by Joan Barfoot
From her bedroom to this old piece of upholstered furniture, even the insides of the house are turning against her, baring their teeth, inviting grief indoors that was previously barricaded beyond the walls, outside the gate where those horrible villagers lurk. She is trapped between nothing good out there and now nothing good in here either.
What do those villagers—all right, townspeople, some of them—see from their uphill perspective? Blasphemy, evidently. Sacrilege and heresy. A taunting invitation to the lighting of torches. A mob of the berserk; but then, that’s what mobs are—a person here, a person there, there and there, whipped into a single-celled, single-minded, dangerous creature.
If there were many residents resistant to mobbery, they were mainly mute, and so not very brave. Which is its own kind of sin. Or perhaps Nora didn’t hear them, another sort of sin.
Her mistake was to underestimate the power of image; an especially unfortunate lapse, given her faith in the power of image. Walk into a room, she likes to think, and see a painting, or a sculpture, or even some less-defined piece that’s intended as art, and if it’s any good, bam!—there’s an impression, an emotion, an idea, a frank point of view.
Evidently she failed to take into proper account the fierce power of the negative bam.
Or she just didn’t care. That came to be more or less Philip’s view, although he was mainly restrained in expressing it, and was more protective than could reasonably be expected. Although she was not particularly reasonable on the subject.
They walked, a couple of years ago, she and Philip, into the opening of a sculpture show. They were acquaintances of the sculptor and his work, and were happy to leave the house in Sophie’s good hands while they took a weekend away in the city. It was a relatively casual event—Nora recalls wearing black trousers and a loose blue blouse she might have worn anywhere—but there, in the close-packed, chattering gallery crowd, was Beth: in long eggshell dress with translucent pale green beadwork at the throat, carrying a glass of red wine. She looked perfectly vacant. Untouched and untouchable, alert but remote. Anyone can be beautiful; there was some other factor at play that kept Nora manoeuvring to hold her in view. Pictures came to mind, a set of images, a meandering stream of notions that had something to do with Beth’s compelling, faint aroma of sorrow; those bones ready for shifting, skin ripe for translation.
Nora couldn’t explain even to Philip why she wanted Beth here when she’d never needed or used a model similarly before. He said finally, “I don’t know what you see in her, but I guess if it’s what you want, go ahead. What’s one more?” When they already had Sophie, he meant. How hard could he argue, anyway, when he was himself a beneficiary of Nora’s trust in first glances?
He would have preferred Beth at least to return to a room or an apartment elsewhere in town at the end of each day, but that would have been too expensive even if Beth had agreed to so isolated an existence. Eventually it might not have even been safe. As it was, it was strange that Beth could just pack up and move in, as if she had no other life. Maybe she didn’t, she’s never said, but how is that possible?
Beth is useful, beautiful, malleable and obedient, and this is what Nora’s hands and Beth’s body have together created:
Beth hanging, gangly and tiny-titted, from a metallic cross, fine bubbly blonde hair obscuring her face, tendons straining in her thin arms, blood trickling down her gaunt thighs and calves, dribbling in drops of crimson fabric off the tips of her painted toes.
Beth emerging baffled, and triumphantly nude, from the dark gaping mouth of a cave. She is steadying herself with a hand braced on a perfectly oval grey rock, the other hand trailing white chiffon (real white chiffon, embedded with a hundred, two hundred glittery sequins) that drapes and falls clear out of the frame.
Beth standing at the summit of a great hill, a huge piece, her arms spread outwards, rich bright yellow and red and green gown (strips of real silk) cascading downwards, enveloping the hill and stitched intricately with tiny figures of hopeful people gazing upwards, the word BLESSED embroidered in large, loose, pale yellow stitches in the low right-hand corner, near the flourish of Nora’s signature.
