Fall Love

by Anne Whitehouse

  There was a hollowness to her footstep on the pavement as she went from the garage to her brownstone building on West Thirteenth Street. No block was bare of people here. She overtook the ones that didn't pass her first. The weight of the week wasn't pressing on her yet, though she sensed now she'd sleep lightly tonight. A reprieve from her routine life had lasted just a little: what had it given her? Or, better yet, she thought, finding herself staring at some geraniums just above her eye level in a window box that, under the electric glare of the street lamp, were tinted orange and brown—better yet, what did she want it to have given her?

  She had loved Althea, and she had loved Paul: the two feelings twisted around her, tendrilled together. Could she untangle them; would she wish to? If she hadn't put the people together in the first place, then she had found them out. She had always thought it was she who deferred to Althea. Now Jeanne sensed, as her fingertip touch on the wrought-iron gate sent it squeakily swinging, that the old situations might no longer apply. The field between her and Althea was now wide open.

  What either of them wanted, and what would happen next, and later on, were different though connected questions. Success might come to Jeanne mostly in small measures; it was her place to be prepared enough to see it. If all her life she had most wanted to know how she fitted in, it seemed to her now, with the autumn almost again before her, that she could take a position and enlarge it.

  Thus it was, as she went inside to her silent home after being away, that her world began to open out, if but slightly at the onset, then all the more significantly in her sense of what that world could be. As she washed her face, brushed her teeth, and crawled into bed, she reflected on the volatile events of the weekend. She imagined love like a light illuminating what, like dust in the air, had previously been invisible.

  Perhaps it was because Paul had turned up in a surprising place before that she hadn't felt as dismayed as she might have after having dropped her passengers off, or hadn't worried at Paul's proximity to Althea, and her own distance from the two of them. When she had found herself between them, she hadn't been afraid; she had, she admitted, liked it. Then why was it that, once in her own home again, she still felt cautious?

  Cautious about seeing the two of them again together, she thought to herself, but not necessarily about meeting separately. In general, Jeanne didn't envy her friends for what they had, but sometimes she felt yearning and resentment towards what they were, even while she loved them. With Althea and Paul, her passion had begun in her passivity; a flow had filled her. Her ascendancy to the manipulations of persuasion was an astonishment to a woman who hadn't thought she'd dare to entice those who at the beginning had beguiled her.

  Jeanne's fear had come first, and then had disintegrated under the mesmerizing touch of a man who held her in his arms while he kept watch over another woman, a woman she had thought she knew almost as well as herself. But then, contrary to a prediction she found herself making of this friend who had always seemed self-contained and hence remote, Althea had acted suddenly. When Jeanne had Althea lying beside her, there had been more than a moment when she thought she found in the woman's opacity, if not a mirror, then a mental space that was closer, shallower, than she had sensed.

  Althea's absence in the morning had altered things in another way. Jeanne had known how to take advantage of the moment when the sleeping man still lay beside her. She realized that Althea, on her return, surmised instantly what had happened and was, in a way, glad about it.

  The second time between the three had seemed like an awaited welcome. Still, it was their occasional clumsiness, the flickering offs-and-ons between a semi-attached threesome, the biological inevitability that made one, at intervals, into a watcher that Jeanne recalled with a feeling of melting intimacy now that she was alone. But a warning tremor travelled through this sensation like an oracle of a possible danger. No more than a shudder, yet it was disquieting enough to induce Jeanne to turn her thoughts over and allow them to be covered by the earth of sleep. For, despite her prediction on the street, drowsiness surrounded her quite suddenly, and she accepted it gratefully.

  * * *

  Althea's light often burned late into the night. Vasari was for her a proven antidote to fruitless and unpleasant self absorption. She read to escape from her worried thoughts, and gradually she would forget herself, willing to be fascinated and instructed by the lives of the great artists. In their struggles which were so much more momentous than her own, she looked for inspiration, and often she found it. She clung to the details of great and distant lives, and she was exalted by profound themes of life and art.

