Small World (43 page)

She told herself that it was to Dolly’s credit that she cared about something so much. Even the kids had never seemed of more than sporadic interest to her. The little voice that peeped out showed her that Dolly cared because the thing was Dolly’s, and it made her feel small. She had misjudged Nick, trying to make him fit her own high standards even retrospectively. Their separation had taught her not that she could not get along without him; she knew she could. What she had learned was what he added to her life, the bed of friendship and mutual joys upon which passion could play lightheartedly. Surely, she answered the little voice, Lucy Novick Douglas was at last old enough, experienced enough, to allow that each person might be their own universe, with their own peculiar natural laws. The end of her internal debate was that she agreed again to do something she really was afraid of doing, that she didn’t want to do.

‘Yes,’ she told Dolly, ‘I will come and look at the dollhouse. Soon.’

‘Good.’ Dolly took both her hands and squeezed them. ‘You don’t know what this means to me. Please keep on thinking about letting me take Zach and Laurie home with me.’

Lucy took back her hands and stuck them in her pockets. She could feel the little piece of glass in one corner, where she’d dropped it. It was smooth, cool, hard, a helpless, hopeless feeling thing, used by the sea.

The two women had fallen behind the children. She walked a little faster to catch up with them.

‘It wouldn’t take very long to assess the damage,’ Dolly told her, hurrying to keep up with her.

Lucy nodded.

‘Listen, dear, I’m going to get out of the sun. We’ll talk again later,' Dolly said.

Lucy watched her mother-in-law turn back and set off toward the house, now invisible behind a spit of beach. Dolly shook Roger loose from his beach combing in passing; he paused long enough to wave his walking stick at Lucy in a friendly gesture.

It was hot now on the beach. Lucy’s upper lip, hairline, and armpits were dewy. The children were in shorts and T-shirts as a defense against too much sun, but the time had come to switch to swimsuits and cool off in the water.

‘Bumbies,’ she called out, summoning them. As they promptly loped back to her, she reflected ironically that they
were
well raised.

An acid little knot of worry burned under Nick Weiler’s breastbone. He didn’t like Dorothy being around at all, especially around Lucy. And it upset his father. Unable to do anything more about ridding the island of Dolly, or to keep the two women from meeting, he decided to look in on Sartoris. He made his way to the studio. Like the house, it was littered with Sartoris’s work. A museum’s security nightmare, strewn about like so many homemade needle-point cushions, he thought, and he had to grin.

The old man was sitting in his studio at a low, crude table spattered with his favorite yellows and reds. He was slumped in a high-backed chair, his head resting upon his massive chest, his face covered by the disreputable old Panama. The even whistle of the old man’s breath told Nick he was sleeping the sleep of old age, sudden, light, and fragile. Nick flopped on a sprung and drop-cloth-covered sofa and waited.

A half hour passed in near silence, the pleasant muffled rhythm of the ocean outside punctuated by an occasional snore or wheeze. Nick closed his own eyes, the better to breathe in the studio smells, the perfume of paint and turpentine, fixative, charcoal, a dozen mundane substances that were the elements of the magic his father worked on canvas, paper, wood, or plaster. The salt scent of the sea was another sacramental, one of release, forgiveness, last rites, he thought. It all brought to mind another day, not long ago, heavy with another perfume, that of roses.

‘Phumph.’ The old man started to wakefulness. His head came up; there was a glint of steely eye from under the hat. ‘What do you want?’

‘Nothing from you,’ Nick replied easily.

‘Don’t even want my daubs, eh?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t turn them down. But I can wait.’

Sartoris cackled. ‘You’ll have ’em anyway? Shit. It’s true. There’s no one else to leave ’em.’

‘You could find a deserving museum. There’s always your beloved motherland.’

‘Hummph.’ The painter indicated an old school-marm’s desk that was a depository for rags, lard cans, and other debris. ‘In the bottom drawer, Nicholas.’

Among dusty bundles of letters that made Nick’s antiquarian pulse beat slightly faster, a new bottle of Wild Turkey. A biographer’s treasure trove, turning into a mouse nest, he thought, and then, of course, there might be something of his mother in them. He pulled out the bottle and slowly shut the drawer.

