“I’m not following.”
“You’re a smart guy. It’s not hard. Think about it.”
“Does Becca like it here?”
“I like it better than she does. She’s a city girl.”
“What do your parents think about Becca?”
“They’re cool. As long as it’s right.”
“And you believe it is?”
“What do you think?” Michael asks.
“Don’t look at me, man. I think it is. But that’s only from my perspective, which obviously isn’t worth much to you.”
“Damn straight.”
“What’s your parents’ take on you having kids?”
“My parents don’t have to worry like white parents about what it’ll be like for their grandkids to be half black. They already got a black kid to worry about.”
It dawns on Eric that for the second time that day he’s more than reluctant to let someone go. “Don’t leave here before I do.”
“Put your name in for coach. But no more fooling around with the contestants; don’t screw up your coaching chances. You need to chill.” Michael punches him in the arm. “This bride scheme of yours is taking you down. Have Becca give you a massage.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“You’re uncomfortable with my girl giving you a massage, aren’t you?”
“I’ve never had one.”
“Shit, you already got naked with her.”
“That was different. You were there. It’s not the naked thing. I don’t like the idea of someone inflicting pain in places when and where I least expect it.”
“It’s her profession. It’s what she does. She’s not just poking around. You’re a control freak.” “No, I’m not.”
“Yeah, Eric. You are.”
“I can’t wait for draft day.” Eric changes the subject because he doesn’t like to think of himself as controlling—just organized. Controlling has bad connotations for a guy. He goes to the fridge and helps himself to another beer. He’s talking about their fantasy baseball league. He’s already begun to research the players’ stats and his draft position—building a team takes strategy. He’s not going to focus on on-base percentage and stolen bases this year, just home runs and RBIs. He’s looking at a bunch of guys who swing hard and put up power numbers.
“Like I said, you’re a control freak. But I’ll let it slide.”
Eric squirms with the discomfort of knowing that Michael sees through him, and yet he’s glad for it. This won’t be the end of the conversation. Michael just knows when to let up some on the pain and let the blood return to the trigger point before he presses again.
“I’ll bet you a two-hundred-dollar lobster dinner my team beats yours,” Michael says.
“You’re on. Last season your team lost nine straight matchups. Or was it ten straight? It was embarrassing.”
“We settled on March eighth for the draft, right?”
“March eighth it is.”
“Too bad our league is all over the globe. Be fun to meet together in one place for a live draft,” Michael says.
“Yeah. Like Vegas. Oh well, I’ll be at your door March eighth with my laptop—or do you want to come to me?”
“Let’s do it at your place. Becca likes her peace and quiet on occasion.”
Eric opens the door to leave and finds Bicycle Girl making her figure eights in front of the house. Almost like a faithful puppy waiting for her master. But unlike that dog that hungers for human touch, he knows she’ll ride away if he even approaches her.
“Ever wonder what it’s like to be her?” he asks Michael as they stand on either side of the threshold.
“Frustrated. Confused. Out of focus.”
“That’s not how I see her. More like liberated,” Eric says.
Chapter 12
Thursday, February 20
The Holy Prostitute
Suzanne sat on the couch—the only piece of furniture they could afford for the family room—watching late-night TV and waiting for Daisy to return from her date. Suzanne didn’t trust her boarder to lock the front door after herself. Earlier that evening, Alyssa had skipped into the kitchen with Daisy’s nightgown draped over her own pajamas, the entire length of the gown bunched up in the child’s hands.
“Where’s the lady?” Alyssa had asked.
Billy demanded that she take the gown off, while a crying Alyssa said that Daisy had let her wear it. Shouting, Billy said he didn’t want her touching anything that belonged to that woman. Then he got up and left. It was midnight now, and neither Daisy nor Billy had returned. At twelve forty-five, she locked the doors and went to bed. Why did she have to lock up, anyway? There was nothing to steal. “To keep out the crazies,” Billy would have said. But the crazies already had keys.
