He walked to the Barge Inn parking lot and picked up his car. He drove home and used his key in the door. The bedroom light was out, but he saw her in bed, illuminated in the glow of the television set.
She smiled. “Missed you,” she said.
“Long night.”
“Busy?”
“Fairly busy. What are you watching?”
“Nothing sensational. You could turn it off, I was just looking at it until I fell asleep.”
He tuned off the set, undressed in the darkness and got into bed beside her. He breathed her smell and put a hand on her and she turned to him and pressed against him. He ran his hands over her and felt the texture of her skin and kissed her.
“Oh, I missed you,” she said.
He kissed her and stroked her, telling himself how perfect her breasts were, how warm she was, how desirable. He focused his mind on the urgency of his desire and how much he wanted her. He made love to her with expert hands and she made small noises and caught at the hair on his back and shoulders.
“Oh God don’t make me wait—”
Nothing. Nothing at all. He could get a hard-on talking to a dime-a-dozen nobody who wished he would drop dead, and now he was with a beautiful woman who was dying for him and he didn’t have enough cock to fill a thimble.
“Sully—”
He kicked the bedclothes back, kissed her breasts, then moved downward. Not her fault so why leave her hanging? His mouth found her and she sighed luxuriously with pleasure, told him over and over how good it was.
He performed skillfully, hating her and hating himself all the while. For a while he thought she was never going to make it, but she got there with a near scream and collapsed gasping on her pillow.
He pulled up the covers and got under them, lying on his back.
“You’re so good to me,” she said.
“Baby.”
“Can I be good to you?”
“Not tonight.”
“Nothing I could do?”
There was nothing she could do because there was nothing that would work. He could not stay married for more than five years because he could never find a woman he could go on wanting for more than two or three years. It didn’t seem to matter how young she was or how beautiful, or how much she did or didn’t love him, or what she did or didn’t like to do in bed. Any other girl in the world right now and he’d be a bull, a prize stallion with the mare’s fee paid, but here he was with the most attractive woman in the world and there was nothing she could do because nothing would work.
“Let’s just get some sleep,” he said. “I’m beat.”
“Me too. Sully? Is it me?”
“You kidding?”
“I just wondered.”
“Too much work is all. I’m no kid, and I was on my feet all day.”
“Well, you made me feel awful good. Love me?”
“Love you,” he said, and kissed her and turned away.
FIVE
Olive McIntyre’s hair had turned silver-gray overnight when she was twenty-nine. Since then her face had had almost thirty years to grow to match the hair and hadn’t yet succeeded. Her brow was unlined, her eyes keen and vital. She was a tall woman, bigboned and stout; men never thought of her as pretty and never failed to regard her as attractive.
When Linda rang the bell of her white clapboard house, Olive led her inside to the kitchen, seated her at a round oak table, poured out two cups of fresh coffee and sat down opposite her. “You’re a damn sight better off without the son of a bitch,” she said by way of preamble. “But nobody can live on thirty a week this side of Pakistan. If you’d lived in New Hope longer you wouldn’t look so surprised. You can’t move your bowels here without the word getting around. Made any plans yet?”
“No.”
“Well, let’s put our heads together. Dumb as we are, the two of us ought to come up with something.”
Olive had never been inclined to beat around bushes. She always found it more natural to walk right over them. She was the only child of a Presbyterian minister who had in turn been the son and only heir of a Scotch-Irish immigrant who got rich in the Pennsylvania oilfields and went on to own railroads and newspapers. Olive’s father had spent little of the money while losing a great deal of it through bad investments; every few years Olive would turn up another batch of worthless securities in the attic. At first she had burned them. Now she sold them in bulk to a local shop which framed old documents and sold them as wall hangings. “Daddy always insisted those czarist bonds would be worth something, and I’ll be damned if he wasn’t right after all,” she’d said more than once. “Twenty-five cents a piece for a trunkful. A fraction less than the original purchase price, but it’s the principle that’s important.”
But there was no way for the minister to lose everything, and after his death Olive put her inheritance solid issues and never thereafter had the slightest difficulty living on her income. Except for occasional vacations, she spent every night of her life under the roof of the white clapboard house where she had been bom. Her wealth and social position enabled her to live as she wanted, unchallenged by anyone. Her dour view of the human race in turn enabled her to regard wealth as convenience and social position as an absurdity.
It was widely believed that the night Olive’s hair turned gray was the same night she married Clement McIntyre. “One night with Clem and she just turned white, and one look at that gray hair on the pillow next to him and Clem felt the need of a drink. Her hair never went brown again and he never stopped drinking, and one’s as likely as the other in time to come.”
It was a good story, the sort men enjoyed telling whether they really credited it or not. There was no truth in it. Olive’s hair went gray three years before she met McIntyre and as many years after her first night in bed with a man. She received her first proposal of marriage three days after her eighteenth birthday. It was the first of a dozen, none of which she ever considered accepting. Then at thirty-two she took a walk along the Towpath and passed a man sitting at an easel and gazing at an empty canvas. He had a three-day growth of beard and his pants were spotted with paint.
