by Dawn Tripp
The sun strikes his face, and there, across the wide empty plane of his cheek, she can see a line of cattle moving slowly toward a hollow dome.
One afternoon, as they are sitting out as usual on the back porch, the heat is oppressive. Small blackflies beat around them in the still wind. He asks her if she would like to take a walk down to the river.
“Just for a spell,” he says. “There will be a breeze there, I’d imagine.”
She hesitates. She has not gone down to the river since the day of the clambake. She has seen Jake several times, but she has avoided any direct passing.
Patrick swats his book across his face to bat away the flies.
“All right,” she says. He stands up and offers her his arm.
As they walk across the yard, he begins to tell her about an essay he has been reading about a project for Domino housing.
“It is practically a revolution in urban planning,” he says mildly.
The grape leaves, she notices, have grown thick. The fruit hangs in ripe clusters and the scent is strong. The Virginia creeper has turned early, and the leaves twist in fierce red rags through the juniper trees. Patrick goes on talking as they walk down the wagon path. Eve catches words of what he says—details about long strip windows and cantilevered space. The grass crunches dry under their shoes. Patrick is still talking as they come out onto the lower meadow. Jake is at the far end scything hay. A flock of swallows beat out of the tall trees behind him, then curve away down toward the river. Their wings scrape the sky. He keeps the scythe low as he works, the blade sweeping back and forth in long and rhythmic curls, his shoulders loose under the weight. His cutting is even, slow and intentional, and the hay lies down under the blade. He will leave it there, outstretched in its windrows, to dry. He will come back several days later to turn it so the drying takes place on all sides. He will rake it into piles and pitch the stacks into Caleb Mason’s horse-drawn flatbed wagon, and the hay will be pulled to Mason’s farm two miles up the road and stored as feed.
The sunlight pools on the field. He has not noticed them. He works with his back turned, moving down the last row along the stone wall toward its end that intersects the path.
They will meet, Eve realizes, with a sudden stab of panic. Patrick is saying something about tall buildings divided by broad cubist parks.
His voice carries. Jake stops his work, the scythe in midswing. He takes them in with a glance over his shoulder. His eyes are cool, and they rest for a moment on her face. Then he turns away, wipes the sweat from his brow, and continues working the scythe along his row toward the corner of the wall. He stops at the end and takes a whetstone from his pocket. He works it down the blade to sharpen the edge.
“This is quite a spot,” Patrick is saying. “Don’t you think, Eve?”
“What?”
“This little meadow here. Humble of course, but quite a lovely spot.”
“Yes.” She nods. They are less than twenty feet from him now. He has not started working back the other way. He is staring down at a patch of uncut grass by the wall. He prods the end of the scythe toward something he has discovered on the ground.
“You there, guy,” Patrick calls out to him. “What do you think of this spot?”
Jake turns as they approach, his eyes wary and detached.
“You would have a sense, I’d imagine,” Patrick says.
“Sense of what?”
“If one were to cut some of these trees, clear out this brush—a stubborn mess to clear, isn’t it, this marsh kind of brush?”
“Bullbrier.” Jake nods. He does not look at Eve. She notices that he has pressed down a spot in the grass behind him, but his boots block it and she cannot see what is there.
“Wouldn’t you say,” Patrick continues, “that if you were to cut down some of these trees—those there—what kind of trees are those?”
“Some birch,” Jake answers. “Spruce. A few maple. Pine.”
“Scotch pine?”
“Pitch.”
“Right. Well, you wouldn’t have to cut them all, of course, but don’t you think if one were to clear, say for example, this patch out here in front of us, wouldn’t you agree, you would have quite a fine view of the river?”
“Might,” Jake answers.
“Do you think, from this point, you would be high up enough for a view of the ocean?”
“Would depend on how high you build.”
“Right,” Patrick says. “Well perhaps you would break ground slightly higher.” He takes several steps back up the hill. “Here, for instance.” His arms sweep out to designate the space. “You would want to build on stilts, of course, underneath on the front end, to accent the natural slope of the hill.” He looks up at the treeline and takes a few more steps away from them, then notices a knot of burrs caught on his trouser cuff. He bends down to pick them off.