Believing that Daisy had come in after she’d gone to bed and was in her room sleeping, Suzanne was astounded when, quivering on the front porch, Daisy rang the doorbell the following afternoon.
“Where’s your boyfriend?”
“He took off somewhere on High Street. He’s jaded like the rest of them. I met these guys. They said they would give me some soup and a place to stay. It was too far from here and too late to get back. They tricked me. They took advantage of me.”
“Why didn’t you use your key just now?” Suzanne asked.
“I lost it.” She climbed the stairs and within seconds the shower was running.
God, don’t let her have given my key to those guys, Suzanne prayed.
UNABLE TO CONCENTRATE on her writing, Ryan shuts down her computer at the law center a little earlier today and heads for the comfort of her favorite museum. Riding on the Green Line E up Huntington Avenue, she takes in the dark cumulus clouds, outlined in white, that float on a clear blue background. Still, the day is gray. How can that be? In Boston the sun resists appearing from winter to late spring. When it does show its face, it’s only for a brief teasing moment and usually during the workweek when almost everyone is gazing out from their cubicles; then it retreats in a timely manner, as though frightened by the hordes of lunchtime foot traffic between twelve and one-thirty, only to reappear briefly around two, before winter’s early dusk. Ryan photographs the fluffy clouds with her phone from the window of the trolley. She’d like to paint them, but she isn’t like her mother; she doesn’t know how to paint. And though her mother tried to cultivate any natural ability Ryan might have had, never demanding that she do it one way or another but urging her to let the brush explore—with circles and lines and broad back-and-forth strokes—to see what developed, Ryan became frustrated.
It looks as if it would be so easy now to paint the sky the way her mother does it: just make swirls—no blobs—of white with a few dabs of ocher, a thin outline of pink, then a thicker one of black. How hard could that be? She would try it one day, maybe even later that evening. Then again, maybe she’ll take up photography, like Eric Boulanger encouraged her to do. Or just stick to writing.
Ryan’s parents’ home on Long Island is filled with paintings and prints bought at charity art auctions or from hard-up artists on the streets of Greenwich Village, the Left Bank of Paris, the courtyard of Montmartre, the flower market in Nice, or a walkway along Lake Como. Her mother had worked as an art model in college, which intrigued Faye and at the same time made her a bit jealous. She envied everything that had been accessible to her daughter but denied to her: an education, sexual freedom, and above all—choice.
Ryan’s mother, Lauren, used to tell Ryan that it had been difficult to sit or lie or stand still, barely breathe, naked, in the studio loft where the art professor, who had discovered her while she sipped coffee in the student union, made her assume a pose for half-hour intervals, with a few minutes to stretch during the three-hour class. But amid the smell of oil, the splattered clothes of the aspiring artists, the mess of it all, Lauren had found her niche. No wonder their house was always upside down; she had no penchant for order, in fact she thrived on disarray. At first she beli
eved her only talent lay in her body and patrician face.
Unlike Ryan, who took after Faye’s family, with their full and symmetrical round features, Lauren had inherited her father’s Sephardic dark hair, olive skin, classic nose—nothing perfect, but taken together, strikingly different and captivating to the students who studied her in detail, as though she were inanimate—a well-preserved cadaver. In that bohemian loft and under Professor Lancaster’s tutelage, she came to appreciate her form—her breasts, her vagina, her butt—as much as the artists and Professor Lancaster did. She thanked Professor Lancaster for her lack of inhibition during subsequent sexual encounters (he being one of them), for lighting the fire within her to study art, for setting her on the path to a fulfilling career. Whenever she thought of Lancaster, she thought of satisfaction. Too much information, Ryan told her mother, who in that regard was just like Faye.
