“Hey, I wish I had a picture of this,” said Tim. “I didn’t think of bringing my camera.”
“Is it cold?” I called out.
“Not too cold,” Hal called back. “Come on in.”
I took off my shoes and walked the length of the concrete border, down the steps and into the shallow end of the pool. Not until I was at the center, near the green hose trickling out water like a burbling brook, did the soles of my feet get wet. The water was so cold that a chill shot through my spine to the back of my neck. I walked on, up to my ankles. At the far end, Hal stood immersed up to his shirt pocket, his arms held above the water with the fingers of one hand lapping tenderly at the ripples as one does in a canoe, while he puffed on his cigar and gazed fondly around at his property. From down in the pool the property took on a majestic aspect: the trees were higher, their swaying tops closer to the azure sky, the spreading house set regally on the crest of the slope. Tim and Celia, standing at the edge and laughing at us, appeared elongated and powerful.
“Hey, I wish I had a picture of this,” said Tim. “I didn’t think of bringing my camera.”
“This is so cold,” I said. “And it’s such a trickle, too.”
“We could turn on another hose,” said Hal, “but then we’d have no water in the house. We did that last night, actually, had both hoses going in the hope that it would fill up in time for you two. We should have factored that in, Tim, both hoses overnight. But then in the morning we wanted to take showers and make coffee and so on.”
“Yes, you wouldn’t want to come out here for a shower,” said Celia. “A bath, it would have to be. Like the British. It forms character. We could offer character-forming baths for children of the local landed gentry.”
The matter of the water being connected to the house confused me. I hadn’t thought of where it might be coming from. Didn’t water in the country come from the ground? A well?
“If it’s coming from the house,” I said, “then why can’t you turn on the hot?”
Everyone burst out laughing, Tim loudest of all. Tim delights in what he considers my impracticality, my remoteness from the nuts and bolts of daily life. A writer, he thinks, deals in fantasy and abstraction. I cannot convince him that I’m an extremely practical person, that writers have to be close to the daily nuts and bolts. This example of my plumbing ignorance would only reinforce his feelings.
I laughed, too—I felt comfortable enough with Hal and Celia—though I wasn’t sure what the joke was, only that I had said something ludicrous.
“The water isn’t coming directly from the faucets,” Hal explained gently, “but from the well which feeds the pipes which supply the house. The well water is cold, naturally. Inside it gets heated up by the boiler.”
Standing several yards from me, in water up to his chest, he spoke with professorial earnestness about the nature of wells, especially artesian wells which go deep into the ground. Meanwhile, Celia took Tim to see the vegetable garden. As Hal went on I retreated a few feet onto the dry part because the water was too cold to stand in.
“Underneath the land we stand on, there’s water,” he said. “Water, water everywhere. What we call the earth is mostly water. In fact, the only reason we have dry land at all is that the earth’s crust is uneven and buckles in places, so it juts out. If the globe were quite smooth, without any warps, there’d be water all over it, a couple of miles deep.”
For some reason this information left me appalled. “I knew there was a lot, but not that much.”
“Yes, wherever you dig you’ll eventually find water, since the earth, the globe, is made of a series of alternating concentric spheres of land and water.”
“That is a very striking image,” I said. “If that’s so, what holds it all together? Why doesn’t the water seep through?”
“Well, it does, in the forms of lakes and springs and so on. It holds together because the layers are very thick. And then, factors like gravity and centripetal force enter into it.”
“You seem to know an awful lot about this for someone who’s in real estate.”
“What I’m telling you is not very arcane knowledge.” He chuckled again, as he had when the water hit his crotch, and added, “I wanted to be a geologist at one point, but I got sidetracked into making money.”
“If I were a Tai Chi master,” I said, “I could make the water rise simply by standing here and slowly raising my arms. It would be the force of my inner energy. They call it chi.”
“Why don’t you try? Who knows? It might work.”
