Truth and Consequences (24 page)

“All right. Well, not all right.”

“Really.” A dark shadow seemed to cross Henry's face. “Why is that? No, wait. Come and sit down. Let's talk.” He led the way to one of the picnic tables by the windswept lake and set his basket of apples and sourdough bread and honey on it. “Okay. Tell me.”

“It's all wrong,” Jane said, catching her breath. “It's all lies. Everyone thinks I'm a good person, but I'm not. Not anymore. I promised in church to take care of Alan forever, and now our house is falling apart and the fridge is full of mold.” A sob escaped her.

“Maybe that serves him right,” Henry said.

“Well, in a way it does, that's what my mother says, but not forever. She says it was right that I left, because then he would know I was serious, and he would feel guilty and appreciate me properly. But now she thinks it's time for me to go back, so we can all be together for Thanksgiving. Anyhow, my sister's coming from New Hampshire, and she'll need the spare room.”

“It's important for your family, Thanksgiving,” he suggested.

“Yes, it is. My sister and her husband and kids always come, and my uncle and two aunts from up the lake, and usually there's cousins too. Isn't Thanksgiving important for your family?”

“Yeah, but I don't always make it to Toronto. I didn't last year, but I'm going up this weekend.”

“And will Delia be there?”

“Nah. She's going to New York. She doesn't get on with Canadians.” He took an apple out of his basket, looked at it, and returned it. “So your mother thinks you should go back to Alan,” he said. “And do you want to go back?”

“No,” Jane admitted.

“That's good.” Henry smiled for the first time. He put his warm hand on her arm, between the wristband of her blue parka and her driving gloves, and Jane did not have the strength to remove it.

“But it doesn't matter what I want,” she said weakly, pushing back her wind-tangled brown curls. “What I want is wicked and selfish.”

“You really believe that?”

“Yes—no. I don't know,” Jane wailed, and buried her damp face in her hands. Another sob escaped her. “I'm an awful person, really.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“I'm so angry all the time, and violent.”

“Violent?” Henry laughed.

“Yes. I told you how I nearly threw that big glass vase at Delia.”

“But you didn't, because you didn't really want to hurt her.” Henry smiled.

“I did too. When she started laughing, as if it was all some big joke, I wanted to hurt her. I only didn't throw the vase because it was a valuable heirloom. It belonged to Matthew Unger's mother, and now it belongs to the Center.”

“Oh, Janey. I love you.” Henry pulled her toward him and kissed her, but Jane only partly responded, looking over his shoulder for spectators and spies.

“I don't see why,” she said miserably when he let go.

“I don't know. I guess it's because you have such sea-blue eyes, and you're so hopelessly honest.”

“Only with you. I'm lying to everyone else all the time, because I'm not telling them the truth. I used to be a good person, but now I'm not, I'm angry and mean all the time, really, inside. Alan's in so much pain, and I used to feel so horribly sorry for him, but now I don't care, almost. I don't love him anymore. I don't even like him much.”

“That's wonderful,” Henry said.

“But it's all wrong. My place is with my husband, my duty is there, that's what my mother says. And her new minister, Reverend Bobby, says the same.”

“ ‘Reverend Bobby?' ” Henry laughed.

“I know.” In spite of herself, Jane smiled. “He's only about twenty-six years old.”

“Well, I don't agree. I think your place is with me,” Henry said. “I'm so glad you're here,” he added. “I was afraid you weren't coming.”

“I almost didn't,” Jane admitted. “But I wanted to see you too much.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Me too.”

“Even though you never came last Sunday when you said you would. I waited here until it was dark.”

“I couldn't. I explained that. Delia was insisting we go to this drinks party, and if I hadn't agreed she would have been suspicious.”

“Yes, you told me.” Jane raised her streaked face and looked out across the shimmering, wind-troubled water of the lake. “It's not the same for us now, is it?” she said, uttering the thought that had sat on her head like a tight dark hat for the whole week. “I've left Alan, and you haven't left Delia. You haven't even told her you know what happened.”

“No,” Henry admitted.

