Monday, Monday: A Novel (18 page)

He looked at her sincerely. “Nancy told me. I’m sorry that happened to you.”

“It seems such a long time ago. What else did Nancy tell you?”

“Ohhhhhh—” He pretended to stall. “Just that you were stubborn and not likely to agree to a date.”

“I have a very full life,” she said, teasing him. “Lots of homework. Half a duplex. Pharmacy customers. I have to help them find tweezers and nail polish. It’s all very demanding.”

“How about tomorrow night? Any demands on you then?”

He took her to see
What’s Up, Doc?
, starring Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal. She liked him better than she had liked anyone else she had gone out with, but couldn’t forget that he wasn’t Wyatt. He was not as tall as Wyatt, and didn’t wear glasses, and his hair was a lighter color. His jaw was broader. When she looked him in the eyes, she felt as if she had wandered into a place she didn’t belong, because his eyes were not Wyatt’s.

“Tell me about him,” Delia asked her at the park one day while they watched Carlotta on the slide.

“He’s nice. I like him. Nothing will come of it,” Shelly said.

“Because you don’t like him enough? Or because you don’t want to?”

But Shelly couldn’t answer that.

Dan took her to dinner, and afterward lingered with her on the doorstep under a hazy lightbulb and talked about his family. Shelly talked about Lockhart and noticed that his laugh had a quiet, intimate tone, and that he smiled while he listened to her. One of his front teeth was crooked in a way she found appealing.

After Dan left, she lay on her sofa and missed Wyatt. She didn’t have any pictures of him, and his face was less and less clear. She missed the way he had made her feel. Dan had stirred up an old sense of longing that she had forgotten.

By the end of the week, she kissed him. His kiss was different from Wyatt’s because of the mustache, but it was nice, and gentle, and afterward he held her quietly and neither of them said anything for a while.

He began to show up at the pharmacy to have lunch with her at the counter. They had burgers and strawberry milk shakes. Sometimes he came from work outdoors, and his boots were scuffed and muddy, and he had an earthy smell that she liked. Wyatt had not been so much of an outdoorsman, and while she liked this characteristic in Dan, she was sorry the comparison put Wyatt in a less favorable light. She reminded herself that Dan had no artistic talents.

One night she cooked dinner for him, and afterward they were drinking beer and kissing in her tiny kitchen when he began to unbutton her summer dress.

“I’m nervous about it,” she whispered. “It wasn’t only my arm that was hurt. My breast has a lot of scars.”

“You’re beautiful,” he told her. “I like everything about you.”

But she was thinking of Wyatt, and feeling as if the scars and the rest of her still belonged to him. He had held her in the beginning when she was bleeding, and later had painted the portrait showing the wounds and imperfections, as if he had formed them with his hands and in that way had claimed them. Only because she was injured had she come to know Wyatt, and to give birth to Carlotta. She would easily choose to suffer all the pain again just to arrive at the place in her life where she now was, with a happy little girl she loved and could often spend time with. From moment to moment she had regretted so much, but looking back now she regretted nothing and was reluctant to let Dan see those parts of her that belonged to Wyatt.

Still, she wanted him to keep touching her. Wyatt had looked at her for months before he could put his hands on her, and everything between them had been difficult and burdened by the inescapable guilt. With Dan, it was all so easy by comparison. She slipped his hand into her dress and allowed him to feel the raised scars and the indentation in the flesh, and she flipped the light switch off as he unbuttoned the dress all the way down and moved his hands over her. But then she fastened the buttons and turned the light back on. “I can’t explain it,” she whispered. “There’s just … a lot I haven’t told you.” She wanted to tell him about her affair with Wyatt, and about Carlotta, because keeping that secret from him had started to feel oppressive. And yet the secret didn’t belong only to her. It belonged to Wyatt too, and to Jack and Delia. She couldn’t jeopardize Wyatt’s marriage, and betray Jack and Delia’s trust.

“It’s all right,” he assured her. “It’s all right.”

She circled her arms around him.

“Is it so bad?” he whispered.

