An Emergence of Green (29 page)

She wondered how much of Carolyn’s feeling for her had had its roots in simple guilt at her husband’s behavior. But then, did it matter? Her own love for Carolyn had evolved accidentally . .

Each night Carolyn slept in her arms, but there was no sexuality in the act. Skittish about being touched even casually, she seemed to lack all sensual awareness.

Val could hear Alix’s words:
This will be difficult for you when she’s so new and wonderful, but she may have very little interest in lovemaking. You’ll have to understand that it’s not rejection of you; it’s another way she’s been damaged. You’ll have to be patient and wait, Val. And it’s impossible to predict for how long…

Carolyn was spending more and more time on the beach, her healing face turning bronze in the November sun. Sitting by herself on the rocks or playing with Neal when he was home from school, she built sandcastles, waded in the surf, walked with Neal hand in hand along the shore.

Val set up a painting table beside the front windows and occupied herself with her profession, the two people she most valued often in sight on the beach below as she worked. She was working well; the break to take care of Carolyn seemed to have brought a fresh infusion of creativity.

Her mind unceasingly occupied with Paul Blake, again and again she ordered herself to be patient. He would be there when the time was right.

Jean Bowman called while Carolyn was down on the beach. Paul Blake wanted to put the house on the market; there were papers for Carolyn to sign. He had filed for divorce, asking a fifty-fifty split on community property. Settlement seemed no problem.

“One more thing, Val. He did request a meeting with either or both of you. To personally return unspecified possessions. Of course I told him no. He requested that I relay the message anyway.”

“Thank you, Jean,” she said evenly, knowing Paul Blake’s “message” was intended for her. But why? Surely it was not physical harm he intended if he would go through Carolyn’s lawyer to arrange a meeting…and he could have assaulted her on that Sunday when she had been with Carolyn. “I’ll relay all this to Carolyn,” Val said, “and get back to you, Jean. Except his request for a meeting, of course. That would only upset her.”

“Still no word of concern about her or what he did to her,” Jean Bowman said. “Know something, Val? It’s not only this man—after fifteen years in this business I’m convinced men think we’re making it up or exaggerating when we talk about psychic scars of rape and battery. I think it’s an unbridgeable gulf between men and women.”

When Val hung up she was elated, but annoyed that the proposed meeting had been Paul Blake’s initiative and not hers.

Carolyn shrugged. “I don’t care what he does as long as I don’t have to see him. I do want your paintings and my clothes, personal things—my degree, photos of my parents, things like that.” She looked at Val miserably. “We could go there when he’s not around but I’d be petrified he might show up. I think if I saw him I’d go completely to pieces.”

“You’ll never have to see him again,” Val stated. She would take care of that. “Make a list of what you want. We’ll give it to Jean.”

Val called Jean Bowman and relayed Carolyn’s agreement to sale of the house and the conditions for an uncontested divorce. “If he’ll have everything on Carolyn’s list delivered to Bekins Storage, I’ll take care of it from there.”

“Fine. I’ll tell him he can deliver his so-called unspecified possessions to me. Any response, however profane, you’d like me to add about the proposed meeting?”

“No. Nothing.”

Jean Bowman might feel duty bound to report back to Carolyn that Val had sent word through Paul Blake’s office when she would meet him.

Val drove to the Blake house and parked. Paul Blake, pacing his front yard, his hands in the pockets of his gray jogging suit, watched her for several moments as she crossed the street, then he strode into his house.

Unhurriedly she walked up the driveway, noting the Century 21 for-sale sign on a lawn which was not yet unkempt but overdue for mowing. The front door was ajar; she left it open behind her. Footprints were tracked on the parquet floor of the entryway, a thick coat of dust dulled the glass-topped hall table. There was a mustiness in the house, an air of abandonment.

Paul Blake sat in the white armchair, his gray jogging shoes propped carelessly on the matching ottoman. His blue eyes seemed transparently pale against the light background. “Sit down,” he said.

The voice was cool, the posture self-possessed. Her instincts told her that she need not make any statement about precautions she had taken; and only then did she concede the real depth of her fear in coming here.

“I’ll stand,” she told him with the insolence of her newfound confidence. “This can’t take long.”

His gaze drifted down her. “You’ve got guts, I’ll say that. Too bad you can’t be the man you wish you were. Too bad you can’t give her what a man can—a good house, good food, good clothes, protection.”

“Protection. I heard the man say protection.”

His expression did not change.

She said, “At her age I was married too. I had all those things.” Again his gaze drifted down her.

“Yes, I remember. Someone actually married you.”

She smiled. “Twice.”

“We’re the same age…How tragic that women live longer than men when the law of gravity is so much crueler to you. Look at you—you’ve already begun to sag. A few decent years, that’s all you’ve got. I’m nowhere near my prime.”

So this was why he wanted this meeting—or at least one of the reasons. To reclaim his territorial rights by assuring her that she had won no victory, that her gains were short term and illusory.

The List etched itself clearly in her mind. She crossed her arms. “She’s with me,” she said slowly, with relish. “Where she wants to be.”

He said evenly, “Queer is such a perfect word for you. You
are
queer. A freak. She’s been with men, she’ll go back to men when she gets tired of being fucked by a queer.”

There was an almost palpable sensation of the words caroming off her, off the impervious armor of her confidence. Never again would she allow the best of herself to be diminished. Why had she ever allowed it?

“I have her now.” She spread her feet and said with deep pleasure, drawing out the words, “I’ll have her a good long time, all that sweetness of her to enjoy…to the fullest. You’ll never have her again.”

