The River Swimmer: Novellas

  Clive was well into college before it occurred to him that naturally Laurette had chosen Keith and his family’s big farm for reasons of stability and, of course, she blamed her mother for her father’s disappearance. He questioned again on his path back through the thicket to Mother’s house how memories could resume so much energy as if they were waiting in the landscape, waiting to attack. He rarely thought of Laurette in New York City except in erotic moments when the vision of her turning over on the car seat so he could see both sides continued to dumbfound him. On his obligatory trips back home she again returned vividly to the point that he would become exasperated. He had anyway forbidden Margaret to share any gossip with him, to which she had unsuitably replied, “No one gets over anything.”

  He was thinking of Jung’s idea that perhaps dreams reside in the landscape. Children in Europe dream of knights in shining armor while American youngsters dream of wild animals. A doe and little fawn flushed in front of him and it dawned on him that he was facing the late afternoon sun, thus the path had looped and he was going away from home. He bellowed “fuck” in the loudest voice he remembered ever using. Within a minute or two he heard the dog whistle and plunged in a beeline straight for the house. Fortunately Margaret kept blowing the whistle every minute or two and he refused to acknowledge any diverting thought as the branches of bushes whipped at his face and body, and blackberry thorns tore one of his favorite linen shirts and trousers.

  After a shower, a short nap, half a cup of coffee, and a very large martini made from a bottle in his luggage his brain stopped whirling and the anger from his misadventure subsided. His mother normally forbade hard liquor in her home, though wine and beer were okay, thinking of it as satanic fuel but having enough sense not to say anything noting that her son was past his wit’s end. Her granddaughter had sent a case of wine from San Francisco two years before but she was saving the bottles for a special occasion that would likely never arrive.

  At dinner Clive had become quite spooked because the memory of a dinner forty years before flooded the table. It had been spring of his sophomore year in college and Margaret had been fourteen. Their father had drowned two months before at the beginning of March. In the previous October his father had lost his right hand to a malfunctioning corn picker and had loathed his prosthetic device. His father had spent much of his last winter at solitary ice fishing on a nearby lake and the evening of his death he had driven his pickup out to his shanty and the ice had been weakened by a late February thaw. Clive privately thought of his father’s death as a suicide because he had always been a cautious man. The consensus in the neighborhood was alcohol. It wasn’t so rare that a vehicle had plunged through the ice after the driver had too much to drink and was too lazy to walk out to his ice shanty from the shore. Clive’s father had been in the Orville tavern for a couple hours. Enough said.

  Clive was remembering the dinner so long ago when his mother had angrily said that since Clive wouldn’t quit college and come home and run the farm she would enroll at Central Michigan University in Mount Pleasant and take a teaching degree. The insurance company for the corn picker had made a modest but immediate settlement so she better figure out how to make a living. Mount Pleasant wasn’t that far away and she would only be gone three nights a week. Margaret at fourteen was grown enough to take care of herself. His mother had finished her dinner speech by saying, “You’ve failed us, son.”

  The main reason Clive felt that suicide was probable was because on a car ride at Christmas on a snowy day his father had said, “If anything happens to me don’t become a goddamn farmer. Stick to your art.” His father had been a transport pilot during the Korean War and had wanted to become an airline pilot but instead had taken over the family farm after his own father had an early heart attack.

  Now forty years later Margaret and his mother were sitting at the same places at the old oak table in the kitchen and Clive was feeling a deep slippage in his life. Was Mother still saying “You’ve failed us, son” in her mind? He felt unconcerned but there was still an eerie sense that his mind had never quite admitted what happened to him in the ensuing time, which had become so palpable that he felt he could weigh time in his hand. The sense of slippage came from the sense that there was no traction for the future in his current life. Coming home he no longer had any belief in the life he had adopted after quitting painting. Twenty years had been lost in the cultural mists during which the world had become utterly usurious, drunk on the puke of its productions. It was so obvious in New York but he had seen it everywhere in his beloved Europe which, after all, was not a museum for aesthetes like himself. When he had quit painting he had lost his almost childish sense of destiny, which had been akin to the belief boys playing catch would generate that they would likely make the big leagues, the Detroit Tigers in fact.

  “It would be nice if you’d paint the garage. It’s not like the house which is high and dry. The back of the garage is in the shade and the boards are beginning to rot from moisture.”

  “Of course I will.” He was wondering why an eighty-five-year-old woman would worry about garage boards rotting.

  “Also the culvert under the driveway at the ditch needs to be cleaned out. It nearly flooded in April.”

  He nodded in assent watching Margaret’s eyebrows lift in disbelief as she ate her unseasoned slice of pork roast. Mother had always believed that seasoning beyond salt and pepper was a sign of moral weakness. He was agreeable about painting the garage because he had a good memory about painting the granary at age twelve. It took a week but Dad had given him twenty bucks with which he bought his first oils. Up until then he had used pastels and caseins but the caseins were expensive which was how he had arrived at painting miniatures no larger than seven inches by nine. It was too expensive to work larger. The broad heavy strokes of painting the granary red were sheer pleasure. Margaret who was only a fourth grader had done the meticulous job of the two paned windows of the granary and the door in a flat white.

