The Doctor's Wife (21 page)
Authors: Elizabeth Brundage
The Spaulls lived on the outskirts of town in a sprawling Federal painted a murky shade of apricot, with muddy brown shutters and window boxes full of strangled pansies. Pots of mums lined the stone path, and fat pumpkins sat on the front steps. Annie felt a bit anxious, wishing Michael had come with her, angry with him all over again because he hadn’t. The front door was ajar and an enticing odor of the evening meal encouraged her inside. She stepped into the empty foyer, hearing scales of laughter coming from the terrace. Through the large French doors at the end of the hall, she could see some of the guests, a string of multicolored Japanese lanterns bobbing over their heads. She took a moment to admire the house, peering down narrow meandering hallways that led into oddly shaped little rooms. There was a great deal of art all over the place, lovely old canvases in gold frames and primitive antiques and wonderful quilts. An enormous painting by Haas hung in the living room, covering nearly the entire wall. It was a strange, absorbing work, dense with mystery, that portrayed a bare-chested man in brown trousers, hunched in stature and solemn in expression, standing in the midst of a gray background that resembled the smoke of a dream. A young girl, naked but for a pair of underpants dappled with little rosebuds, sat on a chair, intently playing cat’s cradle. On the floor at her feet was a white box full of leather gloves, a pair of which the man struggled to pull over his enormous hands. The two figures shared the space but remained detached. The colors were muted, the faces drawn and withered. It was really a fabulous painting, Annie thought, but, still, it made her sad and a little angry because the girl in the painting, who might have been twelve or thirteen when he’d painted it, was now the painter’s wife, Lydia Haas.
Her host backed out of the swinging kitchen door holding a tray of hors d’oeuvres, the perennial cigarette balanced between his lips. Although he suffered from emphysema, Jack smoked Dorals with tireless enthusiasm and spoke in a breathless, ruined voice that gave him a kind of swarthy eloquence. “Well, hello there, Annie.” He removed the cigarette and kissed her cheek. “Where’s the hubby?”
“I’m sorry to say he’s on call tonight. Couldn’t switch his schedule.”
“Poor fellow—the last of the noble professions. Come on outside, I’ll get you a drink. We’re all out here. Olivia’s made mint juleps. Have you ever had one?”
“No, actually.”
“Come. It’s a beautiful evening to be out of doors.”
Spaull, at sixty, had a certain old-world elegance that Annie had come to know as a child, observing her parents’ friends during dinner parties through the posts in the banister on the second-floor landing. He was not a handsome man, yet he had a disarming presence. His yellow hair sprang from his scalp like the bleached grass of summer, and prominent cheekbones set off his rather small, dark eyes. He had on a rumpled seersucker suit that undulated around his gaunt frame, and scuffed penny loafers without socks, flattened at the heels like mules.
She followed him out through the French doors onto a stone terrace that overlooked several acres of lawn and the state forest beyond. It was a cool evening for late September and the air smelled of wood smoke and burning leaves. Several of the guests had convened around an old pine table laden with large platters of food and assorted bottles of alcohol. A pretty white pitcher sat in the center, full of tiger lilies. Most of the guests were from the English Department, but there were a few outsiders she recognized from Math and History. Miss Rose, the eccentric Latin professor, sat off by herself with her little white terrier on her lap, drinking her vodka contentedly and smoking a cigarette out of a swishy black holder. Across the field, the sun glowed behind the tall evergreens. Annie joined the group at the table, exchanging greetings and handshakes, accepting a glass of wine from a passing hand, everyone asking for Michael and frowning with pity when she admitted that he was still at work. There was a festive mood in the air, the exhilarating splendor of autumn, and they toasted Annie, the brilliant journalist, and she smiled and raised her glass and saluted them. Her colleagues were academic lifers and all shared the yellowed, malnourished pallor of the condemned: Joe Rank, professor of rhetoric, given to incomprehensible babbling about the mysteries of the written word, a man with bushy eyebrows and a spitball that consumed one’s attention and was the joke of the school (Joe was probably the most boring person Annie had ever encountered); Joe’s sour wife, Edna, boldly pregnant with their fifth or sixth child—Annie wasn’t sure—who suffered from a slew of mysterious allergies that left her overwhelmed with oozing tissues; Felice Wendell, one of the few professors of color at the school, a renowned expert on twentieth-century African American literature; Dana Roach, a bustling authority on Virginia Woolf, rolling her cigarettes with fiendish alacrity; and Charlotte, the doomed department secretary, who sat at the end of the table with her pack of Pall Malls and a tidy roll of breath mints, observing the gathering with shrewd owl eyes and speaking to no one.
As it turned out, Simon Haas had been invited and predictably arrived late, but nobody had anticipated seeing his wife. “My, my,” Felice Wendell whispered when the notorious couple stepped out onto the terrace. “Look what the cat dragged in.”
