The Off Season

by Amy Hoffman

  “You live with someone, but you don’t necessarily know them,” Miss Ruby concluded, ominously. She stood, stacked our sandwich plates, headed into the kitchen, and I heard the water running in the sink.

  I wondered what I would think about Janelle and me, or, even more difficult, Baby and me, in ten years—but I couldn’t manage it, projecting myself into the future, and after a while I gave up. The present was confusing enough. I was so happy that Baby had chosen me, for now, but even through the mists of her favor I could see that I had better not ask for more. She gave what she could in the moment, and that was as far as she would go. I was walking into it, I stupidly believed, with eyes open.

  A Little Rouge

  Once I knew who he was, I realized Marcus did his grocery shopping quite predictably, on Wednesday afternoons. He was a person of regular habits, so Margot, his avatar, could be counted on also, to appear in front of Town Hall for an hour or so in midafternoon, weather permitting, with a longer session on summer Saturdays, as she basked in the admiration of the tourists. Lately, though, she hadn’t been around.

  “I miss her terribly,” Marcus told me when I handed him his usual packet of a quarter pound of sliced turkey. I had been noticing, from week to week, that what had been an occasional hand tremor had become a constant vibration, and the cane he had carried from time to time was no longer an affectation but a necessity. His face had gone quite gray, and he had tried to liven it up with a little rouge, but even though he had applied it with some expertise, the effect was more garish than healthy. “I used to look forward so to her manifestations,” he went on. “But now, when I open her armoire or see her sign waiting by the front door, I can’t help thinking, ‘What was that all about?’”

  His voice was low and hoarse, so I went out from behind the counter to hear him better and took his elbow. We shuffled slowly to the cash registers. “The choral singing at our wonderful Swim seems to have put a strain on the vocal cords. I simply don’t have it in me anymore.”

  “Maybe she’ll come back when you’re feeling better,” I said.

  Marcus smiled. “Thank you for your encouragement, Nora dear. But no, I think not, although it’s been a terrific run.” We stopped to wait in the checkout line, and when we got to the front, Marcus gave me a hug and an air-kiss on each cheek. “As they do in France, you know,” he said. He turned away and began arranging his groceries on the belt as I watched.

  I wasn’t ready to leave him; in fact, I was on the verge of tears. He’s just fatigué, I told myself, like the day he came to the studio.

  “I’m sure you have other customers waiting,” he insisted, making a brushing motion with his fingers. “Go, go, go. Back to your post!”

  “See you next week, then,” I said. “Or maybe I’ll run into Margot on the street.”

  “Perhaps,” said Marcus. “Perhaps.”

  That night, Baby noticed a lingering smudge of his rouge on my cheek, licked her finger, started to rub it off.

  “No, don’t,” I said. “Just leave it.”

  Open Studio

  Even if, in the middle of the night, I suspected that I was headed for a fall with Baby, in the light of day I was happy. Her renewed interest in me seemed to have released all sorts of positive energies, and I was spending time in my studio almost every day, which I felt proud of myself for, since I hadn’t always been able to maintain such focus. Stop & Shop had turned out to be if not the perfect day job, then at least not a bad one, once I had bought a good pair of shoes and adjusted to being on my feet for a whole shift. It could be boring and even humiliating, with certain customers complaining about you as though you weren’t standing right in front of them, but it had advantages: other customers were surprisingly appreciative, and I rarely thought about any of it when I wasn’t there. In that sense, if not financially or spiritually, it was better than teaching, as I had done in the city, which could suck up as much time as I had to give it, leaving only odd hours for painting: in the middle of the night, when I would rather have been snuggled up against Janelle, or in the late afternoon, after a succession of classes and before starting dinner. Or not at all.

  What had started out as one mural was turning into something more like an installation. On long sheets of paper on three sides of the studio I had painted the Provincetown environment: Earth, the grid of streets and shops and houses; Sea, the rocky shoreline and breaking waves, ducks and fishes and whales; Sky, gulls and pigeons, clouds and moon and stars, sun rising and setting. As for the portraits, some were close to finished, while others were still at the multiple sketches stage.

