I Cannot Get You Close Enough (26 page)

“There's plenty to do. She's got books she has to read.”

“I guess she and King are hitting it off pretty well. I saw them the other day out for a walk.”

“Well, his girlfriend's on her way.” Traceleen whipped a small white cotton blouse off the ironing board and laid it on a chair. Then she took up a little blue skirt and began on that.

“Are you mad at me too?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “I certainly am. You know better than to do the way you're doing. You know it isn't right.”

“What isn't right? What are you talking about?”

“You know what I'm talking about. You know what I mean.”

Traceleen was right. I had traded in my best friend for a mess of pottage. I had rented my house in Seattle for the summer and I didn't have any work waiting and nowhere to go. I had one thousand, seven hundred and fifty dollars to last for three months and now I had fouled my summer's nest. I walked down to the tennis court and found Alan. He was practicing with Joe Romaine. I watched for a while, waiting for them to take a break. King wandered down and then Andria showed up.

“Alan,” I said finally. “Could I talk to you?” He laid his tennis racket against the net and came over to where I was.

“What do you need?” he asked.

“Let's go over here,” I said. I led him over to a little stagnant fish pond beside the path. King was watching us. The whole time we were talking King stared at us without blinking.

“Look, Alan,” I said. “I need to talk. Crystal's furious with me. She knows something's happened. Did you say anything to her?”

“No. God, no. And don't you. Look, I have to finish practicing with Joe, Lydia. Couldn't this wait?”

“She wants you to leave by Friday. Did she tell you that?”

“Joe and I are going up to Canada anyway. I don't care what Crystal does, Lydia. She invited us up here. We didn't ask to come.” He bounced a tennis ball with his racket on the stone beside the pond. Bounce, bounce, bounce.

“I'm really worried about all this.”

“Well, don't be. Just forget it. I have to get back to the court.” He was walking away. He just turned his back and walked away. I looked at King. He was glaring now. Crystal's glare. He looks so much like her it's amazing. I don't know about the Hands and Mannings. No matter who they marry the children all come out left-handed and with those eyes.

That was the night of the Terrible Supper. Traceleen had sent to town for fried chicken from the take-out place and there was salad and bread and store-bought cake and ice cream for dessert. We ate in the dining room on gold-banded china with ancient Strasbourg silver and crystal water glasses. There was German wine in heavy leaded wineglasses. There was a thick white linen tablecloth and cloth napkins and candles on the table. Then Traceleen brought out the chicken on a silver platter. Here we were, in all this baronial splendor, eating fried chicken from a take-out place. Crystal wanted Traceleen to eat with us but she wouldn't do it. Andria ate with us but Traceleen disappeared into the kitchen. As soon as she had food on her plate Crystal Anne disappeared too. Later, when I went to the kitchen to bring out the ice cream for the cake, there they were, the two of them, sitting at the breakfast-room table eating fried chicken and watching a National Geographic special about Canadian bears.

“You should be here,” I told Noel, when I called her later that night. “You could get a nurse to bring you on a plane. Hire an RN and get on a plane and come and watch. You owe it to yourself.”

“What's happening?” she said.

“Traceleen won't eat at the table but Andria will. Andria's in love with King. I fucked Alan and Crystal knows it. I guess that's all for now.”

“You didn't do that, oh, Lydia, say that isn't true.”

“It's true. I couldn't help it. My life's a mess, Noel. I've made all the wrong choices. It's done. I've completely ruined my life. This summer is just one more example.”

“‘We make the best choices we can based on the information we have available at the moment.' It's all we can do. We don't know enough. We never know enough. You didn't know enough. Don't do it again.”

“What's that from? Was that in a play?”

“No, I think that's from Redmond.” She giggled. Redmond was a psychiatrist she used to go to. She was in the habit of crediting him with anything she said that she didn't want to take credit for.

“Say it again.”

“It means you aren't to blame. But don't do it anymore, Lydia. Apologize to Crystal. Make it up to her.
Tell The Truth.”

“I tell the truth. I'm the only one in this little summer operation who would recognize the truth if it hit them in the face.”

“Good. You be good, Lydia. Please be good.” Her sweet old voice was drifting off. I supposed she had taken the night's supply of Valium and lithium and whatever else they are drugging her with these days. “I love you,” I said into the receiver, hoping she would hear it.

