After so much artistic solitude, the idea of making art for a purpose excited her. Late at night though it was, in the early hours of the new year, she felt infused with energy. I am already working on a new painting, she reminded herself. Very soon I will be moving to a new apartment with a view. Now I have a new opportunity: to make art for dance. And maybe I will sell my paintings through my new dealer.
In this optimistic light, her hopes seemed possible, even probable. Kurt took Althea’s empty plate and placed it with his on the table. He said, “Your collaboration will be with me, not with the Dancers. I’m looking forward to seeing your work.”
“My best paintings—the ones I’ve recently finished—are with a gallery,” Althea told him.
“I’ll go there,” Kurt offered.
“You’ll have to make an appointment.”
“I can handle that.”
“Watch out. They’ll try to sell you a painting,” Althea warned him. And she laughed, pleased at the thought.
Just then Jeanne, holding René’s hand, approached.
“Althea!”
“Jeanne!”
Althea looks radiant, thought Jeanne. And even though she loved René, she couldn’t prevent a twinge of envy, imagining Althea in love with Kurt.
“I’m Kurt Matthews,” Kurt said, stepping forward with an easy glamour, shaking hands with Jeanne, then René, so that they had to let go of each other. With a surprising lack of restraint, Althea announced jubilantly, “Kurt’s going to see my paintings at the George Clarke gallery. I may paint a backdrop for one of his dances.”
Now I’ve said it he can’t take it back, thought Althea.
Althea seems so full of herself, Jeanne observed. Usually she is silent about her work. Recently, she’s been defensive about it. Now she seems more confident, which is a good thing.
Yet Jeanne felt disappointed that Althea was so self-absorbed that she did not even appear to notice René. “I hope it works out for you,” Jeanne said, with a slight note of reproach.
“What are your paintings like?” René casually asked Althea, as if they had already been introduced. In fact, Althea knew who he was—the historic preservation architect, the “someone” Jeanne had mentioned over the phone. She remembered how the news had made her jealous, then depressed her. She admitted to herself that perhaps her avoidance of Jeanne and René all night had been deliberate. But why? she asked herself. It’s silly. It’s not necessary.
“You’re putting me on the spot,” she told René. Yet her tone invited him, flirted with him.
René’s dimple winked as he smiled a dazzling smile. “I know how artists dislike describing their work. I guess we’ll have to make an appointment at the gallery, too,” he added. “Or have you already seen these paintings?” he asked Jeanne.
She shook her head. “No, but I plan to.”
“You see,” René told Althea, “your art is already attracting a crowd.”
Althea smiled again; she couldn’t help it. He’s charming, she thought. “It would be nice if it were true.”
“It will be,” said Jeanne, full of generosity, if not confidence, pleased by René and by Althea’s reaction to him.
Sure she was being indulged, Althea stiffened. Then, choosing not to challenge Jeanne, she softened. Jeanne felt a pang of shame. To her own ears, she’d sounded insincere.
“I have more news,” Althea announced, this time speaking to Jeanne, while not excluding Kurt and René. “I’m moving.”
“Where? Not out of the city?” asked Jeanne, truly surprised.
“Oh no, just two blocks away. Not exactly a radical change,” Althea admitted. “Still, it’s significant for me.”
“I disagree,” said Jeanne. “A new apartment, this gallery promoting you—I’d say these are radical changes.”
Their eyes met. Jeanne realized that she was speaking to Althea as if they were alone. I have mystified her more than was warranted, Jeanne thought. She is not really so impenetrable after all.
Kurt had grown restless. “Please excuse me for a moment,” he requested. He soon left and disappeared down the hall.
Jeanne looked significantly after him and then back to Althea. She is waiting for me to spill the beans, Althea thought. But I won’t. In any case, there are no beans to spill.
“So you’re Jeanne’s friend,” René said to Althea. “Come and talk to us for a while. You don’t have to talk about your paintings. You can talk about whatever you like.”
