Luck

by Joan Barfoot

  Oh—is that how Sophie sees what Nora does? As playing? Frolicking with this outrageous notion and that one as if it’s a game, like rope-skipping or hopscotch?

  “Good. Eventually I’ll be selling the house and we’ll both need to make plans, but meanwhile,” Nora takes a deep, obvious breath, “it feels right for the people who cared most for Philip to go on taking care of him.”

  If that’s Nora’s idea of taking care of him.

  But how long has she known? Right from the start, or has she just worked it out?

  Nora uncoils from the sofa and for an instant Sophie presses back in her chair. How stupid—Nora’s not about to attack her, she is saying, “I’m absolutely starving all of a sudden. Are you?”

  They fry eggs, they make toast, they’re having breakfast, evidently, at nightfall. Nora looks at her watch. “Max and Beth will be nearly back by now. I wonder where she’ll go? I hope she’s okay.” Easy to be benevolent, even pitying, from a distance.

  “Maybe she has relatives.”

  “I’m not sure. All the time I spent with her, and I only know she wasn’t in touch with anyone. I didn’t actually get the impression she had any family, but if I ever asked, she wouldn’t talk about anything except all those damned beauty pageants. Nothing about actual relatives. Or friends, for that matter.” Even so, it really is bad not to know. Because the truth is, Nora wasn’t much interested, beyond Beth’s various postures and uses—what a good thing there’s no particular connection between an artist’s virtues and her work’s values.

  Just as there’s not necessarily a connection between visions, hopes and desires, and what actually comes of them. This is the best time, when pictures are still so unformed they’re also still perfect. The moment work begins, when it starts taking on real shape and shading and purpose, that’s the moment it will begin losing perfection.

  For the time being it’s companionable to be sitting at the kitchen table, eating a night-time breakfast with Sophie.

  The more the merrier?

  “Bear with me,” Nora says. “Honestly, I don’t have bad intentions.”

  Do Nora and Sophie sleep on this third night? Oh yes; not like the dead, but near enough. And do they dream? Yes again, but tonight’s dreams are not sweet or bad or useful or even especially sad. Neither of them dreams of Philip Lawrence, three nights dead now. Sophie dreams of adding by hand reams of household sums for no identified purpose; Nora of cleaning paintbrushes over and over, an infinity of the things, an endless task. These are tedious ways to spend the night, but easy ones. The harder part must pick up in the morning, and the morning, again, after that. There is no way to absorb fatal information, and no denying it either, which is precisely the shocking dilemma of grief: that things happen—bang!—out of any day and out of the night, and there’s nothing to be done about it, and that’s almost all there is to it.

  THEOPENING

  Sixteen

  For all the density of black in this large, high-ceilinged room, the atmosphere is the reverse of funereal. There’s not a syllable of muted reverence in the swell of soaring, multiple voices, nor is the style of so much blackness remotely sombre. Nora, for instance, is tanned to the visible navel in a slim-lined, one-shouldered, short black number slit to the thighs. Very glamorous, very fit for her coming-out party, a deliberate, bold, fleshy statement: I’m back.

  Although not back as she once was. Adapt or perish, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger—that’s the sort of difference being spoken by her spare body, scant dress.

  Sophie, by contrast, is even larger than she used to be, and is also one of the few who’ve opted for flamboyance, with a gloriously red, massively ballooning-out dress. In colour and size she takes up more than her fair share of space, like a deep, old-fashioned sofa in a room otherwise occupied by the expensively spindly. She’s here partly for a change-of-pace treat, partly as an effort of loyalty; loyalty having taken several turns in the past year or so.

  Nora and Sophie have both learned, it seems, what Beth used to know: that style and colour have their own language, they have something to say, truth or lies.

  Speaking of Beth, what on earth is she doing here, what was Max thinking? There she is, just coming through the door and already taking up more space than she’s due as well; not because she’s bigger than she used to be, although she is, or because she’s excessively colourful, which she isn’t in a knee-length straight black dress that leaves her arms bare but is high-collared in a fashion that would not be out of place on a nun, but because of her unwieldy accessory: the wheelchair in which she’s rolling a not-awfully-old man.

