“That was Jeff,” she says with immense satisfaction. “Got home fine.”
Chapter 6
In the back lot of the row house in Troy, old vegetation. Lilac and hosta and walnut. Violets and mulberry and hydrangea. Everything wild and unkempt, nothing trimmed or neat. Sydney’s mother set out milk bottles with the first roses of the season on the sill in the kitchen—ancient pink rugosa, flat-petaled and treacherously thorned.
Red plaid wallpaper over the sink. Yellow curtains at the windows. Where did that ocher Bakelite clock go, the one with the frayed cord? Sydney remembers the brown Norge fridge; the day her mother had the washer and dryer installed. The cellar floor was still dirt. A week later, her mother was carrying a basket of laundry to the washer and saw a rat as big as a small dog. Sydney’s mother cornered it and beat it to death while Sydney watched. An act of frenzy and violence that left Sydney speechless for hours.
Sydney remembers crumbling plaster walls. The narrow floorboards, unvarnished and nearly black, that ran the length of the long hallway. Linoleum in the kitchen. There were two bedrooms, a living room, and a bathroom, and, at the end of the hallway, the kitchen. In Sydney’s room, she had a bed, a desk, and a wall of cupboards. She had shimmering purple curtains and a pink duvet. She had a plastic bedside table with drawers in which she put her nail polish, her diary, scribbled notes from friends, and recent birthday cards. As she climbed up the cement stoop each day after school and made her way to her bedroom, it seemed to her that she had swum briefly through the past and emerged safely into the present.
When Sydney was thirteen, she came home from school one afternoon to find the apartment unusually tidy. Her mother was sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for her. She asked Sydney to sit down.
“Did you clean up?” Sydney asked, glancing at the bare shelves.
“Sort of,” her mother answered.
Her mother announced that Sydney and she were leaving, that they were going to live in a real house in Massachusetts. Her mother made it sound like fun. Sydney would have two homes to live in, two sets of friends, two rooms of her own. She would go back and forth from Massachusetts to New York.
What her mother didn’t say was that she was fed up with the brown Norge and the cement stoop, with having to wait for her husband to fulfill his artistic promise. She didn’t say that she had met another man. She didn’t say that she hadn’t told Sydney’s father yet.
That night, after Sydney and her mother moved into the Massachusetts house with its dishwasher and microwave and spiffy new laundry room, the telephone rang. Sydney picked it up and listened. Her father was crying.
This is how Sydney thinks of her parents now: a border runs up from Manhattan; the topography is clear but for two stick figures, one on the left side, one on the right.
Sydney makes the trip into Portsmouth on Monday morning and returns with an easel, a sketch pad, canvases, drawing pencils, oil paints, and two books, one on how to draw, one on how to paint. Mr. Edwards tries to give her money to pay for these supplies, but Sydney explains to him that this is her experiment.
Later that evening, Sydney sees Mr. Edwards enter Julie’s room. When he emerges, pink-eyed, he fumbles for his handkerchief in his pocket. Sydney notes that he visited Julie while Mrs. Edwards was at a cocktail party. Mr. Edwards was invited as well, but he begged off, using the excuse of a stomachache.
The week passes. A storm rolls in from the northeast. Pellets of rain hit the windows. To walk outside to the car is to be blown forward with such force that one trips and stumbles. The rain lasts for days, and Sydney forgets what the beach looked like in the sunshine. It seems that it has always been raining, that this is what she signed up for.
Sydney spends hours in Julie’s room. Sometimes she teaches the girl math, but mostly she watches Julie arrange objects and draw them. Sydney is slightly amazed that neither of the parents realized their daughter’s innate gift. Perhaps they thought that because there seemed to be a deficit, there was little point in probing. But were there not childhood drawings? Paintings Julie brought home from grade school?
Julie is drawn to pears. Sydney attributes this to something more than just the coincidence of having a bowl of pears on the granite counter when she gave Julie the supplies. Sydney herself is intrigued by the shape of the fruit, the bulbous heavy bottom, the way it sits off-balance, the flat planes of the skin, which she has never noticed before.
