by Joan Barfoot
It is dangerous, it is even a breach of Phil’s trust, but, “Thank you,” she says again, in shakier tone. It’s a relief. It’s not so lonely if somebody knows. Goodness, good behaviour, they can take many forms, and if some are more ambiguous than others, well, that’s the tricky, complicated world of grown-ups, isn’t it? The ambiguity of Max’s particular virtue is, it seems, that he is not inclined to betray Sophie or Nora or Phil. Quite an accomplishment.
Now that her armoured but very real grief is acknowledged, though, Sophie sags where she stands. Max puts an arm around her. He’s a nice man. No wonder Nora holds him in such high regard. “How did you know?” she whispers.
“I watch. I listen to tones. I can sometimes feel things.”
When? Max spent a rare day here some weeks ago—a short holiday in the country, much time on the porch, everyone with their feet up talking about work and nothing else very important except, now and then, world events—what could he have seen? Nora’s a watcher, too. Nora calls watching a requirement of her job, and makes a little joke about the fortuitousness of that, given that observing is also her inclination and nature. Does Nora see less acutely than Max, or is she just more careful about what she will see?
“I’ve been watching you for a long time,” Phil said to begin with, and without will or warning, just like throwing up, Sophie is weeping into Max’s shoulder, his arms folded around her, one of his big hands stroking her hair, the other tight on her back, an old man maybe, but firm as a tree. She is gulping for air, she is crying so hard she makes deep-throated, gasping, hiccuping sounds. She would throw her head back and howl inside these arms except even now she is aware of Nora upstairs, and how could she explain the depth and volume of her anguish if, curious and alarmed, Nora came down?
Finally she is able to step back and allow Max to dry her cheeks with his thumbs. “I’m sorry,” she says.
“Ah Sophie, we do our best for many reasons, do we not? I know you have done yours. In his way, Philip did his best as well. Life is complicated, and then suddenly it is much too simple. Strange, isn’t it?”
Yes, it is.
Max has brought air into the house. An outside voice, and moreover a deep one. Those missing bass tones. He also bears an external eye, private solace, a larger outlook on Phil. Sophie takes a deep, ragged breath. Finally, there is such a thing as taking a deep breath in this house. She takes another, and another, and is herself again. Or at least the self that functions and copes. “I’ll pile the sandwiches on a big plate, and then people can eat whenever they’re ready.” Max nods, he gives her a last pat on the shoulder, and takes his place—actually Phil’s place—at the table. That looks strange; but somebody would have to sit there some time.
It would be nice if some similarly warm and consoling event were occurring upstairs, but it’s not.
All morning, from behind the closed door of her room, Beth has been listening to the sounds of the household: the other two getting up, going downstairs, voices rising to her room from below, more trips up and down stairs and then Nora pounding down, Max’s voice joining Nora’s and Sophie’s, and then Nora returning upstairs, Nora going into the bathroom, the shower being turned on.
And nobody this whole long time has tapped on Beth’s door or called out to ask if she’s okay.
She is not okay.
Look what she’s done to her stomach, filling it with poisonous overnight foods—what was she thinking, heating scoops of casserole, cramming herself with cookies and cake? She could feel food dulling history and impulse, but until she was full to bursting with sugar and starch and disgust, she had no idea how heavy food gets; in every way an anchor. She dragged herself back upstairs to bed thoroughly weighted, and then pains in her stomach kept her awake. She did finally sleep, but woke up queasy this morning. Inert, too, even though food is supposed to bring energy, isn’t it?
And nobody cares. They’re probably more interested in what happened to the food than what’s happened to her. Nora, too, not just Sophie. But Nora has a lot on her mind. It doesn’t mean she doesn’t care, only that other things have grabbed her attention.
So Beth must grab it back.
It’s in her power to transform the day.