  After Jeanne had dropped her off, and she had unpacked her clothes and prepared for bed, she opened Vasari to the chapter on Michelangelo—her favorite, because Vasari had known him well and had been his pupil. This time she was struck by an anecdote about Michelangelo's youth with the Medici, casually dropped by Vasari, that she had never noticed in her previous readings. "When Lorenzo died, Michelangelo, in great sorrow for the loss of his patron, returned to his father's house. Piero, Lorenzo's heir, often sent for Michelangelo when he was buying antiques, and once sent to have him make a snow statue in the courtyard when the snow fell heavily in Florence."

  Wakeful, Althea wove a story from Vasari's tantalizing anecdote, a poignant bedtime tale for an artist, in which she drew on all she had learned about Michelangelo. She imagined him at twenty years old, on fire with ambition, but for the moment depressed, grieving for his patron's death, and not wanting to return to the palace when summoned by Piero's frequent requests, yet knowing he had to.

  What was the statue that Michelangelo sculpted out of snow for the foolish Piero, who, two paragraphs later in Vasari's chronicle, would be driven from Florence?

  Althea imagined a heavy snowfall as rare as an act of God in fifteenth-century Florence. On a cold January day, a dull cloud blotted out the morning sun. Before noon the first flakes began to fall, and the storm continued into the night. By the next day, the wind had blown up drifts against the walls of the uneven streets and narrow alleys, into the sills of doors and windows. Snow girdled the columns in the courtyards of the great palaces and lay untrammeled over cobbles that for once did not resound with the ringing clatter of horseshoes or carriage wheels.

  Althea imagined the glittering white silence as the day dawned clear and cold. She pictured Michelangelo's surprise at receiving Piero's messenger while the city still slept under snow. What did he make of the frivolous request? Was he annoyed by Piero's presumption, or was he amused? Was his sculpture of snow a practice for stone? She thought of how, on his deathbed, Michelangelo destroyed many of his preliminary sketches, so that no one would know of the process by which he arrived at his conceptions.

  Perhaps his sculpture was the model for the sleeping cupid which he, uncharacteristically acting on the advice of an art dealer, would scar, bury for a time, dig up, and send off to Rome as an antique in order to fetch a higher price. The life-size figure would be bought by a cardinal who, when he discovered the fraud, demanded his money, but who was to be laughed at and even blamed for not having appreciated the merit of young Michelangelo's work.

  Yet it was unlike Michelangelo, as sensitive, proud, and jealous an artist who has ever lived, to fake antiquity to flatter a fashion. He must have acted on a whim that wasn't to be repeated when he passed his statue off as Roman. Perhaps it wasn't the pagan at all, concluded Althea, but a Christian theme that drew his sympathy in the molding of the slightly wet snow, a vision of a Pietà he was already contemplating. On its stunning completion, so proud of that first Pietà was he that, after overhearing strangers dispute his authorship, he engraved his name in secret one night on the ribbon crossing the Virgin's bosom.

  Althea knew the story of his second Pietà, intended in the twilight of his life for his own tomb. As it emerged from the stone, it came to dissatisfy him. A piece broke from the Madonna's arm, a vein appeared in the marble that tried his patience. Instead
of abandoning this work as he had done with others before, Michelangelo impulsively picked up his hammer and began to smash the statue to bits. He had cracked the Virgin's hand, scarred Christ's arm, knocked off one of his nipples, and would have entirely destroyed his labor had not a friend's hand stopped his, and an offer of generous payment reached the practical side of the sculptor, who then allowed his Pietà, in pieces, to be taken away from his sight.

  But as Michelangelo handled the malleable snow in the dimming afternoon of that January day, the moment when he would be moved to mangle his own work must have seemed unimaginable. Althea pictured him, still practically a boy, failure still unknown to him, stopping to shy snowballs at servant boys crossing the great, solemn courtyard. Perhaps it was a fantasy he sculpted for Piero—a centaur, a faun, some mythical creature that claimed his ability to make of the deceiving, melting medium a being in a state of slow metamorphosis, a changing shape that produced, in the minds of its viewers, a mystification and a subtle, awesome, tangible fear.

