Secrets & Surprises (30 page)

He remembered going to Francie’s house once when Francie was still married, and he and Francie’s husband had sat on the mattress playing checkers while she painted. The radio was playing. People and noise didn’t distract her, usually. He liked it that when she painted, she acted like a painter: she backed up from the canvas, tilted her head from side to side, moved forward to put a small blot of paint on the canvas, stood back, smiled. He lost the game of checkers. Winning had never been very important to him, but it would have pleased him if Francie had known that he had won—if the “Aha!” had come from him instead of from Francie’s husband. Francie herself was both casual about her art and competitive. She would paint quietly, showing nothing, for many months. But if she entered a show and didn’t win first prize, she would be furious, drag out all her canvases to show her friends, pointing out how good they were. Sometimes there was some doubt in her mind—you could tell by the way her enthusiasm came out with a questioning tone—but most of the time failure made her angry, and she resisted the idea of it by talking about all the things that were done right, with originality, in her work. The first time she did that it had taken him aback—all his friends were humble, if not self-deprecating, and he had thought at first that Francie was putting him on. He probably listened to her talk about her work for half an hour with a silly smile on his face before he realized that his expression was inappropriate. Though when other people said, occasionally, that she was an egomaniac, he defended her, saying that it was mature to believe in yourself. Sometimes even Francie knew that she went on about the importance of what she was doing too much; she had a sense of humor about it, and would mock herself: she had a long gray apron she painted in, with G
REAT
A
RTIST
stenciled across the back.

He looked at Francie, slumped by the fire.

“You’re in a bad mood,” he said.

“You don’t think Anita said that to embarrass me?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He threw a chip of wood into the fire.

“Anita and her hundred-dollar boots she walks around in the snow in.”

“Go to bed,” he said. “You’ve tolerated all of us for long enough today.”

“Everybody has to be so teasing. Nobody can talk straight. Freed has to pretend he’s taking the attic. T.W. and Freed have to pretend they’re gay because they’re sleeping in the same double bed. Everybody’s got their act down.”

“What’s the matter with you?” he said again.

“What’s the matter is that it will be six months before I have a show, and
nothing happens
. I sit around here all day alone and I paint. When people come they want to make jokes about my being my own model, as though I’m narcissistic.”

“Your paintings are good,” he said. “You know they are. Nobody else paints the way you do.”

“You like them?”

“I admire them. They’re very good. I think you should hang them on the walls.”

In the living room there was one picture—a photograph taken by Anita of oil drums in the snow in New Jersey the winter before. It was a large 11” × 14” photograph hanging on the longest wall of the room. When Francie’s husband left, she took down the drapes and gave him the pictures from the walls. Perry didn’t ask about it because he thought he understood.

“Put some up,” he said. “You shouldn’t just lean them against your bedroom wall.”

She bent her knee and put her forehead to it. “I guess I am in a bad mood,” she mumbled. “I guess I might hang some of them up. But the earlier ones—not the ones of me.”

“Loan me one,” he said. “I’d like to hang one in my house.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“Then I’ll give you one. Which one do you want?”

She got up and went toward her bedroom. He walked behind her and noticed, as they passed the kitchen, that she had left the phone off the hook.

There was a mattress on the floor of Francie’s room. There were hooks shaped like eagles on the wall in front of the bed, on which she hung clothes. There were bamboo curtains, and in the corner there was a tall plant with four leaves at the top. He thought the room was even more depressing than the one she had lived in, in the house they had shared. Her husband had taken the furniture when he went, and although she had gone to auctions and replaced some of the furniture in some of the rooms, she had put only a mattress back in the bedroom. Seeing the clothes on hooks reminded him of the way coats were hung in his schoolroom in the winter when he was young. In place of the line of yellow boots beneath them were Francie’s self-portraits.

“This one?” she said. The painting she propped against her side was one of her best; she had painted it in front of the fire, and the pink glow of the firelight on her bare legs was just right. He looked from the picture to Francie, wanting to say that what he would like was the person propping up the painting, but the expression on her face (shy but earnest; it was easy to see that she took her painting seriously) kept him from saying anything except that it was one of her best, she should keep that one and give him another.

She shook her head. “I’ll leave it in front, and you can take it when you go.”

