Circle of Three

  Ghastly sight, me in the bathroom mirror. Since 1979, I’ve been asking George to replace the fluorescent tube over the sink with a regular one, a tungsten bulb. He’s never going to do it. I complain to Carrie and she says, “Well, if you can make yourself look halfway human in that light, just think how beautiful you must look in the real world.” Nice logic, but it doesn’t work anymore. Not for the last, oh, twenty years.

  I brushed my teeth, brushed my hair. Which is thinning. Took my blood pressure pill. Hunched toward the mirror, I pulled down the collar of my nightgown to study the new lines on my neck. Turkey neck. Turkey jowls. This is a nightly ritual I really ought to discontinue. It’s funny, but I’m getting more vain the older I get instead of less. No, vain isn’t the right word. Aghast. That’s it.

  Would George want to make love with me if I looked prettier? Lost twenty pounds? Doubtful. Truthfully, I can’t see him getting excited about sleeping with Sophia Loren. Maybe June Allyson; he’s always liked her. Too bad for him he married a woman more like Ethel Merman. Joan Crawford. A coarse brunette, not a perky bone in her body.

  He looked up briefly from his newspaper when I slid into bed beside him. “Tired?” he asked.

  “Why, do I look tired?”

  He shrugged and went back to his paper.

  “Well, one thing I accomplished tonight anyway,” I said, interrupting him on purpose.

  “What’s that?”

  “I made a motion to start a petition drive to halt this ark-building foolishness, and it passed.”

  “You mean—the ark on the river?”

  “No, the ark on I-95.” I really was in a bad mood. “Yes, the ark on the river.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “Why! That’s public property, George, people tie up boats to that dock.”

  “Oh, but not very many, I don’t think.”

  “Well, what about the stupidity factor?”

  “Ah.”

  “And separation of church and state? I’ll tell you what happened—Jess Deeping railroaded that vote through the council before anybody knew what was happening. What if the national news gets a hold of this story? It’s like—Charles Kuralt finding some lunatic in Idaho building a shrine to the Blessed Virgin out of bottle caps.”

  “He did?”

  “No, I’m saying—we’ll all look ridiculous. It’ll be an eyesore, a public nuisance, we just can’t have it.”

  He took off his glasses and started polishing them with the edge of the sheet. “What about Carrie?”

  “What about her?”

  “Isn’t she interested in this? I thought she was—”

  “That’s just boredom, that’s another one of her artsycraftsy projects. Carrie needs to concentrate on her real job, not ally herself with this fundamentalist religious claptrap. Of all the crazy things! And wouldn’t you know Jess Deeping’s right in the thick of it? If that isn’t typical. Blood tells.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “His mother. She was insane, don’t you remember?”

  “No.”

  “Well, she was, she died in an institution, and he’s a chip off the old block.”

  He shook his head, not sympathetically, and rattled the pages of his newspaper. Conversation over.

  That’s typical, too. Ignore a problem by pretending it doesn’t exist. Carrie probably wasn’t going to appreciate my petition motion, either. She might even question my motives. Sure as shooting, she’d never thank me for it. The petition might not do any good anyway, it might be too late. Talk about an end run. Jess Deeping should be ashamed of himself. Maybe I’ll write a letter to the editor.

  “You know what Birdie said?”

  George sighed. “What?”

  “She said I just wanted to be president so I could boss people around.”

  He looked up at that. I waited for him to scoff, but he just looked at me.

  “She said it as a joke, but I didn’t appreciate it.”

  “No…”

  “You think I’m bossy?”

  “Absolutely not, dear.” He ducked his bald head, shooting me a glance under his eyebrows. He had a hopeful twinkle in his eye. I laughed. And he laughed, and it was a good few seconds.

  He folded his paper and put it away, turned out his bedside lamp. He falls asleep every night on his right side, facing away from me; after about forty minutes, he turns over on his back and snores. He started getting his covers just so, pushing the sheet out at the bottom so his feet weren’t constricted—every morning I tuck it back in.

  “George?”

  “Hm?”

