Monday, Monday: A Novel (8 page)

Watching him stir the puddle of white gravy into his mashed potatoes, she decided she didn’t especially like the stylish look of his glasses. Black at the top, the frames faded to clear at the bottom. And she wasn’t sure she approved of his sideburns, either. And his hair was unkempt. But he was great-looking, somehow. His face had a nice lean structure. He watched her with an attentive, unhurried expression.

Putting her fork down, she said, “What do you remember about that day?”

“Are you sure you want to talk about it?”

“When you first decided to help me. How did that happen? It looked to me like you came out of nowhere.”

“We came out of the history building, initially,” he said.

“Is Jack sorry he came to help me?”

“No, he’s not sorry.”

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

She didn’t see how he could, for sure. She looked at his plate. “Do you like the chicken-fried steak?”

“Not really. Do you want some?”

“I don’t really like that kind of gravy. So how are you and Jack cousins—through your moms or your dads, or what?”

“His father and my mother are brother and sister. You’ve got some Jell-O over your mouth.”

She wiped it off with her napkin.

“Are you in a dorm?” he asked.

“Yes. Kinsolving,”

“Oh, so you’re one of those lucky ones with the air conditioning. It gets pretty hot in student housing where I live. And Elaine and I had a baby in August.”

Shelly tried not to react to this. She shouldn’t care if he had a baby. She should be happy for him. But her mood dropped. Somehow, fatherhood made her connection to him seem tawdry and incidental. “A boy or a girl?”

“A boy—Nathan. Nate.”

“So your wife’s at home with him?”

“Until I get the car to her in a little while.” He didn’t actually want to discuss Elaine, having argued with her before leaving for campus. They were behind on rent and needed a second car besides the ’61 Cutlass he had purchased used, and he couldn’t afford to buy one as long as he was in school. Either he or Elaine had to stay home with the baby, and the other needed to earn a decent paycheck, and it was obvious to both of them that Wyatt—even working part-time painting houses—was currently doing neither.

“Were those guys calling you Earp because of Wyatt Earp?”

“It’s the never-ending joke.”

“That’s not who you’re named after?”

“I’m named after my grandfather. We’re from a long line of Wyatts.” He looked at her arm in the sleeve of the yellow cardigan. It lay crookedly on the table. “It’s all right?”

“I can bend it, but I can’t straighten it out the whole way. It feels like there are rubber bands around the elbow, keeping it like this. It looks pretty bad.”

“Can I see it?”

“See it?”

“Look at it.”

“Now?”

“If that’s okay.”

“If you’re up for it. I don’t usually show it to anyone. It’s ugly. Beware.”

He watched her pull the cardigan off her shoulder, push her shirtsleeve up, and reveal a thin, misshapen arm webbed with inflamed scars. Above the elbow, the arm turned oddly. “The bullet went all the way through,” she said. “Right here. There’s a piece of metal in there, holding the bone together. Or I guess the bone has grown back, but the metal’s still in there. If you press here, you can feel some of the screws.”

He put his fingers where she indicated. The scars felt smooth and oddly erotic to his touch. A girl from his design class paused to talk, but when she saw his hand on Shelly’s arm, she was flummoxed and walked on past with her tray.

“Feels creepy, doesn’t it,” Shelly said about her arm.

The ropy, sensual feel of the scars unsettled Wyatt, the pulse of the blue veins in Shelly’s wrist reminding him of how he had felt her heartbeat while he was trying to stop her from bleeding. He turned her arm over, noting the high school ring on her middle finger and the blunt cut of her unpainted nails, then turned it back again and looked at the scars. “Not creepy at all. It looks nearly perfect.”

She dragged the cardigan off the opposite shoulder and stretched her right arm out beside the left. “It used to look like this.”

But he felt somehow more entitled to look at the injured arm.

“Is it horrible?” she asked, rolling the shirtsleeves down and buttoning up the cuffs.

“It’s wonderful. They put it back together. Are you going to finish your beans?”

She pushed the bowl toward him, and he ate the green beans and started into his chocolate pie while she tugged her sweater back on. “Is that paint under your nails?” she asked him.

He looked at his nails. They were cut to the quick, but no matter how short he cut them, he couldn’t prevent the blue paint stains from collecting under the edges.

