About the Author (11 page)

“Good morning,” I said. “I’m looking for Janet Greene.”

His eyes kindled with suspicion. He’d obviously lived in New Halcyon all his life; distrust of strangers was second nature. “She expecting you?” he said, thrusting out his grizzled Popeye chin.

“Well, no,” I said. “But I was hoping to speak to her about—”

“
Is someone there, Jesse
?” The female voice drifted from somewhere around the corner of the house.

Jesse turned in the direction of the voice and shouted, “Someone come lookin’ for you!”

I braced to see old Professor Greene hobble around the corner of the house on her cane. Instead, a tall, dark-haired young woman in a flowered peasant dress and leather sandals materialized.

She stopped a few paces from me and smiled quizzically. When the corners of her mouth lifted, I saw not only a row of fine white teeth but a scalloped rim of pink gums.

“Can I help you?” she said.

“I hope so. That is, if you’re the owner.” I nodded toward the house.

She peered at me intently, as if trying to place me. Her eyes, I now saw, were uncommonly blue, contrasting with her rather prominent dark eyebrows, which in turn contrasted with the color of her skin—skin as creamy-colored as white chocolate, except at her cheekbones, where it was touched with a reddish bloom.

She briskly folded her arms in front of her, a gesture of subconscious protection. “Ye-es,” she said.

So this, finally, was Janet Greene. Not a wizened old hag after all. Far from it.
What
, I asked myself
, did Stewart ever have to do with this lovely creature
?

Taking a half-step forward, I proceeded to deliver the little speech I had been preparing since breakfast. I was (I said) visiting from New York for the weekend and had run into her renters while strolling in the village. I had happened to mention to them that I was looking for a place to buy in New Halcyon, and they had said her place was for sale.

“I don’t know if you’ve even put it on the market yet,” I added, “so I hope this doesn’t seem too pushy. But—call it the New Yorker in me—I just wanted to get the jump on everyone else.”

“Excuse me,” she said, as if she hadn’t listened to a word I had said. “But have we
met
before?”

“I don’t think so,” I said, startled. “Have you ever lived in New York? Or Minneapolis?”

“No,” she said, still scrutinizing me closely. “That wouldn’t be it. It was very recently. . . . Oh, well,” she went on, smiling again, “I’m obviously mixing you up with someone else. It’ll come to me later. You’re looking for a cottage? For summers?”

“No, actually,” I said. “I’m looking for a year-round place. The seclusion of this house seems perfect. You see, I’m a writer, and I—”

“Of
course
,” she interrupted. “
That’s
why I know you. I saw a picture of you in
People
magazine! On the plane last night.”

Ahhh, my
People
magazine debut. How could I have forgotten?

“That
was
you, wasn’t it?” she asked. “Cal . . .?”

“Cunningham,” I said, with a slight bow. “Yes, that’s me.”

I have since had occasion to notice that people react in a variety of different ways when they learn they are in the presence of someone even so lightly touched by the magic wand of celebrity as I was. Some star-struck types go to pieces, as if their proximity to someone “famous” had bestowed on them a talismanic luck; they blushingly request an autograph, they seize and squeeze your hand and won’t give it up, as if to steal from you some of the magic that has graced you with the immortality of a two-by-three-inch head shot in
People
. Once I met a woman who smooched my cheek as if I were a game-show host and she an adoring contestant. At the other extreme are the cool, calm types who feign a deep and studied indifference, turning away yawning or drawlingly changing the subject to something neutral like the weather. Janet Greene fell into neither camp (both of which belie an unhealthy preoccupation with fame). Still, it was undeniable that my renown had an effect on her. She uncrossed her arms and began to finger the tip of her ponytail. In her eyes, I was no longer the lone male stranger—a possible con artist or rapist trying to smooth-talk my way into her life. I was, through the agency of
People
magazine, someone she almost knew.

And so we began to chat, while all around us the early-September morning stirred to life: the breeze hissing in the pasture’s lacy grass; the honks of southward-migrating geese issuing from overhead; the bright, low autumnal sun mounting into the sky behind her, dazzling my eyes and, incidentally, illuminating Janet Greene with an idealizing rim of golden light.