“I want to tell you some things, but I can’t.”

He urged her to try. But if she told him about Carlotta, there would be too many inevitable questions and no satisfying end to them until she had told everything. She couldn’t open up half the story and say only that she had a child, and not say where the child was, or who the father was. It might have been possible to give only a limited part of the story if she weren’t still involved with Carlotta, but she was deeply involved with her, and nothing could make her give that up, or risk it.

Dan told her she was like the aquifer with all those dark channels that he knew were there but wasn’t able to see.

When he was gone, she felt more alone than usual and more uncertain about the future. She hoped she was doing the right thing to be so involved with Carlotta. It wasn’t as if Carlotta could live her life two ways—one with Shelly and one without her, and then choose the one that worked out best. That choice was up to Shelly. And no matter how she thought about Carlotta’s life, or her own, or Jack’s, or Delia’s, or even Wyatt’s, and rearranged the pieces into different puzzles showing far, far different futures, she didn’t believe the child would be better off without her. And Dan would complicate the picture. What if she fell in love with him? Wyatt’s marriage might come undone someday, and he would come back to her if that should happen.

For a while, sorting clothes she had brought from the Laundromat, she considered going to Jack and asking him if he thought it was possible Wyatt would ever come back to her. But she knew she wasn’t the kind of person who would ask that question or live her life waiting for someone’s marriage to fall apart. And Jack would never talk to her about this anyway.

Besides—and she came to this gradually, and tearfully, lying in bed in the dark—she was more ready than she had supposed to leave behind that part of her life and take her chances with Dan.

A few nights later, he took her to Mount Bonnell, a high lookout with a view of the winding river and the lights of Austin and low distant hills rolling to the horizon. The air was scented with cedar and mountain laurel, the moon so thin it barely existed. A scattering of filmy clouds moved rapidly overhead. Shelly and Dan stood with their arms around each other and watched the night over the river. Dan talked of how the place had once been called Antoinette’s Leap, for a girl who 140 years ago had flung herself from the precipice to escape Indians, and of how George Custer had brought his wife here for picnics. “The view is even better in daylight because you can see the turkey buzzards soaring down there.”

There was no one around now. The only sounds were the pulse and drone of insects and the breeze sliding in from the dark, and their own unhurried voices. They found a comfortable place to sit with their backs against a rock, a short distance from the main lookout. Dan hummed the tune of “Dancing in the Moonlight,” but then he fell silent and kissed her. For a long time they kissed. He moved his hands over her belly, and she longed to tell him she had carried a baby in there. He kissed her breasts, and she remembered how she had secretly nursed Carlotta the one time, and she wanted to tell him this too. But she felt she had a sacred duty to such a fragile secret and to the people who trusted her. She pictured the wild leap of Antoinette, and lay down on the ground with Dan, and made love with him, and afterward lay in his arms, staring up at the stars, feeling off-kilter and deeply in love but also engulfed by sadness and disoriented by the wide, dark view of the sky. The affair with Wyatt was finished now. Before, it had only been over.

20

PAINTING OVER

In Provincetown, Elaine had become impatient with the hassle and embarrassment of living in a house owned by her parents. Twice, her parents had come for vacations, and Wyatt had insisted on hauling Elaine and Nate with him to a motel across town to be out of their way.

Money was more of an issue than ever, and Elaine began pressuring Wyatt to paint in a more profitable style or a less time-consuming medium. Sculptures? she suggested. Anything but tempera. Anything that would sell.

“That’s like telling a journalist he has to write something besides journalism—that he has to write poetry,” Wyatt argued. “Or telling a guitarist to play the drums.”

He took a teaching job at a community college in West Barnstable, an hour away from Provincetown, and relegated his painting to the predawn hours. At four every morning, he left the house and walked to a rented studio on a side street, where he painted small, perfect likenesses of landscapes and objects. By 6:00 a.m. he was on the way to teach class. His students idolized him as an artist and a teacher, but galleries appeared to be interested only in Warhol and his legions of imitators, and in angry Abstract Expressionists trying to paint like Jackson Pollock.