“I’m just getting you back for the Jell-O I had on my mouth,” she said. He noticed a fleeting smile. “So I take it you’re still painting?”

“When I can.”

“Landscapes? Portraits?”

“Objects,” he said. “Rocks. Chairs. Windows. For practice. If you’ll walk over to the art building with me I’ll show you. A couple of my students are using tempera.”

“You’re teaching?”

“Just a freshman foundation course.”

He carried their trays and returned to the table for his jacket and book bag and Shelly’s books. Shelly was still seated.

“Can we go down Twenty-fourth Street instead of across the plaza?” she asked him.

He pulled his jacket on. “You don’t ever cross the plaza?”

“Twenty-fourth Street is just as close,” she said.

“No it isn’t.” He sat back down. “Are you planning to avoid the plaza forever?”

“For three more years.”

“Very funny.”

“Actually, I’ve been trying to get up the nerve to walk across it.”

“How about now?”

She frowned.

“Come on.”

“Do you cross it a lot?”

“A couple of times a week,” he said.

“Does Jack?”

“He does. Look, I bet it won’t be as hard as you think.”

Finally, she agreed. But in the corridor, her feet dragged. “I don’t want to be out there when the bells ring.”

He checked his watch. “We’ve got ten minutes before they ring. And we can get across in a few seconds. We’ll walk a straight line along the front of the building and over to the East Mall.”

They exited into mottled sunlight and an autumn breeze tumbling leaves through the courtyard. Bevo, the Longhorn mascot, was tethered to an orange livestock trailer parked at the curb on the Drag, next to a Peace Corps booth, his student handlers, in orange shirts, allowing people to pet him. Nearby, a girl with a placard for SDS sat in an open plywood shack that was covered with antiwar slogans and paintings of bombs falling on villages, and an old man plucked a banjo, shouting obscenities at people who stopped to listen. He shook his banjo at a dog chasing a Frisbee. A banner tugged in the trees like a sail, announcing that
In Cold Blood
author Truman Capote would be reading at the Student Union.

The tower was obscured at first by the roof of the undergraduate library, but it emerged into view as they stepped away from the Student Union. Shelly’s heart started to knock in her chest, and she was glad for the canopy of branches partially blocking the view. Still, she could see the tower rising above her, and she couldn’t shake off the ominous sense that it could see her as well.

A student wearing a Colonel Sanders mask and a Mae West inflatable vest approached and handed Wyatt a pamphlet, then moved on, swinging his satchel.

“What’s the pamphlet?” Shelly asked.

He opened it. “It says ‘Join the Shadebourne Twink.’”

“What’s the Shadebourne Twink?” She didn’t want to keep walking.

“I don’t have a clue.”

Everything about the day was different from that day over a year ago when she had started across the plaza. She reminded herself of this. The weather was different. The air was chilly now, not hot. Clouds that looked like mounded scoops of ice cream traveled across the cold blue sky, shoved along by the breeze. And she would be walking from west to east, very close to the building, not diagonally across the center of the plaza from the opposite direction.

“You’re sure your watch is right?”

“I promise.”

When she started walking, her legs felt heavy. Off to the right, the flagpole rose from the concrete base. She didn’t look at it. She looked at her shoes and made herself keep walking. A scatter of grackles out of the trees startled her, and she drew to a sudden stop but then continued, concentrating on her shoes hitting the pavement and the wind pushing her along. The air gusted, and the light shifted. Time didn’t slow as it had on that day; everything moved. The flag tossed in the wind, clanging the chain against the pole. Shelly narrowed her focus. She kept aware of Wyatt beside her, and fixed her eyes on the black blur of her shoes scudding across the ground. She intended not to glance toward the place where she had fallen, but then gave in to the impulse, and looking at the spot pictured herself lying there in a lopsided circle of blood. She wanted to run, but willed herself to keep walking at the same steady pace, and then stopped and asked Wyatt to wait for her. She walked over and planted her feet on the square of pebbled cement where she had fallen, and made herself look up at the tower.

