In the small portrait the aunts have sent Kylie for her birthday, which arrives in a packing crate two weeks late, Maria is wearing her favorite blue dress and her dark hair is pulled back with a blue satin ribbon. This oil painting hung on the staircase in the Owens house for one hundred and ninety-two years, in the darkest corner of the landing, beside the damask drapes. Gillian and Sally passed by it a thousand times on their way up to bed, without giving it a second look. Antonia and Kylie played games of Parcheesi on the landing during their August vacations and never even noticed that there was anything on the wall, other than spiderwebs and dust.
They notice now. Maria Owens is hanging above Kylie’s bed. She is so alive on the canvas, it’s obvious that the painter was in love with her by the time he had finished this portrait. When the hour is late and the night very quiet, it’s almost possible to see her breathing in and out. If a ghost were to consider climbing in the window, or seeping through the plaster, he might think twice about facing Maria. You can tell just by looking at her that she never backed down or valued anyone’s opinion above her own. She always believed that experience was not simply the best teacher, it was the only one, which is why she insisted the painter include the bump on her right hand, where it had never quite healed.
The day the painting arrived, Gillian came home from work smelling of french fries and sugar. Since Sally had chopped down the lilacs, every day was better than the one before. The sky was bluer, the butter set out on the table was sweeter, and it was possible to sleep through the night without nightmares or fears of the dark. Gillian sang while she wiped off the counters at the Hamburger Shack; she whistled on her way to the post office or the bank. But when she went upstairs and opened the door to Kylie’s room to find herself face to face with Maria, she let out a screech that frightened all the sparrows in the neighbors’ yards and set the dogs howling.
“What a dreadful surprise,” she said to Kylie.
Gillian went as close to Maria Owens as she dared. She had the urge to drape a towel over the portrait, or to replace it with something cheerful and ordinary, a brightly toned painting of puppies playing tug of war, or children at a tea party setting out cakes for their teddy bears. Who needed the past right there on the wall? Who needed anything that had once been in the aunts’ house, up on the gloomy landing, beside the threadbare drapes.
“This is way too creepy to have in the bedroom,” Gillian informed her niece. “We’re taking it down.”
“Maria is not creepy,” Kylie said. Kylie’s hair was growing out, leaving her with a brown streak half an inch wide in the center of her head. She should have looked odd and unfinished; instead she was growing even more beautiful. In fact, she resembled Maria; side by side, they might even appear to be twins. “I like her,” Kylie told her aunt, and since it was her bedroom, that was that.
Gillian claimed she would be too nervous to sleep with Maria hanging above them, she’d have nightmares and perhaps even the shakes, but that’s not the way it’s turned out. She’s stopped thinking about Jimmy completely and no longer worries that someone will come looking for him; if he owed money or had cut a bad deal, the men who’d been wronged would have been there by now, they would have come and taken what they wanted and already been gone. Now that the portrait of Maria is on the wall, Gillian has been sleeping even more deeply. Each morning she wakes with a smile on her face. She’s not as frightened of the backyard as she used to be, although every now and then she drags Kylie to the window, just to make certain Jimmy hasn’t come back. Kylie always insists she has nothing to worry about. The garden is clear and green. The lilacs have been cut so close to their roots it may be years before they sprout again. Once in a while something casts a shadow across the lawn, but it’s probably the toad who has taken up residence in the roots of the lilacs. They’d know if it was Jimmy, wouldn’t they? They’d feel more threatened and much more vulnerable.
“No one is out there,” Kylie has promised. “He’s gone.” And maybe he really is, because Gillian isn’t crying anymore, not even in her sleep, and those bruises he left on her arms have disappeared, and she’s started to date Ben Frye.
