Transparency (22 page)

Andrea’s voice was as low and insistent as the surf receding from the shore. “Do you sometimes have moments,” Andrea said,
“in which you’re walking down a street and everything is normal, but then for no reason at all everything takes a turn and
things become unreal? It’s like you’re more distant from the world. Detached. And everything is new, more present. It’s like
the surfaces of things have been peeled away, and you’re seeing something, trying to understand it, for the first time.” She
picked up a pebble and placed it in the palm of her hand. “I don’t know why I’m saying this,” she said. She searched in the
sand for more pebbles, and then showed them to me. “What do you think?”

There were three pebbles in her hand, a translucent yellow, a rose, and a milky gray. “Very pretty,” I said.

“I think I’ll take these home.”

“Are you going to look for seashells?”

“I’m not so interested in those.”

It was midafternoon by the time we crossed over the breakwater again and returned to town. When we were two blocks away from
the colony, I spotted Martin ahead of us, turning down Laurel Street. I quickened my pace, hoping to catch up with him, but
Andrea would not be hurried, and I had to slow down. We drew closer, and I realized I had been mistaken. It was not Martin
at all but someone taller and thinner, with a frayed satchel and a patch of fabric on the seat of his pants. The man walked
slowly ahead of us, like a convalescent, a gentleness about him that made me want to step lightly behind. An older woman approached,
and he stopped to talk to her, showing her his book.

“Martin!” I said, and he turned around to look at us. Even now, I don’t know why I had ever doubted it was him. Yet he had
seemed different walking up the hill alone. The woman said good-bye, smiling at me as she passed.

“You know,” Martin said, his eyes widening slightly as he tapped me on the arm with his book. “I wanted to tell you something.
Something to do with a discovery of mine about the seaness of the sea.”

“What is it?”

“Oh, it’s too long to go into now.”

“What are you reading?”

He showed me the cover of his book.

“But you’ve already read
The Waves
,” I said.

“Well, you know,” he said, shrugging slightly. “It’s the novel of
despair
.”

I laughed, and we talked about Virginia Woolf as Andrea walked silently beside us. When we arrived at the colony, Andrea moved
away without saying good-bye, and I felt sorry for having forgotten her. “Andrea,” I said, “are you going already?”

She put the can of Coke she had been drinking into the trash. “Well, I can go,” she said in her quiet, acerbic way, and she
climbed the stairs slowly and retreated to her studio.

In April, the visual artists at the colony had a group show at the local art museum. Everyone crowded into the Driftwood Tavern
for food and drinks an hour before the opening. Tea candles spread out before us like stars, and I sat between Martin and
Andrea, the three of us looking down the long table at the other artists immersed in conversation. All these lit, transmuted
faces. A napkin caught on fire in front of me, and I stared at it until a filmmaker extinguished it in his hands. Everyone
clapped. When we asked if he had burned himself, he said that his skin was resistant to flames.

Martin was intently cutting his chicken when he asked Karine, who sat across from him, “If you could push the art button or
the happiness button, which would you choose?”

“The art button, of course,” she replied coolly. “Who here believes in happiness?”

Then I asked, “Who do you think is happiest here among us?”

Martin began to rank the people at the table, from the most depressed to the most happy. He put me toward the bottom of the
list near the people who we knew were manic-depressives, and he put himself toward the top. When he mentioned Andrea’s name,
I glanced at her, wondering if she was listening, but she only continued eating her steak and sipping her wine with the calm
inevitability that marked everything she said or did. “Andrea is healthy and immune!” Martin declared. “She goes to the top
of the list!”

“How do you know that, Martin?” Andrea said quietly, looking at him. “You don’t know me. Or anyone else at this table. How
can you know something like that?”

Martin’s eyes softened, and the rest of us fell silent. We could hear the uneven patter of rain outside, and from the window
we saw silver glints falling. A few, including Martin, pushed back their chairs and went out to smoke, and I whispered to
Andrea that Martin was only teasing.

“Susan, I would be grateful if you didn’t tell Martin my business,” she replied.

As we walked to the museum, Andrea stayed close beside me, carrying her funereal umbrella. “What is it you don’t like about
Martin?” I asked her.

“He talks too much.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

Andrea looked at me. “Martin says a thing, but it doesn’t mean he believes it.”

“You don’t trust him.”

“Charming people are always the worst.” We had arrived at the museum, but Andrea informed me that she was going home.

“But we just got here. Shouldn’t you be at your own opening?”

“It’s a group show. I’m not showing anything anyway.” When I stared at her, she gave a slight shrug. “People like your work,
people don’t like your work. Then they stand around telling you why.” She turned away, and I watched as she tread carefully
down the street, every now and then glancing down at her feet as though she expected the ground to split open and something
to leap out at her.

In the museum, I stared at a defunct radiator whose bland surface Karine had decorated with neat rows of lip imprints. The
lips were all the same—Karine’s?—but the color of lipsticks varied like the shades of flowers. “Where did you get the radiator?”
I asked when she passed by.

Karine’s eyes widened. “I love your reaction!” she said. “That is precisely the reaction I wanted to get. The radiator is
part of this
very
room. It is a fully functioning radiator. You never noticed it before, did you? I’m so glad. I wanted you to pay attention
to the physical space we’re in, to make you really see the things you normally are blind to.”

I nodded, at a loss as to what to say next, and Karine took my hand. “You’re so funny, you know that? Always asking questions
and smiling and saying ‘pardon me’ and ‘thank you.’ “ She dropped my hand abruptly and darted away into the crowd.

