Circle of Three

  The doorbell rang.

  Who? I thought, tiptoeing into the foyer. Who’s torturing me now? It couldn’t be my mother, she never knocked, and if the door happened to be locked she had a key. Long stained glass panels bordered the door on both sides—I’d taken a class and made them myself, last year, when screening visitors wasn’t a priority. All I could see through the soldered yellow and blue panes was a tall shadow. I opened the door an inch or two. Jess Deeping peered in at me, then took a step back, gray eyes startled. “Hi. Is this a bad time?”

  I put him in the living room and excused myself to go make coffee. Wouldn’t Ruth revel in this? I told you, she’d say, I told you to get dressed. I looked ghastly anyway, but more so in Stephen’s red Bulls jersey over my oldest, rattiest flannel nightgown. I wasn’t vain, but I still had some pride, a shred, a vestige. Measuring coffee into the maker, I watched two fat, humiliated tears spatter on the counter. They weren’t remarkable; I cried almost every day about something. Maybe this is as low as I’ll go, I thought hopefully. Maybe this is the bottom.

  When I came back in the living room, Jess was bent over with his hands behind his back, studying some small water-colors I did of Ruth when she was a little girl. They weren’t very good, but I couldn’t part with them; I framed them and put them in a grouping behind the gateleg table, half hidden by the tole lamp. He’d taken off his heavy coat—I’d forgotten to ask him for it. He’d dressed up; he wore pressed slacks and a blue crewneck sweater that looked brand-new. A Christmas present? He had no family, no wife anymore. Who gave Jess presents? His hair was a little thinner now, and darker, a caramel shade, but when we first met, age eleven, he was a towhead blond. In high school it was streaky gold and down to his shoulders. In my illicit dream, the one I can’t forgive myself for, it came down around the sides of his face, and my face. It covered us like a tawny curtain.

  “These are good,” he said, straightening. “Why did you stop painting?”

  “How do you know I did?”

  “Ruth told me.”

  “Ah.” Should’ve known. I sat down on the piano bench, crossed my legs, folded my arms. “I have a cold,” I said. True, but it didn’t explain half of what I wanted it to.

  “I’ve been thinking about you,” he said carefully. “How’ve you been getting along?”

  “All right.” I nodded a lot, trying to make it sound truer. Something old pulled at me to make him my confidant. How easy to say, I’m dead inside, Jess. Ruth’s all that keeps me going, and I’m failing her. “I’ve been all right. Getting by, you know. It’s hard,” I finally admitted. “But we’re okay, Ruth and I. Basically. Tell me about you, what have you been doing?”

  He smiled a bit grimly, to let me know he hadn’t bought any of that. “Oh, the usual. It’s the slow time of the year, so I’ve been taking it easy. Getting lazy.”

  “I doubt that. Don’t you still have to milk two hundred cows twice a day?”

  “Not quite that many.”

  “Ruth told me that. It’s not true?”

  “I’ve got over two hundred head, but not all of them get milked. Maybe a hundred and fifty.”

  “What happens to the other fifty?”

  “Calves, stud cattle, heifers. A few old ladies.” He put his hands in his pockets and looked around the room. “I like your house.”

  “It seems funny that you’ve never been here before.” Because I’d never invited him. Seeing him on his big, busy, wide-open farm, that was all right, and Ruth was always with us. But here in my house, just Jess and me? Not allowed. You didn’t have to say the rules out loud to know what they were.

  “You did all the remodeling yourself?” He stood stiffly, rocking on his toes a little. Uncomfortable, I realized. Most unusual for Jess. I hadn’t seen him since Stephen’s funeral. He’d phoned one time. Ruth answered, and they talked for quite a while. I shook my head and waved my hands when she said, “So do you want to talk to my mom?” Then it was awkward, because he said yes and she had to come up with a reason, quick, why he couldn’t. “Gosh, she was here a minute ago. Well, I guess she went out. I guess she left while we were talking.” He hadn’t called again.