While Ryan secretly loved to study the pastel drawings, charcoal sketches, and oil paintings of her mother that students had given Lauren out of gratitude, or had simply discarded (Ryan would come upon them in the strangest places in their home—the laundry closet, beneath a stack of mismatched dishes in the basement, a bureau in the guest room), her mother’s body, exposed for anyone who came upon these works, embarrassed her. Moreover, she resented her mother, who, despite her professor’s criticisms of her first attempts to create her own art, persevered and succeeded. Whereas Ryan tried to make her profession fit her life—Jason’s and hers—and as a result felt she was walking around in an oversized dress that had gone out of style long ago.
Ryan checks her coat in the new wing of the museum and heads straight down the corridor to the palace. Some days the city wears her down—the fumes, the noise, the odors—and she needs more than a park or a stroll in the country, she needs a new country. That’s when Isabella Stewart Gardner waves an around-the-world frequent-flyer ticket in her face. Need a trip to China or Spain? Italy or the Middle East? Come, I’ll take you there and put you up in my villa to boot.
After all, wasn’t that Gardner’s intention? To have a house just like one she had stayed at in Milan? To build a villa filled with beautiful pictures and objects of art and fauna, with delicate lace curtains that would make it hard for visitors to obey the Do Not Touch sign because they’d add a personal flavor along with other furnishings, large and small, that would make visitors feel as though they were going to bump into Isabella at any moment as she came down a grand stairway, or floated through the long gallery? To share her home was Isabella’s dream, and the dream continues to delight visitors every day except Tuesdays, and very few holidays, for over a century. We are guests in her villa, Ryan thinks. Or are we intruders?
Ryan enters the Spanish cloister, with its green, blue, yellow, and white floral-patterned Mexican tiles that Isabella, working beside her craftsmen, spent hours arranging, along with the Moorish-style stone architecture of an alcove with cobalt blue tiles, the theatrical Andalusian tavern setting that hosts Sargent’s El Jaleo. The gypsy woman’s body is tilted back, defying gravity, one hand lifting her long shimmering skirt, the flamenco heels peeking from the folds, the other hand extended with a castanet. Ryan can hear the clicking—of the heels with their many hammered nails, of the small wooden handheld instrument—and the strumming guitars of the musicians seated in a semicircle around her as one wails his mournful Gypsy lament. But Ryan has no time to stay in Seville. It’s the courtyard that beckons her. It’s the courtyard she’s come to see today. Tiffany does her soulsearching at the dark cavernous Dirty Truth bar on Cambridge Street. Jason used to do his in church. Ryan does hers at the invitation of Isabella Stewart Gardner.
No matter the time of year or the weather, the greenhouse-glasscovered courtyard provides a refreshing contemplative environment, like a giant fountain of rejuvenation. Light, stone, water, exotic greenery. The sound of silence that only beauty of a bygone era emanates.
Sitting on a bench in the courtyard of the Venetian palace, with its stucco walls, arched walkways, fairy-tale-like windows, she is an outsider, a Peeping Tom straining for a glimpse of what the galleries hold. She’s glad she got a chance to go to Venice before it sank out of sight—really got to go. When Ryan was thirteen, her mother had taken her on a whirlwind girls’ Italian train excursion while her father was steeped in tax season. “Art,” Lauren had said as they took in the masters at the Uffizi, of the mosaics of Ravenna, the Venetian architecture, “is the only lasting beauty in this world.”
The intricately carved columns of the courtyard rest on lifesized stone lions. A glance in any direction is a feast for the senses. Every visit presents something new to her attention, along with the satisfaction of recalling something else. Three-story palm trees in each corner and strategically placed pots of plants and statues all render order in the garden, where everything is symmetrical. That’s what she needs in her life right now: order. That’s what she needs in her mind.
She focuses on the mosaic in the center of the courtyard; it becomes her meditative focal point, with Medusa at its core. Through her hideous appearance she had the power to ward off evil spirits, to turn anything she looked at into stone. Ryan remembers this from her Greek mythology unit in high school. She hadn’t really been able to understand it back then. A boy who sat behind her told her that her coppery coils reminded him of the Greek goddess. He called her Copperhead. She had hated him for likening her hair to snakes. She hated snakes and couldn’t even walk into the reptile house at the zoo. She’d wished she could command her curls to hiss at him, even bite him. She’d more or less hissed at him herself.
