Marry or Burn (17 page)

“It was disagreeing with my hip bones,” she said. Dewey could accept that, rather than “I got tired of it,” or worse, “I stopped loving my horse. All that time I could only love one thing.” Of Karel, Dewey knew the name, nothing more. “Carroll,” he spelled it, e-mailing her in New York to say that she should of course bring him or someone else of her choice to the wedding. Dewey's theory, endorsed or more likely proposed by his wife Maggie, was that New York was full of men standing ready to occupy Jane's time and attention. Many men, not one. Maggie would never credit, in Jane, a paralyzed longing for
one
. Dewey shook his head; even though he and Maggie were in the midst of an addition to their stable, he pitied his sister for letting him have her horses.

“You know, Jane . . .”

“It always begins with ‘You know.' Something you don't know, that's going to make you feel bad.”

“I think you blame yourself for what happened.”

“No, Dewey.”

“It may be you do.”

“You mean Maggie does. Just because Tara was over here so much, just because I—” She almost said “love the girl,” but that would be reported to Maggie and Maggie would see it as envy.
“But honestly I never passed on any of my black arts to your daughter.”

“Now Jane.” He wiped his face as she had seen him do in court; with him it was sincere, it had something to do with thought, the draining quality of thought. “Tara was a . . . she was fifteen, she was just a silly girl.”

“No she was not. She was a wild girl, maybe she was an awful girl. Silly she was not.”
I was never so careless, so fearless as Tara, no. So merciless
.
If I could have been, I would have been.

But she must stop, she must not keep on until she brought to the kindly face of her brother, who was, after all, the father, the old look of baffled shame.

 

VERY EARLY THAT morning, Monday, someone had called from the front desk and put Fana on, because Jane had said a month ago that she would be back. “All day he was wai-ting,” Fana said. “Mr. Mayhew.”

Jane knew Mayhew had not been waiting; to wait you had to have memory. Fana said he talked, and Jane defended herself. She knew the man did not talk. “My dear, I don't have my calendar with me”—she was still in bed—“but I feel sure it was today. Yesterday we had a wedding here.” She didn't say,
My niece Tara got married. Ask around. Somebody there can tell you about Tara.

She had given up her habit of agreeing with people when it made her the culprit. For some time she had been saying, in fact, whatever came into her mind. There was no reason not to, now, no reason to be charming or even particularly civil. There was no reason to have her hair cut and colored and know the plots of operas and be ready to book a flight.

It seemed all she had done for years, even putting paint on
canvas, had been done for the sake of a man. A man whose name she must not mention, because it was foreign and unusual, and in some places a known name. A man she must not write or call or imagine leaning on her in a cab in desire so long-established it was almost lawful. And now there was no reason to do anything but paint and sleep.

But the phone had cut off both sleep and the images that formed on waking, and she got up quickly and wandered in her nightgown into the early sun, among the white almost weightless chairs you could rent now, arranged in curved rows in the garden.

Petals coated everything; Maggie had made sure the little girls had their baskets full. Jane picked up napkins, cigarette butts. She brought one of them to her nose. Karel. Karel had given up smoking with the greatest difficulty. Gum and patches and hypnotism, and finally a therapist. Some of the same aids he had required to give up Jane. He admitted such things. “I'm weak.” To love her was weak.

“You're strong,” he told her. “Don't worry. You'll wonder how you ever wasted your time on me.”

“I'm strong,” she repeated.

“It's in the paintings.” Karel was a connoisseur; he gazed, he selected; years ago he had followed her into the coatroom of a gallery, taken her by the shoulders, pressed her into the coats. “Who are you?” she had said, out of breath.

“Don't worry, we have been introduced.”

“I'm glad of that,” she said, testing the thick white hair with one finger.

“It was in another gallery,” he said, smiling.

“I wouldn't have to know you to know these things about you,” he said later, caressing her. “The rashness, the sympathies . . .”

“Ha. That's anybody. Sympathies? I could be Hitler. He was a painter. I could be a murderer like Caravaggio. You would never know.”

“. . . the appetites,” he went on. “I would know,” he said, with the combination of pride in himself and submissive tenderness that she had come to know.

In the rock garden the two lizards, whose cream stripes somehow turned over like ribbon and flashed into turquoise on their tails, sat in the sun. She had narrowed down; she was not the person he described, she was a woman who stood at a bedroom window, forehead on the glass, and watched for flickers in the rock garden while the big clock in the hall struck the quarter hour, the hour. She could have put those lizard colors on canvas in two, three strokes of the palette knife. Yet why would you? Hadn't Dewey been asking, in his muddled way, why you would paint at all? Why paint anything? What if you had lost the sense of how to paint what a thing meant to you?

Now her mind was going to crawl in a low determined way through French doors into a room where it could lift its eyes to the painting hung alone, emblazoned with gouts of cadmium yellow, a sunroom where the man who had sworn himself to her sat on Sunday morning reading the paper with his wife. Where now a mind could crouch—a small replica of herself that was also a lizard, tail lashing—in the dark behind the glass panels of a bookcase, and watch the small, the trembling wife, the wife who spoke with the same accent he did and who was kind and good, holding a treasure, her own life, always in her hands before him like a cracker she could break.

Maybe his children were there. No, they were away at school, in lives of their own. Old enough that they could have managed without him. Of course they could.

Yellow had filled her paintings at the time. Yellow of celebration,
of summer, of ease and satiety. None of them the yellow of today
,
flat and wintry, hers before she noticed it. Northern, like the yellow sky over Friedrich's abandoned landscapes and cold seas. A color for never.
I attest to it,
said the color.
Never.