“Love you too, darling girl,” she whispered. Then she was gone.

Telling the goddamn truth. I had to wait until morning to do it. I didn't sleep all night, tossed and turned on the hard wooden bed. About four o'clock I got up and searched all over the kitchen for a Sears catalog. I had decided to order some mattresses for the beds. All that goddamn silver and crystal and gold-banded china and the beds were as lumpy as a girls' camp. I couldn't find the catalog and I remembered I was broke so I ate half a coffee cake instead. She gets fried chicken at a take-out place and makes butter pecan coffee cakes and leaves them in the refrigerator to ruin my life. Why was I mad at Traceleen? I ate the coffee cake and drank a glass of milk and went back upstairs and tried to do some Zen. Something must have worked because I slept finally from four until seven. At seven-thirty I came downstairs again. I was wearing an old chenille robe I found in a closet. Sackcloth and ashes. I found Crystal in the kitchen and dragged her out to the yard. She had on a seersucker robe that was almost as matronly as the one I was wearing. What had happened to us? Could we bear it? Would we hold up? I looked up into the great pine trees on the lawn. I could hear the sea. The beginning of wisdom, I prayed. Just a glimmer of light will do. Light at the end of the tunnel. Light coming down through the cell wall. “Crystal, listen to me. Forgive me. I slept with him. Okay, I did it. It isn't even worth talking about. I'm sorry. I'm sorry as I can be. Forgive me.” I tried to take her hands but she pulled away. She walked farther down the lawn, moving toward the ocean. “I'm begging you,” I said. “You're the best friend I've ever had. You have to forgive me. Please forgive me. It didn't mean a thing. What can I do?”

“You can't do anything. It's done.” She wasn't looking at me. I could see her shoulders going up and down beneath her robe. I have always loved her shoulders so much. I have always wanted to paint her but she never would commission me to do it. That's it, I thought. I will paint a magnificent painting of her and give it to her for a present. Whether she forgives me or not, I will paint her and send it to her.

“Why are you looking at me that way?” she said.

“Because I want to paint you. Like that, in that robe.”

“Oh, bullshit, Lydia. You won't pull that with me. I've seen you do that too many times.”

“I wasn't pulling anything. I meant it. I want to paint you.”

“Lydia, you fucked Alan, okay. I wouldn't have done that to you in a million years and you fucked him.”

“I'm so sorry. I'm trying to say I'm sorry.”

“Sorry isn't enough.”

“Well, Traceleen's coming. Don't talk about it anymore. I don't want her hearing this.” She was right. Here came Traceleen running down across the lawn, coming to protect, God knows what, Western Civilization.

“Miss Crystal,” she was calling. “Come here, honey. Mr. Manny is calling you. He says he needs to talk to you on the phone.”

So we were saved for the moment. I walked down to the sea and tried to decide what to do. I walked all the way to the water and in up to my knees, holding up my robe, not caring if all the Yankees in Maine saw me and sent the sheriffs.

Something happened to me while I fumed in the ocean. I began to want to paint. I ran back to my room and started making sketches for a painting of Crystal. I hadn't worked in so long I could barely tolerate the emotion. My work had been so dogged and uninspired for several years. Now, suddenly, worn out from no sleep and with a headache coming on, I was drawing as if I had never stopped. Sitting by a window looking out on the flat, uninspiring midday ocean, black and cold, totally uninviting grave of a sea, Anna's grave, I had a vision of Crystal as the prototype of all the southern women I had ever known, worn out from dreaming of perfect worlds, perfect lives, perfect lovers, husbands, children, friends. While the life of the world went on she stopped a moment to look down and gather strength before she went back to motion and to dreaming.

That afternoon I cleaned out the studio over the garage and the next day I began to paint.

So I decided not to leave. To hell with Crystal. It was Noel's house, not hers, and besides, Alan was supposed to leave on Tuesday so that was solved. I stretched a canvas, laid out my paints, swept the floor. On Tuesday Alan announced he was staying a few more days. I tacked a diagram to the easel, got out my computer, figured the perspective, altered the angles, began to paint the face. On Wednesday I went to the studio at dawn, stood in the corners of the room and thought about it. Turned the canvas upside down, went over my litany, “Paint as if you were dying,” “Leonardo always seemed to tremble when he began to paint.” “Draw, Francesco, draw, Francesco, draw and do not waste time.”

