Five Smooth Stones (77 page)

"Hunter. Tea? I can make it. Biscuits from a tin I can give you—"

"No. Having made a colossally stupid remark, I might as well follow through and not back away from it."

"No!"

He paid no attention to her protest, drew up his legs, folding long arms around them, resting his chin on a knee.

"You look like a blond satyr," said Sara.

"I have earlobes. I understand satyrs don't. Besides, who's ever heard of a Negro satyr?" His eyes narrowed to blue slits, showing no expression. "How you making it, young Kent?"

"Fine. Just fine and dandy and peachy-keen, you—you prying bastard!"

"I am, I know. The only reason I'm concerned is because—"

"I know, I know. Because you're fond of me. Keep your damned fondness! I don't mean that, Hunter; I don't, truly. But keep your concern. I'm not such an idiot I don't know that it takes time. And more time. And more—"

"With you and David time isn't the answer."

"Of course it is."

"No. Why'd you do it, Sara?"

"I didn't, Hunter. He did. For God's sake, why don't you mind your own business! How long will you be in London?"

Hunter laughed. "Are you hoping I'll say 'only a few minutes'? Sara, I don't blame you for blasting off. I saw Chuck Martin last week, and he says he's given David hell several times. Now I'm giving you hell. And to answer your question I'll be here two or three weeks. Then to the States again for a few weeks. And I repeat, why'd you do it?"

Sara walked to the end of the long, narrow studio, began fooling with brushes and a palette. Hunter watched her without speaking. When she took off the apron she was wearing and slipped into a paint-smeared smock, he said, "A hint?"

"Only if you'll stay in your own backyard and don't ask questions there aren't any answers to—"

"Like 'why did you do it?' "

Suddenly her mood changed. She tried desperately to cling to the exasperation that had been close to anger, felt it slipping away and giving over to an accustomed pain she could not hold back.

"We squabble so, Hunter, yet whenever I see you—and you always burst in unexpectedly—I go all mush inside with pleasure. So basically I suppose I think of you as one of my" —she hesitated, then went on determinedly—"no, one of
our
best friends. David's and mine. Hunter, listen, please. Please.
I didn't do it.
Yes, I'm the one who packed up and took off, but still I didn't do it. Can't you understand, Hunter? Do I have to—to put a fresh canvas on that easel and paint a picture for you?"

"No, baby." There was an unaccustomed softness in Hunter's voice. "It would show Sara being Sara, all loving and giving. And David being David, all loving and nongiving. And Sara being Sara, it's not good enough. And David being David, it's not good enough either, but he thinks the alternative would be worse. He's ambivalent, spoiled, mixed up, and very much in love with Sara Kent.... Don't look at me like that, baby; you blind me.... You haven't been doubting it?"

"After all this time? I wouldn't be human if I hadn't. At least now and then. A woman likes to
know
these things. Every day—oh, God, every hour!"

Hunter sighed. "Almost you convince me of love."

Sara smiled across the room at him. "You'll never be a real, honest-to-God cynic, my pet. Not about love. You grew up with it."

"You mean my mother and father?"

"Certainly."

He shrugged. "All right. Two exceptions. My mother and father. You and David. And I suppose there are some other examples too."

"Certainly there are."

"You know something, Sara? It's difficult to explain, but in that area it's a hell of a lot easier for a two-feet-on-the-ground, brown-skin, race-proud Negro like David than it is for the likes of me. Someday I'm going to get a mini-motion-picture camera and conceal it in my necktie just to catch, forever, the changing expressions on a woman's face when she discovers the guy she's attracted to is the son of a famous Negro statesman. Travis isn't such an unusual name that it's always spotted."

"Stupid nitwits." She laughed, a delighted giggle. "Hunter, oh, Hunter me darlin', I hope, hope,
hope
you don't tell 'em till the morning after!"

"You think I'm crazy? Sometimes I wait a whole week. But I always tell them, baby; I always tell them. Mind you, young Kent, a lot of these female characters would fall like a lead weight for a David Champlin, and be frustrated as all hell if he didn't reciprocate. At least to the extent of making a pass at them so they could put on an indignation act for their friends."