  “Your hotshot girlfriend bought her old family home down the road.” His mother laughed, awaiting his discomfort.

  “That’s nice,” he said firmly to shut off the line of talk, then glancing at Margaret whom he had forbidden to ever mention Laurette’s name. Margaret shrugged looking at a typed list of European recommendations Clive had made for her and which she wanted to discuss.

  “She’s not here very often. She has this little Cessna she flies up from Grand Rapids and then she keeps a yellow Jeep at the Reed City airport. A girlfriend lives in the house. She’s a poet whatever that means these days. Of course there’s been talk,” Margaret said.

  “I can’t understand why anyone would want a yellow vehicle,” his mother said huffily.

  Clive was dealing with a mind full of bubbling distractions so he got up and went to the kitchen window above the sink. From his dinner seat, the view from the window had looked amazingly abstract in the way things can look if you’re thinking about something else and not trying to make what you see cohere.

  “There’s a yellow bird in the willow outside the window,” he remarked.

  “A yellow-rumped warbler. She’s nesting. Try not to bother her,” his mother said matter-of-factly.

  Margaret took her mother for an evening ride to look at all flying creatures and Clive made himself busy doing the dishes. The yellow-rumped warbler was sitting in her nest not ten feet away, undisturbed and looking at him, evidently used to someone through the window at the sink. He began to think about Laurette, with no discernible rise in blood pressure. He knew she had had a fifteen-year childless marriage to Keith and then had gone off to Grand Rapids to work for the same grocery chain as her father. Barren women had a difficult time in farm families. Keith had remarried and raised a satisfactory brood. That is all he knew about Laurette and he had no intention of asking Margaret for information. At the moment scouring the roast pork pan that could have used s
ome garlic and fresh sage he was struggling for clarity that would dismiss the eerie feeling that had befallen him during dinner. He was thinking that principles were for academics. The working painter or even poet gets his hands dirty in the matter of the world. He, Clive, had become a foreman of sorts, a company stiff despite the power of his early idealism. During the twenty years since quitting painting he had prospered but not to the point he could afford a thirty-five-hundred-dollar-a-month apartment, five times the original rent in 1989. Were his twenty years in the arts, as it were, any different from Laurette hanging in there with a grocery chain? There was an obvious vulgarity to nearly all livelihoods that was disarming. Perhaps the percentage of trash in the art world was the same as that in supermarkets? He had been out in the parking lot playing air guitar. He hadn’t made the cut.

  He was outside in the twilight looking up at a gathering of stratocumulus clouds when Margaret and his mother came back from bird-watching. He was thinking that if he painted the whale skeleton, POV from the interior, he might add some distant clouds on the ceiling or was that too much? Laurette had certainly refused to pose nude but he had done a nice little painting of her back between waist and neck. He had long since recognized that most of his delusion about being a somewhat successful artist in his late twenties had come from his wife Tessa’s money and their living in a nice apartment in SoHo with his studio down the hall.

  His mother was effusively happy from seeing her first Virginia rail in a marsh down the road. He was uncomfortable at the memory of Sabrina when she was seven pointing out a rail in the same marsh so long ago. He said he saw it before he did and she had said, “You don’t act like you see it,” and then he did, with the rail’s neck stretched straight upward looking something like a dead cattail.

  His mother, as always, went to bed at nine with her ritual cup of hot cocoa, and he sat down with Margaret and her European list and they wrangled for an hour. She thought his choices in Paris and Florence too pricey. He said, “Be thrifty at home but splurge in Europe.” She was going to be accompanied by a local schoolteacher, a friend since childhood, who had been saving for the trip for years.

  “Just tell her I gave you money to upgrade the hotels.” He wanted her to stay at the Hotel de Suède on rue Vaneau in Paris. It was a short walk to the Rodin Gardens, also the Jeu de Paume, or the d’Orsay Impressionist collection housed in an old railroad station, he forgot which. Of more interest to Margaret was the presence of the Bon Marché food court, a single long block from the hotel. You couldn’t very well eat two full French meals a day and at Bon Marché you could buy limitless picnics to go. Like everyone else in the world she was worried about her digestion while traveling.

  At dawn her mother was up packing ham sandwiches and sniffling before her bird-watching.

  “My baby is going across the ocean,” she said.

  Margaret and Clive were drinking weak coffee at the kitchen table wordlessly pondering the word baby. As long as you’re around you’re still her children. Margaret was fully dressed and packed two hours before departure, itching to get out of town.

  PART II

  Chapter 5

  On a fine midmorning at the beginning of the second week of May Clive was feeling ordinary mostly because he was washing his mother’s Camry, not as easy a job as he had expected. It had been forty years since he had washed a car and he had suggested that he drive the car to Reed City to a car wash. She thought that was wasteful what with gas at $2.89 a gallon. He was wearing his father’s bib overalls and knee-high rubber boots he had found at the back of a capacious hall closet. There was certainly no reason to wear his own fine clothes in the area. He had noted when driving into Reed City or Big Rapids he was invisible in his dad’s clothing. Just another farmer, like janitors are invisible in their green janitor suits.

