Don't I Know You? (2 page)

No, the most remarkable thing about me that summer at Doon was the fact that I was full of longings I couldn't name. I thought these longings had to do with art. And in a way, they did; first loves are partly works of fiction.

Day after day the weather was humid and lethargic, with pulses of sheet lightning in the evenings. All the women dressed skimpily. I had no sense of being pretty, but did feel in possession of some mysterious new power, a little. I noticed that men were willing to take their time with me, to help me out, and that I didn't seem to have to do anything to earn this attention. I believed they were interested in my “talent.”

Then the week ended, the lady painters all left except for me, and the writers arrived. My heart sank. They were an ungainly group: a stooped fellow in a short-sleeved shirt who made claymation films and wished to learn how to write crime novels; a retired Ottawa Valley schoolteacher documenting her dead husband's war experiences; a poet named L'Orren who had actually published her poetry in journals with names like
Axis
and
Penumbra
. L'Orren had a stormy mass of dark hair that she kept capturing in a large saw-toothed barrette and then releasing, like a little animal. She wore black liquid eyeliner and semitransparent Indian shirts with black tights, despite the heat.

There was a playwright, Steve, hoping to improve his dialogue. Also a fellow with cloudy glasses who said that he had been working on his “picaresque sci-fi” novel,
Dark Matter
, for the past four years. I thought he'd said “picturesque.” Dinner that first night was awkward and there was no Ping-Pong afterward.

The next morning, the group gathered on the deep front porch, dragging the wicker chairs into a semicircle. We exchanged names and a few words about our projects then lapsed into silence, waiting for the arrival of John Updike. He was late. “Well, I have some poems I could read,” said L'Orren, but just then a tall, ruddy-faced, bony-shouldered figure dashed up the steps with a stack of books and papers in his arms. He wore khakis and a button-down oxford-cloth shirt with pale blue stripes.

“I apologize, everyone—crossing the border took longer than I expected.” He took in our listless group and patted one of the white faux-colonial columns that framed the porch.

“This is all rather grand. I was expecting little cabins.”

He handed out the week's assignments and a long, long reading list. I recognized a few names—Philip Roth, James Thurber, Marcel Proust. None of which I had read. One woman, Edith Wharton.

L'Orren offered him her chair but he sat on the top step of the porch with his back against a column, smoking a cigarette. He'd been going through customs at Niagara Falls, he explained, when the authorities undertook a very thorough search of his car, an “unremarkable” Ford Falcon.

“I had nothing to hide,” he said, “but I was overwhelmed by a t-tidal wave of irrational g-guilt.”

A stutter! I looked away. What if it triggered mine?

“Everyone feels like a criminal when they cross a border,” said L'Orren. That earned a smile from John Updike.

Our first assignment was to describe one five-minute period in our day. It was to be a close description of what we observed, not our finer emotions, or, God forbid, ideas. “Ideas are easy,” he said. “First, tell me what you
see
.”

What I saw was L'Orren beside me, gazing at the lawn and the push mower that had been abandoned there with avid, writerly eyes, already basking in the radiance of the ordinary. “I thought Art Week was over,” I whispered to her, but her frown shushed me.

He set up appointments with each of us and collected our bits of writing. Then, with a kind of relish, as if describing a good meal, he told us that writing was “mostly an ongoing experience of self-doubt and falling short of the mark.” He laughed, a sharp sound, almost a bray. “But an absolute freedom exists on the blank page, and we must make use of it.”

The next morning after breakfast I found him waiting for me on the steps of the porch, smoking. His way with a cigarette was languid, a little feminine. The day was already still and hot; the cicadas had begun to make the sound that marks the zenith of summer just before the downward tilt.

He fanned the pages I had given him, including my prize-winning senior essay “The Lonely Road.” (“A road is only lonely when there's someone walking down it…”)

“Anything else you want me to read?”

“No, not really,” I said. It was my entire oeuvre. “Except for this.” I opened my notebook to a poem and passed it to him. It was inspired by a
LIFE
magazine photograph of a homeless black man with anger burning in his eyes.