Looking back on it, she realizes he was paying her a compliment and was probably attracted to her. How many messages did people send that got misread? Had Eric misread her message of friendship when he kissed her? No way. She had clearly flirted with the guy. Now she’s reminded every other day on Facebook that she hasn’t yet responded to his request to friend him. How could she? Let him into her personal life so he can see firsthand she’s a fraud? Maybe he’s into two-timers, this Yankee and his tidy committee of nature lovers so unlike the ethnic misfits of her grandmother’s Boston or the outspoken ones of her own Long Island. Wouldn’t they be disappointed to learn the truth about her love life?
Is everyone a contradiction as she is? Her mother had called art’s beauty a certainty; she had also said it was magic. Then how was one to extract reality from appearance? Truth from disguise? Even the magical Venice would one day sink out of sight. What could one depend on if not what went on in one’s own brain? What made Ryan any different from the senile residents where Faye lived if she couldn’t correctly interpret the codes others sent?
Whoa. All she had come here to do was to focus, tighten the reins and bring some clarity back into in her life. It shouldn’t be that hard. Erase Jason from her mind. Come clean to Eric and the Brackton Chamber of Commerce. And move on, girl. Move on.
* * *
That night she composes an email to Eric confessing all, including how much she enjoyed their kiss in the darkroom. Adhering to her father’s advice about waiting twenty-four hours before mailing an important letter, she saves it in her Drafts folder, where for much longer than a day it will patiently await a click on Send. She’ll even stoop so low as to consider never sending it at all and ignoring the entire embroilment, leaving the Brackton Chamber of Commerce board of directors to fend for themselves. Surely they can get another couple.
Chapter 13
Friday, March 14
ERIC HATED RUNNING during baseball practice, whether for Little League or the high school team. Those were the times he wished he lived in Florida, where weather is baseball’s best friend and spring training means just that and not fighting for time with or even running alongside the softball and lacrosse and tennis teams at the only indoor track in the district. It wasn’t even that he hated running indoors—or in freezing cold if there was no ice on the roads. He just hated running. A former center fielder and receiver who everyone said had w
heels but who didn’t like running made no sense to most but perfect sense to him: He loved outrunning everyone to catch a fly ball or score a touchdown; it was running with no base or ball or goal line in sight that he abhorred. Unless, of course, he was running away. But even that had its purpose.
He runs now, however, during every practice. He runs with the baseball team he’s helping to coach, driving his body to keep up with those half his age, while the silver-haired man who has been head coach for over three decades waits for them at the field. Eric enjoys feeling his heart pumping, his lungs expanding, his brain entertaining thoughts—pieces of conversations, striking images—that pass through it with the air he takes in and lets out in a high-speed meditation. He runs with Michael through the dark back roads of town on warm evenings, both of them closing their eyes at the approach of blinding headlights, sharing that familiar sweat of panic. And for an instant, they are the same: skeletons covered in light and dark, glistening with fear. But no matter how many cars slow down, no matter how much they let each other in, Eric knows he and Michael will never be the same.
It’s been three weeks since I’ve heard from Ryan, Eric thinks as he runs today with the team, six weeks since her visit to Brackton. Her response to his earlier emails following their meeting were evasive: too busy with work to really study the vendor options; Jason not feeling well; overwhelmed with family issues at the moment. Then she went silent, failing to respond to his emails and texts, ignoring his invitation to be Facebook friends. He figures it must be on account of the darkroom incident, which neither of them has mentioned. Asshole that he is for that inappropriate action, though he doesn’t blame himself entirely.
Gone dark after the darkroom antic. How ironic is that? He would laugh if he didn’t sense he’d been played. But to what end by this couple who are like ephemeral beings, tempting and taunting with their absence? Any sense of grounding he experienced with her in that darkroom has sped by with incredible speed. Going, going, and soon she too will be gone.
A Day in June Page 11