Light of Day

by Jamie M. Saul

  Jack found the place, tucked away on the county road. He and Marty sat by the large picture window looking out at a narrow creek and an old covered bridge.

  Marty said, “I hope your day at the office is going more pleasantly than mine.”

  “We’ll talk about it later. You’ve got enough on your mind.”

  “Are you going to start that again?”

  “I think you deserve to take the afternoon off, that’s all.”

  Marty laughed.

  “I mean it. I wouldn’t have been able to come back without your help, and your reward is not having to hear about another day in the life of Jack Owens.”

  “I guess we both have a lot on our minds, at that.”

  “I guess we do.”

  After lunch, they walked out by the covered bridge where the weeds grew through the cracks and shafts of mottled sunlight cut through the seams in the roof.

  Jack said, “I used to come here with Anne.” They walked a little further and he told Marty, “All I have is my past.”

  “That’s all right. It gives you something to feel attached to, like Danny’s box of mementos.” He sounded like Stan saying, “It’s really about continuity, isn’t it.”

  Jack told him about his conversation with Stan, and how foolish he felt after talking to Ainsley, and about his morning with Robbie. “I’ll probably spend the rest of the semester trying to reassure him and everyone else that I’m safe.”

  “Safe?”

  “That they don’t have to whisper to me, like a patient on life support.”

  They came out into the sunlight and walked along the side of the road raising dust and kicking at small stones with the tips of their shoes.

  Jack said, “What I’m afraid of is that every time people look at me all they see is what can go wrong.”

  “My guess is, they look at you and admire you.”

  “Who I was, Marty. And to tell you the truth, I’m having a hard time being that person.”

  “I doubt it was ever easy. But I don’t think you should look too closely at yourself or anything else for a while.”

  A dog barked off in the distance, the air was warm and smelled like the last days of summer.

  Marty told Jack, “There are times when it’s better to let some things go unexamined and cut yourself some slack. Leave Dr. Owens alone for the time being.”

  When they turned around and started walking back to the car, Jack said, “How’d you like to play hooky this afternoon and go to the movies?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’ve got two films to screen and I’d like your company.”

  “What movies?”

  Marty sounded just like Danny when he asked that, and Jack smiled.

  “First, Godard’s One Plus One, Sympathy for the Devil.”

  “Subtitles?”

  “Danny didn’t like subtitles, either. But it stars the Rolling Stones, the real Rolling Stones, when they still had edge. And A Hard Day’s Night, if we have the energy for a second feature.”

  “Can I get a rain check? I’ve got a few things left to do and I doubt my captain will understand. What about tomorrow?”

  “In the Heat of the Night.”

  “Rod Steiger and Sidney Poitier, right?

  “That’s right.”

  “I’ll try to sneak out for that one.”

  Marty didn’t do much talking when they drove back, as though the closer he got to town, the closer he was to having to do all those things he had no stomach for today. It wasn’t until Jack dropped him at the station that Marty spoke. “I’m looking forward to going to the movies tomorrow.” He smiled quickly and walked inside.

  It pleased Jack to know that Marty was going to see In the Heat of the Night tomorrow—Steiger’s sad and sorry Bill Gillespie stuck inside Sparta, Mississippi, Poitier’s urbane and cool Virgil Tibbs. Jack wanted to talk to Marty about buddy pictures and strangers who step off trains to save troubled southern towns from themselves—or strangers who appear at front doors to save grieving fathers…

  When Jack got back to campus, he didn’t go to his office, but walked in the opposite direction, to the Fine Arts building.