He read it with a pencil in his hand, ticked an image here and there, and put an X through the weeping part. “No tears,” he said, “especially not in poems.” Then he made diagonal slashes to indicate line breaks that would improve the rhythm.

I saw that he was right; a poem was more than fetching similes in a stack of arbitrarily short lines. The point, he suggested gently, was not to put my own sensibility on display but to arouse thoughts and feelings in others. He turned the page to finish the poem and came upon some sketches of the naked model.

“Are these yours?”

I nodded, praying that he wouldn't go further and find the childish cartoons that filled the back of the notebook. But he kept studying the nude.

“This line is strong.” He traced one of her parabolic thighs. “Very graphic. Do you like Edward Hopper?”

“I think so,” I said. I held my breath and he turned the page. There was Mickey Mouse, with his impenetrable black irises and dimpled white three-fingered gloves. There was Donald Duck, having a tantrum as he stomped on his sailor hat, releasing little puffs of dust.

Mortified, I reached for the notebook.

“Don't be embarrassed,” he said. “In college I only wanted to become a cartoonist—writing was my second choice.” He tapped the page. “I am jealous of your Mickey.”

“My father taught me how. You start with the three circles, ears and head.”

“Is he an artist?”

“No, but when he was young he was really good at drawing. The local newspaper published his cartoons.”

“So you have his gift.”

“He even got a job offer from Walt Disney when he was nineteen, but he couldn't afford the trip down for the interview.”

“Too bad, you'd make a good California girl. What did he end up doing?”

“Engineering. He said there wasn't much call for cartoonists on the prairies, in the D-D-D-Depression.”

There. It had happened. But John Updike said nothing, only asked if I had written about my father.

“No. After that he just worked, got married, had us kids, and things like that. Ordinary stuff.” He nodded.

“But to write well about the ordinary stuff—that's the hard part, don't you think? To give the mundane its beautiful due.”

He flipped back to my stories and ticked the phrase “lozenge-shaped” to describe a patch of sunlight. He approved of my yearbook's typeface. “It's Dutch, from the seventeenth century. Not often used these days.” He liked my description of crows on a hydro wire looking like musical notes on a staff, “although crows are not really
round
, are they?”

I found his attention to my lines—more attention than I had devoted to them in the first place—both pleasing and unsettling. It also made me acutely aware of my outfit that day, the blue-and-white capri pants and a blue sleeveless top with white rickrack along the bottom. For the first time I questioned my fondness for things that matched.

“I like that,” he said pointing toward the white trim. “Does it have a name?

“Rickrack.”

“Rickrack.” He smiled.

“My mother sews. She's always adding stuff to my clothes.”

“You're lucky. I have an embellishing mother too.”

Then L'Orren banged through the screen door behind us, impatient for her appointment. She carried a thick three-ring binder and smelled of patchouli oil. I ducked past her into the coolness of the foyer.

Before lunch I went into the gallery to play the piano as usual and found John Updike examining one of Horatio Walker's tornado-green landscapes. He beckoned me over.

“There's more than a little Constable going on here, don't you think?”

Why did he assume I understood all his references? Didn't he know any normal seventeen-year-olds?

“Especially that figure in the red hunting jacket,” he said, pointing to a man on horseback, scarcely visible.

“Well,
seeing things
is not my forte,” I said.

“What makes you think so?”

Then I told him about the failed red stairs in the forest.

“Are you sure about that? Why don't you show it to me?”

Reluctantly, but already excited, I went upstairs to the dorm, where I had turned the botched canvas against the wall. I brought it down to John Updike, who held it at arm's length for some time. I had to look away. I saw nothing in it but turbulent, vegetal mud, with a raw geometry of scarlet in the middle, a gash.

“I like what you chose to paint,” he began carefully. “The way it juxtaposes the human and natural worlds.”

“You mean the barn and the trees?”

His hand floated across the bottom of the canvas, as if painting over it.

