a screamer.

They were young. It seemed worth the trouble.

It was.

Die, bitch, die?
“That’s it,” said Philip, and stomped downstairs to confront Lynn. Who went away weeping, don’t forget that either.

“I’m sorry,” Nora says helplessly and for the third time. “I just wanted to tell you. I thought it was something you ought to know.”

“When’s the funeral?”

Surely Lynn wouldn’t attend, to add yet another layer of unpleasantness to an already unpleasant event. “Tomorrow, I hope. Here, at a place called Anderson and Sons Funeral Home. Why, did you want to come?”

“I can’t see why I would. But there’s no RSVP required anyway, I imagine?”

“Not at all. Whatever you decide. The more the merrier,” Nora says, and puts down the phone.

The more the merrier? What a thing.

“I love you,” Philip used to breathe into Nora’s hair and into her breasts and belly and thighs, and she believes that he did. But already, she sees, she grows accustomed to the past
tense. What if her memory works as selectively and capriciously as Lynn’s? What if what she learns is the forgetting of delight? What if she forgets to remember Philip’s laughter and whisperings, what if the rawness of his quick rages fades, along with the light touch of his breath, his tongue, on her throat, her shoulders—people must forget all sorts of things in sheer self-defence.

If they forget, how do they account for the resulting gaps in their lives, years during which they were apparently talking to air, embracing space, reaching out to touch vacuums?

Or the other risk, like Lynn’s creation of something that didn’t exist in place of something that did. As if it wouldn’t have been a far larger betrayal if Philip had stayed with her, on and on,
digging deeper, trying harder.
At least be truthful, that’s Nora’s rule. At very least, be where you want to be.

She hopes that’s where Philip was. It’s a terrible thing not to know absolutely, and now she can’t ask. They’ve been talking for seventeen years, she supposed they could talk on for ever, she was obliviously counting on time. If he were here now, she could recite to him what she told Lynn, and what Lynn had to say, and how she heard Lynn’s voice and its various tones.
The more the merrier
, he would mock, tickled or cross.

On occasion, before first Sophie and then Beth arrived, she and Philip fell together on this ancient sofa and pounded out with their own merry lust the contaminated sorrows of Nora’s parents: the false hopes with which it was chosen to furnish the beginnings of that other long-lost, upended marriage. From her corner now, she can see Philip’s eyes lighting with mischief, she sees his shoulders, his zippers, his buttons, his thighs, his penis soaring up into interest and view. On the next cushion, right here, is one place all this occurs. The shock of permanent absence, that sharp lightning strike sizzling
through tendons and bones, crackles right out through her toes again, making her jerk back, a repeated reflex of rejection.
Never again?

From her bedroom to this old piece of upholstered furniture, even the insides of the house are turning against her, baring their teeth, inviting grief indoors that was previously barricaded beyond the walls, outside the gate where those horrible villagers lurk. She is trapped between nothing good out there and now nothing good in here either.

What do those villagers—all right, townspeople, some of them—see from their uphill perspective? Blasphemy, evidently. Sacrilege and heresy. A taunting invitation to the lighting of torches. A mob of the berserk; but then, that’s what mobs are—a person here, a person there, there and there, whipped into a single-celled, single-minded, dangerous creature.

If there were many residents resistant to mobbery, they were mainly mute, and so not very brave. Which is its own kind of sin. Or perhaps Nora didn’t hear them, another sort of sin.

Her mistake was to underestimate the power of image; an especially unfortunate lapse, given her faith in the power of image. Walk into a room, she likes to think, and see a painting, or a sculpture, or even some less-defined piece that’s intended as art, and if it’s any good, bam!—there’s an impression, an emotion, an idea, a frank point of view.

Evidently she failed to take into proper account the fierce power of the negative bam.

Or she just didn’t care. That came to be more or less Philip’s view, although he was mainly restrained in expressing it, and was more protective than could reasonably be expected. Although she was not particularly reasonable on the subject.

