Five Questions

by Kitty B. Florey

  It was a wonderful house—not large, but low and sprawling, fitted neatly into the landscape, and circled by a veranda. Below it, to the west was a blue glimpse of ocean, to the east a dramatic and spectacular canyon, and, all around, the dry brown hills like a chain of placid elephants.

  Marietta invited me to spend a week with her there the autumn after my fortieth birthday. She was finishing up a job, so I brought my sketchpad and a couple of books to read. The nights were chilly, the days hot and dry, and while Marietta worked in her study I read and dozed and sketched the view from various vantage points. I loved the colorless landscape, all browns and khakis—the eucalyptus and succulents, and skeletal trees I didn’t know the names of. Hummingbird feeders hung from the veranda roof, and from time to time a bird would dart in, feed quickly, and flit away with a tiny chirping noise.

  Marietta and I took occasional breaks to swim in the pool, and one afternoon we had a sweaty hike up one of the fire trails that bordered the canyon. In the evenings we would meet for a drink on the veranda, then put on sweaters and drive down the mountain for dinner, sometimes with friends of hers in the film world, but mostly alone, so we could talk.

  Over the years, Marietta and I had discussed in depth her turbulent romantic life; there didn’t seem much to say about my placid marriage. But on my last evening, when we were sitting as usual with our glasses of cold wine, I told her about the dissatisfactions of my life with Alec, and my desire for a child.

  “So go off the pill,” she said.

  I looked over at her. She was lying back on a teak lounge chair, holding a cigarette, wearing what looked like a black silk sunsuit, her long, pale legs crossed. Her red hair was streaked with white—a stunning effect that I knew wasn’t entirely Mother Nature’s doing. She smiled at me. “Well? Why not? He’s being unreasonable, you want a kid, you’re completely within your rights. What’s he going to do? Divorce you? Kill you? Drug you and haul you off to an abortion clinic?”

  I laughed. “Don’t think I haven’t thought about it.”

  “Well?”

  I shrugged. “We don’t have sex all that often any more,” I said.

  “Then, in that case, Wynn, why do you want to have a baby with him? I mean—what kind of marriage are we talking about here?”

  “It’s not perfect, I suppose. But it’s what we’ve got.”

  “Oh, please.” She took a drag on her cigarette and exhaled with a sigh. “It’s the kid, isn’t it? The one you gave up. That’s why you want one so badly.”

  I hesitated again before I answered. “Yes. It’s partly that. I would like to have another one before I’m too old.”

  “Then you should, for heaven’s sake!” Marietta sat up straighter. “Why in hell don’t you just leave him and find somebody else and have a baby?”

  “I’ve thought about that, too.”

  “And?”

  “It’s not that easy. We’ve been married a long time, Marietta. Alec adores me. And we depend on each other.”

  “Oh God, Wynn. It sounds so tepid! You never should have married him.”

  I wasn’t sure that was true, but even to Marietta, I couldn’t tell the story of why I had married Alec, or how the marriage had saved me from my solitary despair, or that the deal I had made with myself was: Make someone else happy, and the past will loosen its hold on you.

  And has that happened? I imagined her asking. And what would be my answer?

  She startled me by saying, “You know damn well you should have married that crazy Patrick.”

  “He married someone else, Marietta. I told you that.”

  “But Wynn—why did you dump him in the first place? That never made a bit of sense to me. You two were perfect together.”

  I hesitated. It was all so long ago: Why tell her now? I thought of my sad little box of clippings—all I had left of Patrick. And that was the way it should be: I didn’t want to bring it all back. In my fashion, I had learned to live with it. The death of my child, those black days in New York, my panicky flight to London, the years of aimless emptiness: Dragging the story out now, on this sunlit terrace, seemed crazy.

  “We weren’t as perfect as we seemed. It wasn’t working, Marietta.”

  “Why couldn’t you make it work? Why wasn’t that important to you? Jesus, Wynn, you worshipped that guy! Did you even try, or did you just give up, turn your back, and run away?”

  “Shut up, Marietta! Just shut up!”