For Wyatt there was no such thing anymore as waiting for the perfect light to paint by—he saw the sun come up and go down from the car windows on his way to and from the college. His dreams began to die quietly on those car rides, and his self-belief to wither. On weekends he took photographs he intended to paint from, but he rarely had time to look at them afterward. Rolls of film he couldn’t afford to develop piled up on his dresser.

Elaine talked of having another baby, and although Wyatt was determined to be the husband and father he would have been had he never known Shelly, secretly he found it difficult to think about having a second child when he already had Carlotta. He was enamored of Carlotta. The two times he had seen her, he was awestruck by her red flyaway curls and her droll expressions. She was another love that he couldn’t keep close.

Sometimes he allowed himself to believe he might at least see Shelly the next time he went back to Austin for a visit. The distance and the silence between them made everything that had happened seem unreal, and this sense of unreality was deepened by the fact that he had no one to talk with about her. Jack had made it plain that he wouldn’t talk about the affair or about Shelly at all. The only news he would give Wyatt about Shelly was that she was spending a lot of time with Carlotta now, and had become friends with Delia, and was back at school and working part-time and getting on with her life.

Wyatt considered calling her. And yet this would only be selfish. What right did he have to ask for assurances that she was okay? If she wasn’t okay, what could he do?

The longer he resisted calling, the less he could see how either of them would benefit from it. What was there to say? That he was sorry? He still loved her? None of it mattered. He was still married, and she had given their child away.

And soon he would have to give up the portrait as well as Shelly. He shared a studio with two other artists, and the rent was going up, and Wyatt couldn’t commit to another year. He had stored the portrait of Shelly there, along with his other paintings from Texas, all still in the wrappings Jack had shipped them in.

Stymied over what to do with the portrait, he took Elaine to an art show on Commercial Street and walked around with a glass of wine, looking at paintings he didn’t like and mulling over the problem. The gallery was crowded with luminaries from the Cape School of Art: Henry Hensche was rumored to be coming, and several people reported that Robert Motherwell might show up and that Cookie Mueller, the vagabond actress, had already come and gone. A man claiming to be a member of the Native American Church, wearing moccasins, sporting a ponytail, and carrying a plastic bag of cactus buds, set up a canvas tepee on the beach behind the gallery. Partygoers took their shoes off and, carrying their martinis, went out to eat peyote.

Wyatt wasn’t interested in the peyote. He figured the man was a fraud and the whole scene a caricature of the town’s affectations. Watching people loiter on the beach and vomit into the ocean from the bitter taste of the cactus, he tried to convince Elaine to go home with him.

“You go on,” she told him. “Pay the baby-sitter.” She walked off down the beach with a young artist she had been flirting with, and Wyatt watched her run in and out of the frothy waves, her legs lovely and thin. She held her skirt up, her hair pulled by the wind. He thought she might eventually turn and call to him or come back, but she didn’t. He remembered the November day on the beach at Port Aransas with Shelly, and stood listening to the dark waves, watching Elaine wander away.

Finally he left the party and walked to his studio. On his worktable lay a half-finished painting of the UT tower from the viewpoint of the South Mall plaza. He had started it months ago and had eventually scrapped it as a failure, frustrated that he couldn’t make the tempera look anything but flat and antiseptically pale. It had occurred to him the painting should be done in oil or in a combination of paints that weren’t so starkly precise as tempera, and he thought maybe he would try that someday. Or maybe what was needed, more than a different style or a different paint, was an entirely different view from the plaza. While he was painting, he had felt as if the image with the strongest hold on his mind was behind him instead of in front of him, and he had finally realized he was thinking of the face looking down from the third-floor window of the English building. He had seen that face in only a glance that day, just before his glasses had fallen to the ground, and possibly the memory had lasted merely because it was the final thing he had seen with absolute clarity. But he felt there was something more to it. The face had snared his attention the moment he saw it, even before his glasses fell; it had seemed to mean something. In retrospect it seemed to express more plainly than any view of the tower the fear that he himself had felt during that hour and a half of the shootings.