"There were two or three at Pengard—"

"The woods are full of them. And every Negro knows it. My drawback isn't that I'm part Negro. It's that I'm white part-Negro. They can't feel noble and self-sacrificing and liberal and all that; and they can't feel the thrill of nonconforming in a big way, and they can't satisfy their sexual curiosity. They're in a hell of a fix. They discover they've had an affair with a Negro with none of the advantages. And, mind you" —he shook his finger at her—"mind you, if they become furious because they've been deceived they brand themselves as bigots."

Sara was still grinning, and there was no sting in her words. "In your own twisted little way you have fun, don't you?"

"Yes, ma'am. Now I'd better go. You wanted to work."

"I did. Now the fire's gone out It's not your fault I'm just tired."

"Been living it up, luv?"

"Some. I—I—"

"It won't work."

"That's what you heard me telling myself when you were outside the door."

"How about showing me some of your stuff? I've been hearing good things, like exhibits and sales—"

Sara walked over to two canvasses tilted against a side wall, brought them back and leaned them against the legs of a large easel at one end of the room. "I don't know that I want to show them to you. You're a rough and knowing critic. I've never forgotten that 'pretty flower basket' crack. It was mean. I never painted one in my life."

"Sorry, luv."

"You were right. That's why I was mad—" She took a canvas showing a just-started picture from the easel and lifted one of the others to it, then stood back and watched Hunter nervously. After a moment he whistled softly, then turned to her, smiling. "You've grown up, baby. Did you do this on the Continent?"

"Yes. After I'd seen a monument to war dead."

The canvas showed an impressionistic, hazy blur of the spring greens and yellows of a quiet stretch of countryside with patches here and there of the brighter colors of wild flowers, and beneath the fields and low hills the rich brown earth from which the tangled roots of trees and meadow growth drew strength. Here and there were modern villas just enough distorted in outline to give the impression that they had been fashioned by the hands of a not too clever child who had then carelessly placed them wherever they could stand without toppling over. The stylized gardens that surrounded them were in sharp and jolting contrast to the vaguely outlined countryside. At first glance that was all. Then Hunter, assessing the nice balance of light and shade, the avoidance of the massing of any element, drew in his breath sharply. Now beneath the greens and soft spring colors and the crooked off-plumb villas could be seen, scattered throughout the dark, concealing earth as though tossed there by an idiot hand, the yellowing bones of men: skulls, rib cages, spines, long bones and knucklebones. And from the hollow eyes, the sockets of the joints, the interstices between the ribs, the disarticulated vertebrae grew the spidery roots of the trees and grass and field flowers, and the prim blossoms in the gardens of the villas. Barely discernible here and there were weapons and military equipment rotting with the bones. Some were modern, some obsolete, identifiable as such in spite of fragmentation. A long tangle of roots had crept around an arrow, and in one skull there was imbedded a Stone Age ax and what seemed at first to be hairlike root tendrils became on longer study the radiating lines of shattered bone.

After a long time Hunter said, "You've been eating meat, baby."

"Those aren't supposed to be the dead of any particular wars—"

"They're the dead of all time for no reason. One wonders why they died, because one can't somehow disassociate them from the crazy stupid little houses, with their crooked little windows and their silly little starched curtains. Who lives in those little houses, Sara?"

She shrugged. "Little people. Little women, little men—"

"The latter next in line for the boneyard? It's good, Sara." He didn't wait for her comment, said, "Give with the other picture, Kent."

She hesitated. "They're probably both real eighteen-karat corn—"

"The safe area between corn and pretentiousness is a narrow one. You have both feet planted on it very firmly." He walked over to her, tilted her chin up with a forefinger. "Listen, pet. Don't let what's happened to you as a woman destroy faith in yourself as an artist."

She placed the picture on the easel hurriedly, almost defiantly. Again Hunter stood quietly, without speaking, until she said, "Well, say something, Stoopid. Even if it's bad."

"Our little Sara," he said lightly.

"Oh, stop! If you can't be anything but patronizing—"

"God forbid!"

