I Cannot Get You Close Enough (27 page)

“This is the most beautiful, sad book,” I said. “I want to paint like this. To make people feel this way.”

“Noel knew that man.”

“You're kidding. I thought a woman wrote it. It feels like a woman's work.” I held it out, a small red-bound book.

“Pär is the man's name. Ask her about him. She had a lot of copies of that book. I can't believe she never gave you one. Well, look, are you leaving?”

“Yes. I made a reservation for tomorrow afternoon.”

“Alan's leaving today.”

“So what?”

“So we could make up, couldn't we? I mean, let's stop it. I want you to stay.”

I got up and walked to the window. “I started painting so I hate to leave in the middle of that. But I'm not going to stay here with you acting like the ice-maiden. I didn't do anything but fuck him once. And I've said I was sorry and I am.” I turned around. She was looking at me.

“Okay,” she said at last. “I'm sorry too. Alan doesn't belong to me. He's just Alan. And you're you and I'm me. That's that. It's all we have to work with.”

I looked down at the book. “I might paint this oracle,” I said. “Not as an old woman but when she was young and starting out. I could call it ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.' I could call it The Past Was Not Any Better.' It was worse than now.”

“‘Patron Saint of Horoscopes.'”

“‘Virgin Wanting to Believe in Something.'”

“‘Anything Beats Keeping House.' Lydia, I'm sorry this all happened.”

“So am I. Really and truly sorry.”

So it began to heal between us, not very fast at first, about as fast as nerve tissue heals, or bone.

Alan left finally on Thursday afternoon. I didn't mean to tell him goodbye but I did. After all, we're only human here, et cetera. There are no innocents. Everyone is guilty. Et cetera, et cetera.

I was standing in the ivory-painted parlor door when he told Crystal goodbye. “Don't take any wooden nickels, Alan,” she said. “I'll try not to,” he answered. King came out from the back hall and stood there, holding a gun case. I looked out the door to where Joe was loading the racquets in the car. Alan raised his head and looked from Crystal to King to me. And suddenly, it was as though Alan didn't really exist, as though letting him squirt his come inside of me one stupid afternoon while Traceleen was watching television hadn't made a mark on me, not really. Maybe I am finally getting cynical enough to live. Maybe I'll be able to work.

I wonder if things will ever be the same between Crystal and me. Married people get over worse insults than this. But friendship is a stranger thing than marriage. After Alan had gotten in the car and ridden off, with sweet Joe Romaine driving and waving out the window, after they had disappeared down the driveway, I said, “Crystal, let's go for a walk. I need a friend.”

“All right,” she answered. “Let me change my shoes. Put that gun away,” she said to King. “It makes me nervous for you to carry that around.” She went to him and took his arm.

“Put that gun away and go with us,” I put in. “I'm supposed to be your godmother, in case you forgot. Come on, I want to work on your spiritual development. Spiritually developed men get all the women, hasn't your mother told you that?”

“Like good old spiritually developed Alan?” he answered.

“He can use the language,” I said. “It's a beginning.” He walked with us as far as the boathouse and then we went on by ourselves.

“This is the path I took to get the hots for your retrograde boyfriend,” I began. “I want to talk this out, Crystal. I want to defend myself.”

“Go ahead.” She sighed and we walked fast with our hands in our pockets. We were on the sand now, skirting the water's edge.

“I think part of it is your fault for telling me what a great lover he is. The next time you get a hot young lover, don't advertise it. Keep it to yourself.”

“I told you I liked to make love to Manny and you never went after him.”

“He never went after me. When was he so great a lover? Before you got pregnant with Crystal Anne? Before King started the bicycle-stealing ring?”

“He was so tender and funny back then, so shy. I'm shy too, Lydia, and so are you. We've just forgotten it. I might go back to being shy.”

“Go back to liking Manny.” I couldn't believe I said it. It wasn't the kind of advice we gave each other.

