Five Questions

by Kitty B. Florey

  “I mean, you liked Alec so much.”

  “Yes.” A burst of laughter reached us from the workshop. “What was the other thing?” my mother asked.

  I couldn’t stop looking at her hand. I remembered how beautiful her hands used to be. How had she become so old? When had this happened?

  “What?”

  “You said that was one thing, that we might not like him. What else?”

  “Oh—nothing, really. Just that. You know. He doesn’t have Alec’s table manners, things like that.”

  “Patrick is different,” my mother said. “He takes some getting used to. But there’s more to him, I think. We both like him very much.”

  I felt a wave of gratitude. “I’m glad.” I reached over and took her hand. “I’m really glad, Mom.” At the moment, it was true.

  • • •

  On our last night, Patrick and I borrowed the Volkswagen and drove to Osmar Lake. We made love near where Mark had gotten me pregnant. I didn’t tell Patrick that that particular spot of sand had any significance, I didn’t tell him anything: I wanted to, I tried the words over in my mind, but finally I just clung to him, thankful that he was there with me. Enjoy it while it lasts, Marietta had said. Her words had chilled me. But it was Marietta who changed boyfriends with the seasons, not me. And I knew she was wrong: It wasn’t keeping secrets that would destroy my relationship with Patrick; it was telling the truth.

  • • •

  One of the things Patrick and I did was to invent our own language. It started as a joke. We were walking down Huntington Avenue, when he suddenly turned to me and said, quite loudly, “Chafanga tee olungo?”

  I looked at him. He wore a suppressed smile, and his eyes had that wicked gleam that I had come to associate with his unexpected wacky side—the side that sometimes went beyond Patrick Foss the obsessive, maniacally driven and ambitious sculptor and emerged as Patrick the nut, Patrick the funny little rebellious boy.

  I said, “Wayfingo kahbi snoot.”

  “Woggo,” he said, delighted. “Woggo dondolo.”

  I nodded. “Feekimo.”

  It became something we treasured, that crazy language—who knows why? At first it was a form of adolescent foolishness, to make people pay attention, try to figure out what tongue we were speaking in that polyglot city. Surrounded by Spanish and Chinese and Polish in our multicultural neighborhood, we were amused by the odd language we called Feekish. And sometimes in bed, Patrick would turn to me and say, “Boofinka, wheemara?” and I would reply, without hesitation, “Humprammi. Whalliko festuna.” Eventually, we codified various words and phrases. Whalliko festuna meant “I love you”—easier than the English words for two reticent people. Woggo was our word for sex. He called me Wynnooka, I called him Pattonino. It was silly, and yet it was meaningful to us. It was a way of circumscribing our private universe, of being everything to each other, of keeping the real world at bay for a while.

  I thought sometimes that I would confess all the awful things about myself to Patrick in Feekish, if I could only figure out the words.

  We had some good friends—Jeanie Volovich, her boyfriend Andrew, Patrick’s pals Clement Clay and Richie Lippman, and my friend Rachel Lucas, an exchange student from England. But Patrick and I spent most of our time alone together, and that summer we became so inseparable that we began to think it was silly not to share an apartment.

  It was the seventies. Living together was in the air; all our friends were doing it. Even fickle Marietta had moved in with Evan—Richard’s successor. I half relished, half dreaded the idea of my parents’ mild disapproval. Anna Rosa, I knew, would give us her blessing; she had met Patrick at Christmas, and he had passed her test by asking her about her Italian childhood and eating three helpings of gnocchi and sauce at her kitchen table. By the end of the visit, she was calling him doll.

  But we hesitated. We talked it over endlessly and decided we weren’t ready—some kind of separation was still necessary. Sometimes he stayed at my apartment, sometimes I stayed in his bare one-room on Hemenway Street. When we were apart we missed each other, and we could have saved money by splitting one rent. But Patrick used to say, only half-joking, “It’s not right to be so happy all the time, Wynn,” as he kissed me good night at my door. “I’m going home where I can brood about things without looking up and seeing you there and feeling cheered by the sight of you.”

