Painting Naked (Macmillan New Writing) (30 page)

I take a seat beside Tyler and cover my lap with a napkin.

Beth points toward Lizzie, then nudges Molly with her elbow and says, “That’s my grandma. Where’s yours?”

“My grammy,” Molly says, “is buried in the chemistry.”

Conversation stalls. Forks halt midway between plates and mouths, and I bite my lip, wondering how Tom’s going to handle this.

“She’s quite right,” he says, ruffling Molly’s curls. “And I’m sure her grandmother would appreciate her choice of words.”

Fergus clears his throat and nobody speaks until Carrie says, “My mother was a pharmacist, and”—she glances down the table and smiles at her daughter—“Molly’s middle name is malaprop.”

We’re still laughing when the front door opens and Beatrice limps in, leaning on her cane. Her arthritis must be kicking up again, but I doubt she’ll whinge about it because she never does. We make a space for her at the table. I fill my glass with wine, pour one for her.

She leans toward me. “There might be an opening at work.”

“For me?” I say.

“Our publications department needs an assistant art director.” Bea hands me a slip of paper. “Call them on Monday. I already put in a good word.”

“You’re a lifesaver,” I say, hugging her. The job sounds perfect.

Perfect.

Fergus starts in with a shaggy dog story but can’t remember the punch line, so Beatrice conjures up a substitute and Fergus says it’s better than the one he forgot. My sons call to wish me a happy holiday—Jordan from Bridget’s home in Pennsylvania and Alistair from a helicopter, judging by the racket. I can barely hear him.

Laden with leftovers, Beatrice thanks us and leaves, and for some idiotic reason I feel abandoned, sitting on my own at the end of the table, ever so slightly drunk and watching the others laugh and talk and swap stories. Paige and Joel engage Carrie in lively conversation about nursery schools, while Tom and Fergus discuss, of all things, golf. I didn’t even know Fergus played. Lizzie stands behind her ex-husband, hands resting lightly on his shoulders, and when I catch her eye, she smiles and nods as if to say, ‘you were right and I was wrong.’

How long before they’re a couple again?

Couple.

Maybe I’d better leave before my rampant self-pity lures me into another glass of wine, and another. Shit, I hate to bug off before the party’s over, but Lizzie will understand.

“Call me later,” she says.

I’m at the door, reaching for my coat, when Tom asks for a ride home.

“I need to let the dogs out,” he says, “but I don’t think Molly’s ready to leave.”

His granddaughter tumbles past me, shrieking with glee as Beth teaches her to turn somersaults.

Rain pummels my face as I run for the car. Tom reaches it first. Opens the passenger door for me. “Let me drive,” he says, and I don’t argue because my head is spinning.

He seems to sense I’m in no mood for conversation and doesn’t say a word till we turn into our dirt road. “The dogs are okay,” he says. “They’ve been left alone far longer than this.”

My car skids over ruts slippery with rain. “Oh?”

“Do you feel like talking?” he asks.

“What about?”

He shrugs. “I figured you’re upset and might need a shoulder.”

How the hell does he know? Was I
that
transparent?

He glances as me. “Well?” he says. “Your place or mine?”

We slide past his driveway.

“Guess that answers my question,” he says.

Sands Point

November 2011

We sit at opposite ends of the couch, Zachary between us, and it’s obvious I had too much wine at Lizzie’s because my lips are flapping up and down faster than a pair of tart’s knickers. Tom strokes my cat and listens with a quiet, focused concentration while I blather on about my parents’ love affair and mine with Colin and how he loved a memory rather than loving me.

“I wonder if that’s all I loved, as well,” I say, and this is alcohol talking, not me, because now I’m plunging into the purple prose of a romance novel. “He was a mirage, a man I invented from misty old memories.”

Dear God, I’ll be speaking in tongues next.

“Real or not,” Tom says, “it still hurts, doesn’t it.”

“Yes,” I say, with a thick sort of shame. “But I feel like a fraud.” He lost a wife. All I lost was a middle-aged boyfriend who wouldn’t commit. Oh yes, I lost my self-esteem as well. And my business, but I won’t complain to Tom about that.

“A loss is a loss,” he says. “Your pain is no less than mine. It’s just different.”