  He could give himself no reason for going there, maybe it was what Marty meant about feeling attached to something. But no matter, it was the place where he wanted to be right now. To walk up the smooth granite steps, down the hall with the high ceilings and frosted globe lights, to room 415, where the sunlight seemed fixed on the walls, and motes of plaster dust floated in the air, rousted by the opening of the door; where the tables and stools were arranged in an expansive arc set before the models’ platform. The room hadn’t always been used for sculpture; it was the room where Anne had studied figure drawing and still life. He stood in the doorway for a moment, then walked around the corner to the twelve-by-twelve room that had been Anne’s studio, where her style started to emerge in a mixture of paints and pigments, hard edges and soft tones. Where she had tacked on the wall color prints of Byzantine stained glass, the Pollaiuolos’ Saint Sebastian, a poster of Duchamp’s Large Glass. There had been an old chair, not much larger than a child’s, with torn arms, but so very soft and comfortable, and a work bench, paint-smeared and battered, catty-cornered against the wall, and an old wooden easel that she’d brought with her from England. The windows were nearly half the width of the room and as high as the ceiling, and outside, northern light would rise beyond the curve of the railroad tracks at the edge of town, extend through the live oaks, the chestnut trees and sycamores, pass the green and gray rooftops, patched and kilted like a Cézanne landscape, cross the streets and sidewalks, touch the roofs of the college library and gymnasium, and come to rest on the floor, where it would remain, curled like a house cat, until the sunset consumed it.

  Jack would come up from the dark of his basement editing room and see the sunlight slip inside this room while he watched Anne paint, her lean fingers moving the brush assuredly, without intimidation; a dab of yellow and light grew in the crease of a garment, a streak of burnt umber and the vision plane deepened…

  He stood there now and looked at the bare easel, the floor swept in preparation for the new semester and the next student, a girl perhaps, who might, one afternoon, stand in a circle of young artists and happen to look up and smile the kind of smile that can determine an entire lifetime.

  In the ten years since he’d returned to Gilbert, Jack had never stepped into this room, nor so much as walked past it—that was part of the deal. Today he wanted to be here, to breathe in the smells of chalk and paint, the spirits of turpentine and linseed oil. He wanted to walk the perimeter, feel the afternoon sun on his shoulders, and think about Anne, think about the times when he would lean against this very same wall and watch her, the way he’d watched her at the ruins, sketch pad on her knees, as though he were studying a sacred rite, trying to memorize the way she moved, the way she looked.

  Jack wanted to remember the afternoons when he brought containers of coffee and sat in the old, soft chair. Anne raised her hand and whispered “Shh” without turning away from her canvas. She was working on an assignment: “If Rembrandt painted like van Gogh.” Her eyes moved from the slide of Rembrandt’s potentate to van Gogh’s Le Père Tanguy. She used her palette knife instead of a brush, distending one Dutch master’s golden order with another Dutch master’s splendorous dementia. Nursing his coffee, Jack watched the methodical application of color and texture—it was a sight he would see again in the loft on Crosby Street, when it wasn’t cafeteria coffee that he brought her but cappuccino, and in Loubressac, and on Stanton Street, and this day in her studio in the Fine Arts building. “We’re supposed to think this is highly conceptual, but all it is is what Duchamp called ‘retinal,’” she said with displeasure.

  A few minutes later: “So there he was, Rembrandt, dressing himself in costumes, like Aristotle, like a sultan, like a potentate, propping the mirror just so, placing himself before his easel. And they say van Gogh wa
s the mad man.” A few minutes after that: “Is it a self-portrait? The Metropolitan Museum doesn’t acknowledge that it is: ‘Portrait of a man…’ is all they’ll tell you.” A few minutes more and: “You know, what you’re seeing really doesn’t look at all like this. It’s all just dots and streaks of light, tracers of light moving through space in streams and waves. It all happens inside the brain. The brain resolves the light, the spectrum of colors into visual information. It makes sense of what’s actually just visual chaos. It’s sort of like film, the stream of light traveling out of the projector’s lens, flickering at twenty-four frames a second, reflecting off the screen, resolving into images inside the brain. The brain makes sense of it all and turns it into a movie.” Anne lifted her arms over her head and flexed her fingers and yawned loudly. She walked around the room yawning and stretching, stopping at the window, backlit with sunrays sprouting from her ears and hair. “I don’t like going to school,” and she crossed her arms over her chest. “Take me away from all this. Take me to Chicago, or Brown County and we’ll get stoned in the woods.” She took a deep breath. “Anywhere that isn’t school.”

