Results May Vary (15 page)

I never used to know anything about loneliness. Sir have you robbed me of my self-sufficiency?

—Kathleen Scott to her husband, polar explorer Robert Scott, November 1908

In a wholly unprecedented feat, Jonathan managed to get off the Saturday following Labor Day weekend as well, and made the long drive up to visit me once more. He cooked our dinner out on the porch again, even though a light rain beaded the waiting plates stacked on the grill; the middle of September was use-it-or-lose-it season in western Massachusetts. The first crests of color had settled into the trees around the house, and the quality of the light was changing from summer-green to the golden cast of early autumn. And this time, I actually asked for Ruby's weed. It amused me to think of how astonished Adam would be.

“Okay, so don't laugh,” I said to Ruby a few days later, as we sat together in companionable quiet after dinner. “But apparently there's a Grateful Dead tribute band playing in Northampton the first weekend in October, and they're supposed to be pretty good. We could go down, crash in a hotel for the night, frolic in some leaves the next day, and come home.”

She looked up from painting her nails at the kitchen island and gave me a florid double take. “Excuse me,
what
did you say?”

“I know, I know.”

“My sister, who never met a weepy, acoustic-guitar-playing songwriter she didn't like, wants to go see a Grateful Dead
tribute band
?”

“You should be gratified by your influence on me,” I muttered, peering at the concert info on my phone. “Tickets are only twenty bucks—that's not bad. So are you just going to make fun of me, or would you actually want to go? I thought it would be a slam dunk for you.”

She blew on her nails for a moment, then scrunched her mouth and nose sideways. “Actually, Care, I was thinking it's probably about time for me to go back to the city.”

Dread spiraled through me at her words. Though I'd known, of course, that she wouldn't stay forever, I'd gotten used to her here. “I've grown accustomed to her face,” as the lyric from
My Fair Lady
goes. And I think I had thought that whenever she did go, I would be ready for it—happy to be by myself again. I would wave her off with a light heart and a cheerful smile, thinking,
Well, that was fun, but now I'm ready to get on with it
.

I was not ready to get on with it. I felt sad, and lonely, and scared at the thought of how much sadder and lonelier I would be without my sister around.
Ramen stage, here I come.

“Oh,” I said, and words started spilling out of her.

“You're going to be totally fine. You're going to do awesome. We can still talk on the phone all the time, and I can come back on the weekends sometimes, and—”

“Jesus Christ, am I that pathetic?” I snapped. Even though, clearly, I was. I wasn't used to being needy, and I hated it. I hated that this was who I was right now. Hated that Adam had put me here and I didn't automatically know how to be strong by myself. What if I never figured it out?

“You're not pathetic,” Ruby said, in the tone that people use to soothe the overly dramatic. I recognized it, because it was usually me using it on her. “You're going through something incredibly hard.”

“I'm fine,” I said, springing to my feet and beginning to load our dinner things into the dishwasher. “You don't need to babysit me. And you obviously can't stay here forever. Do you have some good prospects on jobs?”

“I'm getting pretty busy with my own clients, actually. It's amazing. People are referring me like crazy. Design*Sponge picked up a floral styling post I did, and I got a bazillion hits from it. I need to buy that woman a six-pack.”

“That's fantastic, peanut. And god knows you're not going to meet the next Burqhart up in this neck of the woods.”

She snorted. “I don't want to meet the next Burqhart. I wanna get me a real man, thank you very much.”

“Well then,” I said. “Get thee to Manhattan.”

“I really will come back to visit,” she said. “I don't want to completely abandon you.”

“You're not abandoning me,” I said, hoping if I said it that would make it feel true. “I'm a big girl.”

“I know, but—”

I slapped the kitchen towel over the handle on the dishwasher and mashed the fabric down into the gap. “Ruby. I'm fine. The last thing I want is you hanging out with me out of pity.”

“It's not pity,” she said, toying with the cuff of her sweatshirt. “Is it okay with you if I actually like hanging out with you?”

