A faint smell of wood smoke filtered through our bedroom window, which was unusual. There were only so many places it could have been coming from but the likeliest was the stone fire pit not too far from the rec hall. David and I had never used it since moving to Alder, but when I was a counselor, we would occasionally light it up on nights when a nearby boys’ camp came to visit for a dance.
Neither of us particularly wanted to leave our room but the responsible thing to do was to go check it out. And we were responsible. We were adults. Were we not?
Against a distant backdrop of black trees, just before it all went dark, we saw them out there, the mercurial goddess of curves and cascading hair, and the swift, pure-hearted goddess whose hair was a dark flame, standing over their strong, steady fire, and I was relieved to note that they were both dressed.
“Hey, hey!” Alice yelled when she noticed us approaching.
Once there, David introduced himself and complimented their handiwork.
“I hope you don’t mind,” said Stella. “We just had the idea.”
“You mean I had the idea,” said Alice, who I assumed was annoyed with Stella’s continued docility toward me. “I dragged Stella into it. I tempted her with visions of a campfire and then I convinced her to bike to the convenience store to get us these marshmallows. And matches. It’s all on me. I’m an evil witch.”
“Can I have one?” I asked, pointing to the bag of marshmallows, feeling my hunger, remembering that I hadn’t really had dinner.
“Take this,” said Alice, handing me the stick she’d been turning over. The marshmallow was perfectly browned, a little crispy outside, and completely gooey at the center.
“You are an evil witch,” I said. “I want to eat this whole bag.”
Alice stabbed another marshmallow and moved her stick over the fire as if she were conducting—which, in a sense, she was. When it was done, she gave it to David. I watched her watch him eat it, and when a sticky white speck remained on his lower lip, she ran her tongue along her own lip to point it out to him—Lick me. Like me—and David wiped it away with the back of his hand.
We’d all been standing, not getting settled enough to extend the moment, but there were large, flat rocks in a formation around the fire pit, and Alice and Stella sat, not going anywhere. To my surprise, David sat, too. So I followed suit. We formed a circle: Alice, Stella, me, David. And Alice, who was not only wearing a shirt but a shirt with a pocket, pulled out a joint. She lit it and then offered it to Stella, who then didn’t seem to know whether she should pass it back to Alice or give it to me. She chose me. She was simply keeping things moving clockwise in the act of sharing, but irritation flickered across Alice’s face, visibly enough for me to see.
The chumminess between David and Stella was damped down, and that must have had to do with Alice’s presence. I could be the recessive suburban wife, enough so that David and Stella could be the carousing husbands. But Alice would never be that recessive, that suburban, and even if she married one day, she would never be a wife.
“Alice, you’re from Brooklyn Heights?” David asked, as I passed the joint along to him.
“Yup,” she said, prepared to be bored by this line of conversation. And then, “Wait, how do you know that?”
“I told them,” said Stella.
“You’ve been talking about me.” Her mouth curled into a smile and she tilted her head toward Stella in a manner that wasn’t entirely sweet. “And you”—she turned to David—“have been listening.” Their eyes locked. Alice wasn’t coy about anything. There was a ferocity to her, something unsoothed. David met it with a kind of evenness, a way of interacting he probably employed with difficult clients at work, a side of him I didn’t see much of. It wasn’t false, but it wasn’t ours. It belonged, at the moment, to him and Alice. I’m listening, I care about your concerns, but only because I’m getting something out of this, too.
“You may have come up once or twice,” Stella said, breaking in.
“Wow,” said Alice. “You guys have become, like, this little group that I have to, like, infiltrate.”
Alice looked to David again while Stella stared into the fire. And David returned her stare, reoriented himself toward her: “I’m pretty sure you could infiltrate anything you wanted to.”
Alice scoffed a little because she could, because she knew she held his interest. And at the same time, she pressed herself closer to him. Their knees touched. I didn’t know what to do with the prickling panic I felt. Other than what I so often did: detachment through close attention. I observed.
