So she went to Washington and started working for the senator and found that in fact aspects of the work absorbed her. Life grew pleasantly full, and after a few months she began searching out the faces in the old family photographs again, looking in antiques stores up and down the Shenandoah Valley, and painting the series of smaller portraits, actually framing them for herself and putting them on the wall in her apartment. They were like company on some nights; they gave her a warm feeling of involvement in her own becoming. She spent weekends quite happily working on them. But the job and her life in the city began to get in the way, and more and more weekend evenings were spent going out and being with people, much of it stemming from her responsibilities in the senator’s office. On some weekend mornings she went to flea markets in the valley and set up a little station to sell her work. One weekend an older lady bought five paintings at fifty dollars apiece. And on others she sold one or two. She always put the money in savings. But then it was winter again. And the mornings were free. She was young, and perhaps she had grown a little lonesome. The cost of living in the city made saving very hard to do, and though she kept her goal in mind, the difficulty of saving enough to make the leap and leave the job eroded her will to do the small things necessary to approach the possibility.
The affair with Mackenzie had begun on a campaign trip to Gulfport. They sat up late sipping bourbon in the hotel bar, and he began telling her what was happening at home: heartbreak and borderline lunacy, his wife’s fanaticism, the delusions—the woman’s belief that she possessed a form of second sight and was having visions of past lives. The visions were becoming more frequent and more bizarre. He said they were sleeping in separate rooms, staying together only for the boy. Natasha was just twenty-nine, in her third year of work in the senator’s office.
Mackenzie was uncomplicatedly fun because he was married and appeared to think of her as a friend. She felt the same. She spent time with him at various functions of the senator’s in the state. They made each other laugh.
But then that evening in Gulfport, there he was, telling her all those too-personal details about himself.
“We were so young,” he said about his wife. “We didn’t really know each other.”
Natasha listened with an increasing sense that a line had been crossed. It had been crossed when she remained behind with him at that late hour in the hotel bar. But he was such a good friend. And with the whiskey blurring her thoughts, she was moving beyond the line anyway, looking into his mournful eyes and beginning to be in love.
An hour later they were in his room, and they spent the rest of the night there. She woke with a little start and felt a rush of guilty remembering, the bedsheets clinging to her body, his legs touching hers, too warm, too close. She had the sense that she must find a way to make things right and then swooned toward sleep, half aware of him stirring next to her. He sighed and coughed and moaned and came to, obviously upset and anxious, claiming disbelief that he could ever have let it happen. But he also held her, and they saw the sunrise from the window across from his bed. The quiet and their soft breathing plainly were calming for him, and he spoke of their life together as if the night had been a source of some overwhelming discovery and truth. Breaking off with his wife would take time. There was his son to think about, and the boy was already emotionally confused, already spending too much time with video games, computer gadgets, fantasy, and goth. The responsibilities of a father were so complicated in these times of collapsing values. He went on in this vein, and Natasha believed that he meant what he said.
As the weeks and months went by, she fell more deeply in love with him, and before long she was spending her nights alone, writing him long letters and poems and admonitions that she never sent, pleading with him to do what he kept saying he would do and what he kept putting off because of the pain it would cause. She threw the letters away in the mornings. It was humiliating to look at them.
And she had completely stopped doing the watercolors.
Once, she told him she did not want to see him anymore, and he began calling and begging, swearing that he would make it so they could be together like any other couple. He sent her little cards and flowers and left phone messages, and after more than a month of this, they returned to the pattern as it had been: seeing each other as his schedule permitted, she often spending her own money to fly whereever he was on assignment.
All that ended with the phone call from the wife.
And what followed, she believed back then, was the worst year of her life, the thing she had found respite from with Faulk.
Michael Faulk, the man with whom she felt she had at last discovered what love really was—that happy inner blaze, the passion that let her breathe fully, and gave a shimmer to each hour. She would never have believed that she could love like this, where the whole world seemed divided in two: on the one side, away from him, the tiresome and gloomy city; on the other, where he was, all intensity and life, vividness and humor, and fascination in the littlest things.
2
They had set the date of the wedding for the first Saturday in October, the sixth. Natasha made calls instead of sending invitations. There wasn’t time for anything else. Constance Waverly and Marsha Trunan were coming, as were Aunt Clara and Uncle Jack. As Faulk had expected, Senator Norland and his wife said they were bound by other, long-standing commitments. They sent a large bouquet of flowers and a five-hundred-dollar gift certificate from Pier 1 Imports.
Iris placed the flowers in the middle of her dining room table.
They watched the president’s speech to a joint session of Congress that Thursday, the twentieth, where the president demanded that the government of Afghanistan hand over all the terrorists and declared the war on terror. The newscasters talked about the sense of a threat inside our borders, and how people were dealing with it.
Iris said, “Maybe we should all move to Jamaica and just stay there.”
The mention of the island turned something over under Natasha’s heart. She said, “Can we turn the TV off? Let’s do something fun.”
“Any ideas?” said Faulk.