There now, there’s the surge food is supposed to provide, like a furnace clicking on—just so, Beth finally rolls out of bed and onto her feet, and immediately, once she’s standing, feels far less pinned and weighed down. She meant to wait, but no, she can’t. Yesterday would have been wrong, but this is the time, this is the day. Nora, now out of the shower, now leaving the bathroom, needs a future, and once Beth reveals it, they can proceed through the rest of the day with their eyes and hearts skipping over the moment, cast forward instead. That sounds right, doesn’t it? Of course it does, and without hesitation Beth aims herself directly from her room to Nora’s. Nora is standing, plump and pensive in mid-calf-length black skirt, black stockings, flat black shoes and navy-blue bra, taking from a closet hanger a black top, long and gold-flecked—an outfit normally worn to openings and other city events. “Nora. Listen.”
Beth’s intention is to raise Nora instantly from misery or weariness or inattention into the thinner, finer, happier atmosphere Beth inhabits simply by standing up, getting moving. “Beth!” Nora clutches the black and gold top to her chest. “You startled me.” Not exactly welcoming, but, “Can I help you with something?”
She can, yes; but more the other way around.
“I’ve been thinking.” Beth is interested to hear how she’s going to put her ideas, what’s going to come out of her mouth. “About plans. What we do next. Wait till you hear.”
It’s only natural that Nora looks confused. “Can it wait? Max is here, you know, and we’ll have to leave soon. I want to get back downstairs.”
“No, please, just a couple of minutes, okay? It’ll make all the difference. Listen. It’s about what to do when we leave here.” Beth hurtles on so that open-mouthed Nora will have no more space for words. Beth can see her perfect vision so clearly right now, and she knows it can save, and she just has to say it.
“See, we go back to the city. I mean, nobody wants to stay here, right? We find a house, or one of those half-houses, what do you call them? Brick, anyway, with a little yard with a fence and vines growing up it, and flowers, and I’ll have a herb garden. You need lots of light, so there’ll be big windows in the room where you work, and it should be on a side street because you don’t want too much noise when you’re working, but it has to be sort of downtown. And high ceilings, and white walls so we can hang your art right, and we’ll have all new furniture for starting out fresh, we’ll have such a good time shopping for exactly what we want, just for us. I can do modelling, or maybe get other kinds of jobs when we need money, and I’ll do the cleaning, and I can learn to cook, too, so all you’ll have to do is your work. Just the two of us, can you imagine?” She is breathless. Perhaps she has spoken too fast. So much, and it’s only taken a moment to say. Maybe it spilled out so full tilt that Nora can’t take it all in at once, and that’s why she’s standing just staring at Beth.
Or she’s overcome by the splendour of the picture Beth has sketched right in front of her eyes. Oh, there’s lots more details: a fireplace in the living room, white-painted brick flanked by white-painted built-in shelves, flowers always blooming in pottery vases and crystal ones on mantels and tables, and candles as well, tall and short, scented and not, lit every cozy, intimate evening. Soft music, and Nora’s latest, most dazzling works—whatever they’ll be next, they are certain to dazzle—lighting the walls. “Isn’t it perfect, Nora, isn’t it beautiful?” Beth finds a use for slightly pouched bellies: she rests her clasped hands on hers.
Nora stares harder. Nora frowns. Finally, watchfully, in a way Beth can’t interpret, Nora says, “That’s quite an idea, Beth. I can see you’ve given it a lot of thought. But you know, I haven’t even begun to think about futures. I can’t, it’s far too soon. There’s Philip, you know.”
> Didn’t she get it? Does she not grasp altered circumstances? “But that’s just it, you won’t have to think about him, you can do what you want, isn’t that just amazing?” Beth sees Nora stepping lightly into this conjured cottage and being … content. Happy and content. Finally, Nora would say then, as if she had crossed a long desert to her reward, her true oasis in a warm, fruitful space.
Honest to God, Beth can see that, true as true.
Nora takes a deep breath. “Beth, please. Think. Try to imagine being with somebody you care for, day in and day out for nearly twenty years, and suddenly you don’t have them any more.”
Yes. And so? “That’s what I mean, how amazing that is. I love you, isn’t that amazing too? I don’t mean sex, not at all, don’t think that, I mean love. And you’re free. We can do anything. You have your whole life in your very own hands.”