  We stared at each other. “That’s better,” she said, and then, gently, “Wynn—what’s with you, sweetie? What’s the matter? What’s been the matter all these years? And don’t tell me nothing.”

  I lay back on my lounge chair and closed my eyes. The sun beat down on my eyelids. “Nothing,” I said.

  She snorted. “OK. Tell me this. Why didn’t you bring your paints? Where’s that nifty little portable easel you used to have?”

  “You know I don’t paint much, Marietta.”

  “Much? What does that mean, exactly?”

  I opened my eyes. “Hardly ever is what it means. Is that a crime?”

  “Might be. I was brought up to believe that if you don’t use the talents the Lord gave you, it’s a sin.”

  “The Lord seems to have taken the talent back.”

  “Oh, give me a break.”

  I shrugged.

  Marietta got up from her chair and came over to kneel beside me. She took my face between her two hands. “Wynn. What the hell are you doing to yourself? Who is this person who doesn’t paint any more, who’s married to a man she doesn’t love and doesn’t have sex with and who won’t give her any children? Who the hell are you? God damn it, you’re not the Wynn I grew up with. She wanted a life, for Christ’s sake! Now where the hell has she gone?”

  “I don’t know, Marietta,” I said helplessly. “Don’t badger me. Don’t hate me. I don’t know, I don’t know.”

  Marietta sat back down, looking out at the view with a frown. “I remember when you came back from Boston. When we were in high school. You were kind of pudgy, kind of distant. And you were so sad, Wynn. I’d never seen anything like it before, in my frivolous little life. You were like a tragic heroine in a novel. Tess of the d’Urbervilles or something. You were so different. It made a big impression on me. And I thought to myself: My God! Things matter! I can’t explain it very well, but it was the first time I’d ever realized that actions have repercussions—you know? Life was serious. And I thought, she will never get over this, her whole future will be colored by this thing.” She picked up her wineglass, sipped, looked at me. “Was that true? Does it all go back to that? I mean everything—not just wanting a kid but marrying Alec, dumping Patrick, not being able to paint—the whole package?”

  “Probably.” I couldn’t say any more. I looked out at the mountains that, obscured by the tears in my eyes, seemed even more like clumsy, well-meaning animals. Marietta reached out a hand, and I took it.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “God, it’s not fair how things hang on, how things we did when we were babies, when we didn’t know any better, when we were like puppies or kittens, we didn’t have the brains of a hummingbird—how stuff from those days can keep haunting us.” She released my hand, sat back in her chair, sipped her wine, and sighed. “I love you so much, Wynn. You’re my oldest friend. I want you to be happy, for Christ’s sake. Someday. I just want you to be happy with your life.”

  I wiped my eyes on a napkin, pressed my cold glass to my hot face, took several deep breaths. “I’m not that unhappy, Marietta.” My voice was shaky, and I waited until it steadied. “Believe me. I’ve been unhappy, I know what it feels like, and this doesn’t even come close.” I knew what a lie this was, but I hoped she didn’t. I loved Marietta, too, but I needed for the conversation to be over.

  She smiled. “You are an amazing person. Did I ever tell you that before? I don’t understand everything about your life, Wynn. For a busybody like me, you’re annoyingly private, and I know there are huge poc
kets of stuff you haven’t told me and never will. But I know this—you’re the strongest person I’ve ever met.”

  We finished our wine and drove down the mountain to Marietta’s favorite restaurant, where we had dinner with a film editor friend of hers, the twenty-two-year-old starlet who’d just been signed for Marietta’s new movie, and a man named Gregory who owned a winery in the Napa Valley and who was destined to become Marietta’s third and last husband.

  When she drove me to the airport, Marietta hugged me and said, “Think about what we talked about, sweetie. Okay? Promise? This is the only life you get.”

  • • •

  As I felt my chance at motherhood slipping away with the years, Alec and I discussed it less often, because when we did there was more open animosity. Our arguments were never resolved, and they left a legacy of bitterness that we buried under our social life and trips abroad and little kindnesses to each other.