* * *
On the roof, a real wind was scattering the sugar, dry as sand, at Paul’s and Bryce’s feet. Licking his lips nervously, Paul hesitated before replying to Bryce. He searched his mind for an answer, as, in the desolate glare of the spotlights, he thought he saw the trace of a tear on Bryce’s cheek. But he wasn’t sure of it.
“Do you think that it is only need that has kept me with you?” he asked Bryce. “And that the need was only for money?”
Bryce shook his head, but it was less a denial than a refusal to answer. “Maybe I’ll let you buy this place from me,” he said. “It really will be yours, but you’ll have to pay me for it.”
I bet he doesn’t mean it, Paul thought. He is very angry at me. Realizing this, Paul resented it. “What’s your price?” he asked, goading Bryce.
“Whatever the market will bear.”
“Whatever offer I make, I don’t think you will accept it.”
“Try me,” Bryce said.
It’s as if we’re speaking in code, Paul thought, and we both know it. At this idea, a thrill seized him. “I’ll win this game, too,” he predicted mockingly.
“But exactly what, in this context, does winning mean?” Bryce challenged him, and he raised the stakes. “What do you want, Paul?”
“You,” Paul replied, almost without thinking, surprising himself. Not until after he said it did he realize that he meant it.
Bryce just stared at Paul. As intensely as the cold air, Paul felt Bryce’s gaze, dark and luminous. “You’re wrong about me,” Paul said. “I don’t want to buy this place from you; I want to own it with you.”
“Why should I consent to that?”
“Because you really don’t want to renounce me.”
Bryce’s silence seemed like a dismissal or a contradiction. Paul waited in vain. “You are so cold,” Paul marvelled. “In the past you were often detached, but never so cold.”
He thought to himself, I’ve lost him. He desperately wished to arouse Bryce, to claim him, but he lacked confidence in himself. All he could call on was reassurance. “You were always in my thoughts,” he said. “I felt your presence, though we were apart. I imagined I was with you.”
“Even when you are not on stage,” Bryce observed, “you are always acting. You are acting now.”
Paul did not deny it. “It’s the way I express myself.” Then, more softly, he said, “I have already lived here alone. I do not prefer it.” He gestured to Bryce, inviting him, “Come, take a walk with me around the roof.”
“All right.”
Paul could feel the tension begin to ease. They set off, reversing the route that Jeanne and René had followed earlier: the men went from the garden, to the bleak back of the house. The roof was still lit for the party. Paul’s crutches made soft thuds on the tar surface. From inside the penthouse came the muffled noises of conversations. Paul looked away, across the roof’s expanse to the night glow of the city beyond the four-foot-high parapet wall at the building’s edge. Impulsively, at the back of the house, he urged Bryce, “Stop and listen to the silence around us.”
Behind the wind, Bryce heard the distant clamor of the city, like white noise, as faint and as constant as the roar of the sea in a seashell.
“I’m imagining the ghosts on this roof,” said Paul, not looking at Bryce, but ahead, into the distance, “not of the guests who have gone inside, but of us, as we’ve lived here together. I’m thinking of all we’ve shared, as well as what we’ve withheld—joy and sorrow, despair an
d desire—and it seems to me that all that life is still here, secret and continuous. I can see it and hear it.”
He turned to face Bryce as he fell silent. In Paul’s expression, Bryce read awe or the suppression of tears, and felt his being vibrate sympathetically in response. Whether Paul is sincere or not, I still believe in him, Bryce realized.
“Tonight I almost accepted that our paths were bound to separate,” he confessed. “Yet what seemed obvious to me just moments ago now seems strange and obscure. All that resolve has ceased to exist, as if it were only a false will.”
Hearing him, Paul was once more at ease. He waited in suspense, scarcely daring to breathe, as Bryce moved closer to him. When I’m on crutches, we’re nearly of a height, he noticed. Though he did not move, it seemed to him that his entire being had dissolved in expectation, as he felt Bryce’s hand caress his cheek.