Beth at a feast with a row of lipsticked and eyeshadowed and rouged women of various colours wearing variously embroidered gowns (real fabric, real embroidery) leaning into each other at a long table, some laughing, some solemn, some plain and some lovely, with one off to the left in throat-to-ankle black velvet looking away from the rest. On the table, carved on its edges with veiled, leaping dancers, a splendid array of pastas and sauces, green and chickpea and bean salads, light and dark breads, and right in the centre a huge, chocolate-iced cake. Also in the centre the gaunt, remote Beth-figure standing, raising a mirror-sparkling crystal (real mirror, real crystal) glass of red wine. Or blood.
Two men, their long, perfectly sloped, identical, bent backs to the viewer, washing Beth’s feet with rags. The backs are Philip’s, each spiny knob and carved muscle detailed from years of scrutiny and memory. Beth wears one of her own loose, mid-calf-length dresses, a soft yellow one hiked high on her thighs. Her legs are spread wide so that one foot rests in the hand of each man. Her head is thrown back, her eyes are closed, her lips curve gently upwards in pleasure.
All of this was slow and delicate work. From Beth’s perspective, possibly arduous sometimes, perhaps boring. She was perfectly flexible, at any rate, and perfectly patient.
Only those few pieces to trigger such tumult! Philip said it at least ought to please Nora that she became famous; or infamous. So did the town. Perhaps by now they’re symbiotic, like those birds that catch bug-meals and long rides aboard hippos, hippos that are cleaned and groomed by the birds.
Outrage and offence, another outbreak of words along the lines of “Die, bitch, die” outside her windows—whatever happened to love and redemption? So old testament, rather than new; like furious old wife rather than hopeful new one.
Philip said, “They think you’re ridiculing what they believe, and that makes them feel threatened, which makes them angry, and then they lash out.”
So?
“So of course I’m not saying they’re right, I’m just saying even if they’re crazy, we’re not. It shouldn’t be as hard for us to understand them as it is the other way round.” Because they, he and she, were smart and sane, he was suggesting. Nora did not see it that way. She thought he might want to move past nostalgia for happy, innocent childhood summers. “It’s not nostalgia,” he snapped, sensitive, it appeared, on the point.
Still, he was good about cleaning and repainting the fence after the “sluts” and “whores” and “blasphemers” and “Jezebels” began to appear overnight. And he was very good about saying, “You just do what you do and don’t worry. It’ll never be really dangerous, nobody would do any real harm while I’m around.” Big, gregarious Philip, fellow drinker, old pal, grown child, good guy. Except he’s not around any more, is he?
Even if they are short of benevolence, why aren’t more people at least curious? Philip was, Nora is: If this, does that follow? And What happens if you look at it this way?
What happens if it turns out a whole noisy portion of humans doesn’t like questions at all, only answers, and doesn’t care for alternative views?
Not much that’s good, it appears.
Nothing has happened, really, since early spring. The nine-day wonder died down; and anyway, the series is done. Certainly Beth’s purpose here is finished, and it’s well past time for her to move on. As Philip pointed out several times. “I’ll get to it,” Nora promised. “It’s hard, though. She’s no trouble, and I don’t know where she’d go.” Nora can sound kinder than she is. Does she by any chance actually contain a sliver of new testament-type human trying to get out, the same way fat people are said to have thin ones clamouring for an exit?
“Who cares where she goes?” Philip said. “She has to go somewhere sometime. If you’re having trouble, ask her to whip you up a tea that works for evictions.�
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Yes, the tea thing does get on people’s nerves. And Philip could be as soft as a cushion or as hard as the frame of one of his chairs.
In the morning he smelled first of sleep. Then of soap, spicy and sharp. By noon his scent was dusty and wood-grained, fresh in its way as a forest. By nightfall, sweaty. By the time he rolled into bed, all that and often beery and smoky as well, the full range of his day was contained in his skin. Nora doesn’t know how to locate a man’s scent on canvas. He frowns, he tilts his head back and laughs.
Nora rises up from the enemy sofa.
This time, once upstairs there’s no invisible hand keeping her out of her bedroom. She slams the door behind her, although more by mistake than from temper. The force of the slam makes the old windows shift in their frames; the sound rings a bell. She has done this before, and with temper. At Philip, intent on going out, never mind what she wanted or said.