“I can't. It's too complicated. It's complicated by the kids.” We turned and walked around a runoff channel, then back down to the hard-packed sand at the water's edge. The sun was behind clouds. A breeze was coming from the shore. No black flies or mosquitoes for twelve days. Maine at its best, the natives kept assuring us.

A long time went by and we didn't talk. Then something came to me.

“You could love Manny. You could think of him as part of Crystal Anne and just go on and hold him and try to make something of it.”

“How can I? He works all the time. All he thinks about is his work. I'm just a sideline. I've tried doing that, then an hour later he's at his desk, caught up in some litigation. And he doesn't do it for money, which I could understand. He likes it that way. He likes to play games and fight.”

“So do you. Maybe you could go downtown and work for him.”

“Maybe men and women expect too much from each other. That's what Daniel says. He says, ‘Goddamn, I don't know what you girls expect from us.'”

“When's he coming?”

“Soon, I hope. Let's call him tonight, shall we?”

“Sure. I hope we do.” We walked to the marina and back again. We didn't speak again of Daniel. And in the end she called him by herself.

Helen Abadie and her boyfriend arrived on Friday. She is Daniel Hand's sister. Anna's sister and, God forbid, literary executor. Anna did that for a joke, or so everybody thinks. Only Helen took it seriously. The boyfriend, Mike Carmichael, is about a ten to the tenth power, one of those Irish faces that seem to know the things the rest of us are seeking. A poet, of course, but also pretty famous for some book about the consolations of art. The sort of man who would have understood me. I took one look and wanted to show him what I was painting. That was all I wanted him for. I had had my fill of the rest of it.

“Helen says you are a painter,” he said, sitting down close to me. Everything he was wearing was soft and old, brown boat shoes turned the color of dust, a khaki shirt so soft it looked like skin, old chinos. Intelligence pouring out of his dark sweet eyes. He poured some on me and I basked in it a moment, then I turned away. I turned to Helen and drew her in.

“Noel says you're making a book. What will be in it?”

“Papers, letters, poems. I'm not mad at her anymore. I think it was okay for her to die that way. She always did everything she wanted to. That was Anna. It's the price we paid to have her. I knew her so well, Lydia. I didn't know how well I knew her until I began to read the papers. Mike says we all know more than we dream we know, about each other and the whole world.”

“There must be a lot to go over. It must be quite a job.”

“Oh, God, you can't imagine. There are thirty boxes full of stuff.”

“So why do you need things from Noel? It bothered her to get your letter, Helen. She's so compromised now, her life has become so small.”

“Well, this should cheer her up, give her something to think about. I can't imagine why she won't let me read the letters that she has. I'd fly down there and read them. God knows her life was scandalous enough and certainly Anna's was an open book. What could Anna have written Noel that both of them didn't tell the world.” She sniffed, it was the same old Helen. Whatever remorse I had been feeling about holding this conversation with the trunk of letters in the next room was dissolved in Helen's dopiness. How could someone be that dumb, I was thinking. How can women like that get hold of men like Mike? Scandal, what a funny old word. Imagine anyone thinking Noel's life was scandalous. Jesus Christ.

“Well, Helen, maybe Noel thinks they belong to her. Maybe she thinks her lifelong friendship with Anna doesn't belong to the world.”

“We need those letters. There are several years when the only person Anna wrote to was Noel.”

“I hate to denigrate what you're doing, Helen, but Anna's work can stand alone. You don't need to publish volumes of letters to plump it up.”

“I've told her that,” Mike said. He had a wonderful deep voice, with laughter in it.

“I want you to intervene,” Helen said. “Ask Noel to reconsider.”

“I don't have a pipeline to Noel. She runs her own show.”

“What does she do down there in New Orleans? I've never met her, you know. I saw her once in Charlotte on the stage, at a benefit. It was right after she retired, before she got to be a recluse. Anna said I could meet her but something happened and I never got to.”

