Cascade (12 page)

He stiffened; she’d gone too far. The car rolled down the driveway, its headlights throwing out two circular beams that winked out when Asa braked and turned off the engine.

He sat quietly for a moment. “What is it you want, Dez?”

“I’m just saying we might do well somewhere else. We might do
better
somewhere else.”

“This isn’t enough for you, is it? I’m not enough for you.”

“Asa, all I meant was that it’s not like this threat hasn’t been hanging over our heads for years, and now the state’s telling us we’ve got a fifty-fifty chance of losing.”

“We’re not going to lose,” he said, and got out of the car.

She sat for a moment, then followed after him. Inside, she saw he’d headed straight for his study and shut the door. She dragged the ironing basket into the parlor, set up the ironing board, and plugged in the hot-iron. While it heated up, she pulled open the door of the studio to look at the half-rendered view of the playhouse, stark against the river, that she
had been working on since last week. With memory of the vertigo feeling that had hit her in Town Hall, and with fresh eyes, she suddenly saw, as if it were already painted, a maple tree looming out over the river, gnarled and reaching, down, down into the water.

She had to start over.

The perspective needed to be the view
up
through the water, the drowning view
up
, like those winter sketches, like the dizzy feeling, the firmly planted tree reaching
down
, its form blurred and heightened by the water’s distortion.

She could see the composition clearly, fixed within her pupils, and knew: she needed to lay the boundaries down before the image slipped away. She changed into her smock, scraped at the old paint, and began to knife out a selection of color: blue-black, ultramarine ash, lamp black. Shades of luminous, silver bark.

But her first dabs dispirited her; they looked false. She kept on, and, gradually, the trunk began to come to life on the canvas.
Not too bad
. Then—it seemed a sudden thing—what she always hoped for with oils, but could never count on, happened: the convergence of effort and inspiration into something that actually looked the way she intended it to look. She let herself go—it was such a gift when this happened—and the tree came alive, the air around it thick and ominous. She mixed madder lake and yellow ocher with white to add layers of luminosity, to show that despite the gloom, trying to get in, there was light. What seemed a minute later, the banjo clock chimed in that speeded-up way time had when it was altered by the pleasure of being engrossed in something, and Asa poked his head in.

“
What
in God’s name are you doing?” Was he angry? He looked angry. He gestured toward the parlor, toward the heaped-up ironing basket, the ironing board and hot-iron, plugged in and forgotten.

She grabbed his wrist and pulled him to her easel. She had to make him see. She did her best to explain: that when she got this kind of vision, she had to express it immediately or risk losing it forever.

“I don’t know much about art,” he said. “This looks interesting, I can
see that. There’s a lot that’s pleasing about it.” She was relieved; she’d gotten through to him. “But can you come down from the clouds? Our house, our town, is drowning—literally—and you’re in here painting pictures. Instead of trying to help, you’re standing up at Town Meeting telling people to sell, and you’re in here doing—this.” He flapped his palm at the painting. The back of his hand smudged the bark details she had worked so hard to get right.

There was a stunned, voiceless moment, almost black. She wanted to tear into him even as she fast-formulated how she could fix it: scrape there, reapply the paint.

“You haven’t been yourself since that crazy friend of yours stopped by, and I’ve lost my patience. Got that? Lost it!” He was yelling. She had never heard him yell. She hadn’t thought he was capable of yelling. “Here we risk losing everything and I don’t have any shirts for morning.”

“But you do, Asa.” She realized her face was wet. She realized she was crying. “There are shirts in the wardrobe.”

He stormed over to the basket and pulled out the first one that came to hand—a white one, like all the others. “I want this one, though!
This
one!” Forgetting that there was paint on his hand, a splotch of brown that ruined the shirt.

“But you don’t, Asa. You only wanted that one because it’s not ironed. Why are you so angry?”

He was all balled up, hands clenched, face red, sputtering for words. He didn’t like fighting any more than she did. But this fight was not about shirts. It was about not wanting the same thing, it was about a man marrying a woman and thinking maybe he’d made a bad choice. It was about realizing he’d ruined a favorite shirt. “And now it’s a rag.” He balled up the shirt and rubbed his fingers with it. “And this sonofabitch oil paint doesn’t come off, does it?”

A harsh word she’d never heard him use, and which had the effect of a slap across her face. It stunned her.

They had been living together for months now. She knew what it was
to turn in her sleep and feel the length of his bare leg; she knew the pharmaceutical smell of his skin at the end of a long day. She knew things she’d never cared to know about anyone, like how five minutes after eating breakfast he needed to spend ten in the bathroom. But she hadn’t ever seen how they would react to problems, and a small part of her stood apart, grimly satisfied. Maybe a rift between them was what she’d wanted all along, she thought, fetching turpentine, handing it to him, then tearing off her smock and pulling the rest of the shirts out of the basket. Throwing them hard, one by one, onto the sofa.

“Okay, okay. Are you happy? Here I go, ironing your shirts. They will all be ready by morning. You will have your pick.”

“Dez.” Now he was the uneasy one.

She ignored him. She spread the first shirt over the ironing board. She felt him watching her, her arm slamming forward and back: collar, shoulder, sleeves, back, front, down between each button, so ironically like the Picasso painting she had thought of when Jacob was last here.
Jacob
. The thought of that kindred spirit a nugget of comfort.

His hand came down softly, briefly, on her shoulder. “Dez, come on. Let’s not fight.”

She twitched his hand away and licked her finger, tapped it to the hot-iron to get the
sssst
. She wasn’t sure, at first, if he remained standing there or if he sat down on the sofa; she refused to turn around through three shirts, but when she finally let herself peek, he was gone.

