About the Author (12 page)

“Here you go,” she said. She stepped toward me, extending the strip of envelope. I took it from her and thanked her once again.

There was now nothing to prevent either one of us from bringing the interview to a close. I made no move to do so. And I noticed, with an inner surge, that it seemed, from something in Janet Greene’s posture—she was rooted to the rug—that she, too, was not ready, quite yet, to end the encounter. Suddenly she made a gesture, as if she’d forgotten something important.

“Oh,” she said, “I didn’t even offer you anything. Would you like something to drink? I’ve got some ginger ale.”

I said that I would like that very much. She excused herself to go into the kitchen. I stood there (the thump of Jesse’s hammer above, Stewart’s painted gaze to my right, my erection still on alert) and took stock of the situation: no men’s shoes among those lined up neatly on the rubber drainer in the front hall; no strewn sports magazines; no boxer shorts draped in the laundry room. A woman who lived alone. A woman who was, thus, perhaps available. But what did that matter to
me
? I was scheduled to fly back to New York on a two-thirty flight. My mission in New Halcyon had been accomplished. It was not as if I really
were
in the market for her house. It wasn’t as if I really
were
thinking of moving here. Yet I could not, somehow, put out of my mind the fantasy of making Janet Greene fall in love with me. I ransacked my brain for topics of conversation that might open up the possibility of some future contact between us. But what? A ridiculous anticipatory sadness wafted around my heart at the thought that I would never see her again.

She returned to the living room bearing two glasses.

“I haven’t asked where you do your painting,” I said as she handed me my drink. Her fingertips lightly bumped mine as I took the glass from her hand.

She explained that she had a studio out back. “We can take a look, if you’re interested. It goes with the house, of course.”

I sipped the ginger ale, the pungent spice stinging tears into my eyes. “I’d love to see it. But I’m not taking up too much of your time?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “School doesn’t start for another week. I’m sort of on holiday until then.”

Carrying our glasses with us, we went out and down the extension of her driveway to a small, pitched-roof building out back. The building, she explained, had once been her grandfather’s wood shop, where he had made the pine furniture and cabinets that furnished the house.

We stepped into the surprisingly dark, cavelike warren. A table in the center of the room was heaped with curled paint tubes and tin cans holding bouquets of paint-caked brushes. There was a huge palette encrusted with a multihued mountain range of pigments. On a shelf was a tape player, its volume knob smeared with paint.

“I love artists’ studios,” I said, breathing the fragrance of oil and turpentine fumes. “But you know, Sigmund Freud would have a field day if he had a look at this place.”

“What do you mean?”

“The split,” I said, “between your house, which is so tidy, and this studio. Look, you haven’t even put the tops on the paint tubes. And when,” I teased, “was the last time you washed those brushes?”

She shrugged, smiled. “I guess it
does
look a little schizophrenic. I don’t know, I can’t explain it. Maybe if I
could
explain it, I’d stop painting.”

“You really are good,” I said, gazing with wonder at a night view of what I recognized as the antique lampposts that lined the breakwater along the park.

“Practice makes perfect,” she said. “I do have a lot of time to work. Living alone and all.”

I turned to her, sensing that this was the opening I had been looking for, and sensing, besides, that she had offered it to me deliberately. She scrutinized me over the rim of her glass, as if trying to judge my reaction to what she had said.

“So you live alone?” I ventured.

She lowered her glass. “Yes.”

“Doesn’t the isolation get to you? I think of
The Shining
—you know, those snowbound winter evenings. The walls closing in. I’m not sure I could take it.”

She lifted a shoulder in a half shrug. “Oh, I don’t know that it’s much worse than living alone in New York, in one of those tiny studio apartments. There are different kinds of isolation, not just geographic. And I’ve gotten kind of used to living on my own. I think it’s good for people. Not in
def
initely, mind you. The ideal thing would be to continue living here
with
someone. But . . .” Her voice trailed off, and she looked away.

“That certain someone just hasn’t come along?”

