Cascade (9 page)

She was in bed when she heard the car pull into the driveway, the back door opening, the sound of rustling downstairs. She opened her bedside drawer and gazed down at the thermometer, closing her thumb and
forefinger around the cool glass. How easy it would be to snap it, to release the puddle of mercury, to say, yes, Asa, I’m ready for all that you want. But she shut the drawer and shut her eyes, slid under the sheets, and pretended to sleep until he came in and turned out the light and pretended to sleep, too.

She woke to morning sun and the scent of soap, to the breeze of his body standing over her. He sat down on the edge of the bed; he took her hand. The pads of his fingers were rough where they made contact with the stone pestle day after day.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have taken my frustrations out on you.”

Thanks, she started to say.

“But here’s the thing,” he said. “I think it might be best if Jacob Solomon didn’t come here anymore.”

She moved to sit up, to look him clearly in the face. “Asa, we’ve done nothing wrong.”

“I didn’t say you had.”

What, then? “Has someone said something?”

“I’m saying something, saying I don’t think it’s the best idea for my wife to be alone with a man who shares her interests. It’s a recipe for disaster, and I think I’ve had my head in the sand about it.”

“But it’s our work we have in common. He’s just a friend.”

His eyes were steady. “I’m not stupid, Dez.”

No, he wasn’t. But neither was she, and she forced herself to hold his gaze, to show her innocence. She’d been careful. She hadn’t done a thing wrong and there was no reason why she should have to give up her friendship. “You can think what you like but you’re wrong. And he’ll be gone soon enough anyway.”

“I don’t care. I don’t want him here.” He got to his feet. “And that’s the end of the matter.”

“But he’s coming today. What am I supposed to say?”

“Say anything. Tell him—tell him you want to meet in town from now on. Maybe you could start something, Art Hour or something. Ask Betty
if you can run it at the library. That’s it. Get other people involved—school kids—send some kind of message to the state, do up some posters maybe.” He looked to her for approval, pleased with the idea. “Now, there’s a way you can help. We’ve got to fight this any way we can. I’ve actually decided to band a few people together to figure out a way to fight this. The men in this town who won’t buckle under.”

And then he was gone, turned on his heels, down the stairs, and out the door. And like echo was the memory of Abby’s voice:
Asa’s house. Asa’s money. He even has your playhouse.

S
he heard Jacob’s knock vaguely, as if from under water. Then again, louder. “In the studio,” she called, rubbing paint from her fingers with an oily rag, rehearsing what to say.
Asa’s asked me to ask you not to come here anymore
.
Asa’s starting to get concerned about the time we’re spending together.
It all sounded so awkward; it would force them to imagine an intimacy that would embarrass them both.

And then there he was, standing in the doorway, hat in his hands. “Hello.”

“Hello.” It was always like this to start: quiet, cordial, eyes connecting. It was as if they acknowledged something they couldn’t put into words or act on, then moved forward with civility, as modern people, a man and woman who could simply be friends.

Or maybe she imagined all that.

In any case, they were easy with each other. She stepped away to reveal her canvas, to ask what he thought. And as he studied the new painting, she, with the fresh perspective that even a few minutes could
give, saw how the light would need to fall much more significantly on that foremost blade of grass. The viewer’s eye needed to be drawn to that blade, forced to reflect on how alike it was to all the others, while still uniquely itself. She needed to add something, a drop of dew perhaps, glistening and fat.

“If you add some aureolin yellow to the undersides of that blade, some flake white to the tip, just there,” he said, pointing, “you’ll get the intensity you’re after. Without the muddiness.” He tipped his head as if to say,
Go on
.

She did what he suggested and the look of the blade changed—it became more dimensional, more emphatic, more what she was after. “That’s it! I want the viewer to first look and see ‘grass,’ and then look closer and mull on the fact that this blade—here—is different. And to wonder why. But I have to make it stand out even more, don’t you think? I thought of adding dew, and one of my thumbnails had the river as backdrop, but I have such a hard time with water.” She gestured to the west window, with its view to the river as it curved sharply toward town. River water was ever-changing and now the weather had been mild enough that it was flowing freely, the last specks of winter ice evaporated.