Bryce’s touch was soft while he studied Paul. Ruthlessly, ruefully, he observed, “Your hairline is receding.”
“It’s said we blonds don’t last.”
“It looks distinguished,” Bryce consoled him. “It becomes you.”
“God preserve me,” Paul replied. “I’ll be distinguished when I’m dead.”
Bryce laughed.
One of the longest nights of the year was three-quarters over, when Paul and Bryce pledged their reconciliation with a kiss.
* * *
In the wood-burning stove, the fire lay in embers. Candles burned low, flickered. Almost everyone had gone home. Impulsively, Bryce invited the few people left to partake of a glass of port. After Kurt accepted, so did Althea. Then René and Jeanne decided to stay on, too. Michiko and Hector brought the group to eight. They urged Jane, the last holdout, to join them. On one end of the green velvet couch, Jeanne sat in René’s embrace, as she watched Bryce decant the bottle of port. He carefully sifted out the sediment, which was collected by absorbent paper in a silver filter. The decanter was crystal.
Bryce poured the ruby red liquor into fluted glasses etched with flowers and leaves and passed them to his guests. There was a moment’s pause as he looked around. Catching Paul’s eye, he lifted his glass and offered: “To the party after the party,” and everyone drank.
“I always did like the hours after a party,” Paul confided from his side of the green velvet couch. “One has the illusion that time has stopped, like a moon that appears caught in the branches of a tree.”
As he spoke, a candle put itself out in a pool of wax. Seated alone in an armchair, Althea sipped the port, as her mind wandered far away to the following summer. If I can make a thousand more dollars by selling paintings and painting backdrops for Kurt’s company, then I can rent the Block Island house for three weeks next August, she calculated.
She wondered if other people wanted the house as much as she did. She wondered if she ought to hurry to reserve it. The island real estate agency would be open for business, she knew, just after New Year’s. She wondered if she dared gamble again on her income, as she was doing already in subletting Cam’s apartment. She was seriously tempted.
It’s unlike me to be so reckless, she cautioned herself, as island vistas took shape in her imagination. They were so vivid that she could almost taste the salt air. I think I might do it, I might just dare. What’s the worst that can happen? If I don’t make the money, I’ll lose my deposit. Mentally she shrugged her shoulders. But this year, if I get there, I won’t invite Jeanne or Paul to join me.
Even as she day-dreamed about Block Island, Althea was half-aware, from the sound of her friends’ voices as they sipped their port, that they were uttering very sober and serious thoughts. When at last she roused herself to leave the island, she realized that a conversation about love and friendship was going on in the candlelight. She had neglected to notice how the subject had first come up, but she found herself entranced by the elevated tone of Kurt’s pleasant voice as he spoke from the shadows of the room.
“When we become disillusioned about someone we think we have loved,” he was saying, “our injustice is such that we project the blame of the weakness in our own natures onto the person who had not the power to retain our love. We discover faults in that person to excuse our own inconstancy.”
“That is true,” René agreed, surprising Jeanne, sheltered in his arms. “We are infatuated for a minute to be melancholy for an hour. We worship our love like an idol, only to hurl it from the altar we had raised to it. Then we find it has been defaced by the smoke of the incense we have burned before it.”
“As indifference begets indifference, vanity is wounded at both sides,” pontificated Kurt, as he approached from the shadows. Althea watched as he appeared in profile in the soft, muted light. He sat down cross-legged on the floor. Hector moved to sit beside him.
“I was thinking about how friendship can develop into love, and wondering how love may also lead to friendship,” Hector confessed, surprising Paul, who had never known him to be so serious.
“Remember the cliché that couples begin as lovers and end as friends,” remarked Michiko. Paul briefly touched her silky, black hair as she knelt below him on the rug.
“That’s true,” agreed Jane. “Think, for instance,” she went on, “of the affectionate friendship most of us have observed in the case of certain married couples, whose early love seems to be replaced by a sentiment less passionate but equally tender and more durable.”