  “Nothing. Never mind.” A feeling came over me, a squeezing sensation, like a vise, something hopeful pushing up from below, something else old and knowing pushing down from above. “What do you think about taking ballroom dancing?”

  He turned his head, craned it over his shoulder. Stared.

  “Friday nights, out at the Ramada Inn. Six weeks, and it starts next week. We could have dinner first—a night out for us. Just something to look forward to.”

  “Well. Hm.” He frowned hard. “The only thing is, Friday’s the night I’ve been meeting with Albert on the book. I gather it’s the only time he can do it.”

  “Friday is the only night of the whole week he can meet you? Friday night?”

  “Well, that’s what he says.”

  “Fine, never mind.”

  “Sorry. It would’ve been fun,” he lied. “Maybe next year.”

  “That’s a good idea.” I reached for the novel on my table. “Let’s wait till we’re even older.”

  “Dana.”

  “Maybe next year they’ll offer ballroom wheelchair dancing.” I slapped open the book, found my place from last night. “Quit.” I was so mad. I twitched his hand off my hip and turned over. “I’m trying to read.”

  He sighed like a martyr, rustled the covers, settled on his right side. “Night.”

  I met George when I was eighteen, working in the customer service department at Willie’s Auto Repair. My first job. I did typing and filing and greeting the customers. I don’t know where I thought this job would take me—nowhere, I suppose; we just got married in those days, we didn’t have careers, not girls from my background anyway. One day George brought in his old rattle trap Plymouth and I waited on him, filling out the little form we had, getting his name and address, writing down what was wrong with his car. He had on an argyle sweater, I remember as if it was yesterday. College boy. I flirted with him because he was sweet and shy, but I’d never have made a play for him. I knew my place. When he asked if he could call me sometime, I almost said no. I thought he didn’t know the rules, that, being from Richmond, he must somehow not be aware that Remington boys didn’t ask out Clayborne girls. Not with good intentions, anyway.

  He took me to an orchestra recital on campus on a Friday night. If he’d been Casanova, if he’d been Don Juan, he couldn’t have come up with a more seductive date. I was thrilled out of my mind, and I was absolutely terrified. That very night I set my cap for him. I want this, I thought. To be with people who talked softly and said things that were just out of my reach. Maybe I can learn this, I thought. Campus—oh, just the word made me dizzy. Campus. It meant peace and quiet and safety. Most of all, it meant respectability.

  It was easy to make him fall in love with me. I was pretty then, and I just pretended he was the center of the world, I cut out of my mind everything but George, I turned all the wattage on and blinded him. Nowadays I suppose I’d have had to sleep with him, but back then it was enough to make him want me. He’s still the only man I’ve ever been with. He says I’m the only woman, but that’s as may be. I don’t question that too closely. The only one in many, many years, though, that I wouldn’t doubt.

  I think the reason I wanted to be president of the women’s club was to see, before I’m a hundred and it really is too late, if my disguise worked. I come from backward people. My father was a drunk. I carry on like I belong in thi
s house, this town, like faculty parties don’t faze me, but I never know for sure if people are on to me. The fact that I lost the election to Vera Holland doesn’t prove anything, unfortunately. All it confirms is that I’m over the hill.

  I wonder if I shouldn’t have married somebody like Calvin Mintz, poor Helen’s husband. More in my class. Which one of us is meaner, Cal or me? Which one of us would’ve won? At least it would’ve been interesting. If we’d survived.

  When I thought I could sleep, I turned out the light and settled on my side, facing away from George. Our rumps bumped. I scooted away an inch, still mad; I didn’t want him touching me.

  Here’s how morbid I am lately—I think about waking up in the middle of the night and finding him stiff and cold in the bed beside me. I’m afraid to touch him. I call either Carrie or 911, I’m not sure which. Carrie, I guess, then she can call 911. The paramedics come. They knock at the door, blue and white lights flashing around the yard, the street, and I show them upstairs in my bathrobe and slippers. They do things…the fantasy gets less real there. The way a dream can start off hard-edged and then get vague, finally tapering off into nonsense. I never imagine any of the emergency people saying, “He’s dead, ma’am.” No. It never comes to that.

