“Well, whoever it is, it’s fucked up,” Sam said loudly.
“Hey,” Marlin said. “Watch the language.”
“I think it’s lovely,” the girl in the corner said to them suddenly, and she was looking at Marlin again when she spoke.
Of course her voice was beautiful, too. Of course it shut Sam up.
Marlin should have been the one to answer. She wasn’t looking at anyone else. He could have agreed with her, even if strictly speaking it was a lie. The nude was hideous. But the girl was lovely, so agreeing with her was instinctual.
Which Ben did before Marlin could stammer anything out. “It’s a fine piece,” he said to her in his neutral business-owner’s tone. “Maybe just a bit too challenging for our space.”
Her gaze shifted to Ben. “Can I quote that?” She smiled. Marlin felt a ridiculous pang of jealousy.
“Better not.” The waitress was passing him on the way to the kitchen. Ben stopped her. “Bring the lady a piece of apple pie,” he said quietly. “On the house.”
“Who is that?” Sam said, for once lowering his voice to a whisper.
“A reporter,” Ben told him. “From the Sentinel. She asked me some questions before you came in. Guess that artist has a show in Paris now. Guess we own one of the only nudes that hasn’t been bought up by some rich art collector.”
“Guess Sarah knows a good buy,” Sam said.
“Guess she knows good art,” Al replied.
Ben rose abruptly. “Dad, I’m going to close up.”
“Well, hey—let me go over,” Marlin said. “Or I’ll send your mother,” he added, a better idea by far. He disliked seeing Sarah at home. He disliked her worry. He was on the verge of disliking the baby.
“Mom pressures Sarah to give the baby a bottle whenever she’s over. She insists the baby’s crying because she’s starving when she’s just nursed. It’s driving Sarah crazy.”
Lily. Always saying exactly what she thinks, and doing it, too. No doubt baby’s had a few bottles on the sly.
Marlin watched the waitress take the pie over to the girl. She smiled briefly and raised her coffee cup for the waitress to fill. So she was here for the nude. He wondered if Ben had mentioned the watercolors were Marlin’s. Maybe that’s why she had been looking at him. When the waitress left her table, the girl returned to her pad without glancing up. She twined a necklace of hair in her slender fingers. He watched her, those lovely fingers, the way she squinted at the paper.
He rose to leave and saw that Ben had hesitated by the kitchen entrance to stare at the girl. Marlin walked over to him. “So she interviewed you about that thing?”
“I wouldn’t call it an interview. She seemed to know all about it already. I think she’s just here to look at it.”
“She’s pretty,” Marlin said without thinking. Eager, like some old geezer.
“I’m thinking of selling that thing. Sink some real money into this place. Hire skilled labor this time around.”
Ben was staring at him, hard. Expecting him to be offended by the skilled-labor crack. Expecting him to care about the nude one way or another. Well, he did care, but he wasn’t about to let on to his son. “Sarah won’t like that.”
“Sarah won’t care.”
A customer entered the diner, snapped for a menu. Ben walked one over, patient and grim. Marlin stuck his hands in his pockets, nodded at Sam and Al, and crossed to the door. As Marlin walked past the girl, he watched her out of the corner of his eye, but she did not look up, not even at the squeal of the heavy glass door as he pushed it open into the cold air and riven walkway Ben couldn’t afford to repair.
Lily had the flu; he could see it at once. Her gray eyes glittered with fever. Swollen blood vessels on her cheeks inflated her veil of wrinkles. He still wasn’t used to it, the way the fine lines of her skin had withered to an alarming tangle of folds and creases that left only the soft crescents under her eyes smooth. Lily had aged rapidly in the past two years. Her hair had thinned, her eyes had narrowed and hardened, her joints had stiffened so that she did not walk like herself anymore. All at once, although it could not have been so quick, her body had turned unfamiliar.
Now the fever made her unrecognizable. Her flush was watermelon pink. Drops of sweat beaded on her brow; pearls pulled taut. He crossed to the couch, where she lay enfolded in the old pinwheel quilt she had sewn right before they were married.
“When did it start?”
