A Mind of Winter (24 page)

I am seeing it
, I thought numbly. I did, in the end, stay away, but I may as well have been there all along. For a moment I hated every one of my collaborators, and I found myself gripped by the urge to set fire to their contact sheets locked in the metal drawer downstairs in the studio.

Alone in the kitchen, I glanced down to see an enormous water bug casually crossing the floor.

What do you do with a tainted eye?

In the blue suite, Barnaby asleep, I tiptoed from the bed to the sitting room. Still muffled by drowsiness, I positioned myself by the window and peered into the thickness of the woods beyond the lawn. I fancied I heard a clear ringing pierce the silence, as when a wet finger is slowly rubbed around the rim of a crystal goblet, only louder, more penetrating, and insistent. It seemed to be coming from where the moon clenched onto a knuckle of black sky, and I remember thinking that it must be the cold lamentation of moonlight, exiled to earth. On any other night, I might have taken this as an omen or sign, but that evening, everything was swaddled, allowing no movement, no meaning at all. Outside, the horizon was obscured by the jostling ovoid heads of trees. Nothing but flatness, and the ringing of the moon, dulled now to a cool and mineral whine.

The evening’s work was done. I looked up to see that the yellow light in Oscar’s study had been extinguished. I packed my contact sheets away in the drawer and headed back into the corridors of the sleeping house.

Outside, the air was cool. Halfway across the courtyard, hugging my cold arms, I realized I had left my sweater behind, draped over a chair. Tired, so very tired, I could think of little else besides the comfortable bed awaiting me in the yellow suite. But then, suddenly, I could not bear the idea of my sweater alone in that room, limp on the back of the chair. I sighed, turned back toward the east wing.

As soon as I entered the darkroom, I sensed that something was awry. I peeled the sweater from the back of the chair. A new wave of fatigue passed over me. I sank into the chair, rested my head for a moment on the counter. The cold metal surface felt soothing. My mind drifted: fragments, colors, snatches of sound, the shimmery descent into sleep.

A muffled crash awoke me. I sprang upright and scrambled toward the source of it, the cubicle on the other side of the room. I drew open the heavy black curtain. It was Oscar. Not the Oscar I knew, but someone else. His face looked somehow bruised—his eyes, usually the serenest blue, were those of a cornered beast: inward, dark, without language. His head turned slowly toward me and, though I could see he was trying to smile, could see, too, the jerky rise of his rigid shoulders in an attempt at a shrug, there was no hiding the inner collapse that had transformed my friend. I took in the rest: the brown leather portfolio in his hand, the vat of steaming chemicals in the trough. The portfolio was unzipped. It flapped emptily where Oscar was holding it above the vat.

“What happened?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

“I didn’t know it was open,” he said, looking dumbly at the portfolio. “Stupid,” he mumbled to himself. “The solvent wasn’t ready, it was just acid. I filled it with acid and—” He looked down at the vat; I followed his gaze in time to see a tiny corner of paper dissolve to nothing.

“I was going to restore them,” he said flatly, again not to me, his eyes fixed on the vat.

“Oh Oscar,” I said, a bit too desperately, reaching for the pair of tongs on the bench and plunging them into the vat. He shook his head.

“It’s too late,” he said, his voice restored to his own. “They’re gone.”

I was back for a few days in Manhattan to scout through some files. I opened all the windows and watered my wilting houseplants, neglected by the neighbor who’d promised to tend them. I realized how overdue this visit was—how much I needed a break from Ellis Park.

I made some coffee, gathered my papers and books, and sat down at my desk. There was a lot to do: checking quotations and facts, hunting up numerous obscure details.

The river below was in the throes of its gentle commerce: egging two sailboats upstream, frilling prettily around a steamship, reflecting back bulging images of swooping gulls. Downriver, a barge: it must have been hauling a heavy cargo, I’d never seen a barge move quite so slowly. I stopped what I was doing to watch it, recalling a line from a poem: Walt Whitman musing on this same river, this same sky, thinking of someone not yet born—why not me?—addressing himself to this imagined somebody and saying that, once in a past that was his present, he too had felt what this future soul would surely feel, looking at river and sky.