The decision to take a chance with Ben came upon her suddenly, as she was driving home from work in Jimmy’s Oldsmobile, which still had beer cans rattling around somewhere under the seat. Ben continued to call several times a day, but that couldn’t go on forever, even though he had amazing patience. As a boy, he had taken eight months to teach himself to escape from a pair of iron handcuffs. Before he mastered the art of putting a match out under his tongue, he burned the roof of his mouth, again and again, so that for weeks afterward he could consume nothing but buttermilk and pudding. Illusions that lasted only seconds on a stage took months or even years to understand and execute. But love was not about practice and preparation, it was pure chance; if you took your time with it you ran the risk of having it evaporate before it had even begun. Sooner or later, Ben was bound to give up. He’d be on his way to see her, he’d have a book under his arm in order to pass the time while he waited for her on the porch, and he’d suddenly think, Nope, just like that, out of the blue. All Gillian had to do was close her eyes and she could see the expression of doubt that would spread across his face. Not today, he’d decide and he’d turn around to head for home and he probably wouldn’t ever come back.
Speculating about the time when Ben finally stopped chasing after her made Gillian sick to her stomach. The world without him, without his phone calls and his faith, didn’t interest her in the least. And who was she protecting him from, really? That careless girl who broke people’s hearts and asked for nothing more than a good time was gone. Jimmy had seen to that. That girl was so long ago and so far away that Gillian couldn’t even remember why she’d thought she’d ever been in love before, or what she’d thought she was getting from all those men, who never knew who she was in the first place.
On that evening when the sky was pale and blue and the beer cans were rolling around each time she stepped on the brake, Gillian made an illegal U turn and drove to Ben Frye’s house before her nerve failed her. She told herself she was an adult and could handle an adult encounter. It wasn’t necessary for her to run away, or protect someone at her own expense, or do anything more than take one baby step at a time in any direction she chose. All the same, she thought she might faint when Ben came to answer his door. She’d planned to tell him that she wasn’t looking for a commitment or anything serious—she wasn’t sure if she was going to kiss him, let alone get into bed with him—but she never got to say any of it, because once she stepped into the front hallway, Ben wasn’t about to wait.
He’d done enough time with patience, he’d served his sentence, now he didn’t intend to look past what he wanted. He started kissing Gillian before she could mention that she was still thinking it over. His kisses made her feel things she didn’t want to feel, at least not yet. He got her up against the wall and slipped his hands under her blouse, and that was that. She didn’t say “Stop it,” she didn’t say “Wait,” she kissed him back until she was too far gone to think anything over. Ben was driving her crazy, and he was testing her, too—every time he got her really hot, he’d stop just to see what she would do, and how much she wanted it. If he didn’t take her into the bedroom soon, she’d find herself begging him to fuck her. She’d wind up saying, Please, baby, which is what she used to say to Jimmy, although she never really meant it. Not back then. It’s never possible for a woman to concentrate on making love when she’s that scared. Too scared to breathe, too frightened to consider saying, Not like that. It hurts too much when you do it like that.
She talked dirty to Jimmy because she knew it helped to make him hard. If he’d been drinking all night and couldn’t get it up, he’d turn on her so fast she’d be reeling. One minute everything would be fine, and the next second the air all around him would be set on fire from the fury of whatever was inside him. When this happened, either he’d start to slap her or she’d have t
o start telling him how much she wanted him inside her. At least he’d have something to do with his anger when Gillian told him that she wanted him to fuck her all night, she wanted him so much she’d do anything, he could make her do anything. And didn’t he have a perfect right to be angry and do whatever he pleased? Wasn’t she so bad she needed to be punished, and only he could do it, he could do it right?
Talk and violence always turned Jimmy on, and so Gillian always started talking right away. She was smart enough to get him hard fast, to talk nasty and suck his dick, before he started to get really mad. He’d fuck her then, but he could be mean about it, and selfish, too, and he liked it when she cried. When she cried, he knew he had won, and for some reason that was important to him. He didn’t seem to know he’d won from the start, when she first saw him, when she first looked into his eyes.