Now something bad happens. Nora throws up those hands, violently, so that Beth takes a step back. “Beth. I do not have time for this.” There’s a sound in Nora’s voice Beth has never heard before, not even when she was raging about the people in town. She is low-voiced and harsh, a stranger saying, “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, and I don’t think you do either, but I’m not listening to any more of it. You have no idea. There’s something the matter with you, but I can’t deal with it now,” and shrugging herself into the black gold-flecked top she whisks past Beth and is out the door and into the hallway and gone.
Oh.
Beth sinks onto Nora’s bed. Such a big bed. So much space.
How come the largest possible events can take almost no time?
How come when something’s so true, it doesn’t just naturally come true? Beth saw Nora and herself in their brick city cottage. She smelled the herbs, she heard muffled traffic, she listened to her voice and Nora’s in low evening communion. She felt Nora brushing a hand over her hair, passing by, the way, but different, Nora sometimes brushed Philip’s shoulder, or he touched her arm. Just little, enormous moments.
This is the second time a desire has simply flowed through Beth uninterrupted in the direction of fate. Bricks collapse, white walls darken. Nobody cares. People who’ve made a living off her, how ungrateful they are, and blind, and unworthy.
Beth turns on her side on Nora’s bed. She’s so heavy. Why does no one take care of her? Admiration is different. Lights and tiaras and sashes were never the same thing as care. Even her hours spent bending to Nora’s visions didn’t add up to true attentiveness, much less respect or affection, it seems. All her pictures turn out to be wrong, and acting on them turns out so badly. She only wants to be safe; for someone, one single human to care. Is there really no one? Was there ever someone? Could there have been? How do other people decide things, weigh them up, pick one choice or the other so that they’re loved? Is that what regular people do? How do they learn that?
Maybe by not being so particularly admired. Maybe they learn in the absence of extravagant beauty. Without so many mirrors and glass, light and darkness.
How desolate, how bereft, how swamped with grief Beth’s crushed, collapsed little heart is.
Also, how busy her mind.
Nora’s, too. Once escaped from her room, and it feels exactly like that, an escape, she could go left, down the stairs, back to the safety of the kitchen and Sophie and Max, as she told Beth she was eager to do. Instead, she finds herself turning right, along the hall to her studio, to stand in its light. That was shocking. Just shocking. Who knew? Should she have known? It takes a minute or two to catch her breath and stop shaking, a few moments to absorb that awful, pathetic encounter.
Who on earth has been living here in this house?
Here on these tables are lined up Nora’s own paints and brushes, threads, needles and glues, around the walls are piled her own fabrics and canvases. Off to the right are her own easels, one medium-sized and one, especially Philip-built for her, magnificently enormous—how restful, and how luxuriously mournful it would be, to stay here alone, in this room all her own, for the rest of the day.
She can’t stay, of course. She has Sophie and Max waiting, a glass of wine to finish, sandwiches to eat, a funeral to survive—and then? Nothing as peculiar as what Beth proposed, that’s for sure, at least Nora will have saner prospects than that after she has performed her first duties in her new role as widow. There is Philip, care for and love of Philip, grief for Philip, all sorts of aspects of Philip to acknowledge today. She can worry and think about the rest of it later, but this is his day; so okay then, deep breath, and a firmer one, and another—that’s better, that’s manageable, and so here she must go, here she goes. Now.
Fourteen
Two women in black, plus one in pale yellow, march out the front door, cross the porch side by side, descend the steps, and make their way to the street and the limousine Hendrik Anderson has sent. Sophie walks in the middle, separating Nora from Beth so that a view of the group weights and tilts towards the two in black, leaving the one in yellow looking light and liable to fly upwards.
Max follows behind, joining them last in the car.
Does anyone enjoy going to funerals? Surely only those very remotely attached to the deceased, with their amiable curiosity, or sociability. Oh, and enemies, too, if only to assure themselves this truly is the final appearance of someone triumphantly outlived.
Philip didn’t have enemies. Well, maybe Lynn.