I deduced from the streaks of soot on the deck that the cargo might be coal. A lone figure stood stern-side, looking up at the clouds. I watched, trying to calculate how much coal a barge like that could carry, how many men it took to load and unload it, when all of a sudden, the barge came to a stop. The man at the stern crouched, as if to retrieve something that had fallen. He righted himself and strolled toward the bow. From where I sat looking down from the eighth floor, he looked like a rickety puppet.

I watched him amble the length of the stalled boat. Holding my red editor’s pencil in midair, peering down at the river, I had the sense that I was about to witness something dramatic. I felt a wave of regret for the little puppet man. Instinctively I reached for my camera, which was in the blue canvas duckbag on the shelf by my desk. But I withdrew my hand.

I had hesitated then too, that day in London, years ago, amidst the ruins, sighting the boy in the olive-green jacket in the viewfinder of my camera. “He made it down into the cellar through an open grate,” the rescue worker was saying, his voice a dreadful distraction which threatened the harmony of the shot.

I had taken two steps away from the rescue worker, trying to brush him off, desperate to be alone with what I was seeing: the extraordinary power of the sky, with its unnatural metallic streaks—colors I might never again see, born as they surely were from the idiosyncratic mixture of gases rising from this particular site of devastation. I focused on the curve of the boy’s shoulders, aware that the slight dip of his head was in perfect equipoise with the shape his foot made as it nudged the clump of charred timber. It ached, this composition; I could feel it as a human force. Here it was, my holy grail: meaning, unity, beauty, grief.

The rescue worker’s voice broke through, shattering the harmony. “War,” he said bitterly. “Don’t you love it?”

For an instant, I took my eye away from the viewfinder. “Please,” I responded a little desperately, struggling for some phrase that would keep him from saying another word.

My tone must have conveyed something, for he shrugged and began to turn away, but then paused, and added in a low voice: “I understand he was the only survivor.”

I slammed the camera back to my eye. The sky had changed: there was a bare remnant of that exquisite, awful, unearthly color that was as much shape as hue. The sky, those streaks, I could feel them dissolving in the full arrival of the day.
And the boy …
How could I not take the shot?

Now, outside my window, on the Hudson River far below me, I watched as the small fire erupted, watched as the puppet man flung himself about deck with what looked like a wet blanket and a bucket, struggling to get the little blaze under control. It was an old instinct which set my fingers to itching, that fierce longing to feel the weight of the camera in my hand.

Leave it be
, said an inner voice.
Let the world get along without you.

I turned back to my work.

Later that evening, I opened a can of soup, buttered some toast, and ate looking out the kitchen window at the round white moon, aware of a sense of calm at having the large spare rooms of the apartment to myself. I washed my bowl and plate and poured myself a bourbon. At the first sip, I was overcome by a crushing exhaustion. No more work this evening, I thought: a long hot bath and early to bed.

I was just stepping out of the tub, reaching for a towel, when the buzzer rang. Three long, hard rings: the doorman, Gerald, not a man who kept his emotions to himself, was clearly irritated. I reached over to the basin for my watch: eleven o’clock. I rubbed myself dry and wrapped a towel around my head.

“Someone to see you, madam,” Gerald said over the intercom. “A
Mr. Harrington
.” In his tone, severity and curiosity both.

“Thank you. You can send him up,” I said.

Barnaby. Here at Riverside Drive. Not part of our unspoken agreement. I just had time to pull on my bathrobe before the doorbell rang.

I opened the door. There he was in a linen blazer, a single rose in one hand, straw hat and bottle of wine in the other.

“You’re surprised to see me,” he said, the half-smile now in his eyes, touching them with that hesitant, coaxing warmth that was in fact not hesitant at all. “You’re angry.”

He offered me the rose, which I unthinkingly raised to my nose. He must have taken this as a sign of invitation because a moment later he was behind me in the hallway, balancing his hat on the hat rack. He took my shoulder and turned me toward him.

“I wanted to see where my dove nests when she’s in the city.” He ducked his head so that he was peering both down and up at me at the same time, the little game of tender imploring fully at play in his face. In my absent haste on my way from the bathroom to the door, I must have picked up my drink; I noticed, suddenly, that I was holding it in my hand.

“Whatever you’re drinking will be fine,” Barnaby said, his finger was now on my chin.