As soon as they were done with sex, Jimmy would be nice to her again, and it was worth almost anything to have him when he was that way. When he was feeling all right and didn’t have anything to prove, he was the man she’d fallen for so hard, he was the one who could make nearly any woman believe whatever he wanted. It’s easy to forget what you do in the dark, if you need to. Gillian knew that other women thought she was lucky, and she agreed with them. She’d gotten confused, that’s what had happened. She’d started to accept that love had to be like this, and in a way she was right, because with Jimmy that’s the way it did have to be.
Gillian was so used to having someone get her down on her hands and knees first thing; she was so ready to be struck and then told she’d better suck hard, that she couldn’t believe Ben was spending this much time kissing her. All this kissing was making her crazy; it was reminding her of what she could feel, and how it could be when you wanted someone as much as he wanted you. Ben was about as different from Jimmy as anyone could be. He wasn’t interested in making anyone cry, then sweet-talking her afterward, the way Jimmy used to, and he didn’t need any help the way Jimmy always did. By the time Ben pulled her panties off, Gillian was completely weak in the knees. She didn’t give a damn about going into the bedroom, she wanted it there, she wanted it now. She no longer had to debate the possibility of being with Ben Frye; this relationship had already happened, she’d walked straight into it, and she wasn’t about to start walking away.
They made love for as long as they could, right there in the hallway, and then they went to Ben’s bed and slept for hours, as though they’d been drugged. As they were falling asleep, Gillian could have sworn she heard Ben say Fate—as if they were meant to be together from the start and every single thing they’d ever done in their lives had been leading to this moment. If you thought that way, you could fall asleep without regret. You could put your whole life in place, with all the sadness and the sorrow, and still feel that at last you had everything you’d ever wanted. In spite of the lousy odds and all the wrong turns, you might actually discover that you were the one who’d won.
When Gillian woke, it was evening and the room was dark, except for something that appeared to be a white cloud poised at the foot of the bed. Gillian wondered if she was dreaming, if perhaps she’d risen out of her body to float above herself and the bed she’d been sharing with Ben Frye. But when she pinched herself, it hurt. This was still her, all right. She ran her hand along Ben’s back, just to make certain he was real too. In fact, he was real enough to startle her; his muscles and his skin and the heat from his sleeping body made her want him all over again, and she felt foolish, like a schoolgirl who doesn’t stop to consider any consequences.
Gillian sat up, the white sheet pulled around her, and found that the cloud at the foot of the bed was nothing more than Ben’s pet rabbit, Buddy, who hopped into her lap. Only a few weeks ago, Gillian had been out in the Sonoran desert, her hands over her ears, as Jimmy and two of his friends shot prairie dogs. They killed thirteen of them, and Gillian had thought it was terrible luck. She’d gotten shaky and pale, too upset to hide it. Luckily, Jimmy was in a great mood, since he’d bagged more prairie dogs than his pals had, shooting eight, if you included the two babies. He came over and put his arms around Gillian. When he looked at her in this way, she understood why she’d been so drawn to him, and why she was still. He could make it seem as though you were the only person in the universe; a bomb could fall, lightning could strike, he simply would not take his eyes off you.
“The only good rodent is a dead rodent,” Jimmy had told her. He smelled of cigarettes and heat and was just about as alive as a human being could be. “Trust me on this. When you see one, shoot to kill.”
Jimmy would have gotten a good laugh catching her in bed with a rodent. Gillian pushed the rabbit away, then got up and found her way to the kitchen for a glass of water. She was disoriented and confused. She didn’t know what she was doing in Ben’s house, although it was surprisingly comfortable, with nice old pine furniture and shelves filled with books. Most of the men Gillian had been involved with had avoided the kitchen, some hadn’t even seemed to be aware that their own houses had such rooms, complete with stoves and sinks, but here the kitchen was well used—a weathered pine table was piled high with science textbooks and menus from Chinese restaurants, and, when she looked, Gillian discovered that there was actually food in the refrigerator: several casserole pans of lasagna and broccoli-with-cheese soufflé, a carton of milk, cold cuts, bottled water, bunches of carrots. Right before they had to leave Tucson in such a hurry, there was nothing in their refrigerator but six-packs of Budweiser and Diet Coke. One package of frozen burritos was wedged way in the back near the ice trays, but anything left in their freezer always defrosted, then refroze, and was better left alone.
