Men and Angels (21 page)

She was powerful because she was immobile. Nothing broke her surface; it was all smooth heaviness. She was unsusceptible to humor or to charm. Her interest in Adrian, Anne thought, had nothing to do with his wit or sweetness. She must be interested in him because he so clearly looked as if he would have the endurance necessary to perform. She hated the thought of Adrian and Laura making love. She could see Laura going at it with the same single-mindedness, the same fixity of purpose that she had when she moved the refrigerator to clean behind it. It was unbearable, the things that Laura made her feel. She could have gone through her whole life without feeling them. It was Laura’s presence with her in the house, it was the life she had to live beside her that made these antipathies so brutish and so real.

She must forget about Laura. She would go back to work. That was the important thing, the essential thing. Because of Laura, she could turn to Caroline’s diaries. There was nothing around the house that needed her attention. So she could put up with Laura, because all the qualities that so annoyed her made Laura the perfect servant. Her dullness, her lack of imagination, kept her from being bored; they made her happy at her job. So that Anne could turn to Caroline’s journal and read what Caroline, sitting in her house on the Hudson River, had written seventy-five years before.

I cannot love. I cannot paint. I look at people, at the river, and I know what is called for. Yet I can do nothing. American skies do me no good. They suggest nothing to me, only some vast stupid openness concealing unimportance.

If only I could do something simple: an apple or a branch. To draw as if I were a cobbler, making something ordinary, useful: a pair of boots. If once again the look of things could move me. When M. Matisse had influenza and thought he was dying, he said he was glad he had lived because of his birds, his gardens, they had been so beautiful. If only I could feel that once again: that itch so that the press of human things washed over me: a heavy wave I was not in the path of.

The sun on the leaves: a light, acidic green. Once nothing could distract me from it. The existence of Stephen dulls everything, muddles everything. His unhappiness poisons the house. His relationship to others twists them for me. Because she dotes on him, I see my sister, whom I love, as a fool. My father, who could raise in me a grudging pride, I now despise entirely. His attentions to my son turn him into the complete American, Philistine and boor. When he tells Stephen, “Get out into the open. Don’t mope around. Do something, be a real boy,” I could strike my father to the heart. Yet I too despise my son for his slowness, his misery. My son. I know where he is. He sits outside my door, waiting for me to finish. I can hear his breath through walls a foot thick. His breath steals mine and blinds me. Sitting out there, covered over with unhappiness, waiting only for the word, the touch I cannot give him, he imagines that, behind the door, I work. I hear his governess tell him to stop sitting by the door, to come outside, to play a game, to hear a story. He will not move.

Poor Stephen at the door, four years old, waiting, doing exactly the wrong thing, what would never gain his mother’s affection, only her impatience. And poor Caroline, trapped in her room, pressed down, rubbed raw by irritation, guilt, contempt, the fear she could not work. Three months a year she gave to Stephen: months wrung grudgingly from a dried skin. Leaving Paris, her life, she boarded ships, crossed seas. To get to what? Her son, whose flesh made hers grow cold. Yet in the paintings of him, she had rendered his flesh beautiful. Her freest brushwork, pinks and purples, blues spread quickly, lovingly, made up the flesh of the boy’s limbs in
Stephen, Sleeping.
When her father scolded Stephen, she was ready to take knives, to strike him to the heart. Yet around the child she could not breathe. Still, she came to him every year, from June to August. Off the boat she swept, by him, above him, covering them both in a miserable cloud of failure and incomprehension, while she tapped her fingers on the windowsills of the house that had been built by Dutch settlers in the 1600s, and smoked, impatiently, a hundred cigarettes a day to spite her father. Then on September first she left, lifting the cloud and leaving Stephen even more defenseless, naked to the devastating blast of manly expectation, which would only make him wither, sicken, fall into his own unlucky nature, his own sinking heart.