  Those small, thoughtful acts that comprised our lives, it occurred to me one day, could be more hostile than any fight.

  Through the summer program I taught in, I became friendly with a woman named Hannah Rickert. She painted in watercolors, and her husband, Jay, was a potter. Hannah was a tall, shy woman with bright brown eyes and long gray hair who dressed in vivid, dramatic clothes she made herself: capes, blouses with billowy sleeves, flowing skirts that swirled around her ankles. Jay was blunt and quiet, usually in denim overalls; he reminded me of my father. They were older than I, their two sons were grown and gone, and soon after I met them they moved to the Cape, where they lived a retired life in one of those weather-beaten hamlets on the way to Provincetown.

  Alec didn’t much like the Rickerts. I forget exactly how he put it—some polite euphemism—but it was clear that he found them boring and unintelligent, and, though they were certainly neither, it was true that their world was very circumscribed. They never traveled; they seldom even drove up to the city. They were nearly self-sufficient in their old shingled house with its ragged garden mulched with seaweed—a house full of pictures of their handsome sons, their sons’ wives, their grandchildren. What I liked most about Hannah, aside from her quiet humor and her blazing talent, was her love for every living thing. Hannah could get excited about saving a bee that had wandered into her living room; I saw her do this once, and when she had managed to catch it in a glass jar and release it out the front door, her face beamed with satisfaction.

  The Rickerts had three goats whimsically named Vera, Chuck, and Dave, and on summer evenings Hannah and Jay would sit on lawn chairs in the goats’ enclosure, reading and talking. “They like to be near us,” Hannah explained. The Rickerts also had a flock of chickens, and ducks on their pond, and they had lost count long ago of how many cats inhabited the barn. When they could, they had them spayed, but if kittens arrived, they were welcomed, named, fed.

  They took care of me with the same gentle affection. At times my life with Alec seemed so sterile and pointless that I had to escape it, and I would drive south down Route 6 to visit the Rickerts for a few days. Hannah and I would walk out on the dunes with our sketch-pads, or down to the shore to make drawings of the boats, the gulls, the tourists. In the evenings the three of us would eat immense seafood dinners off the plates Jay had made, and then we would sit a while with the goats—Hannah in a long dress and big straw hat, an assortment of cats on our laps, the goats coming up to have their backs scratched with sticks. Sometimes I helped can tomatoes or pack up a shipment of Jay’s pottery. I always returned from the Rickerts’ feeling refreshed, loved, consoled, with jars of Hannah’s jam and tomatoes, and one of Jay’s pitchers or bowls which Alec wouldn’t like, and which I would have to keep upstairs in my studio.

  At various times I considered telling the Rickerts the story of my life. I knew perfectly well that they were serving as surrogate parents to me, and I longed to talk to them honestly and obtain some kind of absolution, or a closure that was impossible for me now with my real parents. Many times I came close to confessing to Hannah, but silence was a habit, a way of life, the road I went down every day, and in the end I didn’t want to dredge it all up, I didn’t want to have to find the words to explain it, and I didn’t want to burden them with it. And it still seemed to me that I didn’t deserve anyone’s sympathy. Marietta’s reproaches, Uncle Austin’s anger all those years ago—those were part of the sentence I had imposed upon myself. Hannah’s gentle, motherly understanding didn’t fit into the picture.

  But I couldn’t have survived without the Rickerts, and my visits to Marietta, and my letters from Rachel. I heard myself saying that to someone one day—Marietta, probably—and was struck by how odd it sounded. As if my life were full of affliction instead of pleasure. As if it weren’t a good life after all, but something else entirely.

  • • •

  As years went by, Alec’s interest in art expanded beyond nineteenth-century French landscape painting. He became fascinated with an obscure Spanish painter named Victor Ignoto de Madera, who had been a friend of Millet and Rousseau in France and was much influenced by them. After a stay in Paris, de Madera retired permanently to Mexico, where he painted very French-looking landscapes until his death in 1877. Alec did some research on de Madera, wrote an article about him, and began planning a book. For our fourteenth wedding anniversary, we took a trip to Mexico during Harvard’s winter break.