“Water’s hard.” The sun peeked out and a patch of river briefly sparkled white, as if to make his point. “And there’s no ‘right way,’ of course. But what you want to do is look for its different colors,” he said. “Differentiate them. There’s the color of the sun’s reflection, first of all, which will hit at sharper angles than the color of the sky’s reflection, or the clouds’. You ask yourself, is the water transparent? Here, we’re too far away to worry about whether we can see the bottom, but if we were closer, it would affect the color we chose. You ask yourself, what color are the shadows? Because each ripple casts its own distinct shadow.”

How easily he made suggestions, articulated techniques. But he shrugged as if it were nothing. “Lincoln taught me about water.”

“The image I have of Lincoln Bell is so far removed from ‘patient teacher.’” No one had known Lincoln Bell, never mind studied with him,
but Jacob’s father had somehow finagled an agreement, driving his son down two hours of dirt roads and at least two flat tires a trip to Lincoln Bell’s Connecticut studio once a week, from the time he was sixteen until he went down to New York in 1926.

“Oh, he wasn’t nearly so ornery as the public believed.” He went quiet, almost somber, and she wondered if bringing up Lincoln Bell had somehow been a mistake. “But people often want to believe the worst of people, don’t they?”

“I suppose they do,” she said uncertainly.

He looked away with an attempt at a smile. “Sorry. It’s just that we got some bad news from my cousin Brieghel today.”

Jacob never talked about Berlin—he had plenty of stories about the print shop in Amsterdam, and Spain, which he’d loved, and London, where he had stopped to earn traveling money. But about Berlin, where he’d spent months with Brieghel and his wife, he’d said almost nothing at all.

“What news?”

He shook his head as if he’d rather not elaborate, and Dez’s mind turned to the latest stories coming out of Germany, the kinds of stories you read sidelong in the newspaper, sliding away from the words even as you took them in, telling yourself that things couldn’t really be as bad as they were made out to be.

“So everyone’s talking about the big meeting next week,” he said.

“There’s a very good chance they’ll take Whistling Falls, but Jacob, is your cousin all right?”

He chewed his upper lip, as if deciding whether to speak. Then he said, “His wife wants to leave. She thinks they should get to England while the getting is good.”

“It’s really that bad? Will they go?”

“He’s going to give it a few more months, through the summer, hope for the best. In the meantime, try to put money aside. That shop is everything to them.”

“You must worry.”

“He doesn’t think it can go much further. I guess a lot of people don’t. They think the Nazis are preposterous, and deluded if they think they can get away with all this. I was there during that boycott of Jewish shops and businesses, and it was all very unpleasant but no one really took it seriously.”

Still. “It must have been terrible,” she said quietly.

His face seemed to shadow. Dez would one day try to sketch that shadow—it was a certain lowering of his eyelids, a setting of his lips.

He walked over to the window, put his hands in his pockets, and looked out for a few moments. Then he spun around with an air of decisiveness. “Let’s talk of pleasant things,” he said. “Did your friend end up coming?”

“She did, and I was thinking this morning that it seems like more than just yesterday that she was here.” When weather changed abruptly, transitioning to another season within hours, time felt altered. Abby arrived during what still felt like winter, and then in a matter of hours, spring had arrived with warm wind and rainstorms. Even now, the room was darkening with another spring storm.

“I’m a bit concerned about her. She doesn’t have a job to go to, doesn’t have any money.”

“Brave of her. Or foolish.”

“That’s what I thought. Although, it almost seemed like she was hiding something. I don’t know.”

“Maybe she has a fancy man.” He smiled at her surprise. “Is she that kind of girl?”

“She did say she would model if she had to.”

“Well, there you go.”

Dez wondered if she’d been naïve. Maybe a secret lover was the reason Abby had been so reticent. “She does pride herself on being a bit wild. Her only definite plan was to join the Art Students League.”

“Is she talented?”

“A bit too derivative perhaps, but she’s good, yes.” She headed to the shelf where she’d put Abby’s sketch, then stopped herself. Asa had nailed that right; she was a bit embarrassed by it.