She took the same route back two hours later, not having thought of him since. He was still there in the same position and the canvas was still blank.
“It’s coming along nicely,” she said pleasantly.
“It’s finished.”
“Is it for sale?”
He turned and looked at her for the first time. Some life came into his eyes. “It’s too personal a statement for me to take money for it,” he said. “But I’ll give it to you, if you like.”
“I’d love to have it.”
“It’s yours.”
He handed it to her. She moved to take it, then withdrew. “You didn’t sign it,” she said.
“I’ll sign it on the back. I don’t like signatures on the front. They distract.”
He signed the back of the blank canvas. She thanked him again and went home with the blood singing in her veins. She did not look at his signature until she was inside her house with the door closed. “Clement McIntyre,” she said aloud. “Mrs. Clement McIntyre. Olive Drew McIntyre. Olive McIntyre.” She liked the sound of it, and in less than two weeks it was her name.
He was an alcoholic painter who had drifted into town just two days before she met him. He arrived in a Model-A Ford with the back full of canvases. In two days he had shown his work to every gallery in town and had found no one willing to display him. His paintings and his car and the clothes on his back were all he owned in the world. All he wanted to do on earth was to drink and to paint, and he was better at the former than the latter. No one in New Hope could figure out how on earth he persuaded Olive Drew to marry him.
He didn’t. It was she who persuaded him, and it took her the better part of a week. At first he couldn’t believe she was serious. Then he decided she was crazy. He told her if all she wanted was a husband she could do better than him. She said if all she wanted was a
husband then she had picked a funny time to decide it, because she had already turned down half the town.
“I didn’t want them and I don’t want the other half. I want you.”
“Then you’ve got to be crazy.”
“If I’m too crazy to live with you can always get back in the car and leave. I wouldn’t let the bloodhounds after you.”
“How could I marry a woman I never slept with?”
“Now you’re talking,” she said. “The bedroom’s upstairs. You want to take a fresh drink with you?”
“I want to take the whole bottle.”
In bed they were perfect together. He was utterly astonished, and candid enough to say so. She was not surprised at all, because it had gone exactly as she had expected, exactly as she had known it would be from their first exchange of words on the Towpath.
She said, “Well?”
“Well, you’ve got to be crazy to want to marry me, but I’d have to be crazier to turn you down. As far as that goes I might have to marry you. Meaning I didn’t use anything. I was going to pull out but I got carried away.”
“Thank God for that.”
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t have children. I had an operation a couple of years ago and they had to take out some spare parts. Everything’s in working order but I can’t ever get pregnant. You ought to know that ahead of time. I never cared to have children myself, but it means a lot to some people.”
“All it means to me is never again being embarrassed in a drugstore. It’s your own business but when you say an operation—”
“If I meant an abortion I would have said so.”
“You do tend to cut to the heart of the matter. You know, downstairs I was half convinced you were a virgin, and in bed I got the complete reverse of that impression.”
“In other words, how close to a virgin am I? There were five men. Nobody ever made love to me more than once.”
“An hour from now,” he said, “you won’t be able to make that statement.”
They were married by a justice of the peace in Doylestown on a rainy Thursday afternoon in October. For twenty-five years there had never been a day when she was not conscious of her love for him. He was never an unpleasant drunk, never had blackouts, never became sloppy or hostile. Nor was he ever wholly sober.
He warned her before the wedding that he might not remain faithful to her. “Just don’t bring anything home with you,” she said.
“You wouldn’t get upset?”
“Five years ago the tools in this town passed a law that no dog could run free within town limits. The day the law became official I took two good beagles and gave them to a farmer the other side of Lahaska. I never want anything with a leash on it.”
“I’ve got to marry you because God knows I’ll never find anyone else like you.”
“Of course if a dog or a man would sooner stay home in front of the fire I wouldn’t hold it against him. But it’s got to be him that decides.”
He never once had another woman because he never once wanted one. And not even in fantasy could she entertain the thought of another man. She paid for paints and canvases and he would paint in occasional spurts of great energy. The walls of the clapboard house were covered with his work to the point where every room but one looked like an art gallery.
The exception was the bedroom. Only one canvas hung there, the blank one he had given her on their first meeting. She had hung it that first night, centered over her bed. She had never taken it down.
“It’s a shame he couldn’t have cooled his heels for another month,” Olive said now. “As of Decoration Day we go on summer hours. I’d had it in mind to see if you’d want to work full time starting then. Our summer schedule’s about standard for New Hope. Tuesday through Sunday, eleven to ten, sometimes later on Saturdays if the crowds hold up. Like everybody else we close Mondays. I generally work most of Saturday and Sunday and split shifts on weekdays with whoever works for me.