Julie sets the pears in relation to one another on the dressing table that used to hold her hair ties and jewelry. She attacks the drawing assignments with the same intensity she brings to thousand-piece puzzles.
Occasionally, Sydney catches herself wondering what Jeff is doing. She pictures him in an airless office in a nondescript building at MIT. She tries to guess what he wears to work. A dress shirt and khaki pants? Shorts when there are no formal classes? Does he leave his desk to go to lunch? Does he walk through the rainy streets of Cambridge to his apartment, a worn canvas backpack slung over his shoulder? And what does he do when he gets home? Sprawl in a chair, watch the Red Sox, and drink a Rolling Rock? Does the phone ring, Victoria on the other end? Will Vicki have plans for the evening?
Toward the end of the first week, Sydney breaks out the paints. While Julie has been drawing, Sydney has been reading art books. She has had to go back to Portsmouth for supplies she didn’t know would be needed. Turpentine. Linseed oil. Tracing paper. Sydney explains to Julie as best she can the concept of an oil painting—gessoing the canvas, painting the background first, the need for patience while the paint dries. Sydney parrots the text.
Julie draws three pears on the canvas. Pear shapes are entirely sexual, Sydney discovers, a fact to which she has never given much thought. Sydney cannot say what part of the anatomy, male or female, they resemble, but there is no mistaking their suggestiveness. She wonders if this is the appeal of the pear for Julie. She wonders, too, if Julie is aware of this.
Julie is tentative with the paint, and the results are rudimentary. Patience, however, will not be a problem. Julie has the patience of a monk illuminating a manuscript. Sydney watches her apply ocher paint over a green background, then leaves the room to have her lunch. She steps outside for a walk in the rain. When she returns to the house and enters Julie’s room three hours later, the girl is still working on the same area of canvas as when Sydney left her.
Julie appears not to be aware of Sydney. She doesn’t eat unless Sydney puts a sandwich beside her and nudges her elbow. Julie is lost in a place Sydney has never been. Perhaps, Sydney thinks, Julie has done poorly at school because too much was thrown at her at one time. Possibly she needed to do only one activity for weeks. This strikes Sydney, as she watches Julie, as sound educational policy.
Mrs. Edwards is disapproving.
“All very well, the painting, but what about the SATs? I specifically said Julie was to do two hours a day of math.”
Sydney later hears Mrs. Edwards in discussion with her husband, the words unclear but the tone distinct. Mr. Edwards takes the blame. He cannot be fired.
Sydney makes a mental note never to begin a sentence with the words I specifically said.
The days pass. The two weeks seem endless. The household learns, via the Boston Globe, that the weather is expected to remain abysmal. Another storm system is making its way up the coast.
“Oh, for god’s sake,” Mrs. Edwards says.
One evening, mother, father, and daughter are invited to dinner with friends. Sydney is invited, too, but begs off, citing the stomach bug that is “going around.” Mr. Edwards looks at Sydney oddly.
“Well, if you get hungry,” Mrs. Edwards says, “there’s shrimp in the fridge.”
“Oh, don’t even mention food,” Sydney says, putting a hand to her stomach.
When they are gone, Sydney takes herself on a leisurely tour of the house. She enters rooms into which she has not been invited. It seems a necessary activity if she is to understand the family she is living with. Or perhap
s it is only that she is curious.
On the second floor, there is a long hallway with many bedrooms. Sydney enters the boys’ dorm first. Three twin beds have been arranged, two on one side of a window, one on the other. The bedding is a green plaid fabric from an era Sydney doesn’t believe she ever lived through. On the floor is a sheet of wrapping paper, a roll of Scotch tape. Slung from the bedposts are various baseball caps, most from the Red Sox, one from a private school west of Boston. Sydney imagines Jeff and Victoria and Ben sleeping in the three identical beds like children. She wonders which bed is Jeff’s.