“Anything I want?” she said.
“I mean, you seem really capable,” he added, regaining his evenness, allowing me to regain mine, passing her the joint. “You have drugs.”
“I have drugs.”
“And you built this fire.”
“Right. Well, I am a city girl but my family also has a place up the Hudson, a country house, sort of.”
We could envision it: sloping land and a pond, a rambling old manse of rough-hewn floorboards, somewhat shabbily furnished, but up-to-code electric, HVAC, and plumbing, top-of-the-line appliances in the renovated kitchen. A place where learning how to build a fire was a luxury, not at all a necessity.
“I love it there. We don’t shut it up when we leave, or put sheets over furniture, that kind of thing, but there’s something, like, shrouded about it.” She wasn’t speaking specifically to David now, more to the air, or even, more to me. “I feel like all of my secrets are there, all the good ones anyway, waiting for me, and whenever I go back it’s like, Oh, hello, you.”
Alice. My heart instantly thawed. Hello, you.
“Normally, I’d be there right around now. But—”
She turned her face toward Stella again, her knee no longer touching David’s, and she and Stella exchanged a slow, forgiving look that took in what had passed only between them. It said: I’m glad you’re here and nowhere else. Another reconfiguring took place. There was no longer any little group Alice needed to infiltrate. For Alice, there was only Stella and these two middle-aged strangers hogging her marshmallows and weed.
David saw it, I saw it, and though I didn’t want to leave—I wanted more of the Alice I’d glimpsed, more of the Stella who knew her—we stood again and neither of them tried to persuade us to stay.
“We should get going,” said David. “Nice to meet you, Alice.”
“You, too, David. And don’t worry,” she said, pointing to the fire. “I know how to put it out.”
We walked home without looking back, in a silence that contained so much: David flirting with Alice, me saying nothing about it because I had no right, because what had I been doing with Stella? And then, look where it had taken both of us: shut out, brought to heel by these wayward girls, by their banality, their mystery. We should take hold of the situation and turn it around, ask them to leave. Tell them to. Didn’t we have that power?
“We can be responsible adults,” I said, and I couldn’t quite tell in the dark if David nodded his head.
“Even if we can, I’m not all that sure it matters,” he said.
“We can tell them we’re done, that we’re sorry but they have to go. Not even that we’re sorry.”
“Yeah.”
Another silence, one in which I heard only our footsteps and the soft, surging hum of crickets. I could sense him thinking.
“What is it?”
“I think we’re the ones that need to go.”
I wanted to be able to agree. To accept that the time had come. But all I felt was a seizing in my chest. No. Not yet.
“You know, my first real job site was in Brooklyn Heights,” he said. “Converting a cut-up brownstone back into a single-family home. The family that was going to live there had a lot of demands and a young daughter who also had some very specific ideas. I highly doubt it was Alice’s family, that’s not where I’m going with this. But when I was working there, I’d walk on the Promenade and wonder about this c
hild I was more or less working for. Like she’d already figured out, even at that age, how everything worked, who was in charge and in control, and I was only slowly catching on. How can I still only be catching on?”
“Do you know the one thing I’m in complete control of?” I said.
He laughed a little and said no at the same time. A no-laugh.
“Our TV remote.”
“That’s not funny,” he said, but he gave another laugh.
“But control is really such a weird thing. Because it shifts, it changes. Who is in control, and control over what? What does control even mean?” I’d become Alice for a moment, arguing at a theoretical remove.
“That makes control sound like a matter of semantics, and it’s more than that. You don’t feel that it’s more than that?” No more laughing, just a note of rising irritation.
“No, I know it’s more than that,” I said. I could still smell the fire in the air, though it was out of sight now, behind trees. We were crossing the field by the basketball court, a flat expanse that was so regular and intelligible, so known during the day, but was astonishing, almost dizzying in the darkness. Though I knew exactly where we were walking, the contours of the world seemed to disappear.