I begin to speak, then catch sight of him looking at my reflection in the night-blackened mirror of the sliding glass doors, and can’t say anything at all.

Tom reaches for my hand. “We can try to understand one another’s pain,” he says, “but the truth is, we can’t because pain is unique. You have yours and I have mine. And when somebody says, ‘I can feel your pain,’ they’re kidding themselves. It’s their own pain they feel, not yours.”

“Does it ever go away?” His hand is warm and dry. Friendly, but not suggestive. No thumb running around my palm or fingers squeezing mine, and I’m glad because I wouldn’t know what to do with a come-on right now.

“Yes, eventually, it does,” Tom says. “But I tried to hurry mine along by getting married again.”

Another wife? “Did it work?”

“No,” he says, standing up and stretching. “It was a disaster that lasted two years.”

Is he going to leave? Jeez, I hope not, though I wouldn’t blame him if he did. He’s probably tired of hearing my woes. I can’t believe how much I’ve unloaded on Tom. Village gossip says he was some sort of journalist but doesn’t like to talk about it. That could be right because he certainly knows how to listen and ask the right questions.

Outside, something clunks and the wind shifts direction. It bullies my house and taunts the gutters, tempting shingles to fly of the roof. I’ll have a mess on my hands tomorrow. I hear a noise in the chimney, a rattle, and a clump of soot lands in the grate. Seconds later, a tiny black creature—a field mouse, probably—scurries out, leaving a trail of sooty footprints on the hearth.

Zachary leaps off the couch to investigate.

Laughing, Tom says, “Adventurous wildlife around here. First the parrots, building a nest on top of my utility pole, and now this.”

“You ain’t seen nothing yet.” I tell him about the raccoon that fell down Lizzie’s chimney last spring and left a smelly calling card in her coal stove before climbing back out again.

Tom wrinkles his nose and picks up a log. “How about a fire?”

He’s wooing you with wood, Lizzie said.

“Sure.” I roll and knot newspaper because I don’t have any kindling and my hands are suddenly in need of a job.

Tom builds a fire, lights it, and asks, “How many times have you been married?”

“Just once.” I hesitate. “Tell me about your second wife.”

He sits down, opposite me this time, on the loveseat. “Must I?”

Shit. Now I’ve stuck my foot in it. “Is it painful?”

He grins. “No, it’s embarrassing.”

“Then I promise not to laugh.”

“All right,” Tom says. “She was self-centered and glamorous, and very, very young.”

I look at him and wait.

“She ran off with a surfer. Guess I wasn’t exciting enough for her.”

Biting back a smile, I say, “What do you do, for a living, I mean?”

“Loaf about, mostly.”

Is he independently wealthy? I study his hands, the thickening of the middle finger on his right hand that tells me he’s right-handed, the short, square nails. Blunt fingers. The pale scar that curves around the base of his thumb. Not the hands of an idle man. “But you must’ve done something else besides that,” I say.

He hesitates. “I was a war correspondent.”

So the gossips were right. “Vietnam? The Middle East?”

“And other places,” he says. “Wherever trouble broke out. But now I’m retired and, like I said, I just loaf.”

“My mother was a journalist,” I say. “And an artist.”

“Guess it rubbed off on you, then,” Tom says. “Did you ever finish that kids’ book?”

How does he know about that? Did I tell him? Did Lizzie?

He grins. “I saw those parrot sketches in your office, remember? Figured maybe they were heading for a picture book.”

“I queried a bunch of editors,” I say.

“Any luck?”

“Seven rejections, three to go.”

He winces. “Must be tough.”

I shrug. “I’ll just send out more queries, that’s all.”

“Tell me about your father,” Tom says. “Was he a journalist, too?”

“He owned a company that made fencing,” I say. “Chain link and barbed wire. On Saturday mornings, I’d go in with my dad and watch the men work. A tall guy named Will was missing an arm and I remember being fascinated with his empty sleeve, pinned to his shoulder. One of the other men told me a machine had jammed and Will reached in to free up a length of wire, got his arm caught, and would have followed it to his death if my father hadn’t reversed the machine and saved Will’s life.”

“Quick thinking,” Tom says. “He sounds like a great man.”

