Monday, Monday: A Novel (10 page)

But he couldn’t reduce the portrait to something less than it was, dress it up in clothing—even if Shelly asked him to. Her body was exquisite. He loved the scars. They made her unique: herself. He loved how her arm was bent at the elbow, dividing the breasts—one of them perfectly shaped and whole, the other marred with imperfections that were dignified by the way she bore them. He couldn’t just cover her up with paint.

“But could it be done?” she asked him.

“It could, but that would ruin it. The paint would be too thick. And see how the hair spills over your shoulder? I’d have to paint over that part, and start over on the hair. It wouldn’t look right.”

“But what can we do with it now?”

He didn’t have any answers. “I can store it for now.”

Later, when she had gone, he wrapped the portrait in paper and tape and carried it up to a storage room on the fourth floor of the building. He shoved it upright among students’ abandoned paintings, removing from sight what he could not remove from his mind.

8

WHAT THEY COULDN’T HAVE

How he wanted her. He might have talked himself into thinking he deserved to love her—this was the sixties, after all. He knew couples who were divorcing just to live together in sin. But Wyatt’s moral preferences, like his artistic taste, tended toward the outmoded, and he was already perilously bending the rules. He had told Elaine about his chance encounter with Shelly at the Student Union but not about any encounters since then. Certainly he had not told her about the portrait.

And he did love Elaine. If only he hadn’t needed to remind himself of it so often. And he adored his little boy. Nate was five months old now.

So he spent a lot of time fantasizing about events he never believed would happen. He went about his daily life, working on his paintings, caring for Nate, and making love with Elaine. On weekends he painted houses for extra income. But every few moments his mind would wander to Shelly. He would think about some plan he had made to see her. From the corner of his eye he would glimpse a shimmering place that seemed to belong to a different world from the one where he was living.

And on a cold morning in January, it took only a small windstorm to shatter the partition that had kept him out of that world.

He was driving to his friends’ farm for fresh eggs to use in his tempera paint, and he had invited Shelly to come along. His friends were out of town, and Wyatt was to help himself to the eggs in the henhouse and feed the dog.

Later he wouldn’t be able to say at what point he began to know what would actually happen. It might have been as early as when he invited Shelly to go with him, or when he caught sight of her, bundled in her coat, waiting for him on the corner of Twenty-fourth and Lamar, leaves skittering around her feet. Or maybe it was at some point on the drive, while she practiced Spanish by reading to him from her textbook, and he couldn’t keep his eyes on the road and kept looking at her lips moving.

It could also have been when he pulled to the shoulder and they sat in the car and talked, and he couldn’t suppress his imagination long enough to care what she was saying.

She was in a chipper mood that morning and had a radiant smile. “You’re being awfully serious,” she said. “And it’s a gorgeous day. Look at the sunshine.” She gave him a moment to say something. “Is this a problem with me? Or something else?”

“With you.” Because there she sat, and he was unable even to touch her.

She didn’t have to ask what he meant—she knew. And she wanted him desperately. But there was nothing to do but make light of it.

He wasn’t sure what depressed him more—thinking he couldn’t have her, or knowing that somebody else eventually would.

He started the car and drove on, approaching the farm along a dirt road with grassy pasture on either side. It was a ramshackle group of structures: a dilapidated old house, a shed, a two-stall barn empty of horses, and a walk-in henhouse. Wyatt had come here many times to collect the fresh, warm eggs, and had once been here with Elaine for a summer solstice party. The party had turned strange, with people on hallucinogens wandering around naked, swatting at swarms of gnats and waiting for the sun to set so they could look at the stars. He had thought Elaine would be eager to leave, but she hadn’t been. She had smoked a hash pipe and discussed Tolstoy and Nabokov and the Berlin Wall with a longhaired guy who was stoking the campfire.