He put off starting the job at Social Services and worked all the following week on the house, painting, building bookshelves, working outside on the rose arbor and the lawn, planting flowers in the dog run, a surprise for Natasha, he thought, until she saw what he was doing and joined in. The work calmed them both. They went on with daily tasks, and even so their trouble was always there, unspoken. For Natasha, the toil was beautiful, and she would look at her own hands patting down the earth around the stem of a plant and realize that she felt none of the fear. Such moments would unvaryingly cause it to come rushing back at her, and she went on working until slowly it would begin once again to subside.
She also went with Iris to the Pier 1 on Walnut Grove and used some of the senator’s gift certificate on flatware, dishes, place mats, tablecloths, linens, bath towels, and soaps. And she spent the mornings helping Iris with exercises for her injured knee. The two women avoided the subject of the news, though both of them were paying attention to it.
Work on the house was so involving that Faulk would periodically lose track of the noise on the TV. He was displeasingly reminded each day when he emerged from the house, and there would be a plane coming over toward the airport, nine miles to the south. But he saw that Natasha seemed better. In the nights, in the apartment, they held each other. She was having her period—the beginning of it had come with a feeling of inexpressible relief—and it was a heavy one, causing the usual headaches and cramping, but the headaches were more severe. He read Aquinas into the nights, and she would lie trying to sleep, hearing the little shuffle of the tissue-thin pages turning. It was the thinness of the sound that told her what the book was. “Honey,” she said, “what are you looking for in Aquinas?”
He said, “Remember, I talked about rereading it.”
“You don’t find it a little dry?”
“Have you been reading i
t?”
She had only looked at the first page of it. “I’ve browsed through it some.”
“Why would I be looking for anything?”
“I don’t know. Come be with me.”
“In a little while. Go on to sleep.”
He brought her coffee in the mornings and gave her time alone to rest. She lay with her head burning, having drunk the coffee, and listened to him moving in the other room, preparing a breakfast for them. It was always something new: French toast stuffed with blueberries; a one-egg omelet thin as a soufflé, with cheese and spinach in it, on two toasted English muffins topped by Canadian bacon, with hollandaise sauce poured over the whole thing; or an egg cooked on a slice of provolone cheese and sprinkled with lemon juice. It was always arranged so elegantly on the plates, and he would bring it all in on a tray, with fruit and glasses of orange juice and, twice, a little half bottle of champagne, to make mimosas.
“You’re spoiling me,” Natasha said to him.
“It makes me happy,” he told her. And it did. He spent some of his reading time looking up the recipes each evening after she was asleep, and when he went out to get things for the house he stopped and bought what he would need for the next morning’s feast.
The following Wednesday, he went to the new job at Social Services. Lawrence Watson showed him around the place and introduced him to the other man who worked in that office—a young man on whose desk were two heavy books, like account books, and a lot of typing paper. “This is Pete,” Watson said. “Pete’s condensing the state regulations to a manageable size for field workers. Been on it since the beginning of the summer.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Pete said.
“Hello, Pete.”
Pete had little round dark eyes and a very long nose, a pleasant gentle smile. They shook hands, and then Pete stood by while Watson demonstrated the use of the computer files, data banks concerning jobs in the area and within a twenty-five-mile radius of the city. Parolees were not allowed to travel farther.
“That’s basically it,” Watson said. “Your clients will come through here.” He pointed to another doorway. “There’ll be a steady stream of them on some days, not so many on others. They all have their referrals, from the various officers. They line up out there to sign in, and then they’ll be funneled this way to see you, or Pete if there’s a long wait. Any questions?”
“None that I can think of,” Faulk said.
“Okay.” Watson left them alone.
For a few seconds they just stood as if waiting for him to come back. Then Faulk went around and sat at his new desk. Pete stayed where he was, watching him.
“Like some coffee?”
Having had a mimosa that morning with Natasha, Faulk said, “Sure. Black. And strong.”
“That’s the way I like it, too.”
When the younger man returned, he pulled his chair around to sit at Faulk’s desk. They sipped their coffee. “I’m in your church,” he said suddenly. “I mean I’ve seen you preach.”
“Oh,” Faulk said, dismayed and trying not to show it. “I hope you weren’t disappointed.”
“I liked what you had to say.”
“Well, the gospels, you know.”
“So, you’re not a priest anymore. Is it because of the attacks?”
“It predates all that.” Something about this earnest young man made him feel stiff, almost pompous.
“I would bet it got a lot of religious people thinking.”
“It probably got everybody thinking, wouldn’t you say?”
“The Taliban kind of tears it for me.”
Faulk left a pause.
“I mean if people can really believe they’re going straight to heaven if they kill themselves along with a lot of other people, and that for this the reward in heaven is a bunch of virgins, I mean Jesus, that kind of—that kind of carnal idea of reward—well, I don’t know … that’s a pretty venal thing for us run-of-the-mill believers to deal with.”
“Run-of-the-mill believers,” Faulk repeated.
“But—the martyrs, then. You—you see what I’m getting at?”