Guest rooms lie dormant, waiting to be filled. Samples of crewel embroidery hang on the walls. Someone has tried to update the rooms with white bedding and quilts, but occasionally previous incarnations show through. A maple dresser with a mirror. A candlewick lampshade. A teal-and-red crocheted afghan tossed over a ladder-back chair.
Sydney knows Julie’s room nearly as well as her own, but she has never been inside the Edwardses’ bedroom at the end of the hall. Respect for Mr. Edwards makes Sydney hesitate before the slightly opened door. With the back of her hand, Sydney nudges it a bit further. Committed, she enters.
Sydney is surprised at the marital bed: it is barely queen-size. The Edwardses strike Sydney as being large people. It would be impossible, Sydney thinks, for them not to touch on such a small mattress.
The corner room has several windows. Under one is a desk covered with what Sydney takes to be masculine apparatus: a spill of bills; a ceramic mug of mismatched pens; a metal tape measure; a bulky brown radio that might be older than Sydney. She walks closer to the desk and peers down at a photograph. It is of a slender young woman with long blond hair in a white halter-top bathing suit. A man, lanky and curly-haired, has wrapped his arms around her from behind and is nuzzling her shoulder and smiling. The woman is stunningly beautiful and deeply tanned, her eyes turned toward the man who is kissing her shoulder. If Sydney had any question about why Mr. Edwards married Mrs. Edwards, it has been answered by the look that passes between the man and the woman in the photograph.
Against a wall is a bureau that can only belong to Mrs. Edwards. On it is a Plexiglas organizer in which the woman has placed her makeup: moisturizer, expensive jars of foundation, long tubes of glossy lipstick. Sydney recognizes the brands. Banana clips and bright blue rollers are scattered upon a mahogany surface. An empty bottle of Poland Spring is on its side.
Sydney notes other objects in the room—a treadmill on which Mr. Edwards has hung a shirt, a plastic bin of unfolded laundry, a picture of the three children posed with the ocean as a backdrop—but it is the marital bed that draws her eye again and again. It cannot be a queen, Sydney decides—it is only a full—yet the bedroom is big enough to have taken a king. That the Edwardses have chosen to sleep on such a small bed together confounds Sydney, rattling her preconceptions.
Jeff arrives early on the Friday afternoon of the weekend the brothers are to begin their vacation, startling his mother, who lets out a yelp. Sydney, who has been reading in the living room, stands to see what is happening. She watches Jeff shake off the weather at the end of the dark hallway. He sets down a duffel bag and hangs his windbreaker on a hook by the door. His hair is wild with sea air and wind, as if he had walked from the bus station. He gives no indication he has seen Sydney but instead enters the kitchen.
Sydney adjusts her position slightly so that she can witness, through an open doorway, the tableau in the kitchen of mother, father, and son. Mrs. Edwards puts a hand to her mouth and then turns away to the sink. Mr. Edwards, hands in pockets, slowly nods. Sydney wonders at the news. Has a friend died? Has Jeff been fired? Has he been caught plagiarizing?
After a time, Jeff emerges from the kitchen. He shoulders his duffel bag, and when he turns, he sees Sydney standing in the hallway. Without greeting, he walks in her direction. His shirt collar is soaked, and he has not shaved. The fact that he hasn’t spoken unnerves her.
“Hey,” she says finally.
“Hey.”
Sydney searches for a question. She uses a name she knows Jeff is fond of.
“Where’s Vicki?” she asks.
He pauses a moment. She is aware of his eyes but cannot look directly at them.
“I wouldn’t know,” Jeff says finally.
Sydney sits on the teak deck chair on the porch. The rain falls in sheets beyond the overhang. The ocean is pockmarked and gray. On the beach, not far from the house, a man is fishing. Is this a good time to be fishing? Sydney wonders. What would be worth the misery of standing in such a hard rain? A sea bass? A bluefish?
Sydney wraps her arms tightly around herself, trying to keep warm. A parka wouldn’t be out of the question.