  Time is turning me into somebody I can hardly believe in, I can’t seem to make real. Old lady. Do other people who are old feel old? I always thought they did, they must, but here I am turning seventy any day now and I’m no smarter, no wiser, no happier, no more satisfied or fulfilled or content or enlightened than I was at forty. In fact, less.

  I could live to a hundred, I thought, shutting my eyes against the moonlight seeping in around the curtain. Willard Scott could say my name on TV. Who knew, George could live to ninety-eight in the other wing of the nursing home. The Morning Record could run a picture in the Lifestyles section of us shriveled up in our wheelchairs, holding each other’s knobby hand, cutting a sheet cake.

  Foolishness. Why would I want to stretch out marriage to George for thirty more years? Didn’t the last fifty teach me anything?

  I don’t believe in hopelessness, it goes against my raising. But the trouble with hope is it springs eternal. Crazy old ladies think miracles can still happen. George turned over in his sleep and butted his knee up against my rear end. The warmth felt good, so I stayed still, didn’t poke him to move. See? He’s good for something. That’s hopeful.

  14

  Elephant Day

  ALLA PRIMA. IN painting it meant at once, applying all your pigments in one sitting, not layering them on over time. Van Gogh probably painted Bedroom at Arles alla prima, they say. The advantage over a more painstaking, considered approach was supposed to be excitement, intensity, fluidity. I must be doing very exciting work these days, that’s all I can say. It was good to have an arty foreign word for it, too, alla prima. So much nicer than slapdash.

  Wet otter fur. How did you paint wet otter fur? If I were using oils or acrylics on a good stretched canvas, I would start with a neutral base of ultramarine, Payne’s gray, maybe raw umber, some titanium white. If I could afford it I’d use a Richeson no. 10, series 9050 brush, laying in the basic darks and lights first, trying to imagine the otter’s body as a landscape, skin, muscle, and bone as hills, valleys, and ridges. I’d compose him in an appropriate setting, maybe climbing onto a log after a dip in a stream. The elements in the composition would provide perspective and proportion; we’d know how big the otter was by the size of the objects around him. He’d be gray, basically, but not drab because I’d put him behind autumn leaves (raw sienna, vermilion, Venetian red, Van Dyck brown) and in front of the wet fallen stump (burnt sienna, ultramarine, lamp black). I’d switch to a Richeson no. 3 brush, series 9000, for the fine work, the detailing and refining of his fur, whiskers, eyes, eyelashes, toenails.

  I wasn’t doing any of that. I was using a midgrade True Value exterior semigloss ($20.99 a gallon), in a grayish brown shade called “Farewell.” I was laying it on with a three-inch nylon and polyester brush over what I hoped was an otter-shaped cutout from a four-by-eight sheet of three-quarter-inch polystyrene foam insulation. It was a handicap.

  But not an insurmountable one. And I wasn’t working completely alla prima, anyway: after the gray latex dried, I’d add white and black highlights with a small red sable round brush, my one indulgence, to enhance the sharp, sideways V shapes I’d decided clumped wet otter fur looked like. The trick was lifting up on the brush quickly when you got to the end of the hair shaft; otherwise the point wasn’t fine enough. If I had time, I’d redo his eye with acrylics; I’d have liked to roughen the edge of his pupil, lighten the bottom of his iris with Turner’s yellow and some more white. Because I’d decided the light would be coming from directly overhead.

  I wouldn’t have time, though. God gave Noah 120 years to build the ark, and He threw in the animals for nothing. Eldon Pletcher had given Landy, who gave Jess, who gave me and my “helpers,” about three months to stock a three-story ark with, if you included fish, reptiles, and insects, approximately seventy-eight separate animal species.

  Landy said pinning the old man down to seventy-eight wasn’t easy, and I could believe it. At first some of his choices struck me as arbitrary. He’d insisted on the antelope but not the caribou, for example; wolf but not coyote; moose but not elk; mole but not shrew. Leopard but not puma, dog but not dingo, donkey but not mule—and so on. It made sense when you thought about it: between similar animals, he had consistently chosen the one that was either more immediately recognizable or else more—likable, for lack of a better word. People liked mice, they didn’t like rats.