  “Most of it,” I told him. “Ruth helps me paint sometimes. It’s not finished. I guess now…” I let that hang, weighing how frank I should be. Was it too personal to tell him I might have to sell the house? Ruth loved it, though. Even if we sold it, after only three years of ownership, there wasn’t much escrow in our overpriced circa-1880 money sink on the state of Virginia’s Historic Register. I smiled at Jess. “Some of my plans have been pushed back, put it that way.”

  “You need a job.”

  “God knows I do. Excuse me a sec…” I stood up and went to get the coffee.

  He followed me into the kitchen. “This is amazing,” he said as I filled two mugs with coffee, adding milk to his.

  “What?”

  “This room. You did all this, Carrie?”

  “Yep.” I painted the tiles behind the sink and stenciled the wallpaper borders, I even laid the antique bricks I bought cheap at an estate sale. I was quite the craftswoman. “Well, not the counters. I found the slates, but a man cut and installed them for me. And the cabinets were already here, I just refinished them.”

  It was a great room, my favorite in the house. I could’ve made it bigger, knocked out a wall and extended into the pantry; that was even allowed under the strict rules of landmark ownership. But it was a 120-year-old house—who had big kitchens in its day? And there were only three of us when I was weighing the decision. And now only two.

  Jess scuffed the toe of his shoe across the throw rug he was standing on. “And this?” He looked up and smiled, and raised his eyebrows, and rubbed the flat of his hand against his chest—a combination of gestures I knew very well. In different lights, from different angles, I could still see the boy in his man’s face. I felt such tenderness sometimes. It was dangerous, it wasn’t even true, but sometimes I felt that I knew Jess better than anyone, that I was the only one who could really see him. But that was only the power of nostalgia. And loneliness. The mind plays tricks.

  “I’m afraid so,” I said, abashed. SWEET HOME, the rug said, with the date, in green and gray yarn over a replica of my house’s façade. “My first and last rug-hooking effort. Months, this took.” And it was only four-feet square. Of all the crafts I’d ever taken up out of curiosity, interest, boredom, desperation, whatever—rug hooking was far and away the most tedious. The one that had made me feel the most ridiculous.

  “You’re an artist.”

  “No.” I laughed. “A frustrated one, maybe. Stephen used to say I took it out on the house.” But I was so pleased. It was as if Jess had plucked a hair-thin wire running through me and set it vibrating. I am such a fool.

  He set his cup down and came around the kitchen table I’d put between us—we’d been talking across the length of the room. “I have a job for you.”

  “A what?”

  “I could offer you a job.”

  I saw myself milking cows in his barn. I’d have laughed, but I felt deflated. Stupid, but I thought he might’ve come for something else. “What job?”

  “I’m looking for an artist. To do something. Make something.” He looked me over, head to toe. “You’re perfect.”

  I flushed. If he was making fun of me, it was for the first time. “What, you need someone to—to—” I couldn’t think of the name of it, the person who used to advertise mattresses in department stores by sleeping, sleeping in a big bed behind a plate glass window while people on the sidewalk stopped and stared. I saw it once in an old movie.

  “You wouldn’t make a lot of money.” I sensed a trick, but the light in his eyes drew me anyway. “But you’d make more than Margaret Sachs is paying you.”

  “Who told you about that? Ruth,” I answered myself. “Well, that’s not saying much, believe me. Oh, Jess, I need a real job.”

  “This is a real job.”

  “What is it???
?

  “It’s kind of a long story. Do you remember Eldon Pletcher?”

  “No. Eldon? I remember Landy Pletcher.”

  “Eldon’s Landy’s father.”

  “Landy—you mean from school?” A boy two years ahead of Jess and me at Clayborne High. A shy, backward boy, I remembered; his father had farmed tobacco.

  Jess nodded. “Well,” he said, and rubbed a long index finger across his sideburn, deciding how to proceed. “Do you know about the Arkists?”

  “The what?”

  “No, you’d moved away by then. I’m surprised your mother never mentioned them, though. They—they’re—” He scratched his head, smiling down at the floor. Such a man, I thought, with his deep voice and his rough hands, the weathered skin around his eyes. Stephen had lived in his head, but Jess lived in his body. I wasn’t used to a man like him in my house. “Let’s see,” he said. “About twenty years ago—about the time you left—Eldon, Landy’s father, started a religious group called the Arkists. Also known as the Sons of Noah. Small, mostly local. Well, not that small, they had a couple hundred souls in their heyday. You never heard about this?”

