Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas (6 page)
I breathed in everything around me: the sea grass, the minty blue sky, the beach, the roaring ocean. But mostly I breathed
in Matthew Harrison. His freshly laundered plaid flannel shirt, his jeans, his glistening rose-brown skin, his longish brown
hair.
I breathed Matt in, held him there, and never wanted to exhale. Something very nice was happening.
Now, you may be wondering about Matt Wolfe, the lawyer? Well, I called Matt several times, but all I ever got was his answering
machine, and then he never called me back. It is a small island, though, so
maybe he knew.
Nicky,
I saw Matt Harrison every day for the next two weeks. I almost couldn’t believe it. I pinched myself a lot. I smiled when
no one was around.
“Have you ever ridden a horse, Suzanne?” Matt asked me on Saturday morning. “This is a serious question.”
“I reckon. When I was a kid,” I said with a light cowgirl drawl.
“A perfect answer—because you’re about to be a kid again. Right now, today. By the way, have you ever ridden a sky blue horse
that has red stripes and gold hooves?”
I looked at Matt, then shook my head. “I’d remember if I had.”
“I know where there’s a horse like that,” he said. “In fact, I know where there are lots of them.”
We drove up to Oak Bluffs, and there they were. God, what a sight.
Dozens of brightly painted stallions stood in a circle beneath the most dazzling jigsaw ceiling I’d ever seen. Hand-carved
horses with flared red nostrils and black glass eyes galloped in their tireless tracks in a circle of joy.
Matthew had brought me to the Flying Horses, the oldest carousel in the country. It was still open for business, for kids
of all ages.
We climbed aboard as the platform tilted and rotated beneath us, and we found perfect steeds.
As the music began, I clenched the silver horse rod, rising and falling, rising and falling. I fell under the carousel’s spinning
spell. Matt reached out to hold my hand and even tried to catch a kiss, which he succeeded at admirably. What a horseman!
“Where did you learn to ride like that, cowboy?” I asked as we rode up and down, but also around and around.
“Oh, I’ve ridden for years,” Matt said. “Took lessons here when I was three. You see that blue stallion up ahead? Blue the
color of the sky? Wild-blue-yonder blue?”
“Reckon I do.”
“He threw me a couple of times. Man, did I take a nasty spill or two. That’s why I wanted to make sure you got National Velvet
first time out. She’s got an even temper, lovely coat of shellac.”
“She’s beautiful, Matt. You know, when I was a kid I did ride some. It’s all coming back to me. I used to go riding with my
grandfather out in Goshen, New York. Funny I should remember that now.”
Good memories are like charms, Nicky. Each is special. You collect them, one by one, until one day you look back and discover
they make a long, colorful bracelet.
By the end of that day, I would have my first in a series of beautiful charms about Matthew Harrison.
K
ATIE WOULD
never forget the very first time she saw
M
att
H
arrison. It was in her small, comfortable office at the publishing house, and she had been looking forward to the meeting
for days. She had loved
Songs of a Housepainter,
which seemed to her like the most memorable short stories, quite magical, condensed into powerful, very moving poems. He
wrote about everyday life—tending a garden, painting a house, burying a beloved dog, having a child—but his
choice
of words distilled life so perfectly. She was still amazed that she had discovered his work.
And then he walked through the door of her office, and she was even more amazed. No, make that
entranced.
The most primitive parts of her brain and nervous system locked onto the image before her— the poet,
the man.
Katie felt her heart skip a beat, and she thought,
My, my. Careful, careful.
He was taller than she was—she guessed about six foot two. He had a good nose and strong-looking chin, and everything about
his face held together extremely well, like one of his poems. His hair was longish, sandy brown, clean and lustrous. He had
a deep workingman’s tan. He smiled at something, hopefully not her height or her gawkiness or the goofy look on her face—but
she liked him, anyway. What was there not to like?
They had dinner that night, and he gallantly let her buy. He did insist on picking up the tab for a couple of glasses of expensive
port a little later. Then they went to a jazz club on the Upper West Side, on a “school night” as Katie called her work nights.
He finally dropped her off at her apartment at three in the morning, apologized profusely and sincerely, gave her the sweetest
kiss on the cheek, and then off he went in a Checker cab.
Katie stood on the front steps and was finally able to catch her breath, maybe for the first time since he had walked through
the door of her office. She tried to remember . . .
was Matthew Harrison married?
He was back in her office the following morning— to work—but the two of them skedaddled off to lunch at noon and didn’t return
for the rest of the day. They went museum hopping, and he certainly knew his art. He didn’t show off, but he easily knew as
much as Katie did. She kept thinking—who
is
this guy? And why am I allowing myself to feel the way I’m feeling?
And then—
why am I not trying to feel like this all the time?
He came up to her place that night, and she contin- ued to be astonished that any of this was happening. Katie was infamous
with her friends for
not
sleeping around, for being too romantic, and way too old-fashioned about sex; but here she was with this good looking, undeniably
sexy, housepainter-poet from Martha’s Vineyard, and she couldn’t
not
be with him. He never, ever hustled her—in fact, he seemed almost as surprised about being in her apartment as she was that
he was there.
“Hummuna, hummuna,” Katie said, and they both laughed nervously.
“My sentiments exactly,” Matt said.