A black mutt with a coat full of cockleburs came loping from the back of the house when Shelly and Wyatt got out of the car. The wind was so fierce the dog squinted. They went around back, where Wyatt scooped dog chow out of a metal trash can and filled the water bowl from the garden hose. He used the lid of the trash can as a shield against the wind while he filled the bowl. Shelly liked watching him do these domestic chores. She had grown to like even his untidy hair and the modern look of his glasses, and wished she could lie in a patch of sun in the tall yellow grass of the pasture with him and make love. She had never, completely, made love before, having come close only with her high school boyfriend, Billy, and now she wished Wyatt could be the first and the only. Through the screen door to the back porch, she saw an old couch draped with a Mexican blanket, and wished they could go inside and lie down on it together.

Of course, then there would be that afterward moment, when she would realize what she had done and would suffer the sinking knowledge that the act was irretrievable.

The dog was eating hungrily when they left him. They went to the henhouse and found it dank and cold, filled with the musty smell of the hens and their droppings. Three small windows, closed and dirty and high on the walls, admitted dusty sunlight. The hens dropped down from their perches and gathered around Shelly and Wyatt, clucking and pecking for food. Shelly got handfuls of corn from a barrel and littered the ground with kernels, while Wyatt selected eggs from the nests and put them into a carton. Light through chinks in the walls striped the floor and the cubbyholes of the nests, and Shelly looked around the place and listened to the rush of the wind and thought she would be happy to live on a farm like this with Wyatt. They would have children, and feed the chickens and dogs, and Wyatt would build a studio and paint beautiful works of art.

They closed the henhouse and got in the car, and were driving away when Shelly noticed the door to the shed had blown open and was flapping in the wind.

Wyatt pulled up close and got out to examine the door latch. The screws had worked their way out of the rotting wood. He went inside and searched the shelves, lined with old cans and rusted tools, for twine or rope, or anything else he could use for a makeshift latch. Finally he decided to haul an old lawn mower out and prop the door shut from the outside, and had extracted it from a pile of rat-eaten storage boxes when he turned and saw Shelly. She stood in the doorway, clutching her coat tightly around herself, bouncing on her toes for warmth. The light lay on her hair.

And he didn’t think to resist any longer. After weeks of holding himself in check, the effort simply vanished as if the wind carried it off. He walked to her, and took her into his arms, and kissed her.

In the backseat of the car, he made love with her, the car door open, the shed door swinging open and shut in the wind, a strip of winter light sliding back and forth over Shelly’s body. He traced her scars with his fingers and kissed her wounded breast, and together they entered the dangerous love affair, feeling as if they were safe in each other’s arms.

And then the winter light seemed to go pale. The cold contained a leaden sense of doom. Shelly wept inconsolably for what she had been given and could not keep, and Wyatt tried to comfort her, but was too remorseful and too burdened with his own guilt to say anything useful.

“I wish it hadn’t happened,” Shelly said on the way home, wiping at her tears, “that we could undo it. I have this terrible, dark feeling I can’t get rid of.”

It was only just past noon when he let her off on the street corner. Driving away, he turned to see if she looked at him, but her head was down and she was already walking toward campus.

He went to the studio in the art building and mixed his paints and tried to create something. But Shelly was all he could think of. How she moved, and how she had tipped her head back and fastened her arms around his neck. Several times he walked outside and around the building, hoping to get her out of his mind. For hours, he tried to push the pictures out of his mind. And then for hours he gathered them back up.

9

BEFORE LONG

He shuffled his marriage, even his son, to the back of his thoughts. Everything not related to Shelly was as pale as the first thin layer of paint on gesso. He arranged his days to see her and missed classes to be with her. Elaine chided him for being obsessed with his work. He neglected his friends. Shelly remained in Austin over that summer and he saw her repeatedly, even despite his intentions, as if he had no say in the matter. And she clung to him as if she had no willpower. She felt as if she didn’t even belong to herself.

Jack suspected a love affair, and challenged Wyatt about it. “Who is she?”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about—there’s no one,” Wyatt told him.

“You’re a fool if you screw things up with Elaine.”

