Great Circle

by Maggie Shipstead

  He was studying her. “I know what you mean. You’ve changed but you haven’t.” The bones stood out more sharply in her long face than they had, but still there was an inevitability to her adult self. The long, veiling eyelashes that had given her a shy, modest affect as a girl were blackened with mascara, and as she looked up at him through them, he sensed with some disquiet a new artfulness to her.

  She gestured at the canvas, said, “I look at this and I am so proud. I don’t have any right to be, but I am.”

  “It’s…” He trailed off, looking at the canvas. “It’s not what I wanted it to be, but thank you. The truth is I would never have become an artist if not for that summer.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It is.”

  “It isn’t. You were meant to be an artist. You didn’t need some silly little romance to make you one.”

  Jamie’s pulse of displeasure at silly and little were countered by the avidity in her gaze. He had the sense she was trying to memorize him, too. “It wasn’t just that,” he said. “No one had encouraged me before. You gave me a sense of possibility. Not just you. It was your mother and your father, even though…” He hesitated, then hurried on. “And being around all that art. It was an education, a beginning.”

  He was breathless, surprised by his own earnestness. She was beaming. She said, “Well then, the heartache was worth it.”

  Just then, a man slid from the crowd, putting his arm around Sarah’s waist. He kissed her temple, drew back, and pressed his palm to her forehead. “You’re burning up. Are you feeling all right?”

  Flustered, she pulled away, then turned back apologetically, pressing his shoulder with hers. “Yes, just warm.”

  “You should get some air. I’m sorry—hello.” The man offered his hand to Jamie, who, gripping it, imagined he could still feel the dampness of Sarah’s brow on its palm. Whose heartache? he wanted to demand of her. Yours? What did you mean? The man said, “Lewis Scott. I interrupted. I was distracted by concern for my lovely wife.”

  “Lewis, this is Jamie Graves,” Sarah said. “The artist and my old friend. Jamie, this is my husband, Lewis.”

  “Oh!” Lewis said. “I’ve been wanting to meet you for ages!”

  Jamie had been too intent on Sarah’s face to notice her wedding band. This man, her husband, was sandy-haired and genial-countenanced behind tortoiseshell glasses. A prominent, slightly humped nose did not detract from his handsomeness. His tuxedo fit perfectly.

  Leaning in, Lewis gestured, as Sarah had, over his shoulder at the Cannon Beach painting and lowered his voice. “It’s the best one here. I don’t know a fraction of what Sarah does about art, but even I can see it’s a knockout. Everyone’s been saying so. Congratulations.”

  Miserably, Jamie thanked him.

  “I can tell you’re not the kind of artist who eats praise for lunch. I’ll stop embarrassing you right after I tell you those old portraits you did of the Fahey girls are spot-on. Sarah’s hangs in our house still, and it’s one of my favorites of all our art. I’m biased, of course, but there it is. Now I’m done. No more torturing you with compliments. Down to business. How long are you in town? We’d love to have you over for dinner. You should meet the boys.”

  Almost apologetically, Sarah said, “We have two sons. They’re four and seven.”

  Jamie cleared his throat, said, “You’ve been married awhile, then.”

  “Eight years,” said Lewis. “Sarah wasn’t even twenty. I was a medical student at UW and relentlessly persistent. Could you come tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow’s Sunday,” Sarah said. “We have to go to my parents’.”

  “Couldn’t we skip it?”

  She gave Lewis a look rich with the silent communication that comes from a long and intimate history. Jamie felt contorted with envy. She’d married only two years after he’d left Seattle, maybe even when he’d still been drunkenly rattling around Wallace’s house, mooning over her. He said, “Don’t change your plans because of me.”

  “I would dearly love to change our plans,” Sarah said, “but my father would be difficult about it. You remember how he is.”

  “I didn’t realize you knew the mighty patriarch,” Lewis said, and Jamie understood that Sarah must have told him very little about their past. (Because it did not matter? Or because it did?)