I wanted to tell her how much I'd loved having her here, but I wasn't sure how. We weren't good at this, Ruby and I. We never had been.

“I know. This has been a lot of fun.”

“We haven't spent this much time together since we were kids, do you realize that? Since we were really young. Even before you left for college, all you did was hang out with Adam. And then every summer when you came home, you were inseparable. I seriously have not seen this much of you since I was eleven years old.”

“That's not true,” I said, but she nodded, her loose ball of golden hair wiggling on top of her head.

“Um, selective memory much? Of course it's true. It was always Adam with you. Adam this, Adam that. You were constantly spending time with him.”

“Well, but…you and I were never the right age to ‘hang out' anyway, though,” I said, grasping at anything that would alleviate my sudden rush of guilt.

She bobbed her head toward one shoulder. “No, you're right. Five years is a big gap when you're young. I'm not trying to blame you or anything. Just saying it's nice to get closer with you now, that's all.”

She might not have been blaming me, but the more I thought about it, the more it sank in how impenetrable I must have been. Adam and I had been a couple for so long that we had become a single word: AdamandCaroline. There was literally no space in between us.

“Yeah…I see what you mean. And it's been good to have you here. Really good.” We shared a shy smile before I continued. “Well, since you're leaving me to my own devices, the least you can do is coach me through the rest of this.”

She gnawed on a strand of her hair. “Care, the one advantage of the fact that I have failed to even approach a decent shot at marriage is that I have not yet had the chance to get divorced.”

“No, but you've had breakups. You've helped friends through their breakups. You got me as far as watching bad TV, eating reprehensible food, and beautification. What's the rest of the process?”

“I'm not sure I like being pegged as a breakup expert.”

“I am seeking your advice and wisdom here!”

She sighed dramatically, but I could tell it was working. Everyone likes being asked for advice, and Ruby likes it more than most.

“I don't know, just do stuff that makes you feel good about yourself. Do things that Adam never wanted to do. Blast victorious breakup songs—and no, not ‘I Will Survive.' ”

“All the breakup songs I know are depressing.”

“Jo Dee Messina,” Ruby said. “The woman is like the poet laureate of ‘Later, loser' songs.”

“Jo Dee Messina. Okay. What else?”

“That's all I can think of for right now. Except, as one last component under beautification—you need your nails did.” She patted the counter stool next to her, then waved her other hand expansively at the group of nail polish bottles she had set up in a neat row. “What color do you want?”

Oddly, the question threw me. I wasn't used to nail polish; Adam had always preferred my hands without it. “Can you just do it clear?”

“I think you need Rum Raisin,” Ruby said.

“Why even ask me?”

“To give you the illusion of free will,” she said, shaking the bottle of plummy polish back and forth. She wiggled her other fingers at me. “Gimme.”

I placed my right hand in hers, mesmerized as she swept the polish across my nails in one smooth stroke after another. She was right; it looked pretty. I was fairly certain this would count as my first effort to look anything more elevated than “clean” since this whole thing began.

Ruby set my completed hand aside and gestured for the other one. Then she got halfway across and stopped.

“Hey, Care?”

“Hmm?”

She brushed her thumb gently across my fingers. “Are you really going to leave him, do you think?”

I nodded.
Are you going to leave?
was still a squishier question to answer than
Are you divorcing him?,
but I was letting myself have that. “Yeah. I am.”

“What do you think about these?” she said, tapping my ring finger.

I stared. She was right. I'd taken the rings off countless times before, to wash dishes or put on lotion; but I'd always put them back on. Force of habit, I had been telling myself. I couldn't imagine what my hands would look like without them.

Careful not to smear my brand-new Rum Raisin, I pulled the rings free and set them on the counter beside me with a soft metallic clink. I stared at my hands to assess, but the sight was less jarring than I'd imagined. Because it turned out that after all, my left hand only looked just like my right one. Minus two last naked fingernails.

“Finish me up?” I said to Ruby, and she smiled.