“You can’t just endlessly reframe things,” he said, a voice in the formlessness.
“No, but don’t you think perspective matters?”
“Maybe,” said David. “Maybe you can change your perspective to give yourself some sense of agency, but there’s a difference between that and actually having control.” He’d stopped moving and he’d reached out for my arm. “There are actual, lasting consequences that happen as a result of who has control and who doesn’t, and those consequences matter.”
“Of course there are consequences that matter,” I said. I didn’t pull away, even as my own irritation surfaced. Irritation and something else, something more elemental, more powerful. “I get that there are things that can’t be controlled and can’t be reframed. Things you can’t change no matter how hard you try. You don’t think I get that?” I couldn’t see his face, only the outline of him. “I get it so fucking clearly. Sometimes it’s the only thing I fucking get.”
He couldn’t see my face, only my outline, but he could hear me start to cry and he drew me in, so that I could sob into his shoulder. I cried so hard I shook and he held me until I stopped. He moved my wet hair out of my face, brushed it back, kissed me, on my mouth, off to the side, on my cheekbone, my forehead.
We were so sad, so damp from our sadness, walking back to our house. Once inside, though, it was as if what happened out there in the night was meant to stay out there and not in these lighted rooms.
We went to the kitchen and ate whatever we could pull out of the fridge or cupboards and didn’t have to do anything to, items we could simply put into our mouths. Unthinking consumption of one kind and then another: we lay on the couch, my legs across his, and I pressed play, and we didn’t have to talk or make decisions or consider what was out of our control. All we had to do was watch what was in front of us onscreen. And David didn’t even have to do that—he fell asleep before too long and when I pressed pause, got up to wake him, he mumbled something, extended himself along the length of the couch, and fell back asleep.
I placed a blanket over him—I would never have not liked you—and headed upstairs, where I’d left my phone, where there was a missed call, from earlier that day, and a follow-up email from Samira: It was great to meet me. Would I be interested in coming in for a second conversation? She hoped so and she was very much looking forward to it. Once again, as it had those first days with Stella, time had slowed and warped. It hadn’t been very long, no more than a week, though meeting with Samira now felt like a distant memory.
From a window in the room at the end of the hall, the room where Stella found Aunt Esther’s robe, I could see out across the field to where the fire pit was. But there wasn’t much to see now. The flames were gone and I could barely make out the black trees.
MADAME X
A pale sky, a cool morning. David didn’t ask why I wanted to go with him to Boston, he simply accepted it, approving. We parked by the commuter rail and rode in together, not talking, but not not-talking, the quiet tethering us together, until we let it go at South Station. He headed to his office and I took the T to the Back Bay Fens, where all the green of August had grown tired of being green. No one had any more energy to pull weeds or rake the dusty paths that wound through the park. I followed the trails, over ironwork bridges and under leafy canopies, and ended up, without really intending to, at the Venetian palace that Isabella Stewart Gardner built to house her late-nineteenth-century art collection. On school field trips, we’d learned about this extraordinarily wealthy, adventurous woman from a corseted era of excess, her travels and her jewels, her dashing flamboyance. We learned about her as we learned about the pilgrims and the Mayflower in Plymouth. Massachusetts lore. I remembered the museum’s glass-roofed, flowering courtyard but I hadn’t come here often enough to recall a small interior room where the walls were covered in blue silk and there hung a painting, Madame Gautreau Drinking a Toast, by John Singer Sargent.
A young woman with dark, upswept hair, pale skin, sitting at a brown tabletop, pale pink flowers surrounding the glass in her hand. She wears a black dress that exposes her arms, which are covered by a diaphanous blush wrap. You don’t see who she’s holding her glass toward, and her expression, in profile, suggests indifference. Not unlike the expression she would wear a year later when Sargent painted her in full, in another low-cut black dress, her arms and shoulders bare, the scandalous Madame X. She didn’t remind me, at first, of any woman in particular, more like every woman I’ve known, at some point in their lives that bored and that beautiful. But then, in particular, Liz came to mind. The particular boredom of Liz. Boredom that spoke not of a lack of imagination, but of what happens when imagination is too keen for its context, when it meets no match.