  Sugar daddy? Nora and Sophie catch each other’s eyes through the crowd, and raise eyebrows.

  Despite Max’s cranked-high air conditioning, it’s growing uncomfortably warm with too much humanity on a hot city night. Look at these sleek people sipping their wine, listen to the cumulative roar and mosquito-whine of their social voices. See also a few of them exchanging lowered words, deliberating, frowning, nodding—it’s the discreet who need watching, they’re the thumbs-up, thumbs-down people, the ones doing business. It’s not quite ten o’clock, too early to know for sure, but the room feels promising, there’s a good, high hum to it.

  Max’s gallery, expanded since Nora’s first visit, now has four sizeable rooms. The smallest, which after the loss of Lily contains a single big cherrywood desk rather than two, always has one or two favoured works hanging, but it’s mainly an office. Tonight it will be opened only for business purposes, the private discussion of prices, and with luck the writing of cheques. “My first errand of the day after an opening,” Max likes to say, “is the bank. We do not approve of sober second thoughts.” His little joke, but he is also serious when he pats his belly and says, “If I worked only for love, I could never have this. With love only, no one eats.”

  Max is among those in black. He is shrinking, and his belly is not what it was. Several months ago he had a few tiny strokes, cerebral accidents as they’re called, that have slowed and altered his judgment in ways he is still discovering. He has sold his beloved yellow Fiat. “I take taxis,” he shrugs. “This is life.” One of these days he’ll be gone, too. Tonight it’s possible to locate his progress by watching people shifting and swaying, making way for a happy elderly man moving through the crowd like a child through a cornfield.

  Almost no one has left yet, and some, like Beth, are still arriving. They show their invitations to the hired doorman and once inside are offered white wine or red by more hired staff. This front gallery is the largest, but people are also spilling into a smaller one, where there’s food. The two servers there are busy trying to keep the tables along two of the walls from chaos. How hungry, or greedy, people show themselves to be in their table-side jostlings, even though they are not exactly among the deprived of the earth, and the food, from tiny hot quiches and samosas to chocolate-dipped fruits, isn’t especially interesting. “We feed them,” says Max, “but not well.”

  The third, most intimate gallery is closed and locked.

  In his invitations and advertisements, Max has named the show “Philip etc.” in fat, black, eye-catching, romantically cursive script. All the work does involve Philip, it’s true, although not always in obvious ways. He appears here in a fierce orangey blotch reflecting fury and flames, there in a glued cufflink—PL—on a muscled forearm, the tracing of a hand, carefully callused, holding the chopped-off remains of a red-patterned silk tie. There is the upholstery-fabric blue-grey of his eyes and of grief in one work; in another the shape of his mouth attached to a brilliantly yellow background, in the form of two close-set rows of out-sized, clownish, shiny red buttons.

  That he was closed-mouthed in an open-mouthed way: not uncommon to camouflage secrets behind bold appearance, but who, besides Nora and Sophie, will see Philip in this? The piece is already sold, the buyer, according to Max, a woman who likes the notion of a swoop of unusually wrought, vibrant red lips over one of her sofas.

>   There are in these pieces not codes exactly, but distillations and private commentaries, but they’ll be hard for outsiders to decipher. No one here will know, for instance, that the big, curiously old-fashioned, particularly joyous-looking portrayal of round and merry, colourfully snowsuited children setting off down a tobogganing hill is not joyous at all. That the subtly angled tree at the bottom will prove fatal.

  Max may have named the show “Philip etc.,” but Philip cannot possibly be himself, a separate figure, a man on his own from his own point of view. It’s Nora’s memory and eye that see not only those cheery youngsters headed for doom but the tendons and veins of Philip’s calves, and how they became especially prominent at his ankles; it’s her perspective that views the way the flesh of his thigh shaped itself as it hung from the bone when he was lying in bed with one leg propped up; it’s her senses, not his, that know the precise warmth of the flesh of his shoulder, the little dip where it encountered his neck, the rippling up and down of his spine. Oh, the attention she has paid to the details of Philip—far more in his absence, as a sad matter of fact, than when he was present.