  Alec was on the trail of some of de Madera’s letters and sketch-books from his years in France, and we spent a week in Mexico City so he could visit the museums and go through their archives. He met with scholars at the Museo Nacional de Arte and at a lovely little place called the Museo de San Carlos, while I wandered the galleries looking at bloody portraits of saints and the stone heads of Aztec gods. Then I would sit in cafés and courtyards, reading and sketching.

  Returning to Mexico was a wrenching experience for me, and I found myself thinking about the town of Querétaro, six hours away on the train, where Patrick and I had once been so happy together. Alec and I were staying at a grand hotel called the María Isabel. We went to dinner every night with Mexican scholars and art historians, part of Alec’s vast network of friends and acquaintances. One evening, we went to a nightclub where we saw flamenco dancing and, on another, to a popular disco with a salsa band. I met wonderful people and had a good time dredging up my high school Spanish. But I was alone a great deal and, inevitably, my thoughts wandered to my long-ago visit with Patrick: the quiet afternoons on our terrace in the sun, the freshly made tortillas that we bought for pennies, and the roasted pollo from the mercado, the guitar music and the cobblestone streets, the passionate nights in bed. That time with Patrick had become part of me, as indelible and necessary as my childhood memories. I sat in the courtyard of a museum, and the scent from a blossoming orange tree brought back his voice. I remembered his smile, the way he could talk, with that Irish lilt in his voice, about anything, everything. I remembered how he had laughed and said, Te amo, te amo, I love you, Wynnooka. It was ridiculous, I told myself, after all those years. Patrick and I were middle-aged, long estranged, married to other people. But everywhere I looked I saw him.

  Later that afternoon, I met Alec, and we went shopping at the Mercado de Artesanías. He wanted to buy me a heavy silver necklace that cost the earth. It was beautiful. I loved it. But I couldn’t let him do it. And, God help me, all I could think of was Patrick and the turquoise beads hidden away in the little box with the cat and the clippings.

  By the time we got back to Cambridge, I knew I couldn’t stay with Alec any longer. It was one of the hardest decisions I ever made. I was aware of how Alec’s first divorce had affected him, and how much he hated to be alone. He liked company, an audience for his jokes and his erudite musings. I thought of him traveling without a wife, staying by himself at the quaint inns we had discovered. How hard it would be for him to admit to his friends and colleagues that a second marriage had failed. And how selfish it was of me to want to leave him and our enviable life and al
l the kindness and affection between us, the shared memories, the interests in common. In a way, it was unimaginable not to be married to Alec. And yet something—Marietta’s advice, the passing of time, the vivid memory of my old love—had made it no longer possible. I didn’t love my husband. I loved a man who no doubt despised me. A man I hadn’t seen in nearly twenty years and would probably never see again.

  With all my heart, I wished it were otherwise. But it wasn’t, it would never be, and my life was a joke.

  • • •

  I kept putting off my talk with Alec. I practiced saying, “Alec, I need to talk to you,” and I imagined how his face would change at my tone of voice, how he would understand before I continued that I wasn’t going to say anything he wanted to hear. I dreaded bringing something so sordid into our lives, which were about avoiding trouble, seizing pleasures where we could find them. There would be no pleasure in this conversation.

  I did nothing until, one morning when I was putting away Alec’s laundry, I came across two jewelry boxes, one plain white, the other in the distinctive dark blue of Shreve, Crump & Low. They were tucked behind a pile of clean T-shirts. I looked at them for a moment. My first impatient thought was: No. Please. No more gifts. Then on an impulse I opened them. Inside the white one was the silver necklace Alec had wanted to buy me in Mexico. The other contained a thin gold bracelet studded with diamonds.

  I took them both over to a chair by the window. The necklace was no less lovely. I imagined Alec slipping back to the mercado to buy it for me. What holiday was coming up? Easter? The vernal equinox? My birthday wasn’t far off. I would undoubtedly find this under my pillow or waiting on my breakfast tray.