I shook my head and smiled as I backed out of the pool. Concentric spheres. The notion made me feel a little less secure. The Tai Chi teacher had told us our strength came from the earth, so that we must root our feet firmly to receive its energy. Feel the rushing spring rising, he said, into the point just behind the balls of your feet. And we did, or thought we did. But if beneath the earth was water, then earth, then water all over again? That made the source less stable. No wonder it was called the rushing spring, though. The Tai Chi masters must have known about the alternating layers of water.
Which was at the very center, the innermost sphere, water or earth?
“The obvious thing to do under the circumstances,” said Celia, strolling back with Tim, “is to paint murals on the walls of the pool. I’ve always felt they needed some decoration.”
“Celia is a painter.” Tim turned to me. “Did I tell you that?”
“I’m not a muralist, though. Few people are these days. The demand is slight, except down in SoHo. Still, here’s my chance to do something big, like Gulley jimson.”
“But the pool is so dark when it’s filled,” Tim said. “You won’t be able to see the pictures.”
“You’ll see the tops. Anyway, you’ll see them when you’re underwater.”
“No, sweetheart,” said Hal, emerging from the pool and wringing out the bottoms of his shorts, “you won’t see them when you’re underwater. There’s less light there, not more.”
“There’s only one way to find out for sure,” she said. “Either way, we’ll know they’re there.”
“I’ll paint,” I heard myself say. I hadn’t held a paint brush since Ev and I moved into the apartment on the river years ago. Painting the pool seemed a lark, even though I had no scientifically based opinion on whether or not one would see the murals while swimming underwater, and if I had I would have been hesitant to offer it after my misguided comment about the well and the faucets. “I like that idea.”
“If you really want to do it right,” said Hal, “we should drain the pool so you can cover all of the walls.”
“Oh, Christ, Hal, let’s not drain the pool! Not when we’ve gotten this far.”
After lunch Celia and I drove into the chic little town. “What would you recommend for the walls of a pool?” she asked at the hardware store. She conversed knowledgeably with the clerk, who didn’t seem to find our project at all odd. I suppose the locals were used to city folk performing their frivolities in the potato fields, like colonizers building on sacred graves of the ancients.
Back at the house, she gave me an old pair of shorts and one of Hal’s T-shirts, which I had to knot up at the waist, it was so large. We traipsed out with our paint cans, passing the men on the deck drinking beer.
“You look very fetching, Laura,” said Tim in that sober way I liked.
“I bought that row for three-quarters of a million,” Hal resumed, “and now I don’t think I could get rid of it for half of that. Make sure to leave a strip unpainted above the water level, sweetheart,” he called after Celia, “because the tide will be rising and your work could get ruined.”
“I will. But I got quick-drying paint,” she retorted. “Quicker than our rising tide.”
“What are we going to paint?” I asked as we set up our equipment in the shallow end.
“Sea creatures. Fish. Mermaids. Anemone.”
“I really can’t paint anything. I can’t even draw.”
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“That’s okay, I’ll sketch it all out and you can fill it in. Like paint-by-number.”
Celia moved rapidly along one long wall, outlining a pair of mermaids seated on a rock, combing out their tresses. Her own hair was covered by an aquamarine scarf that caught the light as she zipped back and forth sketching schools of bright fish, fantastically tentacled coral and anemone, outlandish ferns, and a sunken treasure chest spilling out gold coins. We didn’t do the wall at the deep end since neither of us wanted to walk through the icy water. “I should really make Hal do that,” she said, “but never mind.” The wall at the shallow end was too low for anything elaborate, so Celia assigned me the task of painting it sea-green, like Rubens with a beginning apprentice. From time to time she inspected my work, deftly adding ripples and shadows that transformed my flat surface into a credible representation of water. While she did the mermaids’ iridescent scales she asked questions about my life, as women do, and I gave her the broad outlines, omitting Q., of course. At such moments, when people become acquainted and give their data, it was as if Q. didn’t exist, was a fantasy I had made up, though without him any impromptu sketch was as incomplete as her quick outlines on the walls.