They went to bed for the first time on that rainy night, and he made her notice the music of the raindrops as they fell on
her street, the rooftop, and even the trees outside her apartment. It was beautiful, it was music; but soon they had forgotten
the patter of the rain, and everything else, except for the urgent touch of each other.
He was so natural and easy and good in bed that it scared Katie a little. It was as if he had known her for a long time. He
knew how to hold her, how and where to touch her, how to wait, and then when to let everything on the inside explode. She
loved the way he touched her, the gentle way he kissed her lips, her cheeks, the hollow of her throat, her back, breasts—
well, everywhere.
“You’re absolutely ravishing, and you don’t know it, do you?” he whispered to her, then smiled. “You have the most delicate
body. Your eyes are gorgeous. And I
love
your braid.”
“You and my mother,” Katie said. She loosened the braid and let her long hair cascade over her shoulders.
“Hmmm. I love that look, too,” Matt said, and winked at her.
When he finally left her apartment the next morning, Katie had the feeling that she had never been with anyone like that,
never experienced such intimacy with another person.
My God, why not?
she asked herself.
She kind of missed Matt already. It was insane, completely ridiculous, not
her;
but she
did
miss him.
My God, why not?
When she got to her office that morning, he was already there, waiting for her. Her heart nearly stopped.
“We’d better do some work,” she said. “Seriously, Matthew.”
He didn’t say a word, just shut her office door, and kissed her until Katie felt as if she were melting into the hardwood
floor.
He finally pulled away, looked into her eyes again, and said, “As soon as I left your place,
I missed you.
”
Nicholas,
I remember all of this as if it happened yesterday. It’s still vibrant and alive. Matt and I were riding on the Edgartown–Vineyard
Haven road in my Jeep. Gus went along for the ride. He sat on the backseat and looked like one of the lions that guard the
front of the New York Public Library.
“Can’t you drive any faster?” Matt asked, tapping his fingers on the dashboard. “I walk faster than this.”
I am by my own admission a slow and careful driver. Matt had found my first flaw.
“Hey, I got the safety-first award in my driver’s ed class in Cornwall on Hudson. I hung the diploma under my medical degree.”
Matt laughed and rolled his brown eyes. He got all of my dumb little jokes.
We were driving to his mother’s house. Matt thought it would be interesting for me to meet her.
Interesting? What did that mean?
“Oops, there’s my mom!” Matt said just then. “Oh, man. There she is.”
She was up on the roof of the house when we got there. She was fixing an ancient TV antenna.We got out of my old blue Jeep,
and Matt called up to her.
“Mom, this is Suzanne. And Gus the Wonder Dog. Suzanne . . . my mother, Jean. She taught me how to fix things around the house.”
His mother was tall, lanky, silver-haired. She called down to us, “Very nice to meet you, Suzanne. You, too, Gus. You three
go have a seat on the porch. I’ll only be a minute up here.”
“If you don’t fall off the roof and break both your legs,” Matt said. “Fortunately, we have a good doctor in the house.”
“I won’t fall off the roof.” Jean laughed, and went back to her work. “I only fall off extension ladders.”
Matt and I took our seats at a wrought-iron table on the porch. Gus preferred the front yard. The house was an old saltbox
with a northern view of the harbor. To the south lay cornfields, and then deep woods that gave you the impression you were
in Maine.
“It’s gorgeous here. Is this where you grew up?” I asked.
“No, I was born in Edgartown. This house was bought a few years after my father died.”
“I’m sorry, Matt.”
He shrugged. “It’s another thing we have in common, I guess.”
“So why didn’t you tell me?” I asked him.
He smiled. “You know, I guess I just don’t like to talk a lot about sad things. Now you know
my
flaw. What good does it do to talk about sad things in the past?”
Jean suddenly appeared with iced tea and a plate heaped with chocolate-chip cookies.
“Well, I promise I won’t give you the once-over, Suzanne. We’re too mature for that sort of thing,” she said with a quick
wink. “I would love to hear about your practice, though. Matthew’s father was a doctor, you know.”
I looked over at him. Matt hadn’t told me that, either. “My dad died when I was eight years old. I don’t remember too much.”
“He’s private about some things, Suzanne. Matthew was hurt badly when his dad died. Don’t listen to him on that. I think he
believes it might make other people uncomfortable to hear about how much he hurts.”
She winked at Matt; he winked back at her. I could tell they were close. It was nice to see. Sweet.
“So, tell me about yourself, Jean. Unless you’re a private person, too.”
“Hell, no!” she said with a laugh. “I’m an open book. What do you want to know?”
It turned out that Jean was a local artist— a painter. She walked me through the cottage and showed me some of her work. She
was good, too. I knew enough to be fairly sure that her paintings could have sold at a lot of galleries in Back Bay, or even
New York. Jean had framed a quote from the primitive artist Grandma Moses. It said, “I paint from the top down. From the sky,
then the mountains, then the hills, then the cattle, and then the people.”
Jean laughed at my praise of her work and said, “I once saw a cartoon with a couple standing before a Jackson Pollock painting.
The painting had a price tag of a million dollars under it, and the man turned to the woman and said, ‘Well, he comes through
clear enough on the price.’ ” She had a good sense of humor about her work, about anything really. I saw a lot of her in Matt.