She didn’t, or couldn’t, answer him. She was trembling. He tucked the quilt more snugly around her fallen shoulders and caught sight of her nightgown. She had not even dressed. When he left that morning, she had been nursing her coffee. Marlin felt a prickling of fear. He knew how it would go. She would lie in bed, shivering violently as if she meant to throw the fever off, watch him with hard, shining, practical eyes while the fear gnawed at him. The days would crawl. They would both be waiting, each certain of different outcomes. Lily had not been vaccinated, a bad decision at her age. Neither had he, but then, he didn’t need it.
“It’s the flu, you think?” He sat balanced on the sofa’s edge so that they barely touched.
A rasp rose from her throat’s deep hollow. “For heaven’s sake. Don’t start hovering.”
“Let me check your temp.” He was pleading, as if quantifying the body’s struggle would solve anything.
“Don’t bother. Some ginger ale, all right?”
Marlin looked down at her withered hand bathed in sweat, shrinking like the rest of her. A year ago she had her wedding ring adjusted down a half-size. The band of white gold still spun easily around the finger’s delicate spindle, barely secured by the bump of her knuckle. “Baby’s sick, too.”
“I spoke to Sarah. She’s talking about going to the emergency room.”
“Ben’s going home early,” Marlin said, but they both knew it would do nothing to calm Sarah down. Lily couldn’t understand Sarah’s chronic anxiety over the baby. Lily had never worried over Ben. Marlin had mistaken her bravery for some kind of innate feminine utility toward children. Ben’s frequent fevers had sparked dismal fear in Marlin, but Lily had taken care of every health emergency with her usual practicality. Sarah’s worry over baby seemed unwomanly to them both, but, to be fair, she and Ben were late parents. They had tried everything. Fertility treatments. Talk of adoption. Then they had conceived unexpectedly, and with the baby had come the seismic ripple of anxiety. Lily, too, hadn’t become pregnant until many years after they were married, but she had never wanted children the way Sarah had.
Lily was radiating heat. Marlin went to fetch the ginger ale.
After he had held the glass for her to drink, Marlin escaped upstairs to the bedroom to confront the latest unfinished watercolor. A junco nestled deep in a fir tree, half-concealed by a cylindrical pine cone. Marlin had matched the brown patch under the bird’s wing to the color of the cone, but the exact shades made it look as if the cone were a big brown wing. Sloppy work. Anyway, he had no reason to make the scene more complicated by placing the bird behind the cone, except that’s what he’d seen out his window one day. Painting exactly what he saw all the time was poor craft, a lazy habit he should work harder to break.
He lay down, closed his eyes, saw the girl in the diner. Saw the slender fingers curled around the coffee mug, the eyes piercing the space between them. He undressed her, and the body was slim, sprinkled with tiny blemishes on the shoulders and above the breasts, pepper on cream. Not perfect. Not impossible.
What was wrong with him, fantasizing about a little girl with Lily so sick? And what made him think that girl was looking at him anyway, really looking at him and not a pair of blue eyes that reminded her of someone else—her dad? Her grandpa?
He opened his eyes and stared up at the ceiling at a webbed crack in the plaster he’d patched some time back. He had done a careful job with the spackle, but last winter the patch had cracked with the expansion of air in the narrow room that was almost an attic, tucked as it was between st
eeply graded eaves. He hadn’t tried repairing it again. He got up, returned to the easel to fix the junco. No way was he going to nap the afternoon away like an oldster.
He never had the same energy for fixing things around his own house as he had for fixing up the diner. He’d supervised the diner renovation, even when Sarah told him that she wanted to replace a watercolor or two with a local artist’s work after the diner reopened. His feelings weren’t hurt. He offered to recoat the walls himself, to save on contracting costs. His pictures weren’t anything great anyway. He never took the whole thing seriously. Painting was just a way to relax. But he had to admit he was dismayed when, a few days before they were due to close the diner for those two weeks, the new leatherette booths already delivered and crowding the kitchen, Sarah brought in her artist. The artist brought with him the Lavinia nude. The guy was messy and dour, his face hidden by an untrimmed beard and oversized eyeglasses, a real long-hair. He looked as if he hadn’t cleaned up for a woman in years. Marlin didn’t approve of the way the man swept Sarah to a back table to huddle together, speaking in whispers as they studied the nude. Her admiration. His flattered attention. God knows how she had even met him.