‘Since I seem doomed not to work today, I believe I’ll have a

shot of consolation.’ Sartoris opened the bottle. ‘Nothing fit to drink out of here. We’ll have to swap each other’s germs.’ He hesitated with the bottle at his lips. ‘I should hope, considering the company you keep,-you haven’t got the drip.’

Nick held up his hands to show they were clean.

Sartoris chortled. ‘Anyway, this is a virgin bottle. It needs dedicating. Here’s to Mrs. Lucy Douglas, me first.’

After a healthy slug, he passed the bottle to Nick, who raised it solemnly and said, ‘To Mrs. Lucy Douglas, me second.’

‘Indeed,’ the painter snorted. ‘Hard to believe a sensible woman like that would be fool enough to marry Dolly Hardesty's get. Good thing for you both the young idiot took himself out of it.’

‘Well, she’s foolish enough to marry your get.’ Nick handed the bottle back to his father.

‘Ho, ho, is that right? Well, here’s to you both, then. Age before beauty,’ and the bottle glugged again.

Nick took his shot.

The old man offered prenuptial advice. ‘Don’t let her have anything more to do with Dolly. No good.’

‘There’s a little matter of her kids being Dolly’s grandchildren,’ Nick pointed out drily.

‘Piss on that. Maybe you should reconsider this business.’

‘If she can handle it, I can.’

Sartoris laughed doubtfully. ‘Give me that bottle if you’re just going to grub it up with your fingerprints. Just get her away from that witch. She’s a good girl, she’ll make an honest man out of you, if she can’t give you back your shot at history.’

Nick watched the old man upend the bottle. ‘You never needed a woman to keep you honest.’

‘Oh, no. I was never honest, not about women.’

‘Not even Mother?’ Then Nick sobered. ‘I’m sorry. That was cruel.’

The old man shrugged and passed him the bottle.

‘If there’s anyone sorry about that, it’s me. Goddamn but sorry is a waste of energy.’

Nick sucked on it briefly and admitted, ‘I was braced for her dying. I hate to think of whatever happened to her—pain, terror.’ ‘Yes, I know. In my bones, the way old men are supposed to, I feel her death. Shitty world, isn’t it, my boy. Old fossils like Maggie so much game for predators.’

Nick shook his head. ‘It makes me think of Leyna Shaw. She just disappeared suddenly, too.’

‘Leyna Shaw?’

‘Journalist.’

‘Ah. I’ve lost touch. Don’t know anyone but you anymore.’ The Wild Turkey bottle, back in Sartoris’s hands, trembled slightly. ‘Now your woman. The little ones. That’s something.’

‘It’s easy to do. Lose touch with one another, I mean.’

‘When I do read the newspapers, I wonder if I really live on the same planet with all those doodahs and fools and crazies. But I’ll tell you, Nick, the one sure benefit of a long life.’

Nick had to finish his pull at the bottle before asking, ‘What’s that?’ It was becoming an excessively warm day, he thought, and he was going to have to stop this drinking shit before it went much farther.

‘It all starts to look the same after a while,’ Sartoris said.

It might indeed. The old man’s eyes were beginning to look a little glazed. Nick looked around idly, admiring the cavernous studio, filled with light.

‘Lucy would like this,’ he remarked, waving away the bottle. ‘You bring her here.’ Sartoris fumbled in his pockets, flipped a small gold key to Nick. ‘The key of life,’ he said and laughed.

Nick pocketed it. ‘You haven’t forgotten the aphrodisiac of a painter’s studio, have you?’

‘Well,’ Sartoris mocked himself, ‘a little.’

They laughed together.

‘I want you to sort out my pictures. It has occurred to me that I am going to die, one of these fine summer days.’

Nick nodded. ‘All right. I’ll arrange some time away from the Dalton. Okay if I bring a helper?’

The old man grinned. ‘And keep that key? So long as the work gets done, eh? I should like to see what Lucy does, these microcosms, someday, too. The idea of art as a toy entrances me. If art has to have an idea behind it, that may be the best one yet.’ ‘This is the man who tore my ass up both cheeks because I didn’t think art was going to end if I quit?’