“How can you drink with those people?”
“First of all they’re my friends, second of all they’re not those people, and lastly I don’t intend to hide away in this house or change doing what pleases me.”
So, slam!
Softer sounds, too. A grunting noise every time—for years, every time!—he buttoned his pants. It wasn’t exactly an irritating sound, only noticeable. Also the huge, happy exhalation when at the end of the day he threw himself into bed, glad to be there.
On their shared dresser top, he keeps only a black comb and a hairbrush—look, there’s a few of his mostly dark hairs, a few grey, caught in the brush—and a small box containing a jumble of jewellery debris, including cufflinks for those rare occasions when that sort of dressing up was required. “Shit, goddamn things,” he said, wrestling till Nora stepped up to fasten them for him; his wrists dusted with tempting male hairs.
Sometimes she helped tie his ties, too.
His ties are slung around a hanger in his side of the closet. He only has half a dozen because what use are they to a man who works with his hands and dislikes feeling restrained? “Bibs for men” he called them, complaining of strangulation. He hasn’t bought a new tie since he and Nora were married. “I have enough to last me a lifetime,” he said, and so, it turns out, he did.
She lays them out on the bed. They are multicoloured, and of several widths and fabrics.
He has those two aging dark suits she mentioned to Sophie. They are not interesting, and can be given away. The shirts, though—the white, pale yellow, the blue, the cotton, the linen, the flannels—she’ll keep these. She pulls them from their hangers and folds them, too, on the bed. There is a Philip-scent to even the freshly washed ones, of soap and sawdust and something else more elusively his.
She dumps the contents of his bureau drawers in a great pile on the floor, a litter of socks and underwear, folded sweaters, coiled belts, more work shirts of the plaid flannel variety. In their first days together, it didn’t occur to him to do his own laundry. “It’s not magic, you know,” she told him. “Fairy hands don’t take it away in the night and return it by morning.” They had all sorts of household chores to sort out between them. Not without resistance, not without complaint, they found a system for vacuuming, getting meals, clearing up, doing laundry, doing business. Then they found Sophie. Fairy hands.
Nora can’t see putting out only her own laundry for Sophie to do. They’re in a new balance now.
What a mess of stuff, his possessions all over the floor and the bed. The ties, shirts, sweaters and some of the underwear she gathers up in her arms and staggers off down the hall. In her studio there are many overflowing baskets for potentially useful spare materials, scraps.
Too sudden? Of course. Maybe. Who’s to say?
In the studio what is already piled up and scattered—paints, brushes, embroidery threads, needles and glues, beads in jars and beads that have rolled into corners, heaps of displaced and unsorted fabrics, easels here, canvases there—looks chaotic. Disorder easily becomes the normal state of a large room belonging to only one person. This is the one space in the house that is Nora’s.
Except, she guesses, the whole house is hers now.
Is there a way to capture vacancy? To depict desolation?
It’s not so much the literal content of a sketch or a painting that’s important, as intention and style. Anyone can do thunder and lightning, shock, disaster, despair. It’s the selection of materials, the relationship of one thing to another, the singular eye, Nora’s particular interpretation and touch, not anyone else’s, that make all the difference.
So she picks up a sketchpad and pencil, and tosses a few shirts on the floor, and the ties, and begins—because this is all she can think of to do—tracing fast and slowly, carelessly and intently, lightly or with precise, concentrated detail, page after page, for quite a long time, the lines and wrinkles and discarded shapes of his absence.
Ten
The outdoors is a foreign country to Beth. The light seems to her either garish or contrastingly dull and diffuse, and in either case damaging to people like her, with their lives in their skins. The air is unpredictable and unfamiliar as well, causing her to sniff warily, trying to distinguish harmless from hostile like a small, tender animal. What is unknown is unnerving, and Beth has never in her whole life been familiar with the world beyond walls and doors. Even when she was a child, occasions to frolic in the open air did not much arise. So it’s not surprising if stepping outside now, all by herself, causes her heart to leap a few times in anxious distress.