Or unquantifiable, indefinable Beth, who knows? They are all, especially Nora, surprised, even Beth is surprised, that she is among them, but here she is in her pale yellow dress and flat ballerina-style, twinkle-toed shoes and her brushed-out angel-hair, silently making known her intention to be a part of all this. What part, no one has enquired, but Nora has taken care to place Sophie between Beth and herself on their way to the car, and inside it.
As buffer, Sophie is on the alert. Nora told her and Max only the skeleton of Beth’s proposition, but even so little sounded quite fantastic and mad. When Sophie stood from the kitchen table to go upstairs to shower and dress, Nora asked her to check on Beth. “I left her in my room. God knows what she’s doing. Do you mind?”
Sophie frowned. She thought she did mind. “I’ll see.”
“That’s different,” Nora said when Sophie was gone.
“That Sophie is not so much your employee, or that Beth shows herself to have larger desires than to be your material?”
Both, maybe. And both unpleasant, and somewhat critical, as if it’s Nora who comes up short here—this from Max? “Shit, I don’t know. Obviously I’m not very good at deciphering people.”
“Mysteries. People are bound to be unknown to each other in small or large part and therefore naturally surprising, don’t you think? Now. Tell me about Philip. And you. How you are doing.”
Nora began with the moment she turned in bed, the leap up, and the scream. “I keep thinking of me sleeping and him all alone. Struggling. I don’t know.” She waited for her voice to get strong again before telling of the others running into the bedroom, Beth in her nightie, Sophie with her flying robe and with all her red hair aflame. Max’s eyes sharpened, but he made no comment. “Thank you for being here, Max. You and Philip, you’re the two who always make sense of things, but not,” her breath caught again, “any more.”
“You may be surprised. I still hear Lily’s voice. Sometimes she comforts me, sometimes she makes me brave, sometimes she is just present, alongside me. Being Lily, she gives me advice and good counsel.” Nora, although mourning Philip’s living voice, wasn’t sure she would want to hear him on and on for years into the future. “Let yourself grieve. This is not a time to be proud. Pay attention to Philip and who he was in your life, and later what you remember will be the joy of knowing you have experienced genuine sorrow.”
A convoluted sort of notion. And joy—such a deep, hearty word, when was the last time Nora felt anything like it? Nor could she imagine it in any sort of foreseeable future. If joy-lessness was what Max meant
by genuine sorrow, that’s what she had. That and rust; she felt rusted nearly away the past couple of days by disbelief, and by desperation to undo events that could not be undone.
Proud? No, but she could at least carry herself proudly. “All I want to do is get safely through this day.” Safely? What could be safe? “On top of everything else, there’ll be people I don’t want to see. Who don’t deserve to be there.”
“And you are still a little angry that Philip wasn’t as angry with them as you.”
“Oh, Max, I’m angry about so much right now, it’s hard to tell.”
“Philip especially.”
“Yes! Off and on. How did you know?”
He shrugged again. “Lily. I was furious. Forty years, and then she left me, and I felt betrayed. That was wrong, but these things don’t have to be true to be real. Then in time I came to think Lily would be pleased that I cared so much I was furious.” A point of view, no doubt; yet when Lily died Max turned mirrors to walls and sat shiva, and at the end said, “I’ve done my best for her. I can rest.” It now sounded as if his rest wasn’t totally peaceful. If Lily still spoke.
“Yes,” said Nora, “I see.” Although she didn’t, really. Too much confusion today; as if the house itself had decided to go clattering and banging about, raising layers of distress and dislocation like dust.
“It would be foolish to tell you that you will recover, because in very many ways there is no recovery, only change. But there can be good surprises in good farewells, so you may feel as I did with Lily that something is completed by the end of this day. My only advice is, you should be attentive to your heart as it shifts.”
Whatever. “Thanks, Max.” She leaned across in her chair to let her head rest on his shoulder, and his arm reached around her again. She liked his voice, and his presence, and perhaps what he was saying would come clearer later, when she might have a larger perspective and context; for the moment it was nice enough, resting her head.