Suicide's Girlfriend (19 page)

Well, Candace had not gotten off the farm by being stupid. She understood that she envied Joyce Burton. Indeed, because sometimes Candace could not help wanting to be absolutely everyone, in the course of the days since the Rick Haynes suicide, Candace had occasionally—albeit guiltily—caught herself envying Joyce Burton's grief, her starring role as victim/lover/bereaved. Appalling, yes, though not quite so mean when squarely faced. What would have helped, if Carson had been home . . . it would have helped Candace a lot to bring such envy into the light and make it a joke upon herself, like the time that Carson turned up the Toyota's radio to hear a song he had liked as a boy, and Candace was able to poke him and say, “Oh, no, now I have to be jealous of this Girl from Ipanema, too!”

There had been some overlap in the times when both Carson and Candace were at the University of Iowa—she as a student, he as a professor—but the two never met there, and Carson had blushed when, unpacking from their move to Arizona, Candace came upon a packet of photos of Carson as a young professor (the flannel shirt, the woodsman's beard covering face and neck). “My redundant phase,” Carson said, “you wouldn't have liked me.” Dated 1978, that photo had been a scary reminder to Candace that Carson might well die long before she did; and her voice was clotted when she replied, “I could never
not
have liked you, Carson.”

From her own days at the university, Candace owned only one photo: a black and white that the
Des Moines Register
had run with an article on the state's promising young painters. Candace was a graduate student then, but—skinny, hair cropped—she looked like a boy, a shadowy street thief out of a foreign film. This was not entirely an achieved effect. After classes, Candace worked in a theater, selling tickets to movies she could not afford to see; then hurried home to paint for most of the night. Half of her meals in those days consisted of the leftover movie popcorn. She lived in a basement room rented from a bus driver and his older sister. During her last semester of graduate school—just before the photo had been snapped—Candace had to be hospitalized for three weeks; some toxicity developed from her living in the same room in which she painted. Not long after, however—thanks to the
Register
article and a professor who got his gallery to take Candace on—she started selling her work. She moved herself to that tiny house on the edge of Iowa City where, late one afternoon, Carson and Dana O'Connor and their son, Josh, stopped to buy the extra tomatoes and peppers that Candace had put out for sale on a sheet by the road.

The perfect family: handsome high-school-age son; imposing but doting dad; sleek wife with little blue pom-poms hobbling above the heels of her tennis shoes. The boy was the one who asked if they might come onto the porch to see what Candace was painting. Then the father—soon to become Carson—remembered the article from the
Register
. He had admired the newspaper's photograph of her painting. The occasion shifted from a vegetable sale to the possibility of an actual painting purchase. Candace knew that she must focus on the painting sale, but something odd had begun to happen. Even while Carson and Dana O'Connor wandered about the shadowy little rooms behind the porch, and looked at the paintings propped here and there, and Candace gave Josh O'Connor a sketch that he admired, and told him which art teachers she could recommend at the university . . . all the while, she was aware of Carson. Though no one else seemed to notice, she understood that he was a glacier, slowly moving through her house, disturbing every single thing in his path, including her. When Carson and Dana O'Connor were ready to go—
well, they would surely keep that one she was working on in mind!
—Josh showed his parents the sketch that Candace had given him, and then Carson said that they ought to give Candace a gift, too,
come on
. She walked with them to their car, where Carson took from the trunk a pie-size hunk of brown, sugary rock.

“From the Burlington Pits,” he explained. He moved a big finger over the sandy surface, pointing out the broken stems of crinoids, and it was all Candace could do, in spite of the presence of his wife and son, to keep from leaning into him.
Leaning.

Am I crazy? she thought, after they drove off. Did something happen between us?

Very early in life, Candace had pulled in her borders, become the wick on a candle that burned only for her work. That she was a real painter, she had no doubt; it was her grounding as a human being that she questioned.

That man was
old
, she told herself as she went out to the wild garden at the back of the little house in order to pick a tomato for her own dinner. Hadn't he worn the same sort of ugly, white, short-sleeved shirts that her grandfather wore in hot weather—the fabric almost transparent, like the stuff of handkerchiefs?

Still, she was watching the road when he returned that evening.

He stood at the base of the steps leading to her porch. He was
somber and silent, like someone on a rescue mission, a crusade. Candace said, “So, you want more vegetables?”

She was nervous enough that when he did not answer, she pretended he had, and he followed her when she came down the steps and walked toward the garden. There, in the dusk, the basswoods and oaks and maples that surrounded the little yard seemed to grow as thick as walls. Candace knew he stood close behind her as she lifted the big, prickly leaves of the zucchini plants. She wanted him to touch her—to somehow lay his hands on her. When he did, both hands on the tops of both of her bare arms, she leaned back against him, and the light cloth of his shirt, and she whispered, “Oh, my.”

He held her as if she did not weigh anything at all, and she felt as if she might actually turn into something new, she was metamorphosing—but then he moaned an apology. He set her back on her feet and hurried to his car and drove away into the falling dark.

She hated him then.