‘You disguised cowardice as modesty. I will never forgive you the waste of your talent. I’ve changed my mind. I will leave my paintings to Lucy and her children under the proviso that your goddamn museum will never ever have them.’ The Wild Turkey bottle danced in the light as the painter’s voice rose. He pointed a gnarled, multicolored finger at his son. ‘And me, you can’t fuck.’ ‘That’s right,’ Nick twitted him mildly. ‘You’re always the

fucker, aren’t you?’

Watch your mouth. I can take that key back, too. No nice widow-woman in the middle of all this . . . ’ he took in the studio id one expansive gesture ‘ . . . art.’

Bullshit. You just want someone to sprinkle a little sacred sperm, a dab of sexual perfume, in your fucking temple. Which you can’t do for yourself anymore, right?’ i think,’ said the old man carefully, looking into the deeps of the bottle, ‘I will forbid in my will your writing my biography.’

It made them laugh again.

When Nick left Sartoris, the bottle capped at the one-third mark, ind the old man slipping out for lunch and very likely the rest of the day, the painter managed to lift his head from the old sofa long enough to remind Nick about cataloging the paintings. There , wasn’t any chance he wouldn’t. He would clear his head with lunch and try to survey it, however roughly, that afternoon.

(The house was full of Sartoris’s work. If he had slowed as he aged, still, he had had so many years, and had not for a very long time sold anything of importance. So it was scattered, the bits and pieces of his life’s work, throughout the house and the studio. The I long corridor walls were filled, every bedroom, sitting room, and
i
wherever else a bit of wall would accommodate a piece of canvas. In some rooms, paintings were racked on storage frames Nick had supplied through the Dalton.

When Sartoris did not appear for the lunch served on the terrace, Dolly took charge as if she were the hostess. She wanted to know what everyone was doing with their afternoon, as if she were day counselor at a summer camp. For lack of any other, safer subjects to talk about, the answers were rendered.

The Douglas children were headed indoors for afternoon naps. It was apparent they needed them; they were unusually noisy and fractious during the meal. Lucy said she planned on takings walk, exploring the island. She looked hopefully at Nick, who only picked at lunch, but he shook his head.

‘I’m working this afternoon,’ was all he offered.

Dolly was intrigued. She could think of only one thing he could be working on and that was making sure of his inheritance from the old man. After Lucy took the children off to their room, Dolly moved closer to Nick. .

‘How much is he giving you?’ she asked chummily.

Nick rolled his eyes. ‘I haven’t any idea,’ he lied cheerfully.

‘Shit. Who else has he got? And now you’re going to be a family man. You father’s only human. Why should he be immune from the normal desire to see his son married, and a few grandchildren to carry on his name?’

‘Really, Dorothy, I don’t know. My father, as I tried to tell you earlier, knows his own mind.’

‘Fine. Be mysterious,’ she pouted.

Roger, applying himself to cucumber sandwiches, chose that moment to belch. He mumbled an apology and moved on to the brownies. He had nothing much to say to Nick Weiler, and the nothingness was reciprocated.

‘Well, what are you going to do?’ Dolly asked Roger, just noticing he was still there.

‘Go for a walk,’ he said, around a brownie.

‘You’ll need it,’ she twitted, looking at his plate. ‘I’m taking a nap.’

‘You need it,’ Roger said bluntly, and got up, leaving an astonished Dolly gaping after him.

It was a small, and very transitory moment of victory for Roger. Setting off for a jaunt under the hot sun, with a belly full of cucumbers, lemonade, and brownies, proved very soon to be unwise. Queasy and with a mild cramp in his side, Roger loped to a halt in the cool of the orchard behind the house. From there, he could see every possible entry and exit.

Waiting patiently, he became aware of the extra weight of the camera and the minimizer he was carting around on his chest. The leather cases against his cotton shirt seemed to condense sweat like iron shavings around a magnet. His nylon socks were uncomfortably damp and hot also; he took the opportunity to remove them, stuff them in his pockets, and enjoy a few minutes of comparative coolness through his toes. He was just retying his sneakers on his bare feet when he spotted Lucy; she had chosen to leave from her bedroom door, and was headed toward the hills behind the house at an oblique angle from him.