  “I’ve seen some of your family’s pieces on loan here,” he said to Sarah a little stiffly. “Is your father still thinking about a museum of his own?”

  “Oh, I never know what he’s thinking. Sometimes he wants a museum, sometimes he wants to sell everything. Then when he does sell one, he immediately wants to buy it back. I’ve stopped trying to keep up.” To Lewis, she said, “Jamie was the one who discovered those Turner watercolors. They were moldering in a box somewhere.”

  “If tomorrow’s out, then come the next night,” Lewis said. “Would you? I know it would mean the world to Sarah. We’re always having boring doctors over. An artist would be a breath of fresh air.”

  Jamie had intended to leave the next day. To accept Lewis’s invitation, he would have to add not one but two nights at his hotel. No, it would be better if he pled other commitments, departed as planned. He was about to offer his regrets when Sarah touched his arm again. She said, “Please come.”

  It was settled.

  * * *

  —

  In the morning, Jamie went back to the museum to take in the exhibition without the obscuring crowds and the distraction of Sarah Fahey—Sarah Scott, he reminded himself. The gallery was empty. His footsteps sent up soft echoes. The canvases, all Pacific Northwest landscapes, abounded with trees and mountains, islands and ocean. The artists had taken different approaches to conveying light, had complicated or simplified their scenes in pursuit of different moods and effects, but still Jamie grew depressed looking at one after another after another. What was the purpose of painting all these branches and waves? No painting would ever definitively capture trees or the sea. But was that even his goal? Definitiveness? He longed to communicate something not about trees but about space, which could not be defined or contained. Was the pursuit in itself reason enough to persevere? He didn’t know.

  All the other questions he had for himself concerned Sarah Fahey. For example, why had he agreed to go to her house for dinner? There was a simple enough answer: He wanted to see her again. He wanted that so badly he was willing to endure the excruciating presence of her husband and children, to witness another man living out a dream he’d once had for himself. But why? When he examined his feelings for Sarah, he found violent confusion. There was no giddiness in his heart, no euphoria, only churning unease. If he spent more time with her, though, he supposed his present feeling might have the chance to settle into something recognizable. Perhaps a sentimental, nostalgic affection. Perhaps indifference. Perhaps love, after all. He didn’t know which he was hoping for. Was love worth cultivating even if it came to nothing?

  After he’d finished with the exhibition, he took a stroll through the museum to visit the Turner watercolors. By the time he emerged, it was eleven-thirty, and since he’d skipped breakfast, he ducked into the first diner he came across, sat at the counter and ordered coffee and scrambled eggs with toast. He was still waiting for his food when a cook in a soiled white jacket came out from the kitchen and switched on the radio perched on a shelf above the cash register, put the volume up so loud everyone in the room quit talking and turned to look. A clipped nasal voice was talking rapidly about Japanese envoys and the State Department, Thailand, and Manila. The president’s press secretary, the voice said, had read a statement to reporters. Slowly Jamie gathered that Japan had bombed a naval base in Hawaii. A teenage girl two stools down burst into tears. When the reporter said a declaration of war was certain to follow, some people cheered. The program ended with promises of further bulletins, dropped without fanf
are back into regularly scheduled programming: the New York Philharmonic playing something dismal and discordant.

  Jamie didn’t know where to go, so he walked toward the waterfront. Apparently others had the same idea because a crowd was already gathering, mostly men, milling around, casting baleful looks to the west, at Bainbridge Island and Japan somewhere beyond it, as though a swarm of airplanes might appear on the gray horizon at any moment and the men would…what exactly? Throw stones as the bombs rained down? Feeling foolish, Jamie left the crowd to its posturing, walked uphill. The city had taken on a stunned quiet, distinct from a normal languid Sunday hush. The tinny, ambient buzz of radios seeped from windows. People stood clumped on the sidewalks. To Jamie, the war so far had been like the sun, relentless and undeniable but not to be looked at directly. Distant continents were being consumed by suffering and death, and, even if the impulse was cowardly, he had avoided fully confronting the horror of it for fear that he, too, would be swallowed up. But there was to be no escape. He felt as he had as a child in the mountains when he’d found himself, more than once, trapped far from shelter as a storm approached, bristling with lightning.