“She doesn't do anything. She stays in her room. She calls me up and tells me what to paint.” I smiled, thinking of the calls I had received at six o'clock in the morning from Noel. “She calls and wakes me up and tells me things she dreams up for me to paint. Once or twice I took her advice and they were very nice. Anyway, she always bought them for whatever I told her they were worth.”

“She calls you up at six in the morning?”

“She never remembers the time difference.”

“Let's get up some tennis,” Mike said. “I'd like to try that court. I haven't played on clay in years. The yard man keeps it up?”

“We've all been working on it. We had tennis players here last week and they helped.”

“Round up King and the four of us will play.” He looked at Helen. “Come along, girl. I won't care if you're good or not. I don't keep you around for tennis.”

“I'm good at tennis,” she said. “We had lessons when we were young. I'm extremely good at follow-through. Anna always said I had a perfect follow-through.”

We rounded up King and spent the afternoon playing doubles. It was hot and intense and everyone played above their abilities, drawn along by Mike's enthusiasm. No wonder Helen threw away the world. When that one comes along, you count the world no loss. So she thinks she has to give him Anna's papers to make him happy? She would probably be better off cooking and keeping house and letting him write his own poetry but it was clear she didn't think of herself as sufficient dowry. She wanted to deliver a book. I couldn't help feeling that if she knew the letters were in the house she would just go on and steal them.

I called Noel that night and asked her what to do. “I think she knows they're here,” I said. “I'll bet you anything she's figured out they're here.”

“Not unless she's psychic. That's just a coincidence, my darling. Well, where are they now?”

“The chest is in the dining room.”

“Well, move it. Take it out to the boathouse and put it in a locker.”

“It might get wet.”

“No, that's all right. Is there someone there to help you carry it? Can you find old Mr. Farnsworth?”

“I'll get King. He'll take it.”

“Then get him. Do it right away.”

After everyone had gone to bed King and I carried the chest out to the boathouse and put it in a locker. This boathouse is entirely different from anything in our part of the country. Built up on concrete blocks way up on the sand, so that even the highest tide can barely reach it. “What good does it do to have a boathouse that far away from the water?” I asked King.

“I don't know,” he said. “I guess that's the way they do it here.”

We set the chest down on the steps and looked around. The boathouse was made of wonderful old planks a foot wide and two or three inches thick, all weathered now to the color of the bottom of the clouds above the sea. We carried the chest inside to an oblong room, dusty and full of spiderwebs and unused tools and lockers that held sailing gear. There was a built-in table on a wooden platform and, around it, several old captain's chairs. “I bet they played poker here,” King said. “This looks like duck camp.”

“Mended nets and smoked pipes is more likely,” I answered. “I don't think New Englanders are into playing cards.”

“Well, where do you want to put this chest?”

“See if it will fit in that big locker.” We opened the largest locker and set the chest down inside and closed the top.

“What kind of papers are in there?” he asked. “You didn't finish saying.”

“Letters from your mother's cousin, Anna, to Mrs. Chatevin. Your cousin Helen wants to put them in a book and Mrs. Chatevin doesn't want her to. It's all pretty juvenile, but I'm doing what I was told to do. I hate to ask you to keep this secret.”

“I wouldn't want anyone reading my letters. I'm glad to help.”

“A writer's letters aren't like yours or mine. They know they'll be seen by other people. Writers think every word they write is something sacred the world will want to read. Well, it's true. I've known enough of them. They may say it isn't true but it is.”

“I won't tell anyone where they are,” he answered. “Who would I have to tell?”

He didn't have anyone, until Jessie and Olivia Hand arrived. Meanwhile, Crystal Anne had discovered the boathouse and talked Andria into helping her clean it up. I saw them out there sweeping out the sand and polishing the captain's chairs with a can of Lemon Pledge and it may have crossed my mind to worry about the trunk being there. Still, Crystal Anne was creating a new hideout or fort every day so I blew it off and forgot about it. I had enough to do making up with Crystal and painting to worry about Noel's paranoia over the things in that blue trunk.

It never crossed my mind that the young girls would read them or think they were important, much less use them to start a literary cult.