“I can use you a minimum of forty hours a week, maybe a little more if you want extra work. And I’ll raise you to two fifty an hour. Not out of the goodness of my heart. I pay more during the season because it’s more work. In the good months you’re busy all day long. The scum of the earth streams in and out of the shop in a neverending stream. They may not buy much of anything, but they’re there. Forty hours at two-fifty an hour is a hundred a week before deductions, and if you can’t live on that you’ve got a problem.”
“I can live on that easily.”
“That’s starting Decoration Day. In the meantime it’s pointless to extend the hours. It would just give you more time to sit around waiting for something to happen. What I will do is raise your hourly rate to two fifty immediately. That’s not charity either, it’s an inducement to keep you working for me for the next six weeks. It’s not hard to find summer help around here. There’s nothing easier. What’s hard is to find anybody who’s any good, or if you do they pack up and go to Woodstock in the middle of July and leave you stranded. If you don’t plan on staying through Labor Day, I’d like you to tell me now.”
“I’ll stay. Definitely.”
“Fair enough. In the meantime you can work four days instead of three. That would be twenty-four hours. On Saturdays and Sundays you can open at eleven I’ll take over at two. That’s six more hours making it thirty hours comes to seventy-five dollars a week. Can you get by on that?”
“Yes.”
“Barely, but you can make it.”
“The thing is—”
“What?”
“I’ve almost felt guilty working for you this winter. There are days when the shop doesn’t take in enough to pay my salary, and I don’t want—”
“You don’t want to be a charity case. Well, I don’t want to be a home for stray cats, as far as that goes. I don’t make a profit on weekdays off-season. I stay open because it does a business good in the long run to have regular hours and keep to them. If people never know whether you’ll be open or not they give up after a while and stop coming around.
“This is the most amateur town in the world, Linda. The English are supposed to be a nation of shopkeepers. Well, New Hope is a town of shopkeepers, but ninety percent of them are doing it as a hobby. They don’t have to make a living, but they’re sick of playing solitaire and not bright enough for anything else, so they come here and open some artsy-fartsy shop and try not to lose more money than they can afford. As long as the stock dividends or the alimony or daddy’s check comes in every month they’ve got nothing to worry about.”
She refilled the coffee cups, gave Linda a cigarette and took one herself. She said, “Well, I’m an amateur myself. I opened the Lemon Tree because I thought it would be something interesting to do. I like to watch people. I think they’re the most amusing animals on God’s earth. The locals give you more long-range laughs but the tourists are always good for a few chuckles. They tickle the hell out of me.
“But I wouldn’t keep the shop open if it didn’t make a profit. The money’s not important in and of itself. I could live without it, or God knows I could find easier ways to make more of it. But I don’t want to play a game and lose at it, and the money is how you keep score. Now this is a roundabout way to say what I said in the beginning. I’m not doing you any favors. I’m not extending hours to create work. They’re just hours that I’d be working myself otherwise, and there’s no difference between paying two and a half bucks an hour to you or paying it to myself. Does that cover the subject?”
“I guess so.”
“You can go on down and open up as soon as you finish that coffee. I stay on summer hours until sometime in October, so you’ll have enough to live on at least that long. And by then you’ll have some other man to live with.”
“No, I won’t.”
“Oh? Perhaps not. You’re tougher than you look, aren’t you?”
“I’m learning,” she said.
She left her coffee unfinished and went to the s
hop and opened for business. That first day was a fluke; although the volume of tourists was no higher than usual, she somehow took in over two hundred dollars. A third of the sum came in a single sale. There were a dozen of Clement McIntyre’s canvases on one wall, and she sold one of them for seventy-five dollars. It was the first painting she had sold in all the months she’d worked there. Later she found out that there was a twenty percent commission on the pictures. “But don’t get carried away,” Olive warned her. “It’ll probably be six months before you sell another one.”
The days that followed were a return to normal, with a handful of small sales scattered across the hours. She chose to take it as an omen that her first day was such a good one. It seemed like confirmation of Olive’s offer and of her own acceptance of it.
She found herself more involved with the Lemon Tree now. She worked more hours, yet found the work less boring. Before the job had been a place to go and little more. If owning the Lemon Tree had been a hobby for Olive, working there had been much the same sort of thing for her. Before she had put in an occasional afternoon before going home to Marc; now she worked there six days a week for the money that she lived on, and when she left it was to return to an empty apartment. By the end of the first week in May she realized that she was getting along very well. She had anticipated bad moments and there had been several of them, but they had not been as bad as she had feared. There were some sleepless nights, and black hours of self-doubt and self-loathing. But they were no worse than similar hours while Marc lived with her. Solitude in and of itself was not a cause of despair, any more than companionship was in and of itself a cure.
And, too, she was becoming more open to casual conversations than she had been before Marc’s departure. She found herself chatting briefly with other residents of the Shithouse. Before she had rarely spoken to anyone there besides Peter and Gretchen—who had been Marc’s friends through the theater—and the couple on the first floor from whom she had bought a handmade silver necklace. And at work she seemed to be functioning as more of a social being.