  That’s too bad. Still, a person can stagger back from rude shock all she wants, but she does finally have to stagger forward again, the only choice the manner of staggering. This is Nora’s way, all this tonight on these walls.

  What do other people do with sorrow and loss, with anger and error, with recollected delight for that matter, if they have no gift for transforming? Nora has come to see Philip through many different materials and manifestations in the past year. She has also come in several not-quite-identifiable ways to love him, she thinks, sufficiently, and somewhat differently. That’s here, too. She misses his presence moment to moment (including this moment when he ought to be at her shoulder), that loose loyalty of his backing her up, but in the face of impossibility she has done what she could, and if the two of them can no longer be connected in lying-down, getting-up ways, they are at least strung and beaded, glued, painted and stitched together on these walls, in these pictures.

  Most of which she is entirely prepared to release into the world of blank walls over strange women’s sofas.

  What do other new widows do? They weep, they flail, they collapse. Or some take cruises, or lovers. Nora, too, wept and flailed and even fell into excessive sleep for a day or two, a week or two, but there’s still the business of blood flowing, heart beating; the certain, and on the worst days dismaying, absence of death that means a person has no choice but to stand up. Nora was in no mood for cruises, or even for lovers (not yet), but that blood insists on flowing in quickening surges, the heart beats faster, there are luring ideas, pictures, notions, impulses, desires. Who knew Life goes on would turn out to be more than three glossy words? Life does go on, in whatever off-kilter, mutated form.

  So Nora got down to work.

  Not even in her sandwich-and-variety-store days had she worked so fiercely and done so much in such a short time. Once standing, once started, she went for ten hours a day, twelve, a ferocious outpouring. She rummaged through old photographs stored in the sideboard, and through the designs and woods and fabrics and files left behind in the workshop. She considered the many ways Philip was at home in his body, confident that it would do what he wished, move as he desired it to, even only striding over the lawn—that it would not fail him. Misplaced confidence it might have been, but real enough to him, and how to catch that presumptuous grace with elliptical references of colour, shape and material?

  Sometimes she worked so close to memory that she sat down and wept. There he was, in her eyes and her hands, but never quite there.

  At night she mainly slept, as she once would have thought, like the dead; except for occasional dreams of Philip dropping by with, it seemed, the sole intention to seduce and enrapture, so that she woke vibrating and thrilled from better sex in his absence than they’d recently mustered energy for in his presence. Was that ironic? Pathetic, anyway. One of the paintings here tonight is a big, shiny, acrylic depiction of an all-day lollipop—they don’t, she believes, exist any more—swirly and round, a temptation so large and daunting it should last for ever, but under determined application of tongue is destined to vanish.

  Something like that.

  Now what?

  Now, despite the edgily festive spirit of an opening, its buzz and hum, tonight is almost as thorough an ending as the morning she woke and leaped up and cried out.

  Now, right this minute, there are greetings, air kisses, wine, samosas; there are people saying, “Nora! You look wonderful! It’s great to see you again! This work is fabulous!”

  All those exclamations!

  Of course she looks good. With the aid of an hour and a half of weights, yoga and fast-walking at the start of each day, and with the clear intention not to end up like Philip any time soon, Nora is pleased to be pared-down, muscular, pliable. If Philip could be stitched and painted and glued, she could now be stringently sculpted. Tomorrow she is to be interviewed and photographed for a national newspaper. The hook the writer seeks, his sad-sack, inspirational angle, has to do with a year of widowhood spent examining a beloved deceased; although even that might be of inadequate public interest if Nora hadn’t already made that big sacrilegious name for herself. Philip was right: the town did wonders for her. Now that she’s left it, she, too, can make that sort of joke. There’s still not much joking about Philip himself. The distancing that occurs when a private passion enters the public world is well under way, and she feels quite able to discuss her work and Philip in professional, articulate fashion, but there’ll be no spilling of secrets, or even privacies, and it’s most unlikely there’ll be any great comedy either.