A few mornings later, when his car pulled into her drive, she dashed down into the musty little cellar and hid. Until that time, she had allowed only one sweetheart into her life, a leather-jacketed poet she had met as an undergraduate. The very first time that Candace and the poet had quarreled, he had knocked out both of his front teeth with a big rock; that gesture, and the way its results complimented his slam-dancing persona, had left Candace with the sort of suspicions that were sure to ruin not just the romance in question but those that followed. Still, when Carson O'Connor stopped knocking, she hurried up the cellar stairs. Such relief: to find him sitting on the porch steps.

She did not trust in what was happening, but a few days later, when she caught a glimpse of the two of them in the squares of mar-bleized mirror a past tenant had glued to the bedroom door, she could not help but feel sympathetic toward their alliance. She and Carson O'Connor looked odd as the doll couple she had made do with as a kid: a skinny fashion doll swiped from a classmate's backpack, plus the husky toddler doll to whom ten-year-old Candy—Candace's true,
tacky name, the one she had tried so hard to abandon—that toddler doll to whom ten-year-old Candy had given a felt-pen mustache so that he might better fit the part as he ground away at the fashion doll.

The fashion doll thievery had occurred in the spring of Candy's fifth-grade year. The following October, an early snow had fallen, and Morley Cleeve found the doll where Candy kept it hidden in a boot. Candy was whipped, the fashion doll burned, but neither Morley nor Georgine Cleeve could stop the fashion doll's lover from grieving and building monuments to his lost love, and had either Georgine or Morley climbed the apple tree behind the farm's empty chicken coop, they would have seen that the outline of a grand if irregular heart had been trampled into the snow in the field beyond.

Candace's current subject matter included a clipped hedge of pyracantha, three long-handled blue swimming pool tools tipped up against that hedge, and the blue-blue pool itself—all depicted on a stretched canvas whose dimensions measured exactly two inches smaller than the sliding glass doors of the room in which it stood (Candace's studio: red-brick walls, green indoor-outdoor carpet splotched and stiffened with the occasional smear of oil paint).

Down the little hallway lined with stretcher bars and rolls of canvas, here came Candace and Phoulish Phlame. With Phoulish Phlame riding on her head, Candace felt like a fanciful ship, richly if precariously appointed. It was pleasant in the studio, the odor of the cooler's damp excelsior pads mixing sweetly with the odors of turps and oils.

She eyed the bare curtain rod where she usually set the bird if she had to step outside. The bird always protested noisily at being left behind and Candace needed to go outside now to make sure that, overnight, no neighborhood cats or kids had sneaked into the backyard and moved the swimming pool tools off the duct-tape markers she had established before beginning the painting. Candace herself
always disliked having to leave Phoulish Phlame inside. After all, Phoul had safely ventured outside with Candace on numerous occasions when Candace forgot the bird sat perched on her shoulder or head and realized her error only when the noise of Phoul's preening startled her or Carson called out a window, “Candy! You've got the bird with you!”

Carson did not feel much affection for Phoulish Phlame. Carson believed Candace used her relationship with the bird as a substitute for relationships with people. Also, the cockatiel had a tendency to hiss at Carson, and even bite, should Carson draw near his wife while the bird perched on her shoulder. Still, if he had seen her now, knowingly stepping outside with the bird, Carson would have chastised Candace for taking such a risk with something she loved so.

And he would have been right. The book that Candace had studied warned:

Carefully, Candace skirted one of the long crisp strips of eucalyptus bark that lay scattered across the patio bricks—just the sort of thing that could release a snap that would make the bird start.

“Sweet thing,” Candace murmured. “Careful now.”

Zip. The cockatiel made a pleasant little noise as she drew a long tail feather through her bill. Zip.

The duct-tape guides had begun to curl in the heat on the bricks but the tools were in place, undisturbed.

“Golgotha,” Carson called the painting, because of its grouping of
three tools, but Golgotha was an echo from Carson's own Catholic youth. Candace saw the piece as a meditation on stillness, an attempt to achieve calm. Candace saw no point in inhabiting her paintings with symbols when every object shimmered with its own essence. This, of course, was a view that did not appeal to all audiences. A few months before, she had shipped a small canvas from the series of pool paintings to her parents, who returned it without a word. “Guess you wanted us to see you had a pool,” Georgine Cleeve said when Candace telephoned for an explanation. “Well, now we know.”

And what if there were some truth in what her mother said? Twenty-three swimming pool paintings, and who knew how many drawings, all of which she had conceived of as being pure in intention, and maybe she was just showing off? She would have laughed at the farm's response had it not seemed to diminish the possibility of art transmitting mystery, and suggested, instead, that every gesture might be a simple excrescence of vanity.

A melancholy day of painting. Some of the melancholy came from the departure of Carson, and yesterday's quarrel, but, late in the afternoon, when Candace mentally followed the gloom's trail—a little silvery slime, like that left behind by a slug—she wound up back at Carson's desk: the photographs of the soldier and the suicide. Perhaps they and Carson had somehow—with the permission of her unconscious, one supposed—managed to transform her painting into Carson's “Golgotha”? Or an inversion of the same? Though she was not quite sure what had happened, after six hours of work, the sky now looked lurid; the water in the swimming pool, dark and oily, as if a rotting body might pop to its surface at any moment.