Yet from her painting above the mantel one of the old jubilant yellows was shedding its light on him, and on his wife. A wife so fragile, trembling and silent, so huge and powerful, that she could never be left.
She would kill herself.

“I know how many men have said that,” he said humbly. “About their wives.”

“Over the
centuries
,” Jane said.

“Jane, for God's sake, Jane. You know.” He too could plead. “You know her. She would kill herself.” The unsaid thing was that she had tried before. So he had given her reason to try, before.

Jane did know, of course, that there were people who would kill themselves. How had he found the one person who would know this as she did?

There were people who would not give a thought to being dragged out of a car like sandbags while other people did the screaming. They would think only of dying. They would have set their sights on it. Dying, rather than going on, the way everybody else had to. Obsessed people, with no mercy for whoever had to yank hose from pipe and attempt CPR, rightfully howling at the sight of the human face turned demon red by gas, slapping that face, again and again—a bottom-heavy schoolteacher in a pantsuit, home from Parent Night and down on the cement floor of the garage beside the corpse that firemen were going to bring back from being a corpse. Those dreary others, neighbors, parents, sons, gathered in the hospital cafeteria. No mercy for them.

THE BRIDESMAIDS WERE pretty, all of them. Slim in their gauzy togas of green and lavender, pliant. Yet certain ones, she knew, were made of something invisibly resistant, like the polymers that hardened paint. Not pliant. One or two were liars.

A tanned girl bumped her, spilling champagne. “Oh, sorry, sorry,” the girl said in that high voice they all seemed to have, though it was Jane who was dizzy, not the girl with skin so smooth the ball of the shoulder gave off light. If she were forced to paint them Jane would paint their bones: curved little skull barely fused, clean jawline. The glowing collarbones of Tara. Of course if you loved beauty, if you had married badly, if you yourself were known for your black hair and your creased smile, if you had taught World History to tenth graders for fifteen years and still you loved beauty, beauty and daring—if this girl, of all of them, came to your desk after school with those collarbones lifting as she breathed, would you not think of putting your lips there?

Half the dresses in the garden were strapless; the ones that did have straps or sleeves showed bra straps as well. How many years of safety pins, of shamed pulling and tucking had gone into the concealment of bra straps, only for them to emerge finally as part of the ensemble? Although there was no finally. Or not in fashion: had not the tippet reappeared? Given a small twist, brought out as luxurious or perverse, and in the right colors, the parasol could return, even the bustle.

What was the matter with her, scolding like this in her mind? She had reached the side of the rabbi. He was standing by himself at the end of the walk where the paving stones led up and out of the garden. He was a heavy man; things moved around him. Before Tara and her bridegroom Josh he had stood as if to block a door, though his hands had been peaceably folded. She had an urge to sit down heavily in front of him on the scattered
rice, at the level of the milling legs. She knew all these people, though not so well as she once had. They were mostly people her brother's age, from the time when a gap of four years at school was the same as decades.

She looked for Josh's mother, Elaine. She had sat with Elaine at the rehearsal dinner. She felt some responsibility for her, a widow, a short, friendly woman who had inadvertently crossed into the region of Maggie's fiercest smiles during the planning by saying that she hoped to wear peach. Peach was Maggie's color. “I've never visited the South,” Elaine said when Maggie steered her to Jane's side in the garden and left her there. “Look at this. You've done it all so perfectly.”

“Maggie did it,” Jane said. “I'm in disgrace. I lettered the place cards in a hurry. They're messy. I'm the next thing to a visitor.”

Elaine waved that away and said, “Look, just look.” Two faces, close together, white as plates under the paper lanterns: Josh whispering to Tara. He had her hands in both of his. Elaine laid her own hand on her heart. “Excuse me, I might have to cry tonight so tomorrow I'll keep my makeup on.”
Cry now
, Jane thought.

When it was all over the young people drifted out from under the lanterns and down the hill to the empty stables. “I bet they're going to smoke a joint,” Elaine said, patting her hand. “I wouldn't say it except to you.”

“Not to Maggie anyway,” Jane said.

Elaine had asked for a tour of her paintings but there had not been time. “I was studying design before I married,” she had whispered, before Maggie found her shawl for her and took her away.

 

THE RABBI DIDN'T have the generalizing social gaze. His eyes settled on a person, then another. Now they were on her. Under
the thick eyebrows the half-hidden eyes seemed to be green. On the way through the house to the rehearsal, he had stopped to say, “Is this your work?” Eternal question, followed by “Interesting.” Or “Lovely,” when none of it was lovely. “Jane's colors,” you would hear them saying, with the musing calm of people under no obligation to like what might be liked in New York. A sympathy almost, for Jane in her dependence on such colors. He didn't say anything, though he put off going outside, and ventured into the dining room with his fingers together and tipped up in what she would have said was a priestly gesture. But a rabbi was a different thing entirely. He must have a wife.

“How is this done?” he said.

“With a knife.”

“Aha.” Next he would say his wife painted a little. But he didn't; he said, “You're a bit of a Fauve.”

His name was Israel. Israel.

Somewhere in the bookcases was a Bible, her prize fifty years ago for a drawing done before she could read. Where was it, with its zipper pulled by a cross, its words of Jesus in red letters? Inside, pale reproductions of unknown paintings, one of them her favorite for copying in crayon, with her thumbprints on it and her memory of smelling the page:
The Children of Israel
. Men, women, and children were pressing forward across a pastel desert, colored shawls blowing. The sheep, the tents, the wells: as much her own as her horse. And Moses spake, and his rod had a serpent on it. Men broke the earrings out of women's ears to melt for a golden calf. King David sang the Psalms.
Selah
: a word that stirred her, a word with no translation.