  Jack started to laugh.

  “No, really.”

  “I know, I know.”

  Jack remembered Anne when she leaned back from her canvas and listened to the thrill of the train whistle far down the track before the train reached town and the warning bells rang. He stood in the corner where the afternoon light seemed to soak into the floor and remembered the way Anne fought with her sleeves to keep them rolled up, the way she pushed her hair away from her face. The way she told him, “Picasso was once asked what artists talk about and he answered, ‘Turpentine.’” The way she asked, “Are you going to read to me, please?”

  Jack read to her from the paper he’d written for a criticism class—he did a lot of writing about Bresson, Godard, and De Sica—looking up for her reaction, but she showed him nothing, only motioned with her hand for him to continue. It was only after he finished that she said, “Your language is sounding much more confident. Very grounded.” She walked over to him and sat facing him on his lap, her thighs straddling his hips. She leaned forward so he could feel her breasts against his face. She touched his ears with her lips and made a sound deep within her throat, soft and feral. “I find your writing very exciting,” her breath gentle against his face.

  Jack remembered when it was dark outside and he was late again and came running up the stairs and into the studio, where Anne, in tight jeans, was stretched across the chair, her legs dangling over one of the arms, her bare feet wriggling, the languid pose of a young and lush Jeanne Moreau, peering over the top of a magazine and saying, “Like I might ever want to leave without you.” There were times early on when he would walk up the front steps of the Fine Arts building and stand outside on the off chance Anne might appear, and when she didn’t, he walked around back and found her window and just stared at it. There were times when he would stay away and take himself to the library and walk alone through the stacks or sit in the student union with his friends, working on a cup of coffee, talking student talk. There were times when he stood in the doorway of her studio and said with uncertainty, “I thought, maybe…”

  Times when Anne stepped close to him, her skin smelling of chalk dust and the kind of soap grandmothers use, rested her chin on his shoulder, squeezed his hand and said, “Let’s go somewhere and eat onion rings and share a Coke with two straws. Just like in the movies,” and smiled at him, the way she smiled when he first saw her talking with the boys and he stared in dumb amazement. Jack didn’t want to leave the studio, not yet, not until he was satisfied that he’d remembered all that he wanted to remember. The times when Anne could not be disturbed and the times when she softly rubbed his cheek with the back of her hand and whispered, “Let’s misbehave,” in early autumn and the foliage shimmered off the trees. Jack wanted to remember when Anne said, “Joe Soares really liked Lady with Watering Can. He’s recommending me for the Benton Award.” When he said, “Dr. Garraty sent my piece on Resnais to American Film.” When gray winter lay flat across the sky like a lost glove and they looked at each other and if they hadn’t already realized who they were becoming, they were starting to get a pretty good idea.

  Jack stood in the room that once had been Anne’s studio, where there had been an old, soft chair and a work bench with paper and colored pencils and a can of paintbrushes. Where he used to find Anne any time he wanted to. He walked the perimeter of the room and stared out the large windows where the view had not changed. But the outlook certainly had.

  Downstairs, in the rotunda with the brown granite walls and the smooth floor, Jack could hear the sound of a piano being tuned in one of the music rooms, in another room someone was practicing scales. Footsteps clacked around corners, scuttled into doorways and up the stairs. There came the quickening of voices from places unseen, the hurried dialogues that pass in the hall. A female voice was singing in a distant room, strong and confident, a sweet voice, a trained voice still in training, spiraling up to the huge murals: The Triumph of Justice, The Defeat of Prejudice, painted by WPA artists more than sixty years ago.