I am mastering my love for you and turning it inwards as a constituent element of myself.

—Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir, 1926

If I'm being honest with myself, I will admit that most of the reason I moved to Massachusetts is October. In fact, I could even narrow it down to the first half of the month, when every tree in sight bursts into flame against a clear sky vibrating with sunlight. With apologies to the rest of the country, I don't see that there's a more perfect place to experience autumn than in New England. All those postcard images are real: maples stretching hundred-year-old branches over wooden houses far older still; drifts of confetti-like leaves amassing on lawns and against fences; pristine church steeples craning into skies so fiercely blue they make your eyes hurt.

There has always been something about fall that makes my nerves ring with rightness. The scents of dried leaves and woodsmoke, the taste of cider, the familiar sight of pumpkins, gourds, and flint corn: I love it all. I also love the ritual of unpacking my cold-weather garb: my sweaters with their Fair Isle patterns and chunky cable knits; the merino tights I wear with wedge-heeled pumps and Mary Janes until winter forces me to concede the end of skirt season and embark on four months of Sorel boots.

Fall used to feel like an anniversary of sorts, for Adam and me—although we married in June, it was in October that he'd kissed me for the first time, all those many years ago. And October again when we made love in a pile of blankets in front of his parents' fireplace. Although logically, the season was an ending—the end of bloom, the end of green, the end of warmth as our hemisphere slipped away from the sun—it had always made my blood race with the sense that something was starting.

As I drove to the hardware store one crisp October afternoon, the canopy of leaves above me glowing like the inside of a buttercup, I drew on that feeling. Because the empty house had grown oppressive in the week and a half I'd spent without my sister around, I had decided to fill the void with one of the items on her breakup recovery list—do the things Adam wouldn't do. In this case specifically, painting the inside of our house anything other than white.

I remembered poring over the paint deck with Adam before we moved in, fingers rifling back and forth between the cards. As per the instructions I had read in some decorating magazine, we examined the swatches under the light of our wobbly halogen floor lamp, then again by daylight. But though he accepted my insistence on evaluating the colors under different lighting, all he would ever tolerate was white. It was a warm, cozy, friendly white, not the blue-white of the snow that clung to the wooded hillside across the road in January; but white it was just the same.

This time, I was going to paint the house the way I wanted.

The clang of a bell announced my entrance into the hardware store. The guy behind the counter glanced up from his magazine (Rifles? Boobies? Or, wait—let me not make heteronormative assumptions here—leather bears?) and flicked his eyes in my direction.

“Hi there. What can I help you with?”

When I explained what I needed, he led me to the section at the back where the whole array of paint color cards spread out in ranks. I grabbed one at random: browns. With sort of a reddish cast. Five ever-so-slightly-different tints of reddish brown. And next to it, a card of infinitesimally more yellowish browns. There were
hundreds
of colors here. Now that I wasn't restricted to the whites deck, how the hell was I even going to know where to start?

“I'd suggest you try a sample,” the clerk said. “Even if you think you like something, sample it on your wall first. We can mix you a pint, or you can see if the color you like is on here.” He gestured to a revolving rack of small jars filled with colored paint—premixed sample pots. Aha! This…this I could work with.

When the clerk returned to his spot at the counter, I approached the rack. My eyes landed on a pot in a tawny brown the color of homemade caramel, then another in a rich blackberry purple. I put them both in the plastic basket I'd slung over my forearm. Next I spotted my favorite color of all, the golden olive green of an empty wine bottle. Chocolate, cranberry, pear—anything that reminded me of something delicious to eat went into my basket. I hadn't the faintest idea which room I even intended what color for; I was just buying my own personal rainbow.

The heavy thump of the basket on the counter brought the clerk's head up from his magazine.

“Gracious,” he said. “How many rooms you painting there?”

I set my credit card on the counter with a brisk snap. “All of them.”