  I approved of Eldon’s list, on the whole. I was especially looking forward to making a chimpanzee. And an octopus—that would be a mechanical as well as artistic challenge. Landy was going to ask his father if I could have a little discretion with add-ons, because I loved slow, lumbering animals, and his list didn’t include possum or manatee. But even if he said yes, I wouldn’t have time.

  It wasn’t altogether a bad thing, the absurd May seventeenth deadline we had no chance of meeting. It allowed no time for second-guessing. My left brain, if there was such a thing, had been all but silenced; by necessity, I was going on uninhibited instinct. I’d never worked that way before. I was like a newspaper reporter who had to finish the story in time for the early edition. It was faster, obviously, but was it any good? I didn’t know—I was afraid to hope—I thought it might be. But either way, I was having the time of my life.

  The job was seducing me, in spite of all the restrictions and eccentric conditions Eldon had attached to it. It was swallowing me up the way a boa constrictor swallowed a rabbit. (I had been reading up on boa constrictors; Eldon wanted them to represent the snake category—the recognizability factor again.) When I worked, I almost sank into a trance. Not like the miniature flower arrangements trance—that was like sinking into a coma, and this was more like being hypnotized. I was aware of my surroundings, the chilliness of the space, the mooing of a cow outside, the oil, gasoline, and dead grass smells, the hum overhead of the fluorescent lights Jess had hung, along with an inadequate propane heater on the wall, when the barn became the official ark animal assembly area. But nothing distracted me, nothing got between me and what I was working on. It was as if I bled into the paint, and the paint bled into the surface and the surface bled into the object—in this case an otter. Extraordinary! It was the boon, the prize, it was the best part of making art. I used to feel it, but I barely remembered it. I never thought I’d get it back.

  Landy broke my concentration, saying, “Sorry I got to go so early today.” I jumped. The smooth line of my brush took a hitch upward, like a lie detector printout catching somebody in a whopper. “Oh—’scuse me—I thought you heard me!”

  I laughed. We’d been working in Jess’s barn since lunchtime, and even though our work areas were fairly close together, I often forgot Landy was there. It wasn’t just my own absorption: he was such a quiet man, cont
ent to work indefinitely without saying a word.

  “Good,” he said, leaning over, peering down at my otter. “Looks just like one.”

  “I haven’t finished the fur. Is he too gray? Think he needs more brown?”

  “Hmm, could be.”

  “I’m using these photos and those drawings.” I pointed to my otter reference materials, wildlife calendars and a couple of naturalists’ journals. “Yes, more brown, I think. Otherwise he looks like a baby seal.”

  “No, no, he doesn’t look anything like a seal.”

  I believed him, and let that particular worry go. Landy was my trusty, most reliable critic. He was always polite, but he never lied: if my pig cutout looked like an armadillo, he found a nice way to tell me.

  “Are you going to see your father?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Sorry I got to go so early, and so much still to do, but this is when he likes me to come.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Eldon was in the hospital again, for chest pains and fluid on his lungs. “How’s he doing?”

  “Better. They say he can probably go home in a coupla days. Tuesday, they’re saying.”

  “I’m so glad. He’s a tough old guy.” I hadn’t met him yet, but that seemed safe to say.

  “I got done six sets of wheels, I set ’em right over there. Sorry it’s no more.” He stretched his hands out and flexed his knobby, arthritic fingers. “Not such a good day today.”

  “It’s the cold.” I wore fingerless gloves when I worked, but Landy wouldn’t, said they made him clumsy.

  He buttoned his plaid jacket to the chin and jammed on his dirty orange hunter’s cap. “Did two sets for the elephant, like you said. Front and back.” He’d spent the afternoon attaching wheels to heavy wooden bases sawn from four-by-fours, because Eldon wanted to roll the animals onto the ark via a ramp. He could just see it, he said.

  “Great. Think the brakes will hold?” I asked. We bought wheel sets with little foot-activated brakes; ridiculously expensive, but we got a deal by buying in bulk.