  From his pocket he drew Sarah’s embossed card. He remembered the street. She lived near Volunteer Park, not far from her parents.

  * * *

  —

  Sarah opened the door after he’d rung the bell twice. Her eyes were red-rimmed, and new tears sprang up when she saw him. She didn’t seem to question why he’d come, only beckoned him inside, saying, “It’s too awful.” She hugged him quickly, almost roughly, then lifted the hem of her skirt to wipe her eyes, seeming for a moment like a little girl. “Anyway,” she said, laughing a little, “welcome.”

  The Scott residence was an imposing two-story Craftsman with a deep front porch. Inside was spacious and airy and surprisingly full of houseplants. Philodendrons sent down tendrils of heart-shaped leaves from shelves and tables; potted palms stood politely in corners as though waiting to be asked to dance. Geometrically patterned rugs were scattered on walnut floorboards, and an eclectic collection of artwork adorned the walls. The sound of a radio droned from within, growing louder as Sarah led him down a hallway and past a dining room. She stepped around abandoned toys: a metal truck, a hobbyhorse, a misshapen castle built from wooden blocks. Through a doorway into a small study or library, Jamie glimpsed his old portrait of her, matted and framed, a brass lamp fixed above it.

  “Is Lewis home?”

  “No, he runs a clinic in one of the shacktowns on Sundays. He left before the news came, but he would have gone anyway. People count on him. He’s a good man.” This last was said with such obvious defensiveness it gave him a perverse hope.

  “And your sons?”

  “They slept over at my sister’s so we could go to the opening. I haven’t been to retrieve them yet. I don’t want them to see me this upset. Do you remember my sister Alice? She has two boys almost the same ages as ours. Come into the sunroom.”

  The sunroom was bright with flat silver light and crowded with plants. Jamie was reminded of Sarah’s mother’s conservatory, where he had felt so adult when invited for coffee. The windows looked out onto a sloping lawn, electric green under the overcast sky. From a portable radio set amid a thicket of ferns on a side table came the information that Japanese immigrant populations on the West Coast had been put under strict surveillance. Sarah lowered the volume to a murmur, picked at the ferns. “I’m supposed to feel patriotic, I think, but mostly I’m afraid. And so angry.” She gestured to a wicker chair with floral cushions. “I’m sorry. Please sit.”

  “I don’t mean to intrude.”

  She sat on a love seat at right angles to him. “I’m glad you came. I’ve just been staring into space, envisioning what will follow from this. The powerlessness might be the worst part. And the rage! I don’t know what to do with it. I’m grateful my boys are so little still, but all those other mothers…I can’t think about it. They’ll want doctors. I’m sure Lewis will go if he can. I’d go myself if I could. What will you do?”

  The question hadn’t occurred to him, though, yes, of course, he was an able-bodied twenty-seven-year-old man. He couldn’t begin to grapple with the possibilities and so put them aside, saying, “It’s hard to imagine you wanting to go to war. I think of you as being so gentle.”

  “Yes, well, I’d prefer a gentler world. But everybody has their limits, don’t you think?”

  He remembered his surge of happiness that someone had shot Barclay Macqueen. “It seems so.”

  “I feel like I might burst out of my skin with anger. I want Germany and Japan to be nothing but ash and rubble. I want to come down from above in a blaze of vengeance like a Valkyrie and make them pay. Is that at all what Valkyries do? I’ve never thought about killing anyone, ever, and yet I find myself daydreaming about putting a bullet right between Hitler’s eyes. Don’t you?”

  “Hitler seems so abstract, like the devil.”

  “He isn’t, though. He’s a real man. Isn’t it strange, that one person had the power to start this? That’s an oversimplification, but you know what I mean.” She closed her eyes briefly. “Let’s talk about something else. I don’t want to waste our time together rambling on about the war. Tell me about your life. Tell me everything that’s happened.”