“Are you going to?”

“I've got to wait a bit, Janey,” he said. “Right now she's tired of me. I figure she's on her way out. But if she knew I was in love with somebody else, she could get jealous and possessive.”

Jane frowned. It seemed unlikely to her that anyone could be tired of Henry. He's a coward, she thought miserably. Or he's stalling. He might love me a little, and want to sleep with me, but he wants to avoid trouble even more. “You want to avoid trouble,” she said, shivering in the cold wind, which seemed now to come directly from the North Pole.

“Yeah. But it's only for a little while.”

“Oh? How long?” Jane was feeling colder and colder, even though Henry's arm was around her shoulders.

“I don't know.”

Jane said nothing, but she took a step back.

“We'll be together very soon, I hope. When things are easier.”

Jane looked at Henry, his square shoulders, his thick curly hair, and the strong blunt lines of his face. He's here, but he's not really here, she thought. I can't count on him.

SIXTEEN

It had been another strange week for Alan Mackenzie. By Friday he felt as if he had been on a long alternately exhilarating and exhausting nature hike of the sort he remembered from camp, slogging up steep slopes and down into thick swamps. The highs had been his meetings with Delia, his restored ability to drive, and another sale at the gallery in New York. There had also been the soggy lows of persistent backache, obsessive jealousy, a growing despair about his work, and the sudden awkward reappearance of Jane in his life.

On Friday night he lay awake between three and five a.m., suffering from pain and artistic depression. He could not find a comfortable position—the lizard kept shifting its grip, alternately clawing his lower back and left hip. Also something he had eaten, or the drugs he had taken, was causing severe gaseous indigestion. Since Jane had moved to her parents' house the suppers she left had been getting less and less attractive, culminating last evening in a nasty congealed-looking macaroni and cheese casserole with lima beans. Either she was punishing him with worse and worse meals, or she was (no doubt unconsciously) trying to poison him.

If Alan's friends and colleagues knew that his wife had left him and gone home to her mother, dinner invitations would have been forthcoming. But as yet he had not told anyone, because he assumed that, as Delia put it, Jane would soon come around and make this admission unnecessary. Also, he didn't want to answer the inevitable question,
Why has she left you?
either with a lie or with the truth.

Worst of all, as he stared into the cold blackness of the cloudy November night, he had finally admitted to himself that he was sick of miniature ruins of famous public buildings. The first dozen or two had been exciting and satisfying; but lately, as he turned the pages of travel books looking for possible subjects, he had begun to feel weariness, even disgust. Maybe, even probably, his career as an artist was over almost before it had begun. Delia Delaney loved him—anyhow, she had often allowed him to love her. But when she knew he was finished as an artist, she would be disappointed and maybe even scornful, as she had been about her husband's giving up poetry. (“He had a couple of bad reviews, and couldn't take it.”)

At five a.m. Alan unwound himself from his snarled sheets and blankets and staggered into the bathroom. In the smudged, foggy glow of the night-light, he saw the face of a hysterical aging loser: in chronic pain, deserted by his wife, probably about to be dropped by his mistress, and without inspiration. Someone who might as well be dead.

But on his way back to bed, dizzy with drugs and nausea and despair, he had a revelation. By accident he switched on the wrong light in the hall and saw, blindingly white against the black of an unused bedroom, part of a wall, an open door, and a wooden goose in graceful flight toward the dark. He stopped in his tracks, flash-frozen. The scene was fragmentary, but also eternal That section of wall, that doorway, that chair, that motionless yet moving white bird, could have been—
could be
, made of plaster or stone or painted metal. It could stand free, as another kind of artificial ruin—perhaps comic, perhaps ironic, perhaps tragic.

And if this vision could be made three-dimensional, so could other fragments of domestic architecture, each with its own complex, interlocking meanings. The monumental, even mythic corner of a kitchen, with dishes in the rack and a window open over the sink, a knife and a half-sliced tomato on the sill. A bathroom with crumpled hanging towels, a dining room with part of a table, dishes, glasses, a napkin thrown down—

Or a section of wall from his childhood bedroom, with a half-open casement window, his narrow maple bed with its ball-topped posts and thrown-back patchwork quilt; his toy Scottish terrier and suspended model airplane, frozen in time like the ruins of Pompeii. All white—or, maybe more interesting, in a spectrum of sepia browns or grayed pastels.