“You’re very good,” I said as I filled in some shellfish. “How can you do it all so fast?”
“I do everything fast, that’s my trouble. For example, marry in haste, repent at leisure.”
“Really? That’s not the impression I got. I thought it was more of a . . . a kind of number you’ve both developed.”
“Oh, you mean a couples act? Stiller and Meara? Nichols and May? Life imitating art. That’s an interesting angle.” She didn’t go on, though, but daubed at a black hulking shape.
I could understand her silence. It’s one thing to offer the bold outlines of one’s life on first acquaintance, as I had done, and something else to fill in the shadows and ripples that make the story a credible representation.
Before long we were finished, having left a careful margin for the rising tide, as Hal advised. Our creation—Celia’s, really—was an undulating blue-green, orange-pink sea dream where everything shimmered, a whimsical wet paradise whose only object of menace was a large gray fin disappearing into a corner.
“It looks like a stage set,” I said. “I almost feel we should put on a play or something.” Or string up nets like the fishermen at the Bay of Fundy, though we’d never catch anything: we hadn’t even attempted realism.
“On the off chance that it fills up soon we can do an Esther Williams routine.”
Celia stepped away from the wall to reveal the black shape behind her, tilting toward the water line. I was startled to see the eroded frame of a sunken ship. It was superbly done, eerie yet full of promise. I was about to remark on the coincidence, telling Celia how much it resembled the ship I’d tried to reach in the bay, but with her suddenly enigmatic eyes on me, I said nothing. I walked up to it, as though here on the wall it might finally yield up its treasure, but of course it was only two-dimensional, a representation.
“Free time!” she announced, ripping the scarf off her hair and striding briskly to the house. I went in, too, to take a nap—it was amazing I’d lasted so long without one. Tim followed me into the bedroom and wanted to make love. Just a quickie, he urged, but I was worn out from my artistic endeavors. He left grumpily with a book under his arm, a lawyer thriller he found on the shelves, about Claus von Bülow.
BEFORE THE DINNER GUESTS ARRIVED we checked on the water level in the pool.
“I can’t see any difference,” I said. “Except for the murals, I mean.”
“Look at the margin you left under the pictures,” said Hal. “Don’t you see that it’s narrower?”
As a matter of fact it was about an inch narrower. And three-quarters of the pool floor was now wet, or at least dark with dampness.
“Tomorrow, mark my words, we’ll be able to swim. Meanwhile, we’re going to be pressed into service this evening,” he said. “Our friend Steve is bringing over another game.”
“Oh, not again,” said Celia. “The last one, the fairy tale game, was a real bomb. I could have told him that before we began. In this day and age, any game that requires reading is not going to sell.”
“Well, he must know, sweetheart. He’s made a fortune on them. Our friend Steve,” he said, turning to Tim and me, “is a game originator. Yes, that’s a profession. Look, someone has to do it. He invents games and toys. Little robots who perform simple tasks. Electronic-doll kinds of things. Some are doing very well. One doll, Harriet Hermosa, paid for their new house in Water Mill. You should see this place—the living room shelves are lined with his toys. Now he’s into board games. You’d be surprised how much intellectual effort goes into working out a board game.”
How wrong I was in every way about the dinner party. Nothing fancy or nouvelle to eat, for one thing. Hal played man the hunter at a huge open hearth on the lawn, poking at steaks with the sweet ingenuous pride of outdoor chefs, while the rest of us carried out mounds of potatoes and onions wrapped in tinfoil. I was so starved at this fashionably late hour that I could hardly keep from grabbing the meat off the grill with my bare hands. I’d forgotten to eat a banana beforehand, as Jilly had ordered.