  “Everything? There’s so much, but also so little.”

  “We need a starting point. How about—tell me where you live.”

  “Oregon, for now. On the coast. I lived in Canada before that.”

  “You’re not married?” Her tone was carefully neutral.

  He shook his head.

  “And your sister? Is she married?”

  So her mother had not told her about Marian’s visit to Seattle. “Actually, Marian is already a widow.”

  Sarah’s tears, so close to the surface already, welled up. “Oh, how terrible. I’m sorry to hear it. Are there children?”

  “No. Thankfully.”

  “Yes, it’s a mercy they don’t have to grieve their father.”

  Jamie hesitated. “I meant something a little different. She didn’t want any. Her husband was a vile man, but even if he hadn’t been, she wouldn’t have wanted any. She only wants to fly airplanes. She doesn’t like being bound to people.”

  Her forehead creased with consternation. “Being bound to people is the heart of life. My children have lit me up, lit up the whole world. It’s love like you can’t imagine.”

  He smiled ruefully. “Be that as it may, I don’t know if they’re in the cards for me, either.”

  She slumped back into the love seat, exhaling. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what good there is in my saying something like that. But you’ll have them. I’m sure you will.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. I think I’d like them. But I also think Marian would say she knows her own mind. She wants a different kind of life.”

  “I shouldn’t have judged. It’s no business of mine how your sister lives. Or how you live.”

  This last remark stung. He said, “Do you know what this reminds me of?”

  “No, what?”

  “When we walked around the lake together, when we first met, and you extracted my whole life from me, and I didn’t realize until later that I hadn’t asked you anything about yours.”

  “I’d forgotten all about that.” He must have looked crestfallen because she added hastily, “Not about that day or the walk. I’d forgotten you were so worried about having talked too much. But it was the same then as now—your life is more interesting than mine.”

  “No—”

  “Oh—there’s a bulletin. Will you turn it up?”

  Jamie reached for the volume knob. Japan had declared war on the United States and Great Britain.

  After a minute, she said, “That’s enough.”

  He turned down the volume again. Tentativel
y, he said, “I wish there was a way I could just convey everything to you in a flash, have you know it all without having to tell you.”

  “I don’t. I like the way you have to find out about someone little by little.”

  “But we don’t have time. And I don’t trust myself to explain things right.”

  She was looking at him keenly. “I’ve always liked how honest you are. That’s all you have to be, to explain things.”

  “I struggle with the same thing in my paintings. Everything I want to paint is too big, and so I’ve started to think what I really want to paint is the too-bigness. Does that make sense?”

  “Yes, I think so. It’s there in the beach painting.”

  “I think I’m drawn to impossibility.” Cautiously, slowly, he reached out and took her left hand in both of his. She let him.

  “Yes,” she said quietly after a pause. “Impossible.”

  “Your life went on as though I were never in it.”

  “Only outwardly.”

  “Isn’t that what matters?”

  “I don’t think so. But I’m just— I have an ordinary life, Jamie. You wanted me to rebel, and I couldn’t. It’s not my way. Sometimes I wish I were less conventional, but the simplest explanation is I don’t have the guts.” She gripped his hand more tightly. “I’ve always only wished you the best. I want you to be happy.”

  “I don’t like that, how you say that.”

  “You don’t want me to wish you happiness?”

  “No, it’s that there’s something final about it.” He released her hand, hunched forward. “Was our summer just a sweet little rite of passage for you?”

  A soprano’s aria warbled quietly from the radio while Sarah thought for a long time, staring out at the lawn. “No,” she said finally, decisively. “But, Jamie, shouldn’t it have been? Wouldn’t it be better if we decided now, together, that it was? I honestly don’t know why it wasn’t, why I haven’t completely let go of it. But I have a life. I have children. Even if my feelings about you are complicated, what possible difference could it make?” Her gaze blazed on him like a searchlight, and he felt exposed, as though she could see his most pathetic, persistent hopes and desires. She said firmly, “No good can come from us going to bed.”