“It was a pheasant nest,” Jake says to Eve. His voice is low and he does not look at her. He points to the ground with the sharp end of the scythe, and she can see the spot where he had broken down the grass—the slight abandoned indentation in the earth, the smooth dirt hollow, small cracked shells left in the bowl.
She will leave Skirdagh before the fall. Before the sky has grown parched into that relentless blue. Before the goldenrod has filled the marshes and the fields are thick with Queen Anne’s lace. She will leave before the grasping after summer. Before grief in the angle of light. On the first Thursday of September, she packs herself with braided rugs and the green steamer trunk into her father’s new Model A. They drive to the Fall River Line, and she boards the ferry to New York. She will stay there for a month before she leaves for Paris. She will stay with a distant cousin twice removed, and she will sleep on her feet through garden luncheons and the occasional soiree. Once, before the maple trees burn into a redness that aches, she will pass an oak, and the wind will stop her as it moves through the tremendous, burnished leaves. She will hear the sound of the river in that oak. She will imagine climbing into it, into a green cave damp with sunlight that sticks like sap to the bark.
She arrives in Paris at the end of October. She perfects her French and stumbles through lessons in German until she is lost between two languages and not a part of either one. She grinds oil paint out of stone. She learns how to separate the parts of ultramarine from lapis, how to draw them to a heat in a crucible, to soak the powder in vinegar, and then to blend that mixture with wax, red colophonium, and pine resin. She learns how to make the color of shadow out of burnt coal drenched in water and then ground. She will make Naples yellow out of ceruse and sulfur and alum pulverized with a sal ammonia and exposed over low fire overnight, then thinned with an oil of turpentine. When she stands over the pit fire, the heat jumps onto stray ends of her hair. They fizzle halfway to the root and break off.
She finds a hotel apartment, whitewashed with long windows that open out onto the Place de la Concorde. In the mornings, she walks through a maze of narrow streets and window boxes where red geraniums spill through wrought iron. She takes classes at a studio in the Marais three floors above a boulangerie, and the smell of hard-crusted bread seeps into their paints.
The man who is her teacher is named Thierry. As he walks through the room, he carries a chunk of raw lapis in his hand. A heavy rock wide at the top and narrow at the base. It is a kind of zeolite, he tells them, hard enough to cut glass. He wears cravats, always untied, and she can see the sprout of dark hair at the base of his throat. He teaches her to pull a face out of a canvas with her hands and then to work the details of the features with a brush. He stalks her in a quiet gentle way, undoes her in the way he speaks of color, shape, and atmosphere. He smiles at her accented French and corrects a shadow she has drawn too thick through the small of a woman’s back. He covers her hand with his, and his fingers guide the brush to smudge the edge.
In the middle of winter, a dark-haired model comes to them for the first time. Eve recognizes her as the woman who works behind the counter of t
he bakery downstairs. Thierry sets her on a chaise, draped with a sheet of lawn. As Eve mixes cerulean into a flesh tone on her palette, she watches the way Thierry touches the dark-haired model, the way he peels the lawn from her breast and it swells like a fruit toward his hand. He runs one finger along the edge of her waist to show them how the shadow strikes her underside and then falls into a harder shade. He maps a small county of light across her belly, along the lowest blade of her ribs. He cups his palm over a burst of direct sunlight on her hip. Around it, he marks the colored rings.
The model’s name is Madeline. Her body bends toward the hand of the man touching her. She grows loose in the hips. The groove of her spine deepens as if the vertebrae are water.
Eve sees the way Madeline looks at him, the way he looks at her. She can sense the fibers that bind them to each other, strange and glowing threads. She envies them. She envies the small free darkness she imagines they will inhabit later that night: on a thin iron bed in a garret room with an oil lamp, the light crusting their shapes into one violet-colored stain across the wall.