He touched his lips to the top of her head with a small kiss and gave her a hug and went out of the room for a drink of water, then climbed the stairs to bed. His foot felt sore, and too large for the cast. He put the light on in the attic and went over to the stool with the piece of fabric and the shell on it. He stroked the fabric and held the shell to his ear to listen to the roar, carefully holding his free hand on the material so he wouldn’t disturb her still-life arrangement. The sound inside the shell was very loud in the attic. He put it back and turned off the light bulb and lay on the bed. Like a child, he scrawled “Francie” on the fogged windowpane above the mattress, then, before falling asleep, erased it with the side of his hand.

Nobody could understand how Delores and Carl had made such good time driving, but they said they were speeding the whole way, and that one slept while the other drove. They came to Francie’s door late Sunday night—early Monday morning, actually—with Meagan thrown like a sack over Carl’s shoulder. “She had hiccups half the way here,” Carl sighed, sinking down in the nearest chair with Meagan still sprawled up against him.

“But what are you doing with your coats on?” Delores asked. “What’s going on?”

“We were on our way out. Freed has got to teach school tomorrow.”

“Freed!” Delores said, running over to him and throwing her arms around his neck.

“Do I know this woman?” Freed said, rubbing the palm of his hand down her spine after he hugged her. Freed and Delores had been lovers ten years before.

“My Pontiac was stolen,” Freed said. “Ask anybody.”

“What?” Delores said, looking around. “What’s the joke?”

“His car was stolen,” Perry shrugged.

“Do you want some coffee, Delores? Do you, Carl?” Francie said.

“I don’t care,” Carl said. “I’ll do anything.”

“I can’t let you two take off when I just got here,” Delores said.

“I’ll write out directions to my house,” Perry said. “The three of you can come up and stay with me.”

“That’s right,” Delores said. “You have that big house now.”

“Francie,” Carl said, “you look freakishly beautiful. You’ve kinked up your hair and your butt is unnaturally shapely.”

“T.W. was here,” Francie said to Carl, ignoring what he had just said. “He would have stayed around if he had known you would be here so soon, I know.”

“How’s your ex-husband, Francie? It looks like you decided to go on living after he pulled out. Last time I was here there wasn’t a chair to sit in. How’s Beth Ann, Perry? Might as well state all the shit that’s in my mind and calm myself down.”

Delores broke in, saying, “She has nightmares,” to Francie and pointing to Meagan. “They took her to Disney World and she screams in the night.”

Carl picked up a small bottle from the table and shook it back and forth absently. Meagan shifted on him and was still again. The bottle was Hard As Nails, which T.W. coated the middle fingernail of his right hand with, to keep the nail in good shape; to relax, when he was not playing electric music with the band, T.W. played the banjo.

“Did Anita have her kid yet?” Delores asked.

“No—she’s just four months pregnant,” Freed said. “How did you know about that?”

“She wrote me.”

“What did you do to your foot, Perry?” Carl said, standing.

“I broke it.”

“I can see that your foot is broken. Forgive me for speaking imprecisely:
how
did you break your foot, Perry?”

“I fell down. I was stepping off of a stone wall in the woods and my foot went out from under me in wet leaves beneath the wall.”

“Oh Christ, I’ve got to teach in the morning,” Freed said. “I hate to bust things up, but are we about to move?”

“I’ll spread out the sleeping bag for Meagan,” Perry said. He went down the hall and turned the radiator all the way on in the bedroom, unrolled the sleeping bag at the foot of the bed. He went back to the living room and got Meagan, who flopped into his arms without waking up. He carried her to the sleeping bag and put her inside and closed the top over her without zipping it. If she had nightmares, it wouldn’t do to zip her in. There were little flecks of dried skin on her eyelids, and beneath her eyes were bluish circles. Her face was a little sunburned from Florida. “Do you remember me, Meagan?” he whispered. He smiled at her and turned off the light. Meagan never moved.

“How’s T.W.’s band?” Carl asked when he came back into the room.

“Are you giving me a ride home or not?” Freed said.

“What are you going to do without a car?” Delores asked.

“I can borrow my neighbor’s truck. I don’t know,” Freed said. “Hopefully they’ll find it and it won’t be wrecked.”

“T.W. says they’re making money. He had a new demo tape down here that was very good.”