Anne looked at the sketchbooks of those summers. She could see that Caroline was learning in those drawings a new line, quick and bold. She could see it in the drawings of the branches, in the thick line marking the horizon, in the spare, sure strokes suggesting doors and windows. Caroline sat in her room desolated, convinced she was marking time at worthless labor. Yet those drawings were critical to what she achieved in her late work. Would it have mattered, to Caroline, to Stephen, if they had known those heavy, lacerating hours would lead to something? Would Caroline have loved her son more if she had known that what she did while he sat outside the door would point the way to her best work? Would Stephen the child have thought to himself, I am lonely, but it is leading to something? Of course not. Nothing could have helped them. There was no connection between art and life. The backward glance was nothing, or a lie. They had to live their lives. They could only be themselves, Caroline in her room, made miserable by the miserable son who sat outside the door breathing unhappily the air she needed.

The house in the morning thrummed with expectation. The morning sunlight, weak and ordinary, took on purpose. For the children, life was shining: they were going to the city. A wave of strangers would engulf them, beautiful, treacherous, and carry them on. They might see a movie being made; they might see a murder. It was nearly Christmas. Stores would be lit up, lights would be strung through the dense air.

Formally, they walked into Jane’s building. Her apartment was small and circumspect; it was clear that her domestic life was lived in the country. The walls of all the rooms were white. They had been covered with Caroline’s paintings and were nearly bare. Square drab chairs sat on the living room rug like grounded birds. The curtains were a somber green.

“Come in, my dears, come in,” said Jane, sweeping the children forward. “I’d like you to meet my friend Betty Loomis.”

Jane had told Anne not to bring Laura; she said a woman who did some work for her would be happy to care for the children. It was a pleasure for Anne to be away from Laura for a day; it was a pleasure, even, to feel she was in league with Jane in excluding her. Would Laura spend the day with Adrian? She wouldn’t think about it.

“Betty’s staying with me for the winter,” Jane said. “She’s been helping me around the house.”

Betty Loomis was sitting in one of the chairs as if she would be happiest disappearing into it. Her poor thin shoulders folded in toward the center of her body like a coat hanger stepped on by heavy feet in boots. Her hair—five colors, none of them distinct—was pulled back in a red elastic band; there were reddish-brownish patches underneath her eyes suggesting she might have been rubbing them in a particularly violent, desperately habitual way. Her eyes were large and light, covered by a thin, pervasive film of misery, endurance, patience, and bad luck. She wore black ski pants and a Ban-Lon sweater in a shade that twenty years before had been called, too hopefully, royal blue. On her feet were ballet slippers, the thin laces at the instep tied in two neat bows.

“Where are you from originally?” asked Anne, bowing her knees and hunching her shoulders, fearful that Jane’s physical abundance, all her size and color, might be too much for this girl if she added her own to it.

“Florida,” she said. “My people were from Florida at first. I wasn’t actually brought up there. I lived in Georgia for a while, then Alabama. I came here in 1978.”

“Yes, of course you did,” said Jane. “Now, children, you must be very good and do exactly what Betty says, and more, for she’s very kind, and I’m afraid you’ll find her easy to take advantage of. We’ll be back at four, and then we’ll go right off, Betty, so you must see to yourself for dinner.”

Betty nodded, tapping a cigarette on the arm of the chair.

“You shouldn’t smoke. The surgeon general has determined that cigarette smoking can be hazardous to your health,” Peter said.

“Don’t be a bully, Peter,” Jane said. “There’s a very good phrase, ‘Every man to his own poison.’ You may not have found yours yet, but you will.”

Peter fell back on the couch, blushing. Anne was afraid he was going to cry. He was, after all, in love with Jane.

Betty Loomis sat down on the couch beside him. “I know you said that because you cared. Thank you, that means a lot to me.” She said the word
cared
as if it had three syllables.

Peter’s body corkscrewed into the upholstery with pleasure. Like all moralists, Anne thought, he was at heart a sentimentalist. He would probably marry a country and western singer and spend the rest of his life trying to teach her Greek. Anne kissed the children and gave them each a dollar. Walking down the hall, she wondered what peculiar accident had brought Betty Loomis into Jane’s life. She was obviously more than an employee. Standing behind Jane, waiting for the elevator, she knew she would never dare to ask about it, and she thought it at least possible that Jane might never say a thing about it. Jane was the kind of person who was always puzzled when people found her arrangements unusual. With the extreme isolation of the genuinely self-possessed, Jane thought herself the norm.