They walked, a couple of years ago, she and Philip, into the opening of a sculpture show. They were acquaintances of the sculptor and his work, and were happy to leave the house in Sophie’s good hands while they took a weekend away in the city. It was a relatively casual event—Nora recalls wearing black trousers and a loose blue blouse she might have worn anywhere—but there, in the close-packed, chattering gallery crowd, was Beth: in long eggshell dress with translucent pale green beadwork at the throat, carrying a glass of red wine. She looked perfectly vacant. Untouched and untouchable, alert but remote. Anyone can be beautiful; there was some other factor at play that kept Nora manoeuvring to hold her in view. Pictures came to mind, a set of images, a meandering stream of notions that had something to do with Beth’s compelling, faint aroma of sorrow; those bones ready for shifting, skin ripe for translation.

Nora couldn’t explain even to Philip why she wanted Beth here when she’d never needed or used a model similarly before. He said finally, “I don’t know what you see in her, but I guess if it’s what you want, go ahead. What’s one more?” When they already had Sophie, he meant. How hard could he argue, anyway, when he was himself a beneficiary of Nora’s trust in first glances?

He would have preferred Beth at least to return to a room or an apartment elsewhere in town at the end of each day, but that would have been too expensive even if Beth had agreed to so isolated an existence. Eventually it might not have even been safe. As it was, it was strange that Beth could just pack up and move in, as if she had no other life. Maybe she didn’t, she’s never said, but how is that possible?

Beth is useful, beautiful, malleable and obedient, and this is what Nora’s hands and Beth’s body have together created:

Beth hanging, gangly and tiny-titted, from a metallic cross, fine bubbly blonde hair obscuring her face, tendons straining in her thin arms, blood trickling down her gaunt thighs and calves, dribbling in drops of crimson fabric off the tips of her painted toes.

Beth emerging baffled, and triumphantly nude, from the dark gaping mouth of a cave. She is steadying herself with a hand braced on a perfectly oval grey rock, the other hand trailing white chiffon (real white chiffon, embedded with a hundred, two hundred glittery sequins) that drapes and falls clear out of the frame.

Beth standing at the summit of a great hill, a huge piece, her arms spread outwards, rich bright yellow and red and green gown (strips of real silk) cascading downwards, enveloping the hill and stitched intricately with tiny figures of hopeful people gazing upwards, the word
BLESSED
embroidered in large, loose, pale yellow stitches in the low right-hand corner, near the flourish of Nora’s signature.

Beth at a feast with a row of lipsticked and eyeshadowed and rouged women of various colours wearing variously embroidered gowns (real fabric, real embroidery) leaning into each other at a long table, some laughing, some solemn, some plain and some lovely, with one off to the left in throat-to-ankle black velvet looking away from the rest. On the table, carved on its edges with veiled, leaping dancers, a splendid array of pastas and sauces, green and chickpea and bean salads, light and dark breads, and right in the centre a huge, chocolate-iced cake. Also in the centre the gaunt, remote Beth-figure standing, raising a mirror-sparkling crystal (real mirror, real crystal) glass of red wine. Or blood.

Two men, their long, perfectly sloped, identical, bent backs to the viewer, washing Beth’s feet with rags. The backs
are Philip’s, each spiny knob and carved muscle detailed from years of scrutiny and memory. Beth wears one of her own loose, mid-calf-length dresses, a soft yellow one hiked high on her thighs. Her legs are spread wide so that one foot rests in the hand of each man. Her head is thrown back, her eyes are closed, her lips curve gently upwards in pleasure.

All of this was slow and delicate work. From Beth’s perspective, possibly arduous sometimes, perhaps boring. She was perfectly flexible, at any rate, and perfectly patient.

Only those few pieces to trigger such tumult! Philip said it at least ought to please Nora that she became famous; or infamous. So did the town. Perhaps by now they’re symbiotic, like those birds that catch bug-meals and long rides aboard hippos, hippos that are cleaned and groomed by the birds.

Outrage and offence, another outbreak of words along the lines of “Die, bitch, die” outside her windows—whatever happened to love and redemption? So old testament, rather than new; like furious old wife rather than hopeful new one.

Philip said, “They think you’re ridiculing what they believe, and that makes them feel threatened, which makes them angry, and then they lash out.”

So?

“So of course I’m not saying they’re right, I’m just saying even if they’re crazy,
we’re
not. It shouldn’t be as hard for us to understand them as it is the other way round.” Because they, he and she, were smart and sane, he was suggesting. Nora did not see it that way. She thought he might want to move past nostalgia for happy, innocent childhood summers. “It’s not nostalgia,” he snapped, sensitive, it appeared, on the point.