  “No. When was their heyday?”

  “I use the term loosely. Ten years ago? I’m not sure what they believe in besides the great flood, but probably the usual, what you’d expect. From a southern offshoot of Protestantism.”

  “They don’t handle snakes?”

  “No.”

  “Take multiple wives? Speak in tongues?”

  “None of that.” He laughed, but he really wanted to reassure me. “They’re good people, not well educated but well meaning. Gentle. They don’t preach that they’re the one true faith.”

  “That could be why their heyday’s over. Like the Shakers. No, wait, they died out because they wouldn’t procreate.”

  “Right. Anyway…”

  “Anyway. What’s the job?”

  “When Eldon had his religious conversion, he promised God he’d replicate the ark before he died.”

  “Replicate the ark?”

  “To save the world from a second devastating flood, figuratively speaking. Not to mention his own immortal soul.”

  “Figuratively speaking?”

  “In fact, if he breaks his promise, he believes he’ll go straight to hell.”

  “He’s telling you this?”

  “Landy told me. He’s my neighbor now—he bought the old Price farm next door about twelve, fifteen years ago. We’re friends. We help each other out.”

  “I see.”

  “Where was I?”

  “Eldon Pletcher’s going to replicate Noah’s Ark. Is he going to sail it?”

  I was joking, but Jess said, “Yeah, on the Leap.”

  “You’re kidding. What do I do, skipper it?”

  “Ha.”

  I frowned. He looked so sheepish. “That was a joke,” I said. “Right?”

  “Right. Right, you don’t have to skipper it.”

  I spread my hands, completely baffled. “Well, what?”

  “Arks need animals. Figuratively. Eldon thinks God wouldn’t mind if he stocked the ark with representations of His creatures somehow, pictures, models—he’s not too clear on this, to tell you the truth.”

  “Who, God?”

  “Eldon. But he wants them to look good, you know, he wants realism, and the problem is, there aren’t any artists among what’s left of the Arkists.”

  I started to laugh. “And this is where I come in?” Something caught my eye in the window over Jess’s shoulder—the fender of my mother’s Buick in the driveway. “Oh, no.”

  “Well, wait, think about it.”

  “No, I mean—”

  “You could do it. You’re an artist, Carrie, it’s obvious.” He waved his arm around my kitchen. “And I know it sounds crazy, it’s completely absurd, but that’s the beauty of it, isn’t it?” Oh, I could never resist that reckless gleam in Jess’s eye. “I don’t know what he’d pay you. People say he’s got money, but nobody knows for—”

  “Jess,” I said in warning.

  The back door flew open and Ruth burst in, red-cheeked from the cold. Everything curves up when she smiles, mouth, eyes, cheeks, eyebrows. Oh, light of my life, apple of my eye. Love for my daughter swamps me at unexpected moments. I flounder in it, flailing for what I can’t hold on to much longer. “Hey, Jess,” she cried, “I saw your truck! Hi!”

  “Ruth—I can’t believe it. You grew.”

  Laughing, they stood in front of each other for an awkward few seconds, before finally exchanging a quick, shy hug. Their gladness surprised me—I wasn’t sure what I thought of it. Half a dozen times since Stephen died, Ruth had asked me to drive out with her to see Jess, see the cows, his dogs and cats, all the fascinating features of a dairy farm. But I put her off because I was too tired, too weird, too something. I wasn’t ready. She’d missed him, it was obvious, and that was my fault. Well, something else to be guilty of.

  If Ruth was surprised to see Jess, my mother was floored. She did a double take in her ladies’ luncheon finery, fur jacket over a navy wool suit, fur hat, medium-heeled pumps, navy handbag. Oh, Lord, and here came Birdie behind her, Mama’s lifelong bridge partner and oldest friend; she’d been a sort of half-dotty aunt to me for as long as I could remember. All of a sudden the kitchen was teeming with women.