Anne had given the people in the gallery the list she had put together of the paintings of Caroline Watson owned by collectors. Today she would meet the gallery people for lunch, to talk about contacting the collectors and perhaps borrowing some of the paintings for the show. She had seen photographs of only a few of them in exhibition catalogues of the twenties and the thirties. So she was counting on Ben—and Jane—to advise her about which of the paintings might be important to pursue.

They were to meet the people from the gallery at a Japanese restaurant. Their choice of restaurant made Anne even more nervous. A business lunch at a Japanese restaurant. It implied, to Anne, a sublime disregard of convention, a fine, imaginative will to distinguish themselves, these people, from lawyers, stockbrokers, publishers, who sweated in other places over large, dark hunks of meat and, like barbarians, grunted their transactions. She had eaten at a Japanese restaurant only once, in Boston, when she had worked at the Gardner. She remembered thinking it was wonderful, the way the things were done: the small, rolled pieces of fish with their alien coloring and textures, the hot green horseradish, the soup one drank from a bowl one lifted up, the green ice cream that tasted as if it had been made of leaves.

Ben and the two young men at the table rose to greet Anne and Jane; the two young women, seated next to each other, smiled slightly to the left of Anne’s head. Anne was introduced to them; the men were Charles and Daniel, the women Cressida and Jill. She was glad to sit down quickly. The four people made her feel like some gross creature shipped in to do hard labor. They were all thin and their clothes had sharp angles. The men wore suits cut close to their slight bodies with thin lapels and thin dark ties. Cressida wore a jacket of a brass-colored soft leather with hard wide shoulders. Jill was entirely in black, and her ankle-length boots were a silver version of the leather of Cressida’s jacket. Sitting in her gray wool skirt and tweed jacket, Anne felt dowdy and
parvenu.
That she was dressed in a mode at least recognizably similar to Jane’s brought her no comfort. Jane was forty years older than she; these people were more nearly her contemporaries.

“Tell me about that divine pasta you got, Daniel,” said Charles. “I want to know everything.”

“Well, it’s this place in the West Village, this absolutely adorable, tiny, absolutely ancient lady makes it in the back every day. I swear she grinds her own wheat.”

“Of course, the pasta in America is inedible if you’ve spent any time in Italy. As is the coffee,” said Jill.

“I know a place that has the most amazing blend of coffee. It’s their own, but it really tastes European.”

“Obviously, there is no such thing as European coffee. Or American. It has to do with the grinding, the blending and the preparation,” Jane said, putting on her glasses to look at the menu.

“Yes, of course,” said Cressida, “but if you drink what passes in America for coffee you’re drinking dishwater.”

“That’s nonsense,” said Jane. “One can easily get good coffee here.”

“I can’t drink coffee anyway,” said Charles. “Half my salary goes to Zabar’s to get their decaffeinated. At least I can get Ferrerelle there.”

“I don’t understand this craze for mineral water,” said Jane. “It’s fine mixed with something, but people nowadays seem to drink it plain.”

“It doesn’t have any calories,” said Jill, viciously lighting a match, as if the mention of calories made her feel she should have a weapon close at hand.

“But it doesn’t taste good,” said Jane. “One might as well drink nothing.

“I think it’s got a kind of fascinating, ascetic taste,” said Daniel.

“People don’t enjoy eating and drinking the way they used to. Don’t you agree, Ben?” said Jane.

“Absolutely,” said Ben. “And they look the worse for it. In my day, women looked like Anne and Jane, with flesh they were proud of and a good color.”

“I think Americans eat too much,” said Jill.

“Of course they do,” said Charles, “but it’s all shit. I mean if you look at the way a French or Italian peasant eats…”

Jane was looking into the middle distance, clearly bored. Ben turned to Anne and spoke to her about the children’s Christmas presents. For the rest of the meal, he ignored the four young people and turned his attention exclusively to Anne. This made her feel worse. She imagined they thought he had selected her to do the catalogue because she was his mistress. From time to time, one of the four would try to get Ben’s attention. They wanted his approval or his contact; he was famous, he was influential, he had access to wealth and property. Miserably she ate the several courses of her meal. Not one word had been said about the paintings.