No fancy clothes either. The men wore shorts and the women were casual. One, a very pregnant dress designer, wore her own creation, a white linen tent printed with black half moons. Nor was the talk what I’d envisioned. An inevitable swipe at the sluggish real estate market and some brief dismay at the hole in the ozone layer, but nothing serious. There was a risky moment when Steve, the gamesman, remarked on the cholesterol content of the double Brie, but Hal diverted the subject. “My grandmother used to make me drink heavy cream to build me up,” he said. “I was a very puny kid, can you believe it?”
“So was I,” said a grizzled, bearded man close to sixty, the oldest man present. He had a young wife, probably his second or even third, while the other two couples, in their late thirties, appeared to be on their first go-rounds. “I was spoonfed for years. I remember as a boy in Washington Heights I would sit on the floor after dinner listening to the radio and my mother would sit on a chair near me with a bowl of apples on her lap and a knife. She would cut an apple in half, then core it and scrape at it with a spoon so it flaked off. All I had to do was open my mouth periodically and I had instant apple sauce.”
“How old were you when she did this?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t remember.”
“Well, for example, two, three, six?”
“Older than that.”
“Fifteen?”
“Twenty-one?” put in Celia, passing around the salad.
“Was it before or after your bar mitzvah, Harvey?” asked his wife.
“Oh, come on, I’m pretty sure it was before that.”
I was hard at work recording what I heard, silently echoing the phrases and cadences so I’d have them exactly right. Tim glanced across the table and smiled with triumph at my rapt attention. You see, you had a good time, he’d tell me later. And you didn’t want to come. I was in fact enjoying the party, though it took effort to smile and talk and eat properly all at once: I’d hardly ventured into polite society of late. Mona’s party didn’t count as polite society.
During coffee, the pregnant woman eyed me with a mixture of wariness and grudging awe. “You’re a writer, aren’t you? I thought so. Well, I don’t know where you writers get your ideas, but I have a story for you. Someone really ought to write this down.”
It was my turn to smile triumphantly at Tim, for I had bet him on the drive out that I would be offered a story that had to be written down.
“This is a story about my great-grandfather on my mother’s side. He came to New York from Poland as a boy, around the turn of the century. But then he did an unusual thing for an immigrant back then. He turned right around and went back, I’m not sure why. Maybe he found the life too different and missed the old ways, maybe he couldn’t make a livi
ng, nobody in the family really knows. Anyway, he went back, not to Poland but Paris, and there he started making women’s capes. That was how he earned his living. The special thing about his capes was the fantastic colors. They were made of different colored strips of fabric sewn together in the strangest combinations, very flamboyant, not like any capes anyone had ever seen. And these capes of many colors, strange as they were, were worn mostly by the working-class women who were his clientele. Until one day Sarah Bernhardt happened to see one of his capes, maybe on her cook or seamstress, and took a fancy to it. She bought one and started wearing it, then she bought another, and before you know it the capes became all the rage among fashionable women and my great-grandfather became very rich. Eventually he returned to America and married and raised a family. But the point I want to make is, it turns out that these capes of flamboyant strips of color stitched together in such odd combinations were that way because he was color-blind. I mean, he didn’t really know what he was doing. It’s passed on, you know, through the female line to the males—my brother’s color-blind, too. And if I have a boy—” she looked down at her hard belly—“he might be also. Now isn’t that a story for you? You really should write that down.”
(And so I have. The thing these storytellers don’t grasp, however, is that to write down a story the way it was told, as I’ve done, honoring her request, is to embalm it. To understand what the story might mean or give it a meaning, you’d have to break it into its component parts—the immigrant, the return trip, the capes, Sarah Bernhardt and her cook, the success, the color-blindness—then shake them up and rearrange them in a new pattern, thereby sending life—or chi, the life force—through its frame. Sarah Bernhardt’s cook brought the capes to America, where she met a desperate young immigrant, color-blind. .. . A poor young Parisian finds the cape tossed out in the great actress’s garbage and sells it to a seamstress for barely enough money to get to America, not realizing its worth because he’s color-blind. . . . Something along those lines.)
The Fatigue Artist Page 26