  Still, the work hadn’t completely coalesced. The thing that would pull all the pieces together was missing, or hadn’t yet announced itself. I didn’t mind that, though. I had gotten far enough to feel confident that eventually it would, although not far enough to know what it would be, and I was enjoying the anticipation of a surprise soon to be revealed. I hadn’t attempted such a large, complicated work before, so this feeling was new, and I was interested to see what would occur to me next—although I guess my subjects were less so, having allowed me to draw them and wanting reassurance that I hadn’t botched them too much. They had all asked at least occasionally when they could take a look, but their questions were starting to become more persistent. I decided to throw an open studio party, a work-in-progress kind of thing, not a substitute for an exhibit in a respectable gallery—I hadn’t traveled so far from Brooklyn that I no longer saw that as my goal.

  Baby turned suddenly shy about my drawings of her. In addition to the ones I had done in the studio, I had sketched her at home in her kitchen, and once or twice—quickly, before she sensed me looking at her and jumped up—sleeping. “Those are between us,” she said.

  “Us,” I echoed. I loved her saying “us.” She agreed that I could hang her portrait, one of the best I had made, with her red cowboy boots as a focal point.

  Everyone I invited accepted instantly. “Finally!” said Miss Ruby. “I give you the idea to take over that shed, and suddenly it’s a big mystery.”

  “What do you mean? It’s right there; you could go over any time!”

  “And barge in?” said Miss Ruby. “You’d bite my head off.”

  “Exactly, Rube,” Tony added. She had been bustling around the house constantly, bossing Miss Ruby and defending her to me. “No real artist wants to be interrupted like that.”

  “What about that guy in the West End?” I said. He had planted a sign in his front garden that said “Yes you are welcome to come in when I am painting.”

  Tony made a brush-off gesture with her hand. “Phoo. He just wants to sell the tourists his overpriced seascapes. They’re all the same, except the color of the sky.”

  “Sky’s difficult,” I pointed out.

  “He oughta be better at it by now. He had one in the window the other day that was green. Now when did you ever see a green sunset?”

  “Artistic license?” I said. “So it wasn’t green, but maybe he experienced it as green, or saw the green highlights in the other colors. Or wanted to see what it would look like, green. You’re so literal.”

  “That’s me!” said Tony.

  “Then maybe art is lost on you,” I said.

  “His, yeah,” said Tony.

  But, so what if he was painting, essentially, souvenirs, for couples to hang over the couch to remind them of their romantic summer, once the winter dark closed in and things got rough—so what if his pictures were more therapy than art? My real concern, set off by Tony, wasn’t his work, but mine. I had taken liberties with my palette too, and I had gone for an expressionistic, Alice Neel–ish style.

  Dabbing away in my shack, stepping back to enjoy the colors and shapes evolving on my easel, I had forgotten about the fear and shame involved in exposing my work in public—or even, as I was thinking of doing now, to a few basically friendly people. Fear and shame, yet also gratification and affirmation: If the audience connected and came to share my perceptions. If
they loved me. The old masochist-narcissist seesaw.

  “Well, I’m definitely going,” said Miss Ruby, to disrupt Tony’s teasing. She had seen the worry and regret on my face. “I want to see what you’ve been up to, all this time.”

  “Me too,” said Tony. “Just trying to get your goat, Nora. Can’t help it.”

  The studio, with its rough walls, wasn’t the ideal place for an art show, but I tacked the backgrounds across the slats and the sketches and the paintings, in their various stages, on the exposed studs. The one of Baby I displayed on my easel, to look as though I had just been working on it and had walked away briefly for a break. I had picked up a nest of TV tables at a yard sale, and Miss Ruby helped me set them up with brie and crackers, and a few bottles of white wine and seltzer and Diet Coke, just like a real art opening.