Faulk nodded at him.
The other stared, head tilted slightly. “Anyway—your sermons were very eloquent. You could be a writer.”
He was faintly chagrined by the pleasure he took in the remark. “I’m sure whatever you heard came from some other source.”
“Yeah, but the thing itself.” The younger man smiled. “You have a nice way with words.”
Faulk smiled back. “You’re very kind.”
“Well. Thank you.” The other seemed abruptly embarrassed and moved his chair back across the space to his own desk, with its tomes and the strewn paper.
“Is that what you want to do,” Faulk asked him. “Write?”
The younger man seemed baffled. “No.”
It was a long morning. One man after another with a bad history, each of them hoping for work. Yet they seemed cheerful, determined, even brave. He saw very little discouragement; and everyone wanted to talk about the attacks—where they were when it happened and how they learned of it.
Regarding jobs, most of the time there was nothing at all available anywhere. Each man appeared more unemployable than the last, as if the computer were cutting away possibilities by the minute. He could have sworn he saw openings for one thing while looking for another, and yet when he tried to return to the listing, it wasn’t there. At lunchtime, he drove over to the house to find Natasha in the second bedroom, painting, wearing one of his old shirts over a pair of faded denims. He had never seen anyone so beautiful.
She was working on the faded color photograph of the sad-eyed lady as he had called her. She had spent most of the morning painting, after helping Iris exercise her sore knee. Seeing him coming up the walk startled her in a troubling way, as if it would be an unwanted intrusion, but she suppressed the feeling as best she could and waited for him to come to her. He kept his arms around her for some time, she with the wet paintbrush in one hand and patting his shoulder with the other.
“I missed you all morning,” he said. “I feel like a kid. I don’t like this going to a job.”
“I missed you, too.” She put her cheek against his. “But it’s only a little while, and then we can have a nice dinner.”
“Come with me now. I’ve got forty-five minutes left. We can get something quick at Pei Wei or someplace like that.”
“I’ve got paint all over me,” she said. “You just came here for a kiss.”
“I wish it was more than that.”
“Soon,” she said. “My darling.”
They went on through the weekend. In the evening they watched the news and ate dinner with Iris, who insisted on doing the cooking. She made brisket one night, and lamb chops the next. And on Monday she and Natasha brought home a container of pulled pork and ribs from Corky’s. They all had a little too much to drink, and Faulk put his arm around his wife-to-be and told her he loved her. Resting her head on his shoulder, she had to ward off the sense that everything was a kind of forgery. She resorted to carefully constructed, tenaciously resolute thoughts of being in the new house, all the things she would do to make it her place, make that poor little place her own. That was how it seemed to her when she looked at it on its small street, with the big tree looming over it. When she was in those warm rooms, painting the trim and putting up wallpaper and waxing the floors, or when she was trying to get the watercolor of the sad lady so it showed the depth of what was in that face, she was happily almost clear of mind. There were few bad images, few intimations of jarring memory.
3
They rented a U-Haul trailer and moved into the house the following Saturday. It took most of the morning, Faulk moving the furniture and setting the bed up and organizing the books in the new shelves he had built. His back ached. He was pleasurably weary, and he made jokes about feeling like a college kid moving into a dorm. But he was proud of the bookcases, and very meticulous about setting the titles
in alphabetical order. The day was hot and muggy, and even in the air-conditioning his white shirt was soaked. She would come past him and stop to kiss his cheek, and it was their little house, he said, their home with its big picture window and fresh wood- and paint-smelling rooms, and its leaky kitchen sink. Iris put dishes away while the other two arranged the furniture and hung pictures.
She surprised them by taking the kitchen faucet apart at the base and rubbing soap into the threads of the pipe, stopping the leak. “Old trick,” she said.
She made a lunch of boiled eggs and English muffins, and they sat in the little dining area off the kitchen while she talked about moving from Collierville into the city, to this neighborhood, and walking past this house so many times with Natasha before Natasha went off to Europe. Faulk had bought a half bottle of champagne to make mimosas, but nobody else wanted a mimosa, so he put the bottle in the refrigerator, which was mostly empty.
He spent the early afternoon hooking up the television and the computer while the women went shopping for groceries. When he had done everything he could to make the place comfortable, he sat out in the shade of the rose arbor and tried to read, waiting for them to come back. Birds sang in the branches of the river oak, and a breeze had come up; but it was finally too warm and buggy to stay out there, and he went back inside. He felt hopeful, walking through the rooms of the little house and looking at things.
That night, after they drove Iris home, they made love in the dimness, in the quiet, new-paint-smelling bedroom. He lay on his back while she straddled him and moved slowly, looking down at him. “My love,” he said.
“Oh,” she murmured. “Yes.” Resting her elbows on either side of his head, she let her hair come around his face. She kissed him and then nuzzled at his neck. For a long space she simply stayed that way, with him inside her. She felt relaxed, and easy, and wanted it to go on. After a soft few moments, she lifted herself very slightly, and then let down.
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