“Come on,” Freed said, pulling at the sleeve of his leather jacket.

“One minute,” Perry said. He went into Francie’s bedroom and got the painting and hobbled out to the car with it. Freed came out the door behind him, and then Francie, carrying his crutches, saying, “Aren’t you even going to say goodbye?”

“I’m just carrying this out to the car.”

“I’m sitting in the car,” Freed said. “I’m sitting in the car until you decide to start driving it.”

“I hope they find your car, Freed,” Francie said.

“Del looks great,” Freed sighed, and pushed around the snow with the toe of his boot. “That’s all I need to see.”

“Oh—are you giving them directions to your house?” Francie asked Perry.

He closed the trunk and wiped the snow off his hands on his jeans.

“Just one second,” he said to Freed.

“Thank you for the weekend, Francie,” Freed said. “I’m going to sit here and freeze until he decides to get going.”

“He has to give directions—”

“I understand what’s being said, Francie.” He closed the car door, opened the window a crack to let the smoke from his cigarette leave the car. Freed was talking to himself in the car about how he was going to sit there until they got going.

Perry went into the house and found a piece of paper and wrote directions and a map. He gave it to Carl, who pocketed it and said, “Thanks. When are we welcome?”

“Any time,” he said. “Come up as soon as you can.”

“Thank you,” Delores said. “We can help you work on the house.”

He nodded. He could not remember ever seeing Delores do anything with her hands.

“Goodbye, Francie,” he said, giving her a hug. “Stop entertaining people and do your painting.”

“I can’t see,” Carl said. “I’m going to bed.”

“Go ahead,” Francie said. “Goodbye, Perry. Let me know where you hang the picture.”

He hugged her again and stepped to the side, still holding her. He was clowning, clumping in his cast to do the box step. The walkway was covered with snow. The flagstones underneath the snow were slick with ice, so he hopped down the grass, feeling the snow edging over the top of his low boots.

“It’s an odd match,” Freed said, shivering in the car. “Delores and Carl. I don’t get it.”

“Come on, close that window,” Perry said, starting the car.

“I’m smoking.”

“Wait’ll I get the heat on.”

Freed pitched the cigarette into the snow. “You think he’s still on reds?” Freed said. Before Perry could answer, Freed changed his voice. “You have to feel sorry for the little children,” he said, wobbling his head at Perry. “What will become of the little ones?” With the hood of his parka covering his head, he looked enough like a little old lady to make Perry laugh. “What the fuck did I do to deserve having my car stolen?”

Freed lit another cigarette. “Tonight when I saw Del I wished I had her back,” he said. “It makes me sad that I still don’t have any sense.”

“Delores is okay now.”

“She might look it, but she’ll never be okay. You think Carl is still swallowing pills?”

“If he is, they aren’t keeping him too alert.”

“They looked good. Tired, but okay. Del looked good.” Freed sighed. He pushed the tape into the tape deck, listened a second, then rewound to Gatemouth Brown doing “Take the ‘A’ Train.”

“You forgive me for cheering for the Red Sox?” Freed said. He opened the window a crack. “Where’s my car?” he said. “It could be anywhere.”

(They finally went to Alexandria, Virginia, to get Freed’s car. The police found it after four days. At the start of the ride Freed had said, “Thank you very much for doing this,” but Freed had let him pay for his own coffee in the machines along the highway, and Freed had not thanked him again. It was true that when Freed saw the car parked on the lot behind the police station he reached out and grabbed the crook of Perry’s arm, but that was almost certainly happiness at seeing the car rather than silent thanks to Perry. Yet on the ride back to Vermont without Freed, he had been lonesome. He and Freed had shared a motel room the night they got the car. They had eaten soggy fried shrimp in the motel dining room, and wandered around Alexandria. Freed, who always had a lot of energy, had tried to talk him into going across the bridge into Georgetown, but he wouldn’t do it, and Freed had had the nerve to sulk. He had told Freed that he didn’t feel like dragging his broken foot around that night—actually, it didn’t bother him very much, and by that time he was hardly able to remember what it had felt like not to have a broken foot. Reading a letter he had written Francie at that time but forgot to mail—a letter he found in a book—he could read between the lines of his petulance that he was already becoming antisocial.)