After a while I left the studio and went down and helped Traceleen start breakfast. Then I walked down to the beach, past the old abandoned boathouse to a spit of rocky land called Druid's Perch. I was thinking about Crystal. It was her fault for having Alan here and introducing him to me. For telling me what a great lover he was. Fuck Crystal, I was thinking. Who does she think she is?

I walked out past a local man folding nets on the sand. He raised his eyebrows at my bathing suit. It wasn't
that
risqué. He kept on looking at me, though, which made me madder. How dare he judge me, look at me. I stuck my nose up in the air and walked around behind the largest of the rocks, thinking I would find a place to look out toward the sea.

“Lydia.” It was Crystal. She was already there. With Alan by her side. So now she would think I was following them.

“Oh, Crystal,” I said, stupidly. “I didn't know anyone was here.”

“We came at six. We decided to watch the morning come. Alan's leaving today.”

“So sorry to hear it. Well, I guess I'll be getting back to the house. I was just trying to keep that old bastard with the nets from looking at my legs.”

“Stay if you want to.”

I looked toward Greenland, thought of the birth of icebergs, of the paltriness of man's life on earth, after all, what was there to it? What was there to lose?

“No, because you're mad at me for fucking Alan. It didn't mean a thing, did it, Alan? It was less important than a fly, the death of a fly. I should have gone home the afternoon it happened and I didn't. Well, I've had enough. I'm definitely going now.”

“Oh, God,” Alan said, and got up and dove in and started swimming out as fast as he could go.

“Oh, God,” I said.

“He's okay,” Crystal answered. “He could swim to England if he wanted to. Well, don't leave Maine because of me. It's not my house. It's Noel's house. She invited you.”

“She only got me to come to bring her some goddamn papers of Anna's. It's all about Anna, Crystal. The reason all of us are here. Some stuff Anna wrote her that she wants. Poems and letters and things.”

“That isn't why she asked me. Noel is my friend.” She had stood up and was putting on a blouse.

“I guess we are enemies now,” I said.

“I don't know, Lydia. I really don't know.” She turned those steely ice-blue eyes on me.

“Stop hating me,” I said. “It's yourself you hate. It isn't me. It's you and Alan and me. I'm a victim as much as you and so is he.”

“Do you really believe that?” She shook her head. Then she started climbing back over the rocks. I followed her. Alan was still swimming away. Maybe he was going to England.

“I'm going to town and buy some clothes,” she said. “I'm going to spend some money.”

“I'm really leaving,” I said. “I'm going to call and get a reservation.”

“Then go on, I won't stop you.” We strode back to the house and I went upstairs and called the airport in Rockland and got a seat on the first plane out the next day. Then I packed. This time I really did it. I wrapped my shoes in paper and put them in the bottom of my canvas bag. I folded each blouse and skirt and rolled them and stored them on top of the shoes. I went out to the studio and started to roll up the canvas of Crystal. So far it was only sketched in and the face half painted. Then I decided to leave it there. One day she would come out to the studio and see it and know what she had missed. I cleaned off a brush and mixed some lavender paint, very pale, far outside the field of blue, lavender that was almost white. I painted one fold down the center of the sketched-in robe. Then I cleaned the brush and left it there.

I went back to the house and climbed the back stairs and went down the hall to the library and got a book and took it upstairs and lay down on the bed to read. It was an old book by this Scandinavian named Par Lagerkvist, all about an old woman who used to be the oracle in Delphi and had to screw this goat to get high and inhale these burning leaves. Then she'd have this fit and the priests would interpret what she said. When it started she was this simple peasant virgin and at first she liked being waited on and having everyone look at her in the morning when she walked to the temple. Then she got fed up with it and started fucking this boy who swept the leaves and so they kicked her out and nobody would talk to her anymore. Also, she had a baby, this deaf and dumb child, and everyone thought it was the god's son but it was really the boy she fucked who was the father. What else? In the end this man who had been mean to Jesus on Jesus' way to the cross came to her to ask his fate and she and the man and the boy walked up to the top of the mountain and died in the snow. It was so beautiful and sad and I was crying like crazy when Crystal found me. I guess she thought I was crying over her. Not that I was in the mood to take advantage of something like that.