She asked if I was working on a new novel. I lied and said that indeed I was, and that that was why I was planning to move to New Halcyon, for the peace and quiet. She said that it must be difficult to write in New York—all the noise, the distractions. She’d visited the city a few times, and though she had liked it, her visits had confirmed her suspicion that here was where she belonged.

“And yet,” I said, leadingly, “you’re selling your place.”

She said she had no choice. The house had been left to her three years ago by her grandfather, who had built it back in the 1930s. She had tried to keep the place up, but it was just too expensive. She’d spent the summer visiting with her folks back in Boston, mostly so that she could rent the house out for the summer and raise some money for the upkeep. The taxes were bad enough, but the real problem was the repairs. The place was old. She could no longer get by on “patch jobs.”

As if on cue, we both glanced up at the roof, where old Jesse was frankly (and quite literally) eavesdropping, avidly collecting a whole evening’s worth of gossip for his wife about the nosy out-of-towner (“And then he asked her, ‘
How come yer sellin’ the place?’ ”
). Caught, he simply shrugged, then shuffled over to the area of roof he was repairing. He lowered himself, stiffly, onto his knees, then began banging a nail.

Janet Greene turned back to me. “Anyway, if you’re not afraid of doing some pretty extensive renovation . . .”

“Not at all,” I said. “I mean, location is the main thing for me. And this looks perfect.”

She tipped her head slightly to one side. “Would you like to see the house?”

“Very much.”

And so . . . I followed her in through the small vestibule where just twenty-four hours before I had snatched the copy of
Suicide
from her mail table. She directed my attention to a book-lined den off the front hall, which I confess I did not give more than a cursory glance, instead availing myself of the chance to get a good, unobserved look at my hostess. Her posture was exceptional, her back straight, her square shoulders tapering to a narrow waist, then widening only slightly to a set of slender, almost boyish hips. Her slim calves and ankles flashed below the hem of her peasant skirt. Had Stewart been her lover? Had his fingertips brushed away the silky tendrils of her hair as he kissed her eyelids? Had he cupped her breasts in his hands
? Who were you, Stewart? Who were you, exactly
?

In the living room, she abruptly stopped and turned to face me. I adjusted my features into what I hoped was a passable imitation of a prospective house-buyer’s appraising skepticism. A coffee table was piled with mail. A few envelopes had been opened; she must have been going through the stuff when I arrived.

“Excuse the mess,” she said, smiling. “I wasn’t expecting to give a tour this morning.”

She then led me through the house. As I followed along behind, I was struck by the irony that when I first met Stewart, it was under the same conditions: he was giving me a tour of his living quarters. We passed through the dining room into the adjoining kitchen, a bright space outfitted with pine cabinets and a floor of red and white tiles. “Washer and drier in here,” she said as we came into a small pantry. We then emerged into a hallway that, she said, led to two bedrooms in back. We turned left and were back now in the living room.

“My favorite thing about the house,” she said, “is this window.”

She was referring to the large picture window that her grandfather had strategically cut in the living room’s front wall to frame a view of the lake and hills. Together, we approached this expanse of glass, then stood and gazed down over the pasture, past a line of trees where a few widely spaced rooftops showed, and at the lake beyond. I snuck a sideways glance at her profile, and it was then that I noticed how absurdly like a Roman bas-relief it was: the butterfly fringe of her long-lashed eye, the straight nose, the elegantly cut lips, the diagonal of dark hair running from the crest of her forehead to the nape of her neck. No wonder Stewart had never forgotten her. No wonder he had never seemed to regret his sexless Manhattan life. After this woman, all others must have struck him as invisible.

She then proceeded to point out where the house was falling apart. She directed my gaze to the patch of wall and ceiling above a corner cabinet, where water damage had blistered and browned the plaster. She pointed out the pronounced tilt to the floor: the cement foundation was sinking into the hillside, causing the place to tip forward over the front lawn. A contractor had told her that the whole foundation needed to be rebuilt. Then there were the ancient boiler, which gobbled gas, and the old wiring . . .