She had purchased the nude on the spot.
Of course the damn thing turned Marlin on. The fat, sexy breasts. The tantalizing curve of the thighs. He hadn’t even noticed the missing fingers until after the renovation, when Sarah hung it and the regulars started their teasing.
It drove him crazy to imagine what Sarah would do in bed if she’d buy a painting like that.
He had never felt the way he was supposed to feel toward her, and she had never acted the way she was supposed to act toward him. He could never say for certain whether her flirting was a kind way to tease an old geezer.
Until they’d gutted the diner. Until she’d bought that nude.
Sarah. A whistle of syllables, like the silk of young skin. How absurdly deceptive a woman’s name could be. He had said this to Lily once, during one of those marital hiatuses when their sex life was halted by illness or kid care or just because she was tired of him, and he couldn’t seem to repair it; couldn’t do or say anything right; could only hope she’d get over it yet again. He was mad, and lonely, and so he said to her, You’re nothing like your name says you should be.
Of course she was amused, not angry. How so?
You’re tough. You hate yellow.
Lilies are tough, and plenty aren’t yellow. She was knitting something, something with stripes—a scarf, or a sweater for Ben. The needles clicked efficiently. She was spinning out fabric as he watched. Mama named me after the Easter lily. They’re white.
You don’t seem like any kind of lily to me, he had answered, like a jerk. It was a mean thing to say. Why would he say it? But he couldn’t stop himself, that impulse to hurt her.
Of course she wasn’t hurt. Easter lilies are tough to grow, she had said. You need just the right soil. But the bulbs will make it through anything. They’re only a hassle after you plant them.
He looked up lilies after that and read that lilium bulbs are scaly and unprotected. Exposed flesh.
Nude. And never dormant.
Although his door was closed, he heard Lily cough violently from the couch downstairs. Fear soured the lingering taste of coffee in his mouth. He set down the brush he hadn’t even dipped into the junco-colored paint yet, and he couldn’t remember what that girl at the corner table looked like anymore.
The Sentinel didn’t appear on his doorstep the next morning like it should.
“The carrier must be sick,” Marlin said to Lily. She was worse, much worse. She wouldn’t drink the ginger ale he brought her, wouldn’t get out of bed. She also wouldn’t put up with his worry.
“Go get some breakfast at the diner. Help Ben out.”
“I’d better not leave you.”
“You’re making me worse just looking at me like that,” Lily said.
So Marlin drove to the diner, anxious, not thinking about that girl at all, and so it was a shock when he creaked open the door and there she was, seated in the corner by the front window under the nude, looking straight at him. Her hair was pulled back and up. Loose strands floated about her neck. The morning sun lit her, bright, glaring, and whole. She kept hold of him, her gaze traveling brashly from his hairline to his chin. A slow blush beat the same path down his face.
Could he cross the room to her? Could he sit with her right now, face the nude, and see her nude? Lace her fingers with his, bring them to his mouth as she entered his gaze, brushed his irises with lashes and lips until she was all inside, filling his eyes and throat with her sweet mist?
He blinked, kept his eyes briefly veiled. His blush was downright shameful. Not hard to see what trend his thoughts were taking.
He walked unsteadily down the line of tables to where Sam was sitting alone. He was plowing through his cinnamon roll as if eager, for once, to finish his break. A couple playing hooky from their jobs was ordering eggs from the teenage boy who usually washed dishes. The waitress must be sick, too. Two insurance agents whom Marlin recognized as cheap tippers were drinking coffee in a booth by the front door. Marlin tapped Sam on the shoulder as he walked by.
“We lost Al,” Sam grinned. “I’m the last man standing.”