  He and Margaret and Sabrina had shared the cost of the new Camry two years before and had had it delivered. It was 6:30 a.m. on a very hungover morning in New York when the thank-you call came. He was in bed with a ditz, a lingerie model to be exact, who had kept him awake until 3 a.m. talking about, among other things, her raw food diet with a trace of cocaine on her upper lip.

  “Thank you, son, but I didn’t need a radio.”

  “All cars come with radios,” he croaked.

  He heard the warbler in the willow and turned to look at it carefully. Early that morning on their bird walk he had proudly pointed to the yellow-rumped warbler at the back of the property in a Russian olive tree and had been embarrassed.

  “Don’t be stupid, son. That’s a house finch. The yellow is much more intense. Can’t you see?” she said squinting with her tunnel vision.

  He had felt like he had mistaken a Giotto for a Schnabel. He had made a fair living out of the acuity of his vision and had stumbled over a bird weighing an ounce or so but then yellow had never been a persistent color for painters. While attempting to make the Camry windows streak-free he pondered yellow with momentary disgust thinking of the Art Tart throwing the paint on his precious suit, a suit that had drawn dozens of compliments in its lifetime. His irritation quickly bored him. After a quick peek the second day back on the farm he hadn’t opened his laptop. Margaret was an addict and had had Wi-Fi set up but the wind of curiosity had gone out of him with the joking done in the spirit of schadenfreude by colleagues and acquaintances. A friend in Nîmes had sent an elaborate pun on the word jaune but the language was pitilessly complicated, and another in Siena had sent a photo of a big homely girl in a yellow dress. When he had received his first big box of crayons on his seventh Christmas he had been infatuated with colors and yellow had been one of his favorites. By wretched coincidence he heard a weak horn beep and there was Laurette in her open yellow Jeep at the foot of the driveway. There was an impulse to spray her with the hose but instead he walked down the driveway. Coming closer he noted that she looked fairly well with a few tiny wrinkles in the corners of her eyes and mouth, though it was immediately obvious that she had been redone.

  “I’ve Googled you now and then Mister Bigshot,” she said with a laugh. “Lately you’ve had some problems that they called an altercation.”

  “It will pass,” he said wondering again how widely the most nominal news passes into the public. “You’re looking good.”

  “It’s hard work at my age. It even takes medical help.” She turned her head slowly. “Can you tell?”

  “No, not really. Maybe a slightly burnished patina on your left temple.”

  “Oh, screw you. It cost me fifteen grand. I showed the gals in the office your picture in Newsweek.”

  It had been a small photo and item in the arts section. He had examined the collection of a kindly old woman in Texas and discovered three fakes including a Winslow Homer. It simply wasn’t in Homer’s palette to paint the picture. Her son, the usual weasel lawyer from Dallas, had tried to enjoin Clive from making any public comment about the collection, something he never would have done anyway but then the man in threatening tones tried to get him to verify the painting before an upcoming auction, so Clive went public with Liz Smith, whom he had met at a number of parties.

  “Come over at six for a drink.” Laurette’s cell phone rang. He heard her say, “Tell that asshole that we won’t take any more of his smoked pork products.” She turned off the phone. “Come over at six for a drink,” she repeated.

  “I shouldn’t leave Mother.”

  “Oh nonsense. Margaret leaves her all the time to see her boyfriend up in Manton. Besides she lived alone for forty years. Also she has a twenty-two rifle with which she shoots stray cats that are after her birds. I heard shooting and asked her about it at the grocery store.”

  Laurette spun off throwing gravel and Clive reflected on how women could shut you out. Margaret never mentioned a boyfriend up in Manton. Mother with a rifle? Probably his boyhood Remington .22 single shot. Laurette hadn’t waited to hear if he was comi
ng for a drink or not.

  In another half hour of touching up he was absurdly proud of the gleaming Camry. Another career opportunity in a glum economy, he joked to himself. In the morning he had to drive her to Big Rapids to church and she’d probably tell her friends, “My son the art bigwig washed my car.” The first Sunday he had insisted on sitting out in the car, which had made her angry so that she extracted a promise to attend beside her. There was a bit of dread attached to the promise. He smiled at the memory of his wife Tessa saying after she had first met his mother, “She’s a real hard-ass. I’m surprised you’re not more fucked-up than you are.” As a rich girl from an Episcopalian family in Pasadena, Tessa loved to swear.

  He went in, cleaned up, and had a small glass of Côtes du Rhône he had managed to find in a supermarket. His mother was preparing supper, dicing up the leftover pork roast and the potatoes, onions, and carrots that had cooked with it into a hash, which was one of the few dishes from the Midwest he missed. He told her he was going over to have a drink with Laurette.