I nodded for a time, as if soberly assessing and digesting all of this. Hoping to change the topic from subjects that so clearly depressed her, I asked about the oil paintings that were hung around the place. I had noticed them the instant we came in. Above the fireplace at the far end of the room was a striking abstract that, upon examination, proved not to be an abstract at all, its bold impasto resolving into a near-photographic representation of my last night’s view of the sunset over Janet Greene’s hill. On the other walls were a series of smaller landscapes, heads, and figures. She explained that they were her own work. I was stunned. Did she have a gallery somewhere? I asked. Did she show? She explained that while she did sell some landscapes at various shops in the neighboring towns, her main occupation was teaching art at the rather famous coed private school about twenty miles away.

“I love teaching.” she said, “I’d do it even if I became successful as an artist. Not that that seems likely to happen.” I asked why she sounded so discouraged. She said that her most recent trip to New York had been to investigate galleries. The icy men and women behind the counters in Chelsea had treated her like a homeless person begging for a handout. She had returned to Vermont resigned that whatever else happened, she was not going to be mistaken for the next Jeff Koons.

I smiled at this. “No,” I said. “Judging by the looks of these paintings, you won’t. Do you mind if I take a closer look?”

“Not at all.”

I moved around the room, peering at the smaller studies, many of which had been painted on boards of untreated Masonite, the rusty color showing through in areas where precisely that tint was needed. Like the large landscape over the fireplace, these smaller paintings had the same mysterious way of first appearing as turbulent abstractions, until they resolved into sense: a stand of leafless saplings against a scrubby hillside; a wooded ridge soaked in autumn light; a weathered canoe in water striated by soft ripples. The potentially banal, Sunday-painter subject matter was subverted by the bravado of her paint handling, so that each work showed you something new not only about the landscape but about the possibilities of paint on a two-dimensional surface. Marveling, my eye fell on a painting that seemed at first to be nothing more than a jagged diagonal slice of fire that flared from one corner of the frame to the other, its livid flicker broken by a pattern of yellow daubs that presently revealed themselves to be the glint of an eyeball, the tip of a nose, and the gleam on a pair of lips. As if pushing through a mesh of bloodied gauze bandages, Stewart’s face suddenly reared up from its dark background, a face looming from shadow into lamplight, glaring out at me accusingly. I turned briskly from the apparition.

She was standing behind me, several paces away across the Oriental carpet.

“This one,” I said, “is extraordinary.”

She smiled, obviously pleased. “Yes, I’m happy with that one.”

“Someone you know?” I asked.

“Just an old friend.”

I nodded for a moment. Her face seemed to say that this was all I was going to get out of her on the subject of her “old friend.” I turned back to the portrait, which held me in a kind of hideous thrall. If I stared long enough, his mouth would move, his shaded eye would blink.

“Well,” I said, repressing a shudder and turning my back on the face once and for all, “those gallery folks in New York must be nuts. They wouldn’t know art if it bit them.”

“Maybe,” she said mildly. “But they know what they like.”

I smiled at this nice play on the philistine’s proud boast
: I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like
. It was such a graceful way of stating her feelings about the Manhattan art crowd, without descending to vituperation, without compromising her own dignity. No wonder Stewart had chosen this woman to be the first reader of
Almost Like Suicide
. How had he put it in his letter? “Yours is the only opinion (outside my own) that matters to me.” There could be no question about it: he had been in love with her. I began to think I could fall in love with her, too.

“So,” Janet Greene said. “That’s the house. Warts and all. If you’re interested, I can give you the name of my real estate agent. She’s handling everything.”

I said that I would indeed like the name.

“Let me write it down for you,” she said.

She stepped over to the coffee table and tore a strip of paper from one of the envelopes piled there. While she jotted the broker’s name and number on the scrap, I couldn’t help noticing that she was standing in front of the bright picture window, her long, slim legs outlined in silhouette inside the glowing tent of her suddenly transparent skirt. I felt like Stephen Dedalus at the turning point of
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
, when he sees the bird-girl wading on the strand, her skirt dovetailed around her waist, her legs bare to his gaping eyes. “Heavenly God!” Stephen’s soul exclaims—and I knew just what his soul meant. Less abstractly, I felt my bound-down penis stir quickly to life in my hot underwear, stiffening and prodding insistently at the front of my fly. I readjusted my stance.