Marlin found Ben in the kitchen, piling shredded potatoes on top of a yellow mound of fat. The grill was stifling. The hood fan whined ineffectually as it struggled to draw out the heat. Ben was ill. A sick flush matted his cheeks. His eyes glittered with fever. His arms trembled as he nudged some eggs over easy. The teenager ambled in with the order, stuck the slip into the slot above Ben’s grill, and began crashing dishes together in the sink. When the toaster popped, the young man wiped his hands on his suds-soaked apron and plodded over to butter the toast. Ben must be really sick to let the dishwasher handle food. Marlin’s gut burned with alarm. He should offer to fry-cook, and Ben should accept his offer. An emergency like this should lead them back to the normal state of affairs where the father pitched in to help the son. Anyway, the whole family knew Marlin was the better cook. But Ben barely glanced up at Marlin’s worried hover.
“Bad night?” Marlin settled on the safe bet of asking the obvious.
“Bad enough.” Ben wiped away a sweat slick on his brow. Marlin caught the glimmer of pallor under his flush. “Baby’s real sick. Hard breathing, you know, that awful rasp.”
“Your mother’s sick, too.”
“She OK?”
“She’s fine, nothing to worry over. Did you go to the emergency room last night?”
“Sarah decided to wait. Afraid it would be too crowded, too many germs. She’s going to the doctor today. What time is it? Maybe they’ve already been.” He reached over for a plate, slid the eggs onto it, potatoes, the toast the kid had left teetering precariously on the sideboard, before giving in to a fit of painful coughing. The kid left the dishes to run the breakfast to the dining room.
Marlin took up a cloth to wipe crumbs and grease from the sideboard.
“Leave it, Dad.” There it was, the sharp, suspicious tone that cast a shadow over every bit of help Marlin had ever given his son. Ben was right to suspect that any work Marlin performed at the moment would be a selfish distraction from his own ridiculous immunity. Ben and Lily both knew how wrapped up he was in the notion that when he did at last fall ill—and someday he would, he would have to—it would take him quickly, catastrophically. There would be nothing to distinguish illness from accident, unanticipated and unlucky.
It was the way his father had been taken. He had been robust for his age, perfectly healthy, as Marlin was now. Then a sudden bolt of sickness, some devilish, seemingly minor cold, whisked him away. The fact that Dad was elderly and it was quick should have been a comfort to Marlin, especially after his mother’s horrible wasting from liver cancer. During her excruciating slide, he’d come to believe that no other death could be as frightening. The tumor growing palpably day by day, bloating her abdome
n. The sleepless agitation near the end as, despite the morphine, she battled nights of terrorizing pain by attempting to hoist herself from the bed and fling herself to the floor, desperate to be free from the mortal trap of lying prone.
After Mom, Dad’s quick end should have seemed merciful. Maybe once it had seemed that way, when Marlin was younger and not yet his father’s age. Now he was that age. Death’s sudden, unprovoked snatching frightened him more than ever. Marlin had never seen his father nude until the afternoon he died in Marlin’s bathtub. The water was still warm. The folds of white, withered skin floated gently around his skinny body like nesting doves. Dad had complained merely of a stomachache. He had taken the bath merely to be soothed. He hadn’t even had time to run a fever.
Ben rattled out a cough. Marlin dropped the towel onto the sideboard and peeked into the dining room at his girl. She was absorbed in a book now and didn’t see him gazing at her. She seemed completely uninterested in the nude. The couple waiting for their eggs was openly gaping at it. Even the insurance guys, who were regulars, were studying it. No matter how regular a customer was, everyone always ended up staring at the nude. Not his girl. Not today. Guess she had written her article.
Her fingers curving and smooth. Her hair with shavings of gold. She was beautiful, but not hopelessly so. Her lips thinned when she smiled, and the bridge of her nose was broad and angled slightly, as if it had been broken once. She was not perfect. It was not impossible.
“What’s she doing here again?” Of course his voice was too eager.
“Who, Dad?”
“That girl. The reporter.”
“How should I know? Maybe she likes the coffee.” Ben staggered as he broke an egg onto the grill. Grease spattered his cheek.
“Hey, come on. Let me cook. You need to go home.” Marlin resisted the impulse to take Ben’s arm. Ben didn’t like his dad to touch him. Never had, not even as a kid.
“No, I’m OK. Go take the coffee pots around, why don’t you. Fill everyone up. Cash them out. I’ll close up after these folks are done.”
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