She couldn’t get lunch, Liz told me when I called her from outside the museum. But she could manage a late coffee someplace near the campus building where she was handling some administrative work before she resumed teaching a class in the fall. It wasn’t too far for me to walk and all I had was time.
When she saw me she seemed both delighted and distracted.
“We need to do this more often,” she said. “What’s wrong with us?”
“Probably depends who you ask,” I said. But maybe this would become more frequent, meeting up in the day, if or when I would be working in the city. I told her about the second interview I’d scheduled with Samira at the end of the week. That’s really great, Liz said. She didn’t qualify it this time.
She did ask about Stella and I told her Stella was still on our property, in the bunk, but that there wasn’t much else to report. I didn’t mention Alice. There was something satisfying in simply omitting her.
I hadn’t consciously planned this city excursion as a means of staying out of their path, Stella and Alice. I hadn’t wanted my actions to merely be a reaction to them. But it served that purpose. A day away from them, from the lake, from the bunks, the camp. From the positions we’d put ourselves in. All of it.
I asked Liz about her classes that semester.
“What are your students like?”
“They’re young,” she said. Like Stella. Like Alice. Her wistfulness softened the harshness of both the envy and the superiority in her tone. “I’m supposed to say I love teaching because it keeps me fresh. Keeps me literally on my toes. And it does. I’m not trying to be all hardened and surly or like I’m only in it for the money when there’s barely any money. I wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t rewarding—on some level. I do get something out of it and I’d like to think that my students get something out of it. But, yeah, they’re so young. And what I mean is that they don’t get the irony of it, the depressing paradox of dancing—that by the time you have the emotional breadth and depth to fully express what you want to
, you no longer have the body for it. Your knee hurts or you’ve twisted your ankle too many times. And you shouldn’t get the irony of it—I never got it when I was that age—not getting it is what gives you power, as a dancer. You’re in it, you know? You’re not sure of yourself because you haven’t had enough experience, which is different than the kind of doubt that comes with too much experience. You’re not thinking about it, overanalyzing it. So I think what I really mean is, getting the irony, being old enough to get the irony, isn’t much of a consolation. It just makes me angry and frustrated when it doesn’t make me resigned.”
“You make irony sound like a disease.”
“I have irony.”
“It’s a chronic condition.”
Liz: That broad smile of hers that compressed time as it expanded it. I forgot for a minute where we were, who we were. When we were. But it was impossible to sustain. Even if she didn’t have to go, to pick up her kids, the minute would have passed there at the café table. Time doesn’t suspend itself.
And it was normalizing to be in the flow of it. David was working late again so I took the train back on my own but at an hour when the platform and the car were full of people doing the same. Nobody looked at me like I didn’t belong there, nobody looked at me much at all, and being an indistinguishable part of a crowd was a relief, an intimation of what it would be like to do this every day, to have a commute, to seamlessly occupy some recognizable, approved-of role in society. It would get old, it had already gotten old for David, I knew, but that evening, for me, it was a comfort. And approaching it from that angle, even our house had a different cast to it. Not so removed from the world. Not a place to leave but a place to come home to.
Changing out of the day’s clothes, into a worn shirt and soft, forgiving shorts, the kind sold as pajamas, I thought about the women in housecoats. Maybe they hadn’t entirely disappeared, they’d only morphed, we’d only morphed, into a new incarnation. And as I was thinking this, standing by the bay window in the living room, the one that had no covering, I saw Alice through the glass, crossing into the yard. She looked up and stared at me, as I’d stared at the elderly woman with the bright lipstick in the housecoat in the dun-colored suburb as we drove away from a city along highways until we arrived here.
The Summer Demands Page 12