The group went silent as they devoured Lydia Haas, her eyes skittish with embarrassment as she fumbled childishly with her pocketbook, looking for a place to put out her cigarette. She was dressed like a schoolgirl in a green plaid skirt and white blouse, a gold cross at her throat, her pale skin without even a hint of makeup, her blond hair pulled back severely in a bun. One could not overlook the protruding cheekbones, the full lips, the deep gray eyes. Few of the guests had ever spoken to her, but they had witnessed her every private act on his canvases. They knew her intimately, like a lover, and she drew their eyes with the voracity of a goddess. It was not beneath any of them to crave seeing more. Annie’s curiosity gnawed at her, a churning mixture of admiration and jealousy that both compelled and sickened her.
Olivia handed Lydia a drink, and the two women went back into the house. Annie could see them through the French doors, looking at the painting. They sat on the couch. Olivia was doing all the talking while Simon’s wife just sat there, poised as a Siamese cat. It put Annie in mind of Simon’s work and she imagined one of his cryptic titles:
Woman Sitting. Woman with Drink.
Or simply
Wife.
Woman Sitting. Woman with Drink.
Or simply
Wife.
Simon made himself comfortable at the table and poured himself a drink. Looking at him under the soft colored lanterns, she saw a big, lumbering man with powerful limbs, a man who could still rely on his physical strength if he needed cash. He wore worn khakis and a Mostly Mozart T-shirt and his tennis shoes were splattered ominously with red paint. His hay-colored hair was pulled back in a ponytail; she found it highly appealing. His eyes were tinted with gloom, and suggested a lifetime of inner struggle. His students, she imagined, admired this quality. To them, he was the incarnation of a true artist.
“Hello there, Annie,” Haas said to her now, extending his hand for a shake. When their hands collided, his was warm and big. He held on. “I was sort of hoping I’d see you.”
They smiled at each other.
“And your husband? Is he here, too? I was hoping to—”
“On call.” She supplied the answer rather quickly.
“Off saving lives, is he?”
“Delivering them, anyway. He’s an obstetrician.”
Simon Haas considered this. “He must be a busy man, your husband the baby doctor.”
“That he is. We’re in the midst of another baby boom. Do you have children?”
“God, no.”
Except for your little wife,
Annie thought.
Annie thought.
“I’m too much of a selfish bastard,” Simon added.
“That’s a good reason then.”
They didn’t say anything for a moment, and he lit a cigarette.
“I saw your painting inside,” she said, “the one in the living room. It’s very good.”
“It’s an old painting.”
“Who’s the man in the gloves?”
“You’re not going to make me talk about this, are you?”
“I’m guessing it’s her father.”
“Like I said, it’s an old painting,” he said dismissively. “He was a glove man.”
“A what?”
“Her father. He worked at the factory up there. In Gloversville.”
“Oh, I see. That explains it.”
“That explains nothing.” The moment wavered and she thought the subject was closed, but then he continued. “I was painting the factories. I liked the buildings. The windows. In the evening when the sun is low they turn copper. I was interested in the workers, too. Many of them had stained hands, you know, from the ink. I started to explore the area around the factory, where most of them lived. Trailer parks. Small houses. A gloomy town. I happened to turn down this dirt road and there was this old house, set way back. There were so many trees I almost drove right past it. I wish I had. But there was something about the house that interested me.”
“What was it?”
“I don’t know, exactly. I sketched the house several times. It seemed like such a sad place. And then I saw her, this young girl. And I think the fact that she was there, in the midst of all this gloom—it intrigued me.” He went quiet suddenly. “She was,” he said, “astoundingly beautiful.”
“Love at first sight,” Annie said a bit dryly, incredulous that she was actually feeling jealous.
“I’m not sure it had anything to do with love. I’m sorry to disappoint you. I can see you’re a romantic.”
She swallowed more wine, feeling her face growing hot. “I’m not sure what I am.”
“Meaning what?”
“Remember how you apologized for being awkward? You probably don’t remember.”
“I remember,” he said readily.
“I feel awkward now.”
He nodded at her and poured more wine. “Awkward interests me,” he said. “At least when you are feeling awkward you are always thinking. When you are feeling fabulous, for example, rare occurrence that it may be, you stop thinking altogether. Which gets you into all kinds of trouble. Hence, you are far better off feeling awkward. Just the sound of it on your tongue. Like chewing on screws.”
She laughed. “Very tough to swallow.”
“Most awkward things are,” he said.
“Not for the weakhearted.”
“Nor the weak-stomached.”
They laughed and drank some more.
“What are you working on these days?” she asked. “Are you still painting pictures of your wife?”
“My wife is an intriguing subject,” he said. “I’m still trying to figure her out.”
“Mystery can be useful in a relationship,” she said, eager to pry him open like the lid on a tightly sealed Mason jar. “It keeps you guessing.”
“It can also be very tedious. I’m a painter, Ms. Knowles. I’m interested in the truth.”
“The truth is a dubious pursuit,” she said darkly. “An abstract ideal. You never really know the whole truth about a person. You have to trust, that’s all. You have to have faith.”
He lit another cigarette. “Tell me, Ms. Knowles, do you trust your husband?”
“Implicitly.”
He leaned toward her and whispered, “Liar.”
She forced a smile, suddenly insecure. “I do.”
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