It was a gamble, pushing the conversation this way, but I felt that if ever I was going to feel courageous enough to ask such a baldly personal question, it would be here, in the dimly lit, creative disorder of her studio.

“I suppose not,” she said, looking away, her eyes moving lightly around the room. “I’ve had my offers. My chances. So maybe it’s just
me
. A lot of the other teachers at my school date one another, and marry, and everything. You have to put up with a lot of gossip—not just from other teachers, but even from the students, who don’t miss
any
thing. I’m just more”—she paused, seeking the word—“more
private
than that, I guess.” She laughed, tossing her head slightly, so that her ponytail swung off her shoulder. “I’ve always kidded myself that the man I marry will be someone from far away, someone no one here has ever met. A mysterious stranger who just pops into town and wanders up my hill and—”

Her eyes lit on me, and she suddenly flushed and fell silent. “Well, anyway,” she went on, rapidly, the blush creeping right to the roots of her hair. “I guess I haven’t been too realistic about romance. And . . . and what about you? I presume you’re looking for a place for two people. I didn’t show you the, um, the bedrooms, but did I mention there are two? I mean, if you’ve got kids . . . ?”

“No,” I said. “No kids yet. Well, no
wife
yet, actually.”

“Really?” she said, glancing at me, her cheeks redder than ever. “So you’d be taking the place on your own—I mean, if you were interested?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“I see.”

With that the conversation rolled, gently, to a stop. A dog was barking somewhere far away. The sound of a chain saw floated from over a fold in the hills.
Thud, thud, thud
went Jesse’s hammer.

“Well,” I said, “I really should let you get back to what you were doing before I arrived.”

She nodded quickly.

“But I was wondering,” I went on, my heart working at twenty times the speed of Jesse’s hammer, “if you’d like to continue this conversation over dinner somewhere. This evening” (I had already calculated how I could rebook my afternoon flight for the next day and spend one more night in the Pleasant View Hotel).

She lowered her eyes. “I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, thanks, and everything. But really, you’re going back to New York, and I’m—well, I’m
here
.” She looked up at me. “You know what I mean?”

“You haven’t said yes or no.”

She laughed, nervously. “I don’t know if it’s such a good idea.”

“
Din
ner,” I pressed. “You’ve got to eat. We can go somewhere where no one knows you, where they won’t gossip.”

I could see that she was struggling with it, with the craziness of agreeing to go on a date with a man whom she had known for all of twenty minutes. Just at the point when her shoulders sagged and she looked at me with what I took to be an apologetic smile, she stunned me by saying, “Okay, yes, I’d like to go to dinner.”

Then we were back out in the everyday sunshine, walking across the lawn, arranging a mutually convenient time to meet. We settled on seven. She insisted on picking
me
up—a sign, I thought, of her lingering ambivalence, a tactic to make our dinner seem less like a formal “date” and more like a helpful local’s giving a prospective home buyer a tour of the town and its environs.

Back at the driveway, I thanked her for the ginger ale. She lifted one of the glasses in salute. I climbed into my car, but before slamming the door, I called out, “See you at seven!” Immediately I saw old Jesse’s head shoot up from beyond the roof projection. Janet Greene was right: folks in New Halcyon didn’t miss a trick.

By early evening, a shelf of feathered orange cloud had crept over the valley, advancing from behind the western hills. I was standing in the parking lot of the Pleasant View Hotel, waiting for Janet to pick me up for our date. Freshly showered, I stood in a fragrant nimbus of scents: shampoo, soap, deodorant, and toothpaste, a complex blend of aromas that, along with the slight nip in the air, reminded me of how it used to feel, back in high school, to head out on a date all buffed and tonsured, stomach a fluttering mass of butterflies, heart riding alternating swells of anxiety and excitement.

I had spent the better part of the afternoon in nearby Darwin, where I had bought a dark jacket and a new black T-shirt. I was wearing these with my black jeans. The suntan I had acquired over the last two days had baked out my greenish New York pallor, and as I slowly paced the parking lot, I felt good, confident. Of course, I still had no idea what I was doing. There was obvious danger in my risking any greater intimacy with Janet Greene than I had already enjoyed. I can explain my rashness only by saying that I still felt in the grip of something bigger than myself. When I had first made the decision to fly to New Halcyon, I had surrendered myself to that force—of luck, or destiny, or whatever you want to call it—and it had been riding in my favor (miraculously so) ever since. I saw no reason to buck the trend.