And he needn't limit himself to domestic architecture, or to this country, Alan saw suddenly. The images could come from anywhere and anywhen. All of history and geography was available to him. Colonial, Victorian, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Modern—Medieval, Renaissance, eighteenth-century—anything, everything. Fragments of schools, stores, libraries, offices, churches—the haunting architectural equivalents of a George Segal sculpture—

Yes. He could do it. And as an architectural historian he could make all these ghostly tableaux authentic, with the right door and window frames, shutters, cornices, chairs, hanging garments, decorative objects.

Though it was still densely dark outside, Alan did not return to bed. Instead he pulled his navy blue wool bathrobe over his pajamas, went into the study, and located a pad and drawing pencils. In too much of a hurry to retrieve his briefcase/toilet seat from downstairs, he stood in front of a file cabinet and made notes and sketches for well over an hour without stopping. Sometimes he paused for a few moments, overcome with awe and gratitude for the revelation that had come to him. Delia was right, he thought: this gift he had received was a by-product of pain and illness.

At dawn, stiff and chilled, he set the sheets of paper he had covered aside, took more codeine, and collapsed into bed, where he slept until noon. Waking, he feared at first that he had dreamed the whole thing. But the drawings were there, and in the light of day they still looked good: better than good. He dressed, made himself tea and toast, and, ignoring the pain in his back as much as possible, got out some paper and old paints, and began to convert his first sketch into a colored drawing. Delia will like this, he thought. She always has a special feeling for birds.

He was halfway through a second—the attic of his parents' house this time, with its little round window, the upper left-hand pane cracked in a partial star, the old brass-hinged and brass-hasped trunk underneath, and the discarded dressmaker's dummy (terrifying at five, still sinister and melancholy when he left for college) leaning toward the light at an angle—when he heard the kitchen door open.

“Hello, it's me,” Jane's voice called.

She's brought some even more inedible, poisonous supper, Alan thought. He put down his brush, vexed at the interruption. Then, to prevent his wife from coming upstairs and seeing his new drawings, which she would probably like as little as the earlier ones, he descended to the kitchen. Jane was standing by the sink in front of a brown paper bag of groceries, wearing baggy jeans and a Gore-Tex windbreaker For years he had thought of his wife as amazingly pretty: now she seemed ill-dressed, commonplace, and undersized, and her curly brown hair was much too short. Had she deliberately made herself unattractive, or was it that since he'd known Delia his idea of beauty had shifted?

“Oh, hello there,” he said. “Look, you don't have to bring me supper anymore. I can drive now, I can manage on my own.”

“That's all right,” Jane told him. “I mean, you don't have to. I've decided it's time for me to come home, anyhow.” She indicated her suitcase by the back door.

“Oh yes?” Alan smiled only briefly. “That's good,” he heard himself say rather flatly. He was surprised at his lack of relief—because this was what he had wanted, wasn't it?

“But we have to talk seriously.”

“Mh,” he agreed, though what he had to do now was get back to his drawing. The light beige he had chosen for the dressmaker's dummy was wrong: it needed to be darker, or no, better, freckled with pinholes and stains.

“I just have to put these groceries away,” Jane said.

“Yeah, okay,” Alan said. Delia had been right again, he thought. Jane had come around. But why did she have to come around now, breaking into his work?

His wife closed the door of the fridge and sat on a kitchen stool. “We haven't either of us behaved perfectly,” she said in the tone of someone trying to be more than fair.

“Uh, no,” Alan agreed. Delia wouldn't think much of this admission, but the last thing he wanted now was a serious talk, and this might save time. He would add a section of the attic ceiling to the piece, he decided: the beams, the raw insulation and the nails coming through from the shingles. Yes, yes!