Gillian got herself a bottle of fancy water, and when she turned she saw that the rabbit had followed her.
“Go away,” she told him, but he wouldn’t.
Buddy had taken to Gillian in a major way. He thumped his leg, the way rabbits in love always do. He paid no attention to her frown, or the fact that she waved her hands at him, as if he were a cat to be shooed away. He trailed behind her into the living room. When Gillian stopped, Buddy sat down on the rug and looked up at her.
“You quit this right now,” Gillian said.
She wagged her finger and glared at him, but Buddy stayed where he was. He had big brown eyes that were rimmed with pink. He looked serious and dignified, even when he washed his paws with his tongue.
“You’re just a rodent,” Gillian told him. “That’s all you are.”
Gillian felt like crying, and why shouldn’t she? She could never live up to Ben’s version of her; she had a whole secret, horrible past to hide. She used to fuck men in parked cars just to prove she didn’t give a damn; she used to count her conquests and laugh. She sat on the couch that Ben had ordered from a catalogue when his old one became threadbare. It was a really nice couch, made out of some plum-colored corduroy fabric. Just the kind of couch Gillian would have spotted in a magazine and wanted for herself, if she had a house, or money, or even a permanent address to which she could have catalogues and magazines mailed. She wasn’t even certain that she could be in a normal relationship. What if she got tired of someone’s being nice to her? What if she couldn’t make him happy? What if Jimmy had been right and she’d asked to be hit—maybe not out loud, but in some nameless way she wasn’t aware of. What if he’d fixed it so she actually needed it now?
The rabbit hopped over and sat at her feet.
“I’m fucked up,” Gillian told him.
She curled up on the couch and wept, but even that didn’t scare the rabbit away. Buddy had spent a great deal of time at the children’s ward at the hospital over on the Turnpike. Every Saturday, during Ben’s magic act, he was pulled out of a hat that was old and smelled of alfalfa and sweat. Buddy was used to bright lights and people crying, and he was always well behaved. He had never once bitten a child, not even when he’d been poked or teased. Now, he rose onto his back legs and balanced carefully, just as he’d been taught.
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“Don’t try to cheer me up,” Gillian said, but all the same he did. By the time Ben came out of the bedroom, Gillian was sitting on the floor with Buddy, feeding him some seedless grapes.
“This is one smart character,” Gillian said. The sheet she’d taken from the bed was wrapped around her carelessly and her hair was sticking out like a halo. She felt calmer now, and lighter than she had for quite a while. “Why, he can put on the floor lamp by jumping on the switch. He can hold this bottle of water between his paws and drink some without spilling a drop. No one who hadn’t seen it would believe it. Next thing I know, you’ll tell me he’s litter-trained like a cat.”
“He is.”
Ben was standing by the window, and in the pale new light he looked as if he’d slept the deep sleep of angels; no one would guess how he had panicked when he awoke to find Gillian gone from his bed. He’d been ready to run down the street, to call the police and demand a search party. In those moments when he’d climbed from his bed he’d guessed he had somehow managed to lose her, as he’d lost everything else in his life, but here she was, wrapped up in the sheet from his bed. If he was honest with himself, he’d have to admit that he had a real fear of people disappearing on him, which is why he turned to magic in the first place. In Ben Frye’s act, what vanished always reappeared, whether it was a ring or a quarter or Buddy himself. In spite of all this, Ben had gone and fallen in love with the most unpredictable woman he’d ever met. And he couldn’t fight it; he didn’t even want to try. He wished he could tie her up in his room, with ropes made of silk; he wished he never had to let her go. He crouched down beside Gillian with the full knowledge that he was the one tied in knots. He wanted to ask her to marry him, to never leave him; instead he reached beneath the couch pillow, then waved his arm around and pulled a carrot out of thin air. For the first time ever, Buddy ignored food; he edged closer to Gillian.
Practical Magic Page 14