  Speaking of privacies—three of tonight’s works are of Sophie in one lush form and another. Sophie turns out to be a surprisingly frank and adjustable subject, but more difficult to explain than Philip in relation to the show’s dead-husband theme. Nora would not, for the sake of Sophie as well as herself, never mind Philip, dream of telling an interviewer, “This was our assistant for a time, and briefly my husband’s lover. You can see her appeal.” In the end, Nora thinks less of Philip for the affair, and in one or two depictions of him, although not of Sophie, this is reflected; but those are the risks a man takes, yielding to whims, breaking promises, dying.

  Ah, it appears she can still be angry. Now and then.

  In all three portraits Sophie is naked, depicted with unusual realism in various postures and degrees of voluptuousness. Although nowhere near as voluptuous as she is now, chugging through the crowd with Hendrik Anderson following agreeably in her billowy red wake.

  Sharing the house after its population was so suddenly halved was easier than either of them could have expected. For one thing, unlike Philip, Sophie had the advantage of being alive, and of having made Nora no promises. For another, Nora discerned no particular desire in herself—indeed a reluctance—to interrogate Sophie on the how, the why, the when or most of all exactly the what of the thing. What would be the point? In what, when Philip could no longer speak for himself, lay anyone’s interest in asking? Maybe the answers, anyway, are in these portraits of Sophie: all that wide-open flesh, all that looseness and unclothed capacity.

  Nora did ask, “How long?” and when Sophie said warily, or at least softly, “Only a couple of months, just this summer, hardly at all, honestly,” Nora rewound the weeks to try to pinpoint a trigger that could have ricocheted him into the space between Sophie’s thighs, but—what a clever, masked man—even hindsight provided no specific, particular moment. If he were alive, she’d have grilled him and then for all she knows killed him. As it is, there’s a sketch here of him black-masked like the Lone Ranger, standing flat-footed, legs apart, with a gun in each hand. Herself and Sophie camouflaged as Philip’s twin pistols: another private commentary, and a cartoonish joke.

  That a person can apparently be wounded and unspeakably furious, but remain attached by some kind of love, is a revelation of sorts.
Then again, love is a simpler matter when its object is static. All in all, Philip may be pretty lucky he’s dead.

  In his wake and absence, Nora and Sophie fell into routines: drinks before dinner, a catch-up on the day, the to-and-fro of running a household—rather like marriage, that easygoing, and almost as familiar. Occasionally they also fell into memory: “Remember the look on his face the first time we found words on the fence and had to repaint it?” Or, “Remember that combination of sawdust and oils, or whatever it was? I miss that smell around the house, do you?” There was even something about knowing Sophie and Philip had been together that became, eventually, strangely attaching. That in a way they were both his remains; his relics.

  Were widows not once upon a time referred to as relics? Nora could ask Sophie, who was always better at Scrabble.

  Sophie’s not a bad person. She generally means well, give or take the odd husband: one of Nora’s, now one of her own.

  Hendrik must know about Sophie and Philip, and clearly he does not care. Poor Philip: not lightly or easily abandoned, but here are Nora hanging him tidily on various walls, Sophie blooming, and Hendrik one happy man.

  How did this come about?

  If not slowly, at least quietly. Nora was busy for so many hours each day, and Sophie’s chores were so few—of course she found other activities, and more and more often was out of the house; seeing, she confessed finally, evidently embarrassed, or shy, Hendrik Anderson when he was free from his duties. She was hanging out at the funeral home. Or more accurately, in his quarters at the funeral home. “It’s a nice place,” she insisted. “He’s a nice man.”

  “I’m sure he is. Under the right circumstances.”

  When they finally invited Nora to dinner, and she saw how easy Sophie was in his kitchen and at his table, and how they regarded each other across that table, there was a moment when she could barely breathe for the congestion of fresh sorrow; envy, too. A dollop of bitterness. She also saw what Sophie meant when she said Philip would have liked Hendrik’s place. And she thought, Sophie would never have been so comfortable and happy otherwise. By which she meant, without Philip.