“Dr. Proulx commissioned another painting,” he said. “He seems to have taken an interest in me. I’m not sure why, I don’t have the most colorful palette in the world, and his taste seems to run to the less gritty side of life.”

Dr. Proulx’s waiting room was filled with paintings, including Dez’s
After Rain
. “Oh, he’s such a big-hearted soul. I think he’d buy a scribble from the traveling man.” She realized what she was saying before it finished coming out of her mouth. “Not you, of course—”

But Jacob laughed.

“You look like his son.” Paul Proulx, killed by a sniper while stringing telegraph wire along the western front. She had only snippets of memory, but there had been something similarly smoldering and intense about Paul.

“Yes, he’s told me. He talks about him a good deal. Well, he’s asked me for a Jewish painting, whatever that means.”

She smiled as if she was in on “whatever that means.” But all this talk of Jewishness raised questions—simple, curious questions—that she didn’t feel were polite to ask. What was it to be Jewish?

He walked over to the bookshelf and lifted down Portia’s casket. “Maybe I’ll paint him a Shylock, with all of Shakespeare’s ambiguity.” He gave the box a shake and turned it upside down. “I wonder where I’ll be,” he said, almost to himself, “the night you open this.”

Why did she feel startled? “It would be nice if you were in the audience,” she said, even as it struck her how unlikely that really was. In New York, he would be a world away. He would make the trip to see his family maybe once or twice a year. They lived in Springfield, more than an hour from Cascade. A visit to Cascade would have to be planned, fit in. It would never happen. They would lose touch.

“Well, I’ll certainly try,” he said, “and hopefully someday you’ll attend
some gallery opening of mine. Who knows? Maybe someday you’ll move to New York too, like you always thought you would.”

“Asa would never move to New York.” The utter, depressing truth. And now was the time to say it, to tell him Asa didn’t want him to come anymore. She couldn’t get her tongue around it.

“He may have to move somewhere.”

“It’s still more likely they’ll take Whistling Falls, don’t you think? And Dr. Proulx and his partners have spent this entire past year building a golf course. Those men
must
know something. Why would they invest in it otherwise?”

“No idea.”

“They must be certain—”

“Nothing in this world is ever certain, Dez.” He said it mildly; he was simply stating a fact.

“Well, regardless, the clubhouse is already open. It’s beautiful. Have you been up to see it?”

“No,” he said, with a clipped chill in his voice that confused her until it hit her what it meant, and then she became an idiot who babbled. “I just don’t think the kind of men who built it would have invested in something unless they knew the reservoir
wasn’t
coming. Some kind of privileged information.”

The subject needed changing. She jumped up and planted herself in front of her easel. “Add something,” she said boldly. “Whatever you think. I’m curious—this canvas is just an experiment.”

He stayed where he was, demurring, and she said, even more boldly—it was so unlike her to be this bold, especially with him—that it seemed important that if someone was trying to express a truth they couldn’t quite get, well, if someone else could help, why not? “What is the point of art, anyway? To feel things only for yourself, or to somehow share these raptures and insights?” God, she sounded ridiculous. She pushed the brush, one of her Senneliers from Paris, into his hand. Their fingers met, and she had to look away to hide her feelings.

“Such a perfect brush,” he said. The handle was extralong burnished wood, with cupped filbert hog bristles.

“Isn’t it?” In Paris, she’d loved Sennelier, its cramped aisles, loved opening tubes of paint and inhaling them, fingers itching to squeeze them. Paris was a memory even more remote than Boston. Not quite real anymore, that year and a half of classes, the school’s high-domed studio, sharing the tiny rue de Fleurus flat with the wry and wonderful Jane Park from Bristol.

Jacob would be like this, and soon: gone, turned to a memory, not quite real.

“Okay, then.” He slipped his thumb through her palette and went after the tips of grass, the brush poised between his fingers, feathering the paint to the canvas. As he worked, he caught the tip of his tongue between his teeth. His lips were sharply cut, the lower lip full and dark, and watching him paint suddenly seemed the most erotic thing Dez had ever seen. She flushed instinctively, hard and red, then thought:
It’s okay to look, to admire.
I’m doing nothing wrong
.