  As for me, I longed to be with him, but I was stopped by the fear that if we lived together I would be unable to keep my secret, and the real me would stand revealed: the weak and selfish girl who, against her better judgment, had been persuaded to give away a part of herself.

  • • •

  I struggled with my painting all through art school. The certainties I had been blessed with when I was younger had deserted me, beginning with my bleak collages at Edna Quinlan, but persisting long after that, and continuing to plague me no matter what I did. My painting professor called me a chameleon—not entirely with disapproval, but with something like awe. There was no consistency to my work, no single vision—the only thing my creations had in common, Patrick said, was that distance, the refusal to be present in my work.

  “Don’t think so much!” he was always telling me.

  “But I have to plan it out, Patrick—at least a little.”

  “You’re not understanding me,” he would say, and look exasperated. “I don’t mean just rush in and throw paint on the canvas, love. I mean crawl into your work, Wynn—live in your painting.”

  “I don’t get what you mean,” I said.

  I did get what he meant, though: I could remember a time when I did live inside my work. A time when I hardly lived anywhere else, when I was most at home when I was standing at my easel. I was aware that I was doing something else now, but I couldn’t, for the life of me, see how to change.

  “Maybe I should transfer to B.U. and major in English,” I said to Patrick one day. I had already, in fact, sent for a catalog and an application.

  “Maybe you should stop worrying about it,” he said. “It will only make everything worse.” Then he put his arms around me. “Wynn, don’t blow this out of proportion. You’re a good painter; you’re very talented. You’ve produced some amazing things.”

  “Then how can I paint such crap, Patrick?”

  “Shh,” he said, holding me close. “Don’t say such things. You just need to find your voice, darlin’. You need to find out who you are.”

  “I know who I am.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  I pulled away from him angrily. “Don’t patronize me, Patrick! How come you know who you are? You don’t have this problem.”

  He looked at me earnestly. “Wynn. Listen to me. I’m a much simpler soul than you are. I’m easy. I’m a guy who carves things out of wood and welds bits of metal together—that’s all I’ve ever been.” He took my hand. “Think about it, love. It’s all I do. Aside from my bloody work and you, I don’t have much of a life.”

  In a way, it was true. Patrick wasn’t antisocial, but he didn’t talk on the phone for hours as I did, he didn’t read much, he’d never waste a whole evening devouring terrible old movies on TV. He rarely drank to excess, he didn’t smoke pot or cigarettes, he refused to drop acid. He hardly ever took a day off, or even an afternoon. Occasionally on a beautiful summer day I could persuade him to go on a picnic or take a walk. He worked every chance he got, and his friends were the same way; when he and Richie got together for a few beers, they always talked about art—what they were doing, what other people were doing, what they had seen in a museum or a gallery, why one thing was good and another bad.

  “And that’s all I’m ever going to need.” He grinned at me. “Pathetic, isn’t it?”

  Even while he was still in school, Patrick was beginning to sell his sculptures. A middle-aged couple from Brookline—both doctors—encountered his work at a student show, and they bought one of his smaller pieces immediately. They introduced Patrick to other co
llectors they knew and, gradually, he began to sell things—not for a lot of money, but steadily—and he stopped being painfully short of funds. He bought a couple of new sweaters, including a beautiful golden-brown one at Brooks Brothers, exactly the color of his eyes. He took me to Red Sox games—he had a crazy affection for that doomed team. He bought some of the burled maple he had been craving, and a set of Japanese chisels, and he began to talk about, someday, when he could afford it, having one of his welded metal works cast in bronze.

  When we had been seeing each other for two years, he made a killing: a large metal piece was bought by the Brookline doctors, and Patrick treated us to a trip to Mexico on spring break. We flew to Mexico City, then took a bus north to the town of Querétaro. Jeanie and Andrew were spending a year there; Andrew was taking Spanish at the Instituto Allende in nearby San Miguel and Jeanie had wangled a grant to research the architecture of the area and make paintings of what she saw. They had rented a house in Querétaro, and we had agreed to baby-sit their plants and their cats for ten days while they went off to the coast to explore the Mayan ruins.