One day in the middle of March during an early evening snowstorm as Eve is walking home from class, she remembers that she left her brushes soaking in a jar above the sink. She returns to the studio and enters through the side door that leads up into a stairwell on the courtyard side. Thierry is sweeping the floor. Eve stands for a moment in the doorway. Across the room, she can see her brushes that he has moved to the window ledge. As he rakes the broom away from the corner, he turns and sees her.
You have forgotten something? he says in rapid French.
The brushes.
Oh, he says. Oui, bien sur, the brushes. He smiles.
He makes love to her in the passageway between the studio and the stairs. She stays after class the next day. And then the day after that. He hoists her up onto the banister until the groove of the wall digs into her spine. For a month this goes on until, one evening, she whispers to him that she wants him to bring her the dark-haired model. She wants to lie on the wooden table stained with linseed oil, turpentine, and the sand that they have ground from colored stones. She wants her face wrapped in the white lawn as the two of them move over her.
Aveugle, she says.
Blind.
He will put a small bottle of duck orange paint into one of her hands and the skull of the blue rock in the other. He will hold her hips and tilt them toward the dark-haired woman’s mouth. She grips the bottle hard. The glass breaks and the orange paint runs into streaks down her arms. Her head explodes with light.
By the middle of June, the man is an afterthought. Before dawn, Eve sits at the small rolltop desk across the room from the bed and writes small notes while Madeline sleeps, her black hair flung across the pillow.
She writes on quarter pieces of rice paper that she folds twice and tucks into the pocket of the apron skirt hanging on the hook beside the door. Small intimacies in a rough French that Madeline will find on her way to work that morning.
They meet back at the apartment midday, Madeline’s face dusted in flour, the grit of egg wash in the creases of her hands. They make love on the white bed, and her hair sprawls around them like the soft bottom of the river at night.
They walk arm in arm through the broad sun on the quay. They feed large purposeful chunks of bread to the pigeons that gather in tame flocks in the Tuileries Gardens. They wander past shops in the Rue de Seine, past dealers in antiques and overfilled store windows. They pass men pushing vegetable carts, shouting, “Chou-fleur, chou-fleur.” They eat poached eggs on Sundays in the crémerie, and Madeline teaches Eve how to suck out the soft yolks with her tongue. They walk down Rue Raspail to the cemetery in Montparnasse. They separate and mingle with the stones. Madeline takes leftover pieces of bread from her skirt and breaks them smaller. As she shapes the dough with her hands, the birds steam around her. Eve walks among the stones. She looks for the graves that were planted close together, that are old, small family plots with their edges sanded down, the names worn thin, and as she passes through their rows, it occurs to her that a cemetery is not unlike a library, a place of community, solace, death, where the unrealized thoughts of men turn slowly through a tough and gentle grass.
Once—and it happens only once—past midnight as they are fumbling together in a doorway, by the meager light of the streetlamp, Eve sees Jake’s face in the stain of rouge across the other woman’s cheek—his profile—so close—as he waded with her through the shallows toward the sandflat. She remembers this. The moment rises up in her, and she kisses Madeline hard on the mouth. She presses her hand into the rouge, wipes the color in, and clears his face away.
In the middle of August they spend three days together in the apartment, with two loaves of bread, a bottle of red wine, apricots, and the long windows flung open to the heat. Madeline puts a handful of violets in a jar of water on the oak dresser and she turns the mirror against the wall. In the evenings, they sit between the casement and the fire escape wrapped together in a sheet with their arms bare. They smoke cigarettes and wear cheap green glass earrings with hooks they have twisted out of wire. They drop the ashes into an empty soap dish and watch the top hats and stiff black and white shapes pass in slow rings around the Place de la Concorde. On Sunday, the streets settle into stillness, and Madeline reads to Eve from a book of new poems.
She reads a poem of vowels. A poem about a drunken boat. She reads a series of poems in German and, as she is reading, Eve takes the violets out of the glass jar, breaks off the petals and crushes them between her hands—a thin, dry base of paint—she mixes it with water and begins to draw in lean strokes along Madeline’s ribs, the belly rising, falling, lightly as she reads.