Still, he was good about cleaning and repainting the fence after the “sluts” and “whores” and “blasphemers” and “Jezebels” began to appear overnight. And he was very good about
saying, “You just do what you do and don’t worry. It’ll never be really dangerous, nobody would do any real harm while I’m around.” Big, gregarious Philip, fellow drinker, old pal, grown child, good guy. Except he’s not around any more, is he?

Even if they are short of benevolence, why aren’t more people at least curious? Philip was, Nora is:
If this, does that follow?
And
What happens if you look at it this way?

What happens if it turns out a whole noisy portion of humans doesn’t like questions at all, only answers, and doesn’t care for alternative views?

Not much that’s good, it appears.

Nothing has happened, really, since early spring. The nine-day wonder died down; and anyway, the series is done. Certainly Beth’s purpose here is finished, and it’s well past time for her to move on. As Philip pointed out several times. “I’ll get to it,” Nora promised. “It’s hard, though. She’s no trouble, and I don’t know where she’d go.” Nora can sound kinder than she is. Does she by any chance actually contain a sliver of new testament-type human trying to get out, the same way fat people are said to have thin ones clamouring for an exit?

“Who cares where she goes?” Philip said. “She has to go somewhere sometime. If you’re having trouble, ask her to whip you up a tea that works for evictions.”

Yes, the tea thing does get on people’s nerves. And Philip could be as soft as a cushion or as hard as the frame of one of his chairs.

In the morning he smelled first of sleep. Then of soap, spicy and sharp. By noon his scent was dusty and wood-grained, fresh in its way as a forest. By nightfall, sweaty. By the time he rolled into bed, all that and often beery and smoky as well, the full range of his day was contained in his
skin. Nora doesn’t know how to locate a man’s scent on canvas. He frowns, he tilts his head back and laughs.

Nora rises up from the enemy sofa.

This time, once upstairs there’s no invisible hand keeping her out of her bedroom. She slams the door behind her, although more by mistake than from temper. The force of the slam makes the old windows shift in their frames; the sound rings a bell. She has done this before, and with temper. At Philip, intent on going out, never mind what she wanted or said.

“How can you drink with those people?”

“First of all they’re my friends, second of all they’re not
those people
, and lastly I don’t intend to hide away in this house or change doing what pleases me.”

So, slam!

Softer sounds, too. A grunting noise every time—for years, every time!—he buttoned his pants. It wasn’t exactly an irritating sound, only noticeable. Also the huge, happy exhalation when at the end of the day he threw himself into bed, glad to be there.

On their shared dresser top, he keeps only a black comb and a hairbrush—look, there’s a few of his mostly dark hairs, a few grey, caught in the brush—and a small box containing a jumble of jewellery debris, including cufflinks for those rare occasions when that sort of dressing up was required. “Shit, goddamn things,” he said, wrestling till Nora stepped up to fasten them for him; his wrists dusted with tempting male hairs.

Sometimes she helped tie his ties, too.

His ties are slung around a hanger in his side of the closet. He only has half a dozen because what use are they to a man who works with his hands and dislikes feeling restrained?
“Bibs for men” he called them, complaining of strangulation. He hasn’t bought a new tie since he and Nora were married. “I have enough to last me a lifetime,” he said, and so, it turns out, he did.

She lays them out on the bed. They are multicoloured, and of several widths and fabrics.

He has those two aging dark suits she mentioned to Sophie. They are not interesting, and can be given away. The shirts, though—the white, pale yellow, the blue, the cotton, the linen, the flannels—she’ll keep these. She pulls them from their hangers and folds them, too, on the bed. There is a Philip-scent to even the freshly washed ones, of soap and sawdust and something else more elusively his.

She dumps the contents of his bureau drawers in a great pile on the floor, a litter of socks and underwear, folded sweaters, coiled belts, more work shirts of the plaid flannel variety. In their first days together, it didn’t occur to him to do his own laundry. “It’s not magic, you know,” she told him. “Fairy hands don’t take it away in the night and return it by morning.” They had all sorts of household chores to sort out between them. Not without resistance, not without complaint, they found a system for vacuuming, getting meals, clearing up, doing laundry, doing business. Then they found Sophie. Fairy hands.