He stared at her with his transparent eyes. “You’re pathetic. An imitation man. A perversion of a man. A dyke, a cuntsucking—”

“She doesn’t like to be sucked.” Her voice was soft, containing none of the exhilaration she felt. “I start by putting my tongue just up inside and circling her. Her hips rock, she goes crazy.”

The transparent eyes froze on her.

“I know all the ways to move my tongue, how to make her moan and want to come, but not let her come.”

As his face blanched, she watched with the most savage joy she had ever known, the adrenaline surging through her.

He rose. She squared her shoulders and stood to her full height.

She said, gauging him, “You saw us that Sunday—did you watch the whole afternoon? Did you see all those times? Did you watch all those ways she loved me?”

She braced as he moved toward her; she would slash the edge of one hand across his throat, drive the knuckles of the other hand into his eyes.

“Every night from now on I’ll have her. Every night she’ll be fucked by this queer.”

She stopped, not because he had halted a few feet from her, but because she was finished, and because every item was gone from The List.

She stared into his white face. She could smell alcohol on his breath. He moved around her, past her, and into the guest room.

Her euphoria vanished. Fear took cold shape. Had he gone in there for a weapon? Nonplussed, unsure, she hesitated, then took two steps toward the door she had left open.

“Wait,” he commanded from behind her.

A painting under each arm, he walked up to her and placed them on the floor, turned their faces out to her. “These are what I wanted to return.”

In sick dread, understanding what she would see, she forced her eyes downward.

Across the grays of the rain painting, the slashes were diagonal and ragged, as if the blade had deliberately paused to inflict deeper damage. In
Summer Sunrise
the slashes were vertical and so close together that fragments of the canvas hung from the frame; the thin gaps in the bright oranges of the canvas were dark and jagged, as if the sun were bleeding black blood.

“A vandal,” he said.

She wrenched her anguished eyes away from the corpses of her paintings to meet his pale blue stare.

“I wanted to give them to you personally,” he said. “You see how it feels to have some pervert destroy what another person values.”

“Pervert,” she repeated. “Perversion is destroying what you yourself value. Especially when it can never be replaced.”

Unable to look down, she gestured to the paintings. “Other things can be replaced. Like these.”

He would not know that she could only make replicas, that the creative spark and urgency that gave force and depth to these paintings had been used up and was gone.

She reached into the pocket of her jeans and he stepped quickly back. She realized in sharp exultation that they were equals in their apprehensive mistrust of each other.

“I have something to return to you, too.” She raised her hand and let the ring fall onto the carpet.

Their eyes locked.

She said, “If you come near us I’ll kill you.” To say these words was the reason she had come here.

He smiled, and she was the one to take an involuntary step backward. A memory flashed through her—the same memory as the night she had first met Paul Blake—of being in the desert with Neal, and retreating in dread revulsion from the shiny rattler patrolling its territory with easy and deadly efficiency.

“Why should I come near you?” His eyes held the arctic cold of a shark. He said softly, “There are other women.”

He pushed the paintings toward her. “Take these and get out.” She closed the door of the Blake house behind her, wishing she could hermetically seal it.

Quietly, Val let herself into the beach house. Neal was watching television. Carolyn, he told her, was upstairs reading in bed.

Sorting through the mail she had picked up at her flat, Val opened an envelope from Hopestead Gallery in Santa Barbara. A letter from Hilda Green asked her to please note the enclosed check for twenty-one hundred dollars, and testily enumerated attempts to reach Val to discuss additional paintings for the gallery.

Carolyn was propped up in bed, her hair fanned over the pillow. She lowered her book. “You were gone a long time.”

The reason for leaving the beach house had been to go to the flat. “I took care of a few things,” Val said easily, sitting on the bed. She handed Carolyn the check from Hilda Green. “You weren’t really worried, were you?”

As she hoped, Carolyn was distracted by the check, gazing at it with a slowly widening smile. Eventually, Val reflected, she would have to tell Carolyn about the destruction of the paintings. She had never allowed Carolyn to watch her work; perhaps she could manage to secretly duplicate them.

“Dear, wonderful Val,” Carolyn murmured. “I’m so proud of you.” Val began to unbutton her shirt. “Let me do that,” Carolyn said in soft command, sitting up.

Val submitted to the warm hands, steeling herself against the heavy silk hair that brushed her throat and shoulders, the enveloping gentleness. Carolyn slid her arms around her and buried her face in Val’s bare breasts.

Succumbing, her desire sharpening as a nipple hardened in Carolyn’s tender mouth, she pressed Carolyn’s mouth into her. Was desire finally surfacing in Carolyn, or did she still want her breasts for comforting, as a mother’s breasts?

Carolyn took her mouth away but did not release her. “God, you’re so beautiful. But—”

“I understand,” Val said quickly. Her question answered, she was heartened by the words and by what had just happened between them.

“I need just a little more time to—to…”

“I know.”

“You truly are so beautiful.” Carolyn released her, moved her hands caressingly over Val’s shoulders. “Much as I hate to leave this wonderful house, I think I’m ready. But not to go back to your place, Val. I’m uneasy about that. I think—well, I don’t know, I haven’t thought this through, but I’ve got a little money now…

“We’ve both got money.” Val picked up the check, let it flutter down to the bed.

Just a little more time with you…I need a little more time, too. To be everything I can, to do everything I can ..

She smiled into Carolyn’s green eyes. “I think I’ve definitely entered a green period. I’d like to be in a place where it’s all green. What do you think about going up to Oregon for a while?”

“You crazy woman.” Carolyn shook her head. “It’s the worst possible time for a trip to the Northwest.” She said dreamily, “All that rain and mist and fog, all those green trees…it sounds like absolute heaven.”