What would she be doing, she wondered, if she had not married him, if she had moved her father into the hotel, if she had moved back to Boston after her father died? What would that other self be doing now? There were so many possibilities. To imagine them in parallel with the life she was living made her feel like she was stepping outside herself. It was like getting her bloods each month, and reflecting on the fact that a particular combination of circumstances that would have produced a singular child was gone. A girl or boy, his or her chance at life gone forever. You couldn’t help but wonder who that child would have been. And where
all her own other might-have-been lives would have brought her. Every single choice in life offering up a dizzying branching of options.

She heard Asa get up a few times, heard him at the top of the stairs, but she didn’t call up to him, and he didn’t come down, and as the pile in the basket shrank, she began to feel strong, self-sufficient. She opened a window to let in the night air and finished her ironing feeling more wide awake than she had ever felt in her life.

In the studio, she studied the canvas. The tree was good, but she would have to do more with the water. She would have to be patient with it, work toward developing a cascading look of floodwaters. Using the upper end of a pencil cut to a fine point, she dragged through the paint while it was still wet, while there was still a thick pull to it, creating distortion, the sensation of seeing under water.

She finished all she could finish and stepped back, satisfied. Tomorrow she would work on it outside, with the river itself as model. Thursday. Jacob was supposed to come, and she would let him come.

She set her brushes to soak, turned out the light, and was halfway up the staircase when she turned back around. She just had to give it one more look.

A push of the wall switch flooded the room with light, illuminating the easel in a way she perceived with a shock of pleasure—the harsh beauty of the tree dominating the unfinished floodwaters. She took her eyes away for moments at a time so that she could reward herself by looking back and getting the pleasing shock of a fresh look.

The end of a good session’s work was the best feeling. You were still in love; you weren’t yet critical; you could wholly admire what you’d done.

It was late, past three o’clock. Dawn was still a couple of hours away, but already the sky was growing milky. She leaned against the doorjamb and let go, let herself do what she’d never quite dared, but which the quarrel with Asa seemed to permit: to fully wonder what it would be like to be partnered with Jacob, to be able to talk about work while doing everyday chores like folding laundry or stirring pancake batter or sweeping. To have two easels side-by-side, to stay up late while the night air blew the
scent of sweet woodruff through the curtains. She carried the fantasy with her up to the spare corner room and crawled into bed with it, imagining exquisite intimacy that took her breath away, made her realize how much she wanted it, made her exhilarated and brave, and determined to do something, say something to tap at their wall of carefully maintained propriety tomorrow.

T
he Buick entered a dream that wouldn’t pin to memory, chugging to life, tires kicking up gravel. Details of the night flooded back, her defiant Jacob fantasy replaced by a grubby sense of guilt and shame. Just a few hours earlier she had truly felt that sleep was not only unnecessary, but an indulgence. That a rift with your husband didn’t matter. Now the happy alertness, the expectancy that normally marked Thursday, was gone.

She climbed out of bed, her limbs dragging like sacks of sand.

She had never in her life, not once—not in school, not at home—woken up after having gone to bed fighting with someone close, and now she felt hollow and anxious. Asa did not usually come home during the day, but there was a chance he would now, after last night, and he couldn’t find Jacob in the house.

Funny, she didn’t even want him to come now. In the light of day, her fantasy became timid and shrank away. He’d never made a pass at her, never been anything but decent.

She would have to do what Asa had asked, tell Jacob that his presence had started to make Asa uncomfortable. In the meantime, prevent herself from thinking, stay busy: hang up the ironing, make the beds, wash out the coffeepot and wipe up Asa’s toast crumbs, the spilled jam, scrub the pan he’d used to cook the eggs he would have been glum fixing for himself, mop the kitchen floor. She took a bath and washed her hair and didn’t bother setting it in pin curls, like she normally would on a Thursday morning, but scraped it back into a bun, half a dozen pins to secure it. What mattered in life? Not hair, not New York, not a pointless infatuation.

You want, you want, you want; when you’re so lucky to have, to have, to have.

She was outside and everything was ready—easel set up, colors laid out. But her hand couldn’t quite decide where to start. She couldn’t get going.

Sometimes that was her problem: doing too many chores too quickly to get them out of the way, then being so geared up she couldn’t slow down and focus.

She paced, the grass stubby under her thin rubber soles, the ease of the night before not quite with her anymore. Suddenly there seemed to be so much noise! A constant bird racket and across the river, somebody hammering something, over and over and over again.

She knew better: when artistry seems most elusive is when you must focus, dig deep, and force yourself to think about how to give form to an idea that seems almost too vague to express. The worst thing is to give in to distraction, to chores that need doing, to anything that deludes you into pretending you are so busy you can’t focus on your work. But giant weeds—how had they grown so quickly, with so little rain?—were choking the nascent poppies, silent green pods that would fatten, then split, in a few weeks time, to unfold papery splashes of red and pink.

She found herself weeding the poppy patch, relishing the physical satisfaction of pulling and shaking roots, of dirt packed into her fingernails.
She pulled gangly grasses and dried, overgrown stalks away from the raspberry canes, away from the rose border, until her palms bled from the thorns and prickles and then she threw up her hands. Gardening could easily be a full-time job; she would never be able to keep up with it alone. The ice wagon clopped down the drive, and she gave in to the cleaning fit that seized her after Happy Joe set the block into its tray and she saw, with new eyes, how grubby the shelves were, littered with flakes of dried milk, soft mold like a mouse’s fur starting to spread on a Florida orange she’d been excited to get her hands on, then saved so long she’d ruined.