I saw his eye wander up the hallway, sensed in him a flutter of excitement.
He must be very sure of me,
I thought.

“I don’t think you should stay. I was just about to go to bed.”

“Then I’ll tuck you in.” His finger traced slowly up from my chin, coming to rest behind my earlobe.

I could feel my irritation dissolving. But I also felt uncomfortable standing there in my bathrobe. I pointed toward the living room. “The bar’s in there. I’ll be right back.”

I turned and walked through the dining room toward the bedrooms at the back of the apartment. Fleshy rounds of moonlight glowed on the varnished floorboards. The rooms had lost their calm.

In the bedroom, I unwound the towel from my hair, pulled on slacks and a light sweater.

When I returned to the living room, Barnaby was standing by the window with a glass in his hand, staring out at the flat expanse of river.

“Does it always perform so magnificently for you?” he said, his back toward me. “The river, the sky, the moon?” He swiveled around to face me across the width of the room. “But perhaps you take it for granted.”

“We could go out for a walk,” I said.

“I was going to tuck you in.” Barnaby passed his gaze from my shirt to my slacks. “Although I see that you’re dressed, now.”

“I’ll get my jacket,” I said.

Back in the dining room, everything was disturbed, as if the building, after an unexpected blow, was struggling to regain its balance. In the bedroom, I sat for a moment on the green plaid chair by the window. I felt a terrible longing for Simon, pictured him in a small hotel in Montreal, sitting at the little desk found in such rooms, noting down images and thoughts for tomorrow’s writing; pictured him setting down his fountain pen, stroking the back of his neck with forefinger and thumb the way he did when he was concentrating. I rose, took my purse and keys from the dresser, retrieved my cotton jacket from the closet, and clicked off the lamp.

Walking back through the dining room, I noticed a dim light issuing from the end of the passageway: Simon’s study. Aware that I was almost tiptoeing, I headed down the hall, then stopped at the half-open door. I peered in to see Barnaby leaning over Simon’s desk, half of him aglow in the light thrown up by the desk lamp, the other half obscured in the fuzzy blackness of the room—no moonlight on this side of the apartment, where the shades were drawn to keep the grimy airshaft from view. The sight of Barnaby’s half-face was disturbing—not only because of the apparent loss of its complement, but because of the oddly prurient expression he wore. Barnaby glanced my way. He was holding up a handwritten manuscript page; delicately, he set it down.

“Let’s go,” I said. Barnaby pretended not to notice the curtness in my voice.

Downstairs, crossing the lobby, I noted the frank disapproval in Gerald’s face.

Barnaby and I headed north on Riverside Drive, walking for several blocks in silence. He reached for my hand; reluctantly, I let him take it.

“Don’t be cross,” he said, giving my fingers a gentle squeeze.

I extricated my hand. “You had no business going into Simon’s study.”

“I just want to know about your life,” he said. “Can you understand that?”

I stopped, Barnaby stopped. His face was shrouded by shadow. Above us, a canopy of leaves; beside us, the towering trees of Riverside Park, exhaling oxygen into the night air.

“Simon’s study is not
my
life.”

A veil softly falling, the smile that stole across Barnaby’s face, taking full possession of his features.

“But Marilyn, it is,” he said.

A woman in a white uniform and white lace-up shoes hurried anxiously toward us. A nurse, I supposed, coming off the late shift. I nodded to her as she passed. A convertible sped by roof down, a young rake in a checkered cravat at the wheel. Beside him, hair held down by a tightly tied scarf, a woman laughed into the onrush of air. I looked back at Barnaby, saw, for an instant, a vivid apparition—Barnaby swinging a child onto his shoulders, looking at me with those same knowing, relaxed eyes: sure of himself, sure of me, questioning nothing. It was a happy child, settled and loved.

“Honestly.” I took a step toward him. “You really believe the rules don’t apply to you, don’t you.”

He drew me toward him, looked at me happily and long.

“Darling,” he whispered, “you really should try to be less serious.”

* * *

Later, I lay on the bed looking out at the moon sinking by my window, unable to sleep, feeling trapped, somehow, between the layers of the river and the layers of the night. I kicked off the sheet and stepped from the bed. I dressed, threw a few things into my weekend valise, and took leave of the apartment.