The second canvas was as cold and blue-white and devoid of color as the first had been warm and bright. It was a world of snow, and around its edges were the twisted, distorted shadows of unseen trees, yet there was no sun to cast them. They were nightmare shadows, their outlines exaggerated into the cruel, grasping claws and gaping, fang-filled mouths of beasts that lurked beyond sight. In a lower corner stood a tiny, defiant figure, naked and brown, that of a Negro boy-child. He stood facing the blue-white sweep of snow and the menacing shadows, chubby legs slightly spaced, one small foot advanced, half buried in the snow, little fists clenched in dimpled defensiveness. Again Sara had set definitely outlined form against an impressionistic background, and made the starkness of the form a head-on collision with reality. The eerie whiteness of the snow and the warm flesh tones of the child made Hunter shiver, his own flesh chilling and goosepimpling.

"You may catch hell from the critics," he said. "You're not fashionable. But my God, they're good. Are you going to exhibit them?"

"I'm going to try. You've given me courage."

"I'd like that one—the little boy—for my father."

"You think he'd like it?"

"I think he'd flip. So would my mother."

"You're not just being good friend Hunter Travis?"

"No. If you want, I won't tell him about it, just wait till it's exhibited and take him to the gallery. I won't even tell him who did it. Now how about taking off that monstrosity you're wearing that makes you look nine months pregnant, and going to lunch with me? We might run by and see my mother afterward. She says you've only called once since you got here."

***

After lunch Hunter leaned back and lit a cigarette, waiting for coffee. Sara made a face at him from across the table. "You always look so damned elegant. You don't use a long cigarette holder, but you always manage to look as though you're using one."

Hunter sighed. "I'm overcompensating. Sara, you're in London to establish a root or two, aren't you?"

"I rather have to pick someplace, Hunter, and London's it. If they sneer at my foreign accent here, they're too polite to do it openly, in the French manner. And I love the city. My next choice is Copenhagen, but the language, Hunter! Besides, here I see people from home now and then."

"You still say 'home.'"

"I feel rootless there, too. Now. Did you know my father is going to marry again?"

"No. Mean old stepmother?"

"Real grand person. But. They plan to sell the house and buy a cooperative apartment. It's—God, Hunter, it's a desolate feeling."

"I can see how it would be. Now, mind if I talk about David for a minute?"

"I can't very well stop you. It's gratuitous—"

"Like hell it is. You're a living, quivering question mark from head to foot."

"I am not!"

"I'm learning to recognize it in both of you, that unspoken 'Have you seen him?' 'Have you seen her?' I wasn't born to be a middleman, but it's been thrust upon me. I may regard David Champlin as an advanced case of adult infantilism in certain areas of his thinking, but I'm fond of him—"

"He's in Boston?"

"Of course he's in Boston," said Hunter crossly. "Where did you think he'd be? I saw him about six weeks ago there. And did he ask about you?"

"I didn't ask—"

"To answer your question, no, he didn't exactly ask. But he managed to extract the information that you were in Denmark. Which you were, then. And which is, I suppose, where he thinks you are now. Sara, when you did that big renunciation bit, did you think that David might, just might, come trotting over here?"

"I knew he couldn't. And I knew I couldn't get back there without yelling for help to my family. And don't make nasty cracks like 'big renunciation bit.' It wasn't phony. If it had been, I'd have gone to New York or someplace where he could get to me."

"Well, he can now."

"How? Why now any more than then?"

"You knew Professor Knudsen died?"

"Aunt Eve wrote me about it."

"And left David a fairish—more than fairish—legacy?"

"Hunter! How wonderful!"

"I don't know whether it is or not. He's heading for Oxford in the fall, in a couple of months to be exact. Political science and international law. That jolts you?"

"Yes. I didn't dream—go on, Hunter."

"That's about it. I'm not sure about his motives. He thinks you're in Denmark—which is only a neighborly distance away. Unless he's going in for politics or diplomacy, he needs political science and international law at this point about as much as he needs an extra set of teeth. What he needs now is a couple of years sound, hard practice of law. So—I don't know. And to be honest, I don't think he knows himself."

"He's wanted to do that for a long time, Hunter."

"That doesn't prove anything. You've been coming over here for a long time. I become jittery, pet, when almost everything a guy wants, and far more than he could expect, falls into his lap."