“He was, and I adored him. I was nineteen when he died. Thought I’d never get over it, but I did and I honestly don’t remember grieving very long.” I sniff. “I’m so ashamed of that.”

“Don’t be.” Tom leans forward, elbows on his knees, and steeples his fingers. “Loss is easier when you’re young because you have most of your life ahead of you. A loss at our age is much tougher. We’re pushed for time, desperate for another chance. Some of us panic,” he says, looking chagrined, “and wind up making idiotic choices.”

A log shifts, and sparks fly out. I grab the brush and sweep them back into the fire, add more wood.

“Know what I miss the most about Peggy?” Tom says.

“What?”

“Not having someone to remember things with.”

I swallow hard.

Gently, Tom says, “You feel the same about Colin, don’t you?”

I nod, then tell him how I felt at the anniversary party Lizzie and Fergus dragged me to. How envious and yes, let’s be honest here, how jealous I was of all those gray couples.

“They were probably jealous of you, too,” Tom says.

“Why?”

“Because you’re younger than them.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Relatively speaking,” he says, grinning. “Just remember, you won’t always feel like this.”

“Is that a guarantee?”

“Trust me,” he says. “There are days when you feel that you’ll never recover. But you do, or at least you pretend to the rest of the world you’ve hauled yourself back. Then one day, you wake up, and find that you have.”

“Will I ever,” I ask, “be able to haul myself back?”

“Of course you will, but you can’t put a time limit on grief, or a measure on how you feel, or how you think you ought to feel,” Tom says. “The wound will heal, but the scar will remain. It won’t fade completely, but you’ll learn how to cope with it. Most of the time.”

“How do you cope?”

“By keeping busy.”

Doing
what
? I wonder, but don’t ask.

Tom stands and stretches, checks his watch. “I ought to be going. Those poor dogs will
really
be crossing their legs now.”

Beatrice’s company, a rising star in the biotech world, grants me an interview so I tart myself up and drive to New London. The main office lies on the outskirts of town among tasteful plantings and winding brick paths. An elevator whisks me from the underground parking garage to the third floor. Dense carpet, mellow lighting, tinted windows. No wonder Bea likes working here.

The woman who interviews me wears a dark gray suit and a pale pink blouse. Yes, they’re impressed with my portfolio, and my qualifications fit their needs, but they’ll have to check with my previous employers. Standard procedure, she tells me. Just to verify dates and time spent on the job, that’s all.

“Assuming it’s all satisfactory,” she says, “we’d like you to start right after Christmas.”

“That would fine,” I say, as she goes on to explain company benefits. Health insurance, profit sharing, retirement plan.

Security.

Another month. I can hang on till then.

Dutch’s one hundred days have come and gone, but memories of Colin cling like burrs on a blanket. Drinking tea from an enamel mug with no handle, playing tag among thickets of broom, painting one another and sticking together like Velcro. I struggle to keep him at bay, but he pushes inside my head, demands I pay attention. Is he thinking about me? Does he regret that letter? Should I write to him? No, of course not stupid. Remember his reaction when you phoned?

Sorry, there’s nobody here by that name.

I spend hours walking the beach, trying to make sense of it all, of my need to have someone special in my life. After all these years of living alone, you’d think I’d have gotten used to it by now.

But that’s all it took. One taste of togetherness and I was worse than a kid with an incurable crush.

He dumped you. It’s over. Get on with your life.

That little clump of thrift is still alive. Despite withered stems and brown leaves, it’ll bloom again next year. To make sure, I scoop mulch around its base and tuck it in for the winter. Dammit, if this plant can survive, then so can I. I’ll bloom. I’ll get back to that place where I was before Colin showed up.

Independent, sure of myself. Content with my life.

Feeling a new spring in my step, I walk farther than usual, past the breakwater to the end of the beach. For a moment I stop to admire the black-and-white striped lighthouse that sits on a pile of rocks, guarding the entrance to the harbor. What else, I wonder, have I inherited from my mother besides the ability to draw and a fascination with lighthouses?

Falling in love with unavailable men?

It’s a day with dim colors and soft edges and such perfect stillness not even the sea grass is moving. Suddenly, and without warning, Cornwall and Claudia’s cottage on the cliffs come out of hiding. I take a deep breath and hold it till the memory subsides.