  Early June is the Cape’s most unpredictable month, either lashing rains or gentle sun, and I had gotten the sun—a breezy afternoon with a promise of summer, warm enough for Miss Ruby and me to sit outside to wait for my guests. I noticed that over the winter, cutting across the property line in the snow and the mud, I had tamped down a path in the lawn. I was wondering if there was a way to rake the crabgrass to cover it when a guy stepped out onto the deck of the big house next door. The summer tenants were here! This one was wearing shorts and no shirt, justifiably, since he had the abs and biceps for it, had probably worked on them all winter, becoming a fixture at his gym and resisting all carbs and fats. Now he was holding a red plastic party cup. “What up?” he yelled over the thumping music that had started up behind him. “You’re trespassing, dudes.”

  “Nah,” Miss Ruby called back. “We’re allowed to use the place. How was your winter?”

  “Miss Ruby!” I whispered. “That’s not true!”

  “Like I told you, no one cares,” she hissed back.

  The tenant didn’t answer, just went back in, slamming the door behind him.

  “Festive,” said Miss Ruby. “I don’t think he meant to bang the door like that.”

  Tony came huffing across the lawn. “Sorry,” she said. She opened the studio door and looked around. “I meant to get here to help set up—but I see you’ve done okay without me. Sponsees, you know. They get into their scrapes and I have to sort them out.”

  The shed grew crowded with other guests after that: Reverend Patsy with a few of her congregants and a skinny bald guy with a straggly gray pony tail whom she introduced as her meditation teacher, then my boss and coworkers from the Stop & Shop, and Bob from the Teddy, and Chuck Pina, and Silvie from the post office, whom I hadn’t invited but who seemed to find out about and attend everything. Finally, Janelle and Roger. With Mi’Kay. I recognized her immediately: her sharp nose and cheekbones; kohl-lined, observant eyes; and a complicated braided hairdo that accentuated her height.

  Intimidated, I held out my hand. “Nora Griffin.”

  She took it, then laughed and said, “Oh, please, no formalities,” and leaned down to envelop me in a hug. “I just feel like I know you already, Nora,” she said. “Ever since I saw the beautiful portrait you made of Janelle. But this . . .” She swept her hand around the room. “Way beyond. Awesome! Really. Such color! Such insight into character! Such love!”

  “Thanks,” I said, smitten. “You really seem to understand what I’m doing.”

  “Oh, absolutely,” said Mi’Kay. “Excuse me, but I have to take a closer look.” She turned away from me and stood for a while gazing at the murals, then moved on to examine the portrait of Baby—who just at that moment appeared in person, tak-tok-tak-ing through the door, red cowboy boots, purpley lipstick, rough blonde hair and all, smiling, making a beeline for me, holding out a big bouquet of flowers. Mi’Kay looked up, and I swear I saw a spark arc and fizz between the two of them.

  Janelle said later that she saw the same thing.

  But all that was interrupted, at least for the moment, by loud knocking. “Just come in!” I yelled. “It’s open!”

  The door opened on a puzzled-looking man holding a rake.

  “Mr. Ruis!” said Miss Ruby, bustling over to corner him in the doorway. “It’s been ages! I hear you and Gloria moved down to Chatham.”

  “The boys told me there was some kind of commotion going on up here,” he said. “What’re you getting up to, Miss R?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Really. You just stopped by at a busy time.”

  He stared at her. “This crazy place. Yeah we moved down Cape—we should’ve got off entirely. Why you people think you can just—I don’t know, just walk in! On a man’s property! I want you cleared the hell out.” He looked around at my drawings and paintings, and sniffed the turpentine in the air. “And put this place back like it was. It’s a toolshed for chrisake.”

  “I thought it was part of our deal, Joe,” said Miss Ruby.

  “What deal? We never had no kind of deal. I want you out of here,” he repeated. “And the cabin, too. Our niece needs a place; I’m gonna put her in it.” He handed her the rake and walked out.

  The room was silent, all of us looking at Miss Ruby. “Whoa,” she said. “My landlord.”

  “Maybe he’ll forget about it,” said Tony.

  “Doubt it,” said Miss Ruby. “Although he never seemed like the possessive type before.”

  “All right, all right, then let’s get to work,” said Tony as she clapped her hands. Somehow, she instantly had Reverend Patsy and the congregants and meditation teacher taking down the murals, while others started packing up my supplies and picking up paintings to carry down to Miss Ruby’s cottage. “Careful with all that!” Tony said.