I saw Martin enter the room, momentarily pause to look around him as he toyed with the loose button on his coat. He was the
person whose presence I desired most, yet I could not bring myself to go up to him. I walked around the museum, pretending
to look at the art, until he approached me. “So how many times have you sighed and looked up at the sky today?” he asked,
lifting the end of my scarf and placing it on top of his nose.

“What did you just say?” I was worried that my scarf smelled of rain or mildew.

“My God, you only hear half the things I say to you, isn’t that right?” He laughed. “I’m too fast for you! I’m running circles
around you!” And right there in the museum, he began to run in place. “So where has your plucky companion gone off to?” he
asked, coming to a sudden stop.

“Andrea?”

“Your chatty friend and I have butted heads before. Do you know she tried to slam the door on my finger when I visited her
studio?”

“She values her privacy.”

It was too crowded to talk in the museum, and we left the show early, heading back toward the colony. “Andrea is like a stone,”
Martin said. “I don’t know what’s worse. Is it better to be numb to the world or overly sensitive to it?”

I stopped. “It’s better to feel too much, of course.” Martin looked back at me in surprise, and I laughed and took his arm.
We walked back to my studio like this, my arm linked through his.

“I always think there’s something occult going on whenever I pass by your place,” he said as he entered, looking around him.
He sat down at my desk and opened my drawers, examining their contents before slamming them shut again. He got up to inspect
the books on my mantel, and when I returned with cups of tea, he was slipping a paperback into his coat pocket. “I’m stealing
your Maupassant,” he informed me.

“All right,” I said, handing him his cup. I hadn’t any clean spoons, and he stirred his tea with a pen lying on the coffee
table. “That isn’t sterile,” I said gravely.

“Ha! I am not a sterile person!” he declared, and he leaned over to kiss me. It was lovely and strange to finally touch him.
His skin was soft and warm, smelling of cloves and soap and cigarettes, and I could do nothing to make the sensation less
immediate, my mind slower than my body, as if emerging from a thick fog. Martin pulled me toward him, then just as suddenly
released me, climbed over the futon, and yanked the lamp cord out of its socket.

The next morning I looked out my window and saw Martin fixing his car in the parking lot. He had a pitiless look about him,
a forthright, unsmiling intensity, and seemed closed off in his own world. It was hard to believe anything had happened between
us. I watched as he scraped beneath the hood of his car with methodical ferocity.

We passed by each other in the mailroom, and Martin greeted me with an ironic smile, which I reflected faithfully back. “Hello,
Susan.”

“Hello, Martin.”

We retreated to our separate studios.

I couldn’t work. My whole being was set at a higher pitch, but what did this matter to Martin or anyone else? People knocked
on your door, entered your space, then ruined your peace. I left my studio and walked down Market Street to clear my head.
The sky was vertiginously blue, and the road and trees seemed to glow and vibrate. The locals and tourists were out riding
their bicycles, sipping their coffee, reading the daily newspaper, and I felt that I was seeing everything from the eyes of
a child or a drug addict. The world’s sharp beauty wouldn’t leave me alone. It was difficult just to cross the street.

I returned to my studio and found a piece of paper wedged into my screen door. It was a scribbled note from Martin, asking
if I cared to go fishing.

Martin picked me up that afternoon, and we drove to a beach outside of town. He had brought along an extra fishing rod, which
I tried to use, but it took me only a few minutes to tangle my line. Martin cast his rod sternly as if it were a whip, and
in the rigid way he held himself I sensed how much he demanded from the world. Nothing would ever be easy for him. Now and
then he glanced at me shyly, and I knew he felt self-conscious with me there watching.

I set down my pole and began walking. Tiny starfish had washed up along the shore, their arms contorted at various angles.
They were not brittle or light but a surprising weight in my palm, all the water and life still in them. I put them down and
kept walking. Sandpipers and gulls moved out of my path.

When I turned around, Martin was a tiny sand-colored figure against the horizon.

The tide was coming in by the time I returned. Tiny fish were leaping out of the water and pockmarking the surface like rain.
Martin had caught a thin herring, its back tinged with pink and green. It lay on the sand, and when a wave came in, almost
taking the fish away, I scooped it up, its scales smearing onto my hand like silver flecks of paint.

The sky darkened, and it felt uneasy between us as we drove back to the colony. “Sometimes, when I see you outside, you’re
entirely different,” I said. “You’re terse and brusque and aggressive.”

“Hey, I have things to do.”

“But other times, you are completely sweet and even mild. It’s like there are two Martins. I never know which one to expect.”

“Well, you need the one in order to appreciate the other. Which do you like better?”

“I like both,” I said hopelessly.

He smiled a little at this, staring ahead at the road. “Do you think we get along?” he mused. He glanced over at me. “Perhaps
we don’t truly get along.”

“We do,” I said, but his question hurt.

There was an awkward pause, and then Martin said he had not smoked a cigarette for a week and that he was going crazy. When
I suggested candy or nicotine patches, he blew up at me. “Can’t I have this experience on my own?” he demanded. He thought
he should go cold turkey. He wanted to savor how difficult it was to quit in order to have the full experience of not smoking.

“You are the most difficult person I know,” I said. “You make everything complex.”

“But I want the opposite of complexity,” he said. “I am trying to have an experience that is not mediated by anything else.”
He parked the car, and we sat in gloomy silence. “It’s like this,” he said, taking his key out of the ignition and pressing
it against the windshield. “I want to touch this glass, but I am touching this key that is touching this glass. So I am not
touching this glass at all.”

“Why do you have to analyze everything? Everything is a struggle for you,” I said bitterly. In truth, I was sick of artists.
I was tired of complexity and contradiction, of sensitive people saying remarkable, nuanced things.