It’s been fine living here, staying in, letting Nora bend and display her at will, turning her, in a way, into someone else altogether. Beth doesn’t need to know if the town is a good or a bad place, and doesn’t especially care except for how upset people got, upsetting Nora, and then a few times Beth herself was scared by raised, angry voices. But mostly Sophie takes care of daily necessities, and Nora and Philip have been in charge, and even in the bad times Beth was able to stay—Nora told her to stay—pretty much to herself, out of sight.
This will now end. But—here’s another spin on second days—what prospects instead!
At the front gate one turns left to follow the street slightly downhill into town, or one turns right onto what, within steps, becomes a highway into the country. Sophie would have gone left at the front gate, towards the funeral home, carrying the blue gym bag with Philip’s clothes. Beth, then, will turn right. She is restless in ways beyond the reaches of teas. Mainly, though, she’s stepping out in order to keep speechless; because who knows what would come out of her mouth if she started talking? To Nora, she means.
Besides, the loud slam of Nora’s bedroom door made it perfectly clear she prefers being alone. That’s all right. Except it means that for once being inside is too weird; really quiet, and lonesome. The thing about living with three other people is that usually a person’s only alone if she wants to be, and there’s almost always some rustle or step or voice that says at least somebody’s around. It’s not that Beth misses Philip, not at all, but she does find herself missing the way the house worked inside itself, and sounded, and smelled, up until yesterday morning.
The highway is fairly busy, a two-lane route much used by trucks, so to be safe Beth has to walk as far as possible off it, on gravel or in the long grass between the gravel part and the slope to the ditch alongside. Everything’s kind of shrunk in the heat. What were probably bright orange wild lilies a couple of weeks ago are now bald, brittle stalks. The ditch is empty of water. She must take care not to go so far she can’t comfortably get back. Thin sandals aren’t exactly good walking shoes. Transports roar past, reminding her fleetingly of her father, who repaired such trucks for a living. One, a silvery tanker, announces on its side that its rounded, steely belly holds milk. Another, its separate compartments open to the air, is taking chickens someplace. That’s sad, all those birds crammed together, off on a trip, no choice in the matter and no good ending to their journey either.
Cars aren’t so bad, but these oc
casional trucks whip up the flimsy, fly-away skirt of her dress, green today with tiny white dots but in the same style, as are most of her dresses, as yesterday’s fluttery calf-length pewtery one. She wishes for a hat: one of those broad-brimmed kinds you see in movies, English movies, ladies strolling or gardening, sheltering their skin. Beth feels exposed and vulnerable to drying up, like the ditch, or the lilies.
If Nora gets pictures in her head, so does Beth. Impulse control: such a dry term, as if its very dullness has an effect. And maybe it does. “Take a hundred deep breaths,” they used to tell her. “Count and concentrate.” There are lots and lots of ways to practise. Counting a hundred breaths is one, because by the time you’ve done that the urgency of the impulse, if not always the current desire itself, should have vanished. Beth is pleased to have thought up for herself the idea of coming out here, removing herself from temptation altogether. Not to mention escaping that atmosphere that feels darker today, and lower, and sort of airless as well.
Now Beth sees that besides counting breaths for calm and restraint, it’s also possible to concentrate on her feet and their surroundings: the grasses and tiny white and yellow sticking-up flowers and little purplish ground-crawling ones. A good number of wild plants—burdock, dandelion, chickweed—are harvestable for teas. They heal or hearten, cure or calm, oh, there are all sorts of ways to use ingredients fresh from the ground, and if Beth had brought her new encyclopedia of useful plants and herbs with her, she could have sat by the roadside and made a study of what’s probably right here at hand. She has never done this and now it may be too late. What she knows about the effects and components of teas comes from books, with their descriptions and recipes, their photographs and drawings of particular plants, good for this, useful for that. This is how she has learned that some teas require flowers, some roots, others leaves, and that some ingredients are supposed to be boiled down to essences while others must be hung up to dry.