  Outside on the quad, a groundsman was mowing the grass, perched on his tractor, driving slow, tight circles like a suburban dad on a Saturday morning. Another man was clipping hedges around the wood benches, gifts from the class of ’56. Senior boys and girls, wearing bright shorts and souvenir T-shirts, sipped sodas and ate French fries out of paper bags, pedaled bicycles, walked the campus proprietarily like landed gentry, offered each other expanded greetings. Unshaven kids, looking younger every year, with their journals and notepads, lying on their hips and elbows languid beneath the trees, smoking cigarettes, lifting tempered smiles to Jack as he passed by. “Hello, Dr. Owens,” “Good to see you, Dr. Owens.” “Hi, Dr. Owens.” “Hello.” “Hello.” “Hello, Dr. Owens.”

  On the east side of the quad, Glenn Morrow and Aaron Reed, from the Language Department, Gladys Montgomery, from American Studies, Penelope Chen, from Theater, were carrying cartons up to their offices, pushing uneasily against the front door, waddling gracelessly up the stairs with their accordion folders, their diskettes, their pens and coffee machines and ceramic vases, their toothbrushes and combs; the things they took with them at the end of the old semester and brought back for the new, the things they liked to have around them, the framed prints and photographs, the coffee mug with the black and white Westie. Mementos informing them of who they are and why they came here and why they remain. It happened every year, a performance, a devotion, without which there could be no academic year.

  From open windows came the halting sounds of academic industry playing softly like a motif, riding on the air. Work in preparation, work already done. The constancy of routine flowing uncontested.

  Jack could see the window of his own office, where Robbie was working, where phone messages were duly recorded and another student crisis was surely lined up. Where Jack’s industry waited for him, his contribution to the academic machine. He looked at the students and the men from the physical plant, the returning faculty, and could feel himself attached to the college—feeding the awakening organism—one of its parts, fulfilling its set of expectations and promises, obeying its rules; who appeared in front of the classroom and taught his course three times a week—without facing the expanse of time which was summer. He felt a sense of mooring, of being tethered to a piece of solid ground with offices and buildings, schedules and committees, students and teachers. Where the normalcy of days like this was no small miracle.

  He thought that this was what Stan meant. He hadn’t been talking about the neurotic tic, about the ritual to hold the world together, at least Jack’s particular piece of it, anyway. He was talking about being part of the college and the routine of this community—before Jack had joined the Community of Parents of Dead Children and Sad Detectives. It was why Jack had to go to Anne’s studio. Because Anne, who had been an art student and once had a studio
in the Fine Arts building, was part of that continuity, just as teaching at Gilbert was. Just as being Dr. Owens was.

  Jack could lean into that for now. He could rely on the routine—on all the works and days of hands—that filled the blank calendar squares, that occupied his time.

  He sat, for a moment, on the wooden bench with the brass plaque from the class of ’56 and wondered if maybe he’d gotten it wrong. Maybe it was possible for more than one incarnation of Dr. Owens, or whoever Dr. Owens had become. Someone other than the Dr. Owens of memory, but who lived in memory, nonetheless. Who had been the young film student and could be found, like Anne’s tracers, streaming through the air, through Time, running up the stairs of the Fine Arts building, sitting on the quad or in a classroom. Someone other than the grieving father. Someone who was—hell, he didn’t know—but someone students still seemed to recognize; someone his friends weren’t afraid to talk to; who could show up for faculty lunches—it might be possible to still be their Jack. Even if that Jack was nothing but the past. Maybe that’s where his friends would agree to find him. He thought it might be possible, even as he felt the twinge of disloyalty to Danny. Even as Danny, the living Danny, receded a little further away from him. He thought this was who he was now. This was where he belonged. He thought Danny would understand.

  He started to walk across the lawn to the registrar’s office but decided that the i’s could be dotted and t’s crossed tomorrow, and instead went to his screening room. The prospect of sitting alone in the dark was not at all uninviting.

  Just last semester, he’d said, “Hey, pal, feel like going to the movies?”

  Danny asked, “What movie?” He asked, “Can I bring someone along?”