  “It’s a falling-down shed!” said Miss Ruby, still standing there in the midst of it all. “He’s never had any use for it.” She tossed the rake out the door, its tines boinging over the ground. “Probably never will, either. I bet he doesn’t even have a niece.”

  “Watch it with that thing,” said Tony. She turned to me. “So what’re you going to do about this sorry situation, Norma?”

  We were back to that—and I had no idea. Miss Ruby came over and put her arm around my shoulder. “Don’t blame her, Tony,” she said. “It was me put her up to it.”

  “Naturally,” said Tony. “I will never understand you, Rube—why you do this stuff.”

  “She was helping me!” I said.

  “That’s how it starts,” Tony told me. “You should’ve known.”

  Tony left when the other guests did, after they finished clearing out the studio. For all the time I had spent there and all the work I had done, it took almost no time for them to restore it to its original, abandoned-looking state. Soon there were just five of us sitting around glumly in Miss Ruby’s living room, she in her recliner with a cat or two; Baby and me, Janelle, Roger, and Mi’Kay on the floor, finishing up the brie and crackers and drinking warm white wine from plastic cups.

  “This stuff’s awful,” said Janelle. “I don’t know why I’m drinking it.”

  “Bad wine’s the tradition at openings,” I said.

  She went into the kitchen to pour it down the sink.

  “Oh, Nora, your beautiful show,” said Baby. “I’m so sorry it ended like this.” She leaned over to kiss me, but our lips misconnected and our teeth clicked—probably because, just for a second, her eyes darted over to catch Mi’Kay’s.

  “Yeah,” I said. I didn’t think I could say more without starting to cry. Everything I had put together during the long winter seemed to be falling apart at once, and I felt like I had when Janelle had first kicked me out: stopped in my tracks. That day, Miss Ruby had appeared to pick me up, but this time she was already here.

  And in a low voice, Baby was asking Mi’Kay, “Have we met before?”

  “Not in this life,” said Mi’Kay.

  L’Heure Bleue

  The bad news didn’t stop with my so-called party. Marcus hadn’t attended because at the time he was in an ambulance speeding down Route 6, and I hope he was unconscious. Everyone’s seen th
ose ambulances, cherry lights rotating ineffectively, stuck in traffic on the two-lane stretch between Orleans and Dennis. People called it suicide alley because of the supposed frequency of collisions, but the ambulances were the more common problem, the drivers around them pulling over onto the muddy shoulder and offering a brief prayer to whatever god or goddess they subscribed to, or just to the random universe, that the victim inside had something like a broken limb that could wait out the journey, and not a stroke or a heart attack—and sometimes the prayers worked, but not that day, not for Marcus. He didn’t make it much farther than Eastham.

  No one could believe he was gone, and Margot with him. I couldn’t have been the only one who kept looking for her singing in front of Town Hall, especially on the nicer days, as the Cape warmed toward summer.

  A son nobody had ever heard of showed up to take charge of the funeral, so the obituaries made no mention of Margot, her performances, or the pleasure she had given her audiences—but a people’s memorial sprang up in front of Town Hall, a red wagon kept full of flowers and a framed photograph of Margot. Propped against the wagon was Margot’s sign, “Living My Dream,” and next to it a boom box softly played Sinatra. One day I gathered up my drawings and the painting I had made of Marcus and placed them among the bouquets. Sitting among the other idlers on the long benches everyone called the meat-rack, watching the daily parade on Commercial Street and sketching the passersby, I can’t say I exactly felt Margot’s spirit, or Marcus’s, but it was comforting just to sit there as people came and went, listening to “Witchcraft” and “Strangers in the Night” and other songs I had always thought were so corny.

  As the sun was setting I got up to walk through town. I left my pictures of Marcus at the memorial and headed off, away from the sun, through the East End, past houses so big they obstructed any view of the bay, most still boarded up and deserted, until I reached the point where the parallels of Commercial and Bradford Streets converged into Route 6A, and there was a platform with a set of wooden stairs that led down to the beach. I stopped at the top and leaned on the railing to look back over the crescent sweep of the bay, Provincetown silhouetted against a broad band of orange at the horizon.