“The foreground is a little nebulous, but the overall sense of gloom is good.”

“The forest makes me nervous.”

“That much is clear.”

“I don't hate this part”—I pointed to a troubled triangle of sky visible through the tree branches—“even though it's that weird yellow.”

“You're very adventurous. A chrome-yellow sky would never occur to me.”

“Well, I only brought eight tubes of paint. Some of the others have that many different shades of red.”

He gave the canvas back to me.

“I know a little something about this, you know,” he said. “I spent a year at art school in England after college. If you like, I could help you. You shouldn't give up on this so easily.”

Was he saying that my writing was hopeless?

“I don't know. Art Week's technically over.” In the next room, the waitresses dashed the cutlery onto the long tables, setting up.

“Let's go find your stairs after lunch. I could use the walk.”

“Okay. Maybe Emilio would lend me extra paints.”

“I wouldn't involve Emilio if I were you. Meet me down by the mailboxes, where the lawn ends.”

I raced back upstairs, where L'Orren was sprawled on her bed, writing in a notebook. She gave me a searching look but I said nothing, only changing out of my capris into something that would protect my legs in the woods.

*   *   *

Lunch was salmon patties, potato salad, and the fat, cushion-shaped tomatoes that Emilio grew behind the painting studio. John listened politely to the war widow beside him as she discussed the architecture of Normandy. He sent me a look, not quite a wink. Then everyone drifted away for Individual Work Period. I gathered up my paints and canvas and went down to the mailboxes. All empty.

He had changed into a polo shirt with a logo on the pocket, a little black man golfing. His forearms were golden-haired and deeply tanned; this was from walking on the beach, he said. He and his family lived near the ocean, north of Boston. His wife, Mary, stayed at home with their four children.

“Holy cow,” I said, “that's a lot.”

He laughed. “Yes, it is. That's partly why we left Manhattan for the suburbs. That and the fact that New York is overstocked with writers and agents and other weisenheimers.”

The forest, crosshatched with deadfall and nettles, was not easily penetrated. I showed him the shy white three-petaled trilliums, the “provincial flower,” illegal to pick. We struggled on.

I had a moment of panic when I couldn't find the stairs. Had I invented them? But once we had leaped over a boggy ditch, there it was, the ghost barn with its dark cavity. One slumped wall remained, like the hindquarters of a lame animal.

“I see what you mean,” Updike said. “Nice.”

As I set up my easel he sat nearby on a stony ledge, the remnants of some enclosure. The staircase seemed duller and less meaningful to me than before.

“If I can suggest something,” he said. “When you look at it, try to banish the words ‘stairs' or ‘barn.' Just keep looking and let what you see flow onto the canvas.”

I did as he said and it helped. I lost track of the literal thing and only received its presence in the dappled, trembling light of the forest. The stairs became shrine-like—an Incan altar or a broken letter of the alphabet, some forlorn human shape rising out of green decay.

John sat in silence as I painted. Not silence—birds darted among the treetops and sang their repetitive, ardent songs. We shared a spell, the charm of work going along. I no longer felt apart from things.

When we emerged from the forest I held the newly wet canvas away from my white pants. I stole another glance at it; yes, it was better, it was all right now. It might even be the beginning of a story, although its meaning was still obscure to me.

As we crossed the deep sward of grass I saw with a sinking heart that Emilio was in his glass-walled studio, painting. He glanced up and gave us a curt nod.

“See you at dinner,” John said with a little salute as we parted.

*   *   *

That night, after the expedition to the Shell station to throw stones at the sign, as everyone was heading for bed, John Updike came to the foot of the stairs.

“Miss McEwan?” he called up to the dorm. I think he meant this as a joke about our teacher-student relationship.

I came halfway down the stairs.

“I brought these for you.”

He handed me a short-story collection, including one by him, and a slim anthology of Canadian poetry called
Love Where the Nights Are Long.
“I just reviewed this,” he said, wagging the poetry, “and thought you might like it.”