You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. Streets that I chanced upon—
Who knows? perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us,
yesterday, separate, in the evening.…
Wer weiß? ob …
Who knows? perhaps …
Who knows, perhaps, echoed through both of us. The words turn over in Eve’s mind … separate, in the evening … and as they turn, she is aware that she is looking for something in them or behind them … a street that you had just walked down and vanished. Who knows? Who …?
Madeline has gone on to read another poem, farther back toward the beginning of the book, again in German. A poem about an Orpheus in a blue cloak. As she reads aloud, Madeline gets stuck on one word—Nachklang. Echo. Nachklang. She cannot get her throat around the hard middle of it. She slams the book closed.
“Fini,” she says, throwing the book into the corner. Her mouth curls, mischievous. She crawls across the bed, takes one of the apricots from the night table, breaks it apart, and she feeds the pieces to Eve with her hands.
They make love at noon. White light. Their mouths damp. Breathless. The heat is thick, with the consistency of water. Eve cries out, reaching toward the open window, reaching through the iron frame into a white sky, on the verge of seeing something there.
That night as Madeline sleeps, Eve lies awake with the sounds of the traffic moving through the street below. There is a birthmark on the right side of Madeline’s back. Eve finds it with her fingers in the dark. A curious speckled shape below the shoulder blade. Walnut-colored and raised slightly away from her skin, rectangular like one of the Midwestern American states. A small toothed outcrop juts from its lower right end.
E is the vowel of whiteness. Of light and milkweed and fog.
It was a silver day. The sudden heave of a current.
She remembers how easily the sandflat was devoured by the rain. Salt in her lungs and she coughed up the river, her knees in the mud, as Jake lifted her again—she could feel him lifting her the rest of the way across the river. He set her back on solid ground. His name is on her tongue, and she is on the verge of saying it, this way, to herself in the dark. Since that moment, she has worked tirelessly, methodical
ly, to pack him away, to convince herself over and again that it was nothing—that closeness she might have felt—she might not have felt it after all. It was a simple moment. Discarded now. Timeworn. Out of use.
In the dark, she moves her hands along Madeline’s ribs, her fingers mapping each flute of the bone, and the light tense of muscle between them. She finds the birthmark again below the shoulder blade. Her fingers trace its outline. The irregular border. A strange and darker continent.
CHAPTER 11
Patrick
He finds her in Paris. He tracks her to the small apartment near the Place de la Concorde. He pays the landlady to leave a dozen lilies outside her door with a note: a quote from Thoreau and the address of one of the pavilion restaurants surrounded by chestnut trees near the Rond-Point.
He is on his way to Cologne, he says, for a conference. She has brought Madeline with her, and the three of them have dinner. They sit at a table that has been set for two, the girls close together. They dip bread into lamb juice and garlic oil and feed each other playfully, laughing, in front of him, and when Eve orders the baked snapper served whole and Patrick exclaims, “But how primitive!” she glances at Madeline, who shoots her a cunning smile in exchange, and Eve does not argue with him, she does not try to explain that she prefers the fish whole, that she has always preferred the fish whole, with the eyes and lips and bones and gills—with all the parts it had still living—instead she lets him persuade her to order the fillet of salmon instead, and when it arrives, poached and skinless, a gorgeous orange flesh sprinkled with green shreds of dill, she picks at it carefully, in small bites, with her fork.
After dinner, they walk down to the quay. Retaining walls heave up on one side, vast sections of blocked stone pierced by openings that were once old water gates. The trees lean over the edge of the Seine. Their fractured shadows pass through the slow-moving water at the fringe. The sun has not yet set, and the light scatters on the cobbles. Eve walks between Patrick and Madeline. She is quiet as they speak and laugh and flirt around her. She can hear the sluggish purr of the barges on the river, the scrapped conversations of couples strolling by, the call of a small boy pushing a cart full of wildflowers, crude wheels turning over the stones.