  A shiver went through Althea as she turned a page and found again Vasari's tribute, just as she had remembered it: "This master was certainly sent by God as an example of what an artist could be. I, who can thank God for unusual happiness, count it among the greatest of my blessings that I was born while Michelangelo still lived, was found worthy to have him for my master, and was accepted as his trusted friend."

  She had been afraid to sleep; she resisted sleep, but when at last she relaxed, sleep overcame her as she sat up in bed, propped against her pillow, with the light on, still holding her book open on her lap, as if it were an anchor, steadying her.

  Chapter 7

  The light behind the slats of her shade the morning after Althea's return to the city was flat and dull. It was the second of September, and she wasn't surprised to note, when she pulled the cord and anchored it firmly, that outside it was raining. Not the false drizzle of air conditioners, but a real drenching rain that filled puddles and ran rivulets in the bare earth of the backyard. The tiers of windows before her held all manner of objects on their sills: the usual geraniums, old tennis shoes, a bedraggled ball of yarn, an empty jar, a broken piece from a plastic toy. As she watched, a rotting window box gave way, and a cascade of rainwater and mud spilled into the yard, a miniature torrent sheering and blurring the mortared brick. For a moment she thought she discerned behind the rushing water a fainter music, like the plucking of harp strings, but as the rain slackened, it ceased, and later she thought she must have imagined it. Practicing musicians were commonplace in this part of town. To one of this invisible host, she first ascribed the melody behind the noise. Then she shut out the shifting sheets of rain for a reclusive and cozy breakfast.

  After breakfast she sorted her laundry, separating the white and color-fast from what might bleed. The laundromat on Tuesday morning was half-empty: the bad weather had discouraged customers. As she set out for home, holding her umbrella over her shopping cart piled high with folded clothes, the rainfall briefly became a downpour.

  From the alley behind the laundromat, surging billows of white steam were issuing out of the exhaust pipes. In the gloom, they were dully luminous, funnelled between the tarred brick walls of the alley, while arrows of rain smashed to the ground, bursting into shapes with the geometry of gentians, an eye at the heart where the stamen is. The flowers of rain bloomed and exploded, and the spikes of rain struck Althea's shoulders.

  Down the sedate and narrow side street came a battered pick up truck, more suited to muddy backroads than city wayfare. The driver, she noticed, was singing lustily, banging on the dashboard with the hand he wasn't driving with, keeping time. "Well, shake it up baby, now, shake it up baby! Twist and shout, twist and shout!"

  Paul loved that song, she knew. He was singing it one evening on Block Island, when he was out in the yard, cleaning mussels they had collected for dinner. From inside the house she had heard him, and she paused in the kitchen window to watch him exultantly drumming the kitchen knife on the side of the pot as he belted out the words at the top of his voice.

  "Come on, come on, come on, come on, baby now, come on, baby": now she listened to this unknown singer while he waited at the stoplight. As his tempo quickened and then slowed, she saw him stick his arm out of the open window and beat the truck's worn body.

  She'd noticed that gesture before. She remembered the sunburnt driver of another truck she'd glimpsed from a bike as she rode next to Paul back home from the beach on their first evening. The yellow light of that dusk formed a natural halo around the memory of her and Paul's initial encounter.

  She didn't doubt that she loved Paul just as she knew she couldn't have him on the conditions that she wanted. She wasn't conventional, so perhaps it wasn't surprising that she'd chosen for her mate a man already attached to another man, yet she was likewise unaccustomed to giving shocking exhibitions. In loving Jeanne, had she really meant to speak to Paul?

  To tell him what? That the love she bore for him could be accommodating: did she mean to tempt him with easeful attentions? Her excesses where Jeanne was concerned as well as her good graces might have been indications to Paul of how far she'd be willing to go to keep holding onto a part of him.