The bedroom was the only place to start. Partly this was because its size didn't demand the kind of mental commitment that the living area did, but that wasn't really why. This was the room where Adam and I had made love, and slept with our hearts beating close enough to knock against each other's ribs. I needed to wipe him away.

My new sheets had been a good beginning: a beige ticking stripe pattern, in soft L.L. Bean flannel, perfect for a New England girl. Buying them was almost the first thing I'd done, after Jonathan brought me home that day. Our first grown-up mattress had long since been hauled off to the dump. I had almost finished doing what I needed to feel at peace in this room; painting was the very last thing.

I spread a drop cloth out along the floor and carefully taped its edge to the base molding of the wall opposite the bed. My habitual meticulousness was high on Adam's list of Caroline Things; if he were here, he'd tease me for this. “You're putting tiny blobs of paint on tiny brushes and rubbing them gently on the wall. You really need to hermetically seal the drop cloth?”

I dipped one of the small, spongy brushes into the first pot of paint, called Roxbury Caramel, and daubed it onto the wall, smoothing it down and out into an even rectangle. When I finished, I stepped back to get a little distance. It looked nice! It looked pretty. But I had so many other colors to test.

Next I opened the blackberry pot and the cranberry one, and laid them up in tidy rectangles in line with the caramel. As I studied them, I saw that a single wavy filament of my hair had stuck itself into the wet paint, and when I stepped toward the wall to remove it, my foot knocked into the pot of cranberry paint I'd left open on the floor. I swore and jumped backward, but thanks to my foresight with the drop cloth, there was no real harm done. Instead, as I stared down at the spilled paint, I was unexpectedly struck by how lovely it was. Richly pigmented, it seeped into a small puddle, its surface glossy in the late afternoon sunlight. I picked it up, scooping as much of the spill as I could back into the pot, then ran my finger around the edge to wipe it clean. And then I dipped two fingers inside the pot, scooped up a gout of paint, and threw it at the wall.

I didn't even realize I'd done it until I saw the paint hit the wall. It was the oddest thing. It was as if my hand had acted independent of my brain, going rogue in an instant to create an act of unpremeditated destruction. The cranberry had landed in the middle of the caramel, splattering outward from the point of impact, and as I watched, droplets began to form and ooze their way down the wall, grudgingly obeying the call of gravity. Messy as it was, the deep red glowed against the caramel, and it was beautiful—sloppy and silly, but beautiful. I put the cranberry pot down, sealed it, and reached for the blackberry.

People who don't know better think Jackson Pollock's work is random, just a haphazard landscape of splattered paint. But they couldn't be more wrong. There is structure there, and rhythm, as precisely judged as a Mozart concerto. Now, to be clear: What I did to my bedroom wall on that October afternoon was almost nothing like what Jackson did, but if he had fun with his work while he did it—well, then, that we had in common.

With my window open to the chilly, leafy-scented breeze, I blasted Jo Dee Messina's victorious breakup songs at a volume that, in New York, would have earned me a neighbor's fist pounding on the wall. It didn't even matter that I didn't especially care for country music; Ruby had been right, this woman knew what the hell she was talking about. And while I danced, and sang, and jumped around with my hands in the air, I painted. Paint after paint after paint—one handful after another, I tossed them at the wall, and something inside me flew loose every time I did. In a few places, I swiped the side of my palm through the splatter, the paint slick under my skin. Now my wall was a Franz Kline.

I painted until the square of dancing leaf shadow and light from my window had tracked its way across the room and vanished. When it grew too dim to see well, I switched on my bedside lamp and surveyed the damage. Every one of my pots was empty; there was $180 of Benjamin Moore spattered all over my bedroom wall. I had created a mad, unholy mess, but it was
my
mess. And I loved every single square inch of it.

October trickled by, one glorious stained-glass day after another, and my life without Adam began, if not to feel normal exactly, then at least to feel like less of a barrage of constant little hurts. He was still writing me letters, and I was still reading them. But I was tossing them into the recycling bin, instead of feeding them into the shredder with bloodthirsty zeal.