It was huge. Its height created the illusion that it was leaning toward her. She studied the deck and the enormous clock face and thought of Whitman’s eyes from the cover of
Time
magazine. She pictured his finger on the trigger.
He’s not up there now
, she told herself. But in her mind, he would always be up there.
It’s cold today, not hot. I’m walking from a different direction.

Her reassurances were empty whispers. Her heart pounded. But she didn’t run. She glanced around and saw the students going about their business: a girl in a blue coat and black Mary Janes, a boy tossing his arm around his girlfriend, people moving with purpose across the plaza, energized by the cold.

Wyatt was waiting for her, holding her books, but she decided not to leave this spot until she no longer wanted so badly to run from it. She kept her feet planted exactly where her face had been seared against the hot cement that day, as if she were standing on her own crippled body. And she eyed the tower, the rows of windows and the observation deck at the top.

Finally she turned and looked at Wyatt. He was watching her. She lifted her palms, as if to say, See what I’m doing? and make light of it. She thought he might smile, but he didn’t. She walked to him and they continued across the plaza together, down the steps to the East Mall. She made herself walk slowly, but at the base of the steps her knees began to feel weak again, and her heart wouldn’t stop pounding. Tears rolled down her cheeks.

“What is it?” Wyatt asked her, leaning his head down so he could see her eyes.

She kept walking, but couldn’t stop crying. “I’ll stop this in a minute.”

When they had reached the art building, she splashed her face in the water fountain and drank more than she wanted, hoping the cold water would wash away the anxiety. But the pulse in her temples didn’t slow down.

“I’m fine,” she insisted. “I’m fine. I want to look at the paintings.”

On the second floor he took her to a studio where one of his students, bent over a desk, was sanding a square board that was coated in what looked to Shelly like plaster. The student was a thin girl with a high forehead and sloping chin, and she smiled shyly when she saw Wyatt.

“Just like you warned me,” she said, showing him the board. “The gesso bubbled.”

He introduced her to Shelly as he adjusted the heat under a double boiler filled with pale brown glue, then ran his fingers over the plaster coating on the board, inspecting the surface and edges. “You’ll need at least four coats on the back, and you should use a finer-grit sandpaper for this,” he told the girl. He showed her how to make firm and efficient strokes, the sanded plaster covering his hands in white dust.

“Can Shelly see your geraniums?” he asked, and the girl took Shelly to a table on which a painting, about eight inches square, was lying. It was an amateurish work—Shelly could see that—but Wyatt pointed out colors and the interesting composition, and the girl was obviously pleased with the praise.

Afterward, he led Shelly down the hall to a boxlike corner office that he explained a professor had loaned him for the semester, and pulled from a bottom drawer in the desk three of his own paintings, laying them side by side on the desktop.

They were even smaller than the girl’s painting, about as big as Wyatt’s hand spread open, and at first Shelly thought they were photographs. When she looked closely, she was astonished.

One of the three was a long-stemmed white rose pictured against a black background, the petals so precise that Shelly had the impression she could touch them and feel the velvet texture of real petals. Another was of a half-submerged sand dollar with rippling water washing over it, every speck of sand distinct and the image of the sand dollar, exquisite, with its starlike shape in the center, slightly distorted by the movement of the shallow water.

The third painting, and the one she looked at longest, was of a red apple on a sunny windowsill. The apple was bruised and scarred, and the windowsill old, with cracking paint that gave the sense it could be peeled off in curling rectangular slivers. The bruises of the apple were painted so convincingly that Shelly could imagine the sweet, fermented flavor.

Pulling a book about tempera from the crowded shelves, Wyatt laid it open on the desk. He turned to illustrations showing how the paint was made, and explained that Andrew Wyeth was the contemporary master of tempera. “A lot of people dismiss him as too representational,” Wyatt said. “But I think he’s brilliant. Usually painting with tempera is about being precise, and for the artist there can be something nice and private about that, because people looking at the painting don’t have to consider the artist or what he intended; they’re just drawn to the subject. In my opinion Wyeth takes it beyond that, because his paintings aren’t just about the subject. They’re almost as much about what you don’t see, as what you do. And I’m not talking about the configuration—like in this one, where you’re looking through a doorway and can only see part of the room. I’m talking about an ethereal quality that’s hard to describe. As if he’s using a kind of paint the rest of us don’t have. I’m not explaining it well.”