He would have left Elaine if not for Nate. He lied to her almost every day about where he was going or where he had been. At times, when he was coming home to her, or when he was trotting through the apartment with Nate on his shoulders, his duplicity filled him with self-loathing.

Then later in a parking lot on campus, Shelly would slide into his car and look at him with her soft eyes and slip her hand into his, and he would sweep her into his arms. His intimate knowledge of the tragedy that had helped to form her made him feel as if he had been with her at the moment of her conception. It gave him the sense she belonged to him—that they belonged together. The exceptional origins of the affair seemed almost to justify it.

Shelly knew the risks. And yet she allowed Wyatt, who was the greatest threat to her future, to become her touchstone. In the fall, she thought of leaving Austin—taking a bus and going somewhere and staying away long enough to forget Wyatt. She could get a job and support herself. Or go back home to Lockhart. But she didn’t have the resolve. She told herself that in two years she would do it. She would join the Peace Corps and leave Wyatt with his family, and distract herself in a foreign country from a broken heart. Now was only the meantime.

Spring came, and on a cloudy April afternoon, Shelly walked out of a shop on the Drag, carrying a birthday gift for her mother in a box under her arm, and saw Wyatt standing at the curb with a beautiful woman she knew must be Elaine, who held a baby. Elaine looked like Cher, her dark hair parted and swinging around her as she cradled the baby and leaned to retrieve something out of Wyatt’s car. Wyatt lifted the baby out of her arms, and when he turned, Shelly saw the child’s face—the round eyes and toothless grin as he looked up at his father and his father looked at him.

She walked in a daze back to her dorm and sat for a long time on her bed, wondering how she had let herself become this person. Until that day, Elaine and Nate had been faceless to Shelly, but now she couldn’t dispel the awful feeling of seeing Wyatt in his other life, and couldn’t deny how well that life seemed to fit him. She couldn’t forget the look of happiness on the child’s face when he was in his father’s arms, and she tried to summon the strength to stop seeing Wyatt.

10

HOW AFRAID SHE WAS

Hoping distance would break the spell, Shelly went home to Lockhart for the summer and got a part-time job keeping the books at the local feed and hardware store. She was at a desk piled with accounting ledgers in a back room crowded with boxes of plumbing supplies when she realized that her period was three days late.

For two weeks she waited, sleepless and worried, praying at night on her knees as she had not done since she was a child. Afraid to go to her family doctor, she asked her high school boyfriend, Billy, to take her to Austin on his day off from the oil rigs.

“I need to sign up for fall courses,” she told Billy as an excuse.

They drove in his rattling Ford pickup. It smelled like oil from the rigs, and the cabin smelled of exhaust fumes. Shelly bounced around on the uncomfortable bench seat, feeling sick to her stomach. But she chatted with Billy. He was nice-looking, with dark curly hair, and he wore a black ball cap with a John Deere logo. One of his eyes was brown and one was a cloudy blue and had what looked like a bubble on it from an accident with a firecracker when he was in second grade.

He let her out near the campus and drove off to Barton Springs to meet a friend and go swimming. When he was gone, Shelly put on a ring she had inherited from her great-aunt, then walked to Sabine Street, to the Planned Parenthood clinic that a girl from her dorm had once been to and talked about. It was a stucco house with a portico, and she climbed the steps and went inside and registered in the front room under a made-up name, pretending she was married.

The doctor was kind to her. He examined her, took a urine sample, and told her to come back on Thursday or Friday for the results.

“But do you think I’m pregnant?” She tried to sound happy about it.

He didn’t appear to be fooled. “Let’s wait and see,” he told her. “We’ll know in a few days.”

“But we used a condom. Aren’t they effective?”

“Usually they are. Not always.”

She walked back to campus, unsure what to do next. She wanted to go to the art building and see if Wyatt was there, but couldn’t think of what she would tell him. His life would be ruined if her fears were true. Over and over, she recalled the details of making love with him six weeks ago. It was one of the only times they had been in a motel room. A fan had turned slowly over the bed.
I Dream of Jeannie
was playing on television.