A few minutes earlier, Mrs. Edwards came to the screen door, looked out, and then disappeared. Julie will be upstairs painting pears. Does Ben know anything? He must, as the two brothers were supposed to come with Vicki. Sydney is pretty sure that was the plan.
Sydney hears the screen door open and then slap against its wooden frame. Zipping up his windbreaker, Jeff takes a seat on a chair close to Sydney’s.
He has showered and shaved.
“So, how are you?” he asks.
“I’m good,” Sydney says.
Jeff looks away and back again. “You asked about Vicki,” he says.
She waits.
“We are, to use the common phrase, taking a break.”
Sydney wraps her slicker more tightly around herself. “How long a break?”
“Long.”
His face is pale in the gray light.
“Was this mutual?” Sydney asks.
“Not exactly,” Jeff says.
He leans forward in his chair, puts his elbows on his knees, and studies Sydney’s face, as if, having put down a hefty deposit on a fine piece of jewelry, he wants to get a better look at it. “You can’t possibly not know what this is all about,” he says quietly.
Sydney cannot say the obvious. To have a thought, a desire, become reality seems an astonishing act of physics. Like lightning on the water. Or flight.
Jeff trails his finger from her knee to the hem of her shorts, his first deliberate touch. The hairline touch saying everything that needs to be said, in case she wasn’t listening.
She did not imagine this so fast, nor Jeff so certain. Instinctively, she moves her leg away.
“Maybe you’re still in mourning,” Jeff says.
“I’m losing that.”
“Then. . .what?” he asks.
“When did you know?”
He thinks a minute. “That day on the porch,” he says, but immediately he amends his statement. “No, when you were body surfing and came out of the water. You were having fun. You seemed entirely unself-conscious.”
Are such things possible? Sydney wonders. To see a person and to know? To scratch through all the defensive layers and know?
“It’s hard to believe in that,” she says. She tries to smile, to make it light.
“In retrospect, I can see it. I can’t say I knew it that instant.”
“You were about to become engaged,” Sydney says.
Jeff leans back in his chair. “I knew when I didn’t tell her about Julie. It seemed natural not to, that I’d somehow, in the hours you and I were searching for Julie in the village, passed from one life into another. If I’d had doubts before, I had none then.”
“So, when you got back to Boston you told her?” Sydney asks.
“Something like that.”
“Was she upset? Sad?”
Jeff glances over the railing. “Piqued, I’d say. Annoyed I’d done it first. She said as much when we argued. That she’d had doubts, too. Offers I hadn’t known about. Though, of course, she would have remained loyal. She made a point of that.”
“You didn’t mention. . .?”
“You? No. She wouldn’t have believed me.”
The thought stings. Vicki wouldn’t have believed Jeff because Sydney is so much less attractiv
e than Vicki? Or does he mean only that no one would believe in so much based on so little? As, indeed, Sydney can hardly do.
“I didn’t want you part of it,” he explains. “I didn’t want to say your name, though I’ve been saying it over and over since then. Even, sometimes, out loud.” He chuckles, as if at a memory of himself.
Sydney tries to picture this. Jeff in an apartment she has to invent, saying her name as he cooks his eggs. Jeff in a traffic jam in Central Square, saying her name to the windshield.
He is—already—so far ahead of her.
He smooths a bit of hair off her forehead. “Ben will be furious,” he says. He bends to kiss her.
The kiss takes Sydney by surprise, and he catches the side of her mouth. When he pulls away, she feels overwhelmed and cannot look at him.
A sudden break in the overcast sky brightens the day. The rain has stopped without Sydney’s having noticed. The porch feels less intimate, subject to invasion.
“How is Julie?” Jeff asks, leaning back in his chair.
“Julie.”
Sydney misses a beat, still trembling from the surprise of the kiss.
“Julie’s great.”
“Really?”
Sydney is distracted. Didn’t Jeff just tell her that he broke it off with Victoria to be with her? “She’s painting,” she says.
“Painting as in paintings?”
“Yeah.”
“How did that happen?” Jeff seems remarkably calm. Shouldn’t he be shaking a little, too?