  When we arrived, it was late evening, and the town was asleep. We took a taxi to the little house in the hills, where we found the key, as promised, under the mat. In the dark, we could barely make out the keyhole, and we were completely unaware of the charm of the place. It seemed only cold, silent, alien. We were exhausted from our long trip, and we stumbled inside, fed the cats—Pablito and Rosalia—and collapsed onto the huge carved bed, behind a huge carved door, and fell instantly asleep.

  In the morning, we woke to paradise. The tiny house consisted of a kitchen, the bedroom, and a large back room that opened into a courtyard. The courtyard was full of flowers: geraniums, bird of paradise, miniature roses, cacti of all kinds, vast drooping festoons of bougainvillea. An orange tree was in blossom, wafting its sweet scent into our windows. The cats slept in patches of sunshine.

  Patrick and I made breakfast from the cold cereal, milk, oranges, and tea Andrew and Jeanie had left for us, and then we went out to the courtyard and sat in the sun with Pablito and Rosalia. Four hours later we were still sitting there, dazed with the beauty, the smells, the street noises, the Spanish music from at least three nearby radios, and the excitement of being together in a foreign country. Finally we roused ourselves and went out into the street to investigate.

  The house was up the hill from the vast Friday mercado. We bought fruit and vegetables, bright tin toys and straw dolls, carved wooden animals, a brilliant shawl, cheap shoddy espadrilles, fresh-made tortillas, a roasted chicken. And Patrick bought me a necklace of turquoise beads strung on a silver wire. When he fastened it around my neck, he kissed me gently on the cheek and said, “Whalliko festuna, Wynnooka.”

  I looked into his face. “No.” I shook my head. “Say it, Patrick. Say it.”

  He had never really said it, except in Feekish. He had said I’m crazy about you, and You’re the greatest, and How did I ever get along without you. But he had never said the words, and suddenly, standing there in the middle of the crowded market, my arms filled with bundles, the scent of roast pollo rising up between us, his fingers fumbling with the clasp of the necklace—suddenly I wanted to hear it, in English.

  “Say it. Please. Now.”

  He smiled and bent his head down to me. He put his forehead against my forehead. His eyelashes brushed my eyelashes. “I love you, Wynn,” he said. “Te amo. Whalliko festuna.” And then again, “I love you.”

  We stood there as the crowd surged around us: Mexican grandmothers with bright plastic shopping bags. Beautiful, well-behaved children clutching their mothers’ skirts. Sellers bargaining with buyers. Tourists with cameras. And the two of us smiling into each other’s eyes, saying over and over, “I love you. Whalliko festuna. Te amo.”

  We didn’t do many of the things tourists do. We didn’t sightsee or take pictures or even make sketches. We bought postcards that never got sent. We took long walks, but we didn’t go to see the Palacio Municipal or the Convento de la Santa Cruz. We never rode the bus to San Miguel de Allende or to check out the craftspeople at San Juan del Río. We didn’t go dancing at the just-opened disco; we didn’t hear a concert or see a ballet at the Académia de las Bellas Artes. We did happen to pass the Jardin Obregón one Sunday evening when a band concert was in progress, and we sat among the decorous family groups and listened. We occasionally drank margaritas at El Rincón, a bar where a sad-eyed flamenco guitarist played.

  But mostly we stayed in Jeanie and Andrew’s apartment. We made love in the big carved bed, on the kitchen floor, in the bathtub—once on the terrace, late at night, in the dark. And for long, blissful hours, we did nothing at all—just sat in the courtyard with the cats on our laps, talking about our future together, our hopes, our prospects. It was the first time we discussed marriage, how we would live, the children we would have.

  Despite my promises to myself and Marietta, I had never been able to tell Patrick about my past. The more involved we became with each other, the more I doubted that he would understand my story, and as time went by the simple fact that I’d concealed it for so long became bizarre and indefensible. Once, a boy we knew from school had made up a stupid lie, absurdly inflating some trivial accomplishment, and Patrick, telling me about it, said, “That guy’s a pathological liar!”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Isn’t that a bit of an exaggeration, Patrick? It sounds like he was just trying to impress people.”