A horn tooted. A blue subcompact had pulled up in front of the hotel. Janet’s face flashed in the driver’s-side window.

I climbed into the passenger seat. Janet (dressed now in a thick turtleneck sweater and black leggings) had loosened her hair from its ponytail, and the dark tresses lay spread out on her shoulders. She had (I also noticed) touched up her lips with lipstick and applied mascara to her lashes. Again I was reminded of high school, of the mingled lust and terror that came with the first glimpse of your date in her unfamiliar, grown-up, excruciatingly thrilling evening incarnation.

Our destination was a restaurant in Sayer’s Cliff, a scrubby mill town located on the bay at the opposite end of the lake from New Halcyon. So Janet had taken to heart my suggestion that we go somewhere where we would not be observed by her neighbors. I was not exactly sure how to interpret this, so I tried not to. The restaurant, French, proved to be an unpretentious place with wooden beams, oil lamps, checked tablecloths, and travel posters of France tacked to the bare wooden walls. A young woman with plucked brows and a bib apron showed us to a table by a window overlooking the black mountains.

Helped by the bottle of smoky French red that I ordered, we soon found the rhythm of conversation—which had been a little herky-jerky and self-conscious on the twenty-minute drive to the restaurant. Janet talked about her girlhood in Boston, her years at Yale, where she had studied fine art, and her childhood summers in New Halcyon. I lightly sketched my background, describing my migration to New York, then segued (making no mention of Stewart, of course) into tales of the Manhattan literary world, giving particular play to dear old Blackie. Laughing, she leaned into the light of the candle that flickered in a small glass bowl on our table, and I could see that she had thrown off all trace of the ambivalence she had shown earlier about this date. It was
me
who was having all the trouble.

She was, of course, everything I had ever hoped for in a woman: an almost eerily exact embodiment of the beautiful artist I had dreamed of meeting during my first months in New York. And yet now that she had appeared before me, I felt powerless to do anything about it. Something (or someone) stood implacably between me and the happiness she represented: Stewart. It was one thing for me to have appropriated his manuscript; it was another to contemplate the appropriation of the woman he had loved. Some instinct of conscience seemed to constrain me, despite the growing feeling I had that Janet wanted nothing more than for me to make a move. I did not make a move, however, and eventually our empty dinner plates were removed from the table and replaced by two cups of decaffeinated coffee. I watched helplessly as she sipped hers and then turned her head on the long stalk of her neck to gaze out the window. I imagined reaching out to smooth back the curtain of glossy dark hair that lay against her cheek, to hook the filaments behind her ear, but I did not do it. At the same time I felt perilously close to blurting out something hysterical like “
I love you
,” then bursting into sobs. Soon it was eleven o’clock, and Janet was looking at her watch and saying how late it had gotten. At this point, things began to move with haste. We were back in the car, rolling along the dark highway, back to New Halcyon. Time was running hopelessly out.

And then it was gone altogether. She pulled into the Pleasant View parking lot. The bikers and farmers whose pickups and choppers had crowded the lot for the past two nights were all gone now. It was midnight on Labor Day. Summer was over.

“There you go,” she said, bringing the nose of her car to rest against the hedge of saplings that screened the parking lot from the highway below. She cranked the emergency brake, then turned to face me across the foot or so of space that separated us across the two front seats. The heater blew warm air over our feet. Her face shone in the glow of the dashboard lights.

“That was really great,” she said as she searched my face for signs of what I was thinking. It was clear that she was now deeply confused by my actions; obviously she had been expecting me to try to initiate further contact or intimacy between us, and yet I had strangely withdrawn. It was with a note of disappointment and forced jollity that she now drew a smile onto her face and said, “Thanks again. But you should have let me pay for half. I was serious.”