The long-awaited visit from Diana Ramirez was scheduled for a few days before Halloween, and I had been polishing my gallery talk and sketching out the points I wanted to make in our conversation. Neil, of course, would be doing a lot of the actual schmoozing, but he'd wanted me to stay involved, and I appreciated his confidence that I'd be an important part of the relationship. Even if, perhaps, the confidence might be a teeny bit misplaced. Under interrogation, Jonathan had sworn on his nephew's immortal soul that he'd never so much as flirted with Diana; but her voice had definitely cooled when I'd mentioned him.

The morning she arrived, the last dapples of October color clung in patches to the mountains, but mostly we were into the tones of later fall: the smoky brown of leafless trees and the heavy, impenetrable gray of the clouds that held back the sun. Neil waited sensibly in the vestibule behind me while I shivered in my plum-purple duffle coat and plaid pencil skirt outside the museum entrance; but I'd wanted to welcome Diana with a human face amid the sprawling complex of buildings. The leaves had fallen off the upside-down
Tree Logic
saplings for the season, which I always hated because it made them look dead—it didn't show the way they were thriving in their unusual situation.

When I saw Diana approaching, I took a deep breath and walked up to meet her with my numb-fingered hand extended. Though I barely remembered her appearance from college, my impression was that the years had allowed Diana Ramirez to look like exactly what she was: a woman who'd spent her whole life bucking expectations. Topping out at fifty-nine inches if you counted her distressed black leather sneakers and spiky, boyish haircut, she had full, rounded cheeks and shrewd dark eyes. I bet there'd been a lot of fools who'd taken the cheeks and the stature as the measure of the woman, and I pitied every one of them. Because those eyes told me Diana had swatted them all down like houseflies.

“Hi, Caroline,” she said, shaking my hand firmly. No air-kissing for Diana. I liked that. “It's nice to see you; you look well.”

“And you, too. How's the Stockbridge place? Are you mostly settled in there now?”

“Settled in? It's been done for months, but this weekend is only the second time I've gotten to use it. It still feels like somebody else's house. One of these days, I guess. Anyway, I'm glad I made it up for this. I can't believe how long it's been since I was here,” she said, head swiveling as she looked around her.

“It's grown a lot. So where would you like to start—the Sol LeWitt galleries, maybe?”

She shrugged. “I don't know who that is, but sure. Sounds good.”

The museum when it's empty of visitors has always been one of my absolute favorite things. It's such a unique luxury—and that morning, it was just me, Neil, Diana, and some of the greatest art of the last few decades.

Whenever I give a person or a group a tour of the collection, I can always tell whether or not I've got them. It's especially fun with high-school-age kids: 90 percent of them will be bored, checking their phones, shuffling their feet along the polished hardwood floor, but what I live for is that handful of kids who are looking around with bright, fascinated eyes. Kids like I was on that long-ago MoMA tour: wired out of their skin with the excitement of being surrounded by so much creativity.

Diana was not wired out of her skin. She was paying attention, more or less, though I caught her smothering a couple of yawns behind her hand. But she wasn't connecting with any of the artwork. And she kept glancing at her phone like it was a stopwatch timing a race. I met Neil's eyes over her lowered head, and he angled his lower lip down in the universal gesture for “Oy vey.”

We took her through Sol LeWitt, through glass artist Randy Allen, and into the football-field-sized Building 5, where three enormous composite sculptures embodying the specter of climate change oozed and crawled around the cavernous, sunlit space.

“
The Island
is my favorite,” Neil said to me, after Diana merely nodded in response to my explanation of the artwork. “The image of someone slowly drowning in a rising tide. It's chilling.”

“Mine is
The Desert,
” I said, pointing to the dusty brown installation at the far end of the room. “If you can even call that a favorite, you know—something so terrifying.”

After a few beats of silence stretched out between us, Diana popped her head up with a guilty expression.

“Crap, I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm addicted to this thing. Goes with the territory, I suppose.”