  Patrick said, “Call it what you like—but I feel I can never really trust him again.”

  How could I tell him I’d been lying to him for years? I was forced to continue to lie: an ever-expanding circle of deception that I didn’t know how to break through, and that, in time, even my painting became part of.

  I had become aware that my artistic failures were troubling to Patrick; I sensed his bewildered impatience while he waited for me to figure things out, for some direction to emerge from the confusion of works I was producing. “Don’t dream such small dreams,” he said once. “Don’t ask so little of your art, Wynn!” This talk made me weary: Everything seemed so much more complicated than Patrick made it sound, his ideas as irrelevant to my concerns as if we were different species.

  During one of these conversations, he said, “An artist has to be honest above all—don’t you think? Even if the process is agony?”

  He wasn’t referring to me; he was brooding about the roots of his own obsession with collecting damaged, cast-off objects and trying to create beauty from them. But my heart fluttered unpleasantly at his words.

  “I don’t know what you mean by that,” I said. I know I spoke more sharply than I’d meant to. “That sort of blanket statement always puzzles me. What is honesty, exactly, for an artist?”

  Patrick thought for a few seconds, then grinned at me. “You’re trying to say I’m being pretentious.”

  We were sitting at my kitchen table, drinking beer. “Something like that,” I said, and I had to smile back at him. As always, his own candor, his openness disarmed me. They also made me uneasy. That evening’s rice dish was bubbling away on the stove, and I got up to check it.

  He went on, “I guess all I mean is that in my own case, there are certain feelings that I have to trust. When I was doing all the wood carving, it never felt right to me, not really. Not the way working with metal did. The old pieces of junk have a life of their own, they tell me some kind of truth.” There was a pause. “I’m not explaining it very well. It’s just that the work has to feel honest—you have to pull it out of your soul, Wynn—and you can’t be making it for any other reason.”

  Needlessly, I kept stirring the rice, breathing in the hot steam that rose from the pan. I was remembering the dark, belligerent collages I’d done at the Edna Quinlan Home. On one of my trips home, I had burned the whole stack of them in the fireplace, a few at a time, and astonished myself when I was done by bursting into tears. It occurred to me that those collages were perhaps the last honest
art I’d produced.

  “Do you see what I’m saying?” Patrick asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “But I’m not sure I agree.” I sat down again, abruptly. My face was sweaty from the steam, and I wiped it on my sleeve and took a long drink of beer. Patrick looked at me in surprise. I continued, feeling reckless, “Maybe honesty isn’t always so positive. We all have things in our pasts that we don’t want to face, that we just want to forget—don’t we? Doesn’t everyone? And maybe—sometimes—if we give it time—something can come out of that, Patrick. I mean, something grander than we’re aware of. The way a shadow sometimes has more power than the actual object.”

  He was frowning. “You’re talking about a kind of pathological art,” he said.

  “No! That’s not what I mean, I don’t mean hidden crimes or perversions or anything sick, just—” I looked at him helplessly. “Just things.”

  He seemed truly baffled. “What things, Wynn? I don’t understand.”

  I took another sip of beer. The knot in my stomach combined with the smell of the boiling rice made me think I might throw up. The simple fact was that I needed to tell him the truth, all the truth, the vital truth of my life without which it was impossible for him to know me at all. I was convinced in that moment that not to tell him was wrong, self-destructive, mad. It was the closest I ever came to letting it all spill out, to saying, Patrick, Patrick, there’s something I haven’t been able to be honest about, something important, and I’m going to tell you now, I have to tell you, because if facing the truth is agony, hiding it is worse.

  I studied his face. His expression was perplexed, quizzical—but also, I perceived, oddly wary, as if he were nervous about how I might answer. Like a child about to hear bad news, I thought. Looking into his eyes, I saw the vastness of the gulf between us, and how his own innocence walled him off and made him unable to comprehend something like a friend’s silly, insecure lie, or my confession of abandonment and deceit.