  Paul had seen her as womanly and had wanted her. From the evening of his arrival on the island, she had felt him weaken at her touch. Trundling her laundry down the street after the traffic light had changed and the singing truck driver was gone, Althea felt a desire she'd already known dissolving her, followed by a perilous sadness that was almost as precious.

  Rain made Althea naturally pensive, urged her after putting her clothes away (still luckily dry) to sit with her head in her hands before her window, watching, without actually meaning to, the tiers of windows in the tan brick wall of the building opposite, with patches of pink and gray cement on its bottom story. Against the wall, a long rope with a large looped knot at its end waved to and fro in the driven rain and the wind.

  Like the swaying rope, her troubled thoughts went back and forth. Had she been wrong to rouse her old friend by caresses and in Paul's company? It was as if Jeanne's seduction had resulted from an unspoken will shared by Paul and her, but which was odder: their complicity or Jeanne's compliance? The strangeness beyond strangeness was that she had known what Jeanne would feel. There was an undeniable familiarity to their unaccustomed act: if it was only that, then she could bear it.

  But she was encumbering one kind of love with another. The Althea who had made love to Jeanne was the same woman who, after college, had urged her friend to relocate to Manhattan, had helped her marshal her energies through those first, peripheral jobs towards the creation of a career. Althea knew she was a tower to Jeanne. She rather liked being leaned on, and enjoyed the pleasant sensation of private power in knowing her advice had prompted happy results. She and Jeanne could talk famously or sit quietly, each following a private train of thought, but when they met, the occasion had meaning, which isn't to say it necessarily partook of a purpose any grander than that of making dinner. But awareness and wisdom may come in meandering ways; and Althea and Jeanne loved each other like sisters, collaborated like friends, and, like sensible cousins, reserved a respectful distance between themselves in some things. Now, however, Althea had recklessly broached an area off bounds, an unshared space like a corridor between them which had left the movements of desire in their bodies separate and sacred.

  Before the sad back faces of the buildings, the rope fell and rose. This was Althea's lookout on the world. A gap existed between her circumstances and her expectations that she'd almost filled in with a rented house, but her tenure there had terminated, and she found herself again in an all-too-familiar spot. It was the awareness of a quickening of life she had shared that shrank from her now, with the white noise of the rain all around her, as she watched a rope swinging in inertia.

  Like an exile she longed for Block Island. How she had been dazzled there by presences, been loved, been lulled! Wistfully she recal
led the feelings of splendor that had come to her as the qualities of an island submitted themselves to her knowledge. She pictured heart-shaped lilypads cupping fresh water, a light rain in a swamp. After having been below the ocean's surface and seen that what was there was not blue, she could not easily forget. Shafts of sunlight became blunted in bottle-green water, reflecting particles of suspended sand. In contrast the floors of ponds were black and still.

  Now she stared at the rain and the swaying rope until her eyes became unfocused, and then blinked. Turning from the window, she restlessly paced the confines of her apartment.

  She slowed in her tracks. Humble as it was, it was still hers. As if she were discovering her room all over again, she paused before a reproduction that she had hung on the wall. It was of a Chinese scroll in pen-and-ink wash. She had originally put it there to remind her that a brush's stroke could be subtle, humorous, and wise, as in the depiction of the straw rainhat of the man on the bridge, and could then erase that personality in the delicacy of a grey mist.

  In the upper left corner of the scroll, a sixteenth-century poem in effortless calligraphy merged with the scene that illustrated it. On a card she had written out the translation and taped it to the wall.

  Even in the spring mists

  One hears the sound of water

  Trickling through the rocks.

  There were three red squares across the sky in her Chinese reproduction, each printed by a separate stamp, of a calligraphy obscure to her. Upon inquiry, she had discovered that these were the names of the original's various owners set by them there at diverse intervals. The Metropolitan Museum, which presently exhibited the scroll, was content with a chaste label and the sale of copies. An institution was happy to let many own a glimpse, but the three individuals must have wanted exclusive proprietorship and, in the act of blotting a sky with their names, tried to claim it forever.