  “Mama, you remember Jess Deeping,” I said in a hostessy voice, thinking, If she pretends she doesn’t know him, I’ll kill her. But she said, “Why, of course I do,” in her best southern accent, “you came to my son-in-law’s funeral, I so appreciated that.” Such an accomplished liar. Before Stephen’s funeral, Mama had been delighted not to lay eyes on Jess Deeping for twenty-five years.

  “And Birdie,” I said, “Jess, this is Mrs. Costello, my mother’s good friend.” They said hello, how are you, nice to see you. And then, because the silence was expectant and I was jittery and everybody was staring at me, I blurted out the worst possible thing. “Jess came over to offer me a job.”

  “A job?” Birdie’s faded blue eyes snapped with interest. She rubbed her hands together.

  “Wow! What job?” Ruth demanded, crowding in.

  My mother said nothing. She stared.

  Jess looked hounded, disbelieving. The glance he sent me—Carrie, what the hell?—should’ve cowed me, but it didn’t. For some reason it warmed me up. Us against them: just like old times. He closed his eyes for a second. And then with a pained, hopeless smile, he told everybody about Noah’s Ark.

  4

  Good Help

  I’LL BE SEVENTY years old in the spring. I’ve been sixty-nine for nine months, and hardly enjoyed a minute of it. Sometimes I feel like I’m in a car speeding toward a boulder in the road somebody’s chiseled into a giant 7–0. The scenery might be nice, but all I can see is those numbers, high and hard and coming up fast. I’ve got a one-track mind.

  I must be bad off when George notices. “Dana,” he said to me the other night, “is anything bothering you?” Well, that got my attention. That was like a blind man saying, “Did somebody turn the lights on?” I tried to remember what I’d just been doing that could’ve focused George’s attention on me instead of his computer screen. Nothing—telling him to move his big feet so I could vacuum under his desk; fighting on the telephone with Birdie, who doesn’t think I should run for president of the Clayborne Women’s Club; slamming things around in the kitchen for the hell of it, just to make some noise. Calling Carrie twice in an hour with good advice. It must’ve been the accumulation, all four added up, because by themselves those aren’t very remarkable. But imagine George noticing. As I say, it pulled me up.

  He was sitting at his desk, working on the book he’s been writing with a colleague for the last year and a half. It’s about a poet from the 1700s named—well, I forget his name. Alexander Pope called him “Namby Pamby,” so that’s what I’ve been calling him. George is sorry he ever told me that. He swears they’ll be done with the book by next May,
which is about the time I’ll be queen of England. When George retired from the college two years ago, I thought our interesting new lives were about to start. We’d travel, maybe learn a foreign language together, take up some sedentary sport. Talk. Well, surprise, so far that hasn’t worked out. He still spends all his time in his study with the door closed, reading, writing, and not talking to me. Carrie called one night about a month ago, teary and upset. “Mama, it’s so quiet in this house. It’s as if everybody died, not just Stephen.” I didn’t say it, but I thought, oh, honey, it’s like that all the time at my house.

  I pushed some papers to the side and sat down on the corner of George’s desk, next to the computer so he had to look at me. “Is anything bothering me?” Already he looked sorry he’d asked. “My arthritis. My blood pressure medicine. My upcoming senility. Those are off the top of my head.”

  “Ha ha,” he said, humoring me. He had his trifocals on top of his bald, freckled head. He’s shrinking; these days when he drives, he needs a pillow to see over the steering wheel. I’m shrinking, too, but not as much as he is. He’s two years younger than me, but he looks older. I hope.

  “George,” I said, “wouldn’t you think at our age we’d know something?”

  He turned his good ear toward me. “What’s that?”

  “When you were young, say when you were Ruth’s age, didn’t you think people as old as us knew something? Knew something? I sure did. But don’t you feel like the whole thing’s still the same mystery it was when you were fifteen?”

  He just blinked at me. He’s supposed to be the intellectual in the family. I married him partly for his brains, and look where it got me. “What’s the trouble?” he said, but his eyes were drifting. He fidgeted when the screen saver came on, a reminder that time was passing.