“You should say more enduring,” objected Paul. “I think that if love dies, what keeps people together may simply be endurance, along the lines of ‘what can’t be cured must be endured.’” Bryce’s watchful eyes were on him as he continued, “Who that has felt the all-engrossing passion of love could support the stagnant calm you refer to for the same object?”
“Can an affectionate friendship really spring up from the ashes of extinguished passion?” Jeanne wondered aloud from the depths of the couch and René’s supporting arms.
Althea looked away, into the shadows, as she spoke. “Often, I am afraid, the recollection of a burnt-out love is too mortifying to admit the successor, friendship.”
“Is it not wiser, then,” said Kurt, “to choose the friend, I mean the person most calculated for friendship, with whom the long years are to be spent?”
“While idols are nearly always chosen for their personal charms,” observed René, “they are seldom calculated for friendship. Hence the disappointment that follows, when the violence of passion has abated, and the discovery is made that there are no solid qualities to replace the novelty that has passed away.”
“What does one look for in a friend,” wondered Bryce, “if not an agreeable disposition, an affinity of mind, and powers of conversation? These win our regard the more they are known, and thus love often takes the place of friendship.”
“I do not disagree with any of you,” said Michiko, “nor, I believe, from what she has just said about certain married couples, does Jane. The only difference in our opinions is that I believe that friendship can and often does succeed love, and nothing will change my opinion.”
Paul laughed. “Then all our fine commentaries have been useless,” he said, not seeming to mind at all.
* * *
Before he and Jeanne left, René searched for a matched pair of toe shoes in the box by the front door. He found two of battered and smudged white satin, which Jeanne slipped in the bag with her butterfly wings.
“Why do you think Althea wouldn’t let us walk her home?” René spoke in a low voice, so as not to be overheard.
They stepped out onto the roof. Jeanne noticed the black half masks that lay at their feet, discarded. “She was waiting for Kurt to ask her, of course,” she replied, as she stooped to pick one up. “These masks are like the litter of playbills in a theater after the performance,” she commented.
“Or like fallen leaves from an exotic tree,” René suggested. “Do you think he will?”
Jeanne turned the mask over in her hand. “Who knows?” She shrugged. “What di
d you think of him?”
“The ubiquitous Kurt?” René made a moue—it seemed to Jeanne very French. “I prefer to admire him from afar.”
“And Althea—what did you think of her?” she asked as she dropped the mask in her bag.
“She’s beautiful.” René looked at Jeanne closely. “Are you jealous?”
Refusing to answer, Jeanne shook her head. They both laughed. “Are we friends?” Jeanne asked.
She knew that he knew that she was referring to the discussion of love and friendship over Bryce’s port. She was still mulling over what people had said. She was grateful when René took her hand. “We had better be,” he said, “if we are to spend our long years together.”
As casual as it sounded, it was a proposal, and she knew it.
“Yes,” she replied.
* * *
“Don’t bother to see us to the door,” Hector, Jane, Michiko, and Kurt assured Bryce and Paul. Her goodbye chiming into theirs, Althea walked out with Kurt and the Dancers, exiting the party in their company, just as she had entered it. So she was among the last to leave, but not the very last. Although there were enough toe shoes in the box near the door for each departing guest to take one, only Jane and Althea did so. Jane selected a faded scarlet, Althea a water-stained lavender. Without discussion, the others declined to choose. It was all very casual—take it or leave it.
Althea felt compelled to go away with a toe shoe because Paul had asked them to. Though it seemed absurd to her to treat Paul’s request as a command she must obey, she couldn’t help it. But none of the Dancers seemed to care what she did one way or the other. Their indifference and their tolerance were a relief to Althea.
As she walked with them across the cold, windswept roof, she suddenly remembered how, at Paul’s opening night at the Joyce Theater, she had overheard an exchange about a party after the performance and felt painfully excluded. Now, she believed, I’d be included.
Fall Love Page 51