Painting Naked (Macmillan New Writing)

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Painting Naked (Macmillan New Writing) Page 10

by Maggie Dana


  I drop my towel and climb in beside him.

  Chapter 17

  Sands Point

  March 2011

  My body tingles when I wake, and I reach for Colin, but the space beside me is empty. Damn! It was a dream, except how do I explain the damp spot beneath my thighs? I check out the dresser. The candles are burned down. Okay, so I wasn’t dreaming, but where the hell is he?

  “Jilly?”

  I turn toward his voice. He’s perched on a chair by the sliding glass door, elbows on his knees, hands wrapped around a mug, leaning forward as if poised for flight. Outside, on my balcony, everything is white.

  “What time is it?” I ask.

  “Almost six.” Colin hesitates. “Coffee?”

  “No, but thanks.” I shove a handful of hair from my face. “I can’t face that much caffeine this early in the morning.”

  “Then I’ll make you some tea.”

  I stumble into the bathroom and attack my mouth with a toothbrush. Has last night’s romance turned into morning-after guilt? Is he regretting whatever impulse made him come over? I have a shower but it does little to wash away the sight of Colin sitting on that chair with a mug of coffee and a smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes.

  My tea’s on the dresser when I emerge from the bathroom, swathed in towels and drying my hair.

  “I’d like to ring England,” Colin says.

  “Don’t you have a mobile?”

  “Yes, but it’s dead and I forgot the charger.”

  “Then be my guest,” I say, nodding toward my bedside table.

  Colin clears his throat. “I’d prefer a public phone.”

  I stop toweling off. “Why?”

  “Because it’s harder to trace.”

  Oh boy, we’re into serious guilt here. “Then I’ll drive you to the village.”

  * * *

  It takes an hour to shovel the driveway and it’s almost eight when we pull into Sands Point. I park outside the drugstore between mounds of snow taller than my car. A sleepy-looking clerk is slumped behind the counter. He looks up from his magazine as we step inside on a blast of cold air. I point Colin toward the far corner where, amazingly, there’s still an old-fashioned pay phone. In a booth no less.

  While Colin makes his call, I wander up and down the greeting card aisle. He’s still talking, hunched like a penitent in the phone booth, when I circle around for the third time and I wonder, childishly, if he’s now confessing his sins and seeking absolution from Shelby. I buy a bottle of shampoo and a gaudy St. Patrick’s Day card for Anna.

  We have breakfast at the café next door. I order waffles. Colin asks for bacon and eggs and a large pot of coffee. He begins to talk, so softly I have to strain to hear him.

  “I’m sorry for being distant, but … I’ve never been—you know—unfaithful before.” He pauses. “I don’t know how to handle it.”

  “Furtively?”

  He gasps.

  My mouth needs a zipper. “I’m sorry. That was flip.”

  “No, Jilly. That’s just you being you,” Colin says. He pulls a roll from the basket and spreads it with butter. “Those three years in Wickham Forge with Hugh and Keith … and with you and Sophie. They were the best. I’d never had friends like that before.” He pauses. “Or since.”

  I take a deep breath. “So why did you disappear without a word?”

  He flinches. “You heard what my father did?”

  “Yes, but that wasn’t your fault.”

  The waitress interrupts with food. I grab the syrup and smother my waffles. I need a sugar buzz to push this conversation forward. “Colin, what happened after you left? Where did you go?”

  “Scotland. My mother had relatives there.”

  “Edinburgh?” I say, visions of him in a kilt. “Dundee?”

  “An island in the Hebrides.”

  “Jeez! That’s a bit remote.”

  “Ferry twice a week to the mainland, electricity—occasionally—and the only phone on the island was at the post office.” He shivers. “I remember being cold, all the time. Even in summer.”

  I swallow a chunk of warm, comforting waffle. “Your mother?” I hesitate. “Is she still—”

  “She killed herself when I was twenty-four.”

  My fork clatters to the table, bounces, then lands on the floor.

  Colin hands me another. “It was my fault. I wasn’t watching her carefully enough.”

  “You mean—?”

  “She’d tried several times before.” His mouth hardens. “But she finally got it right in the end. Sleeping pills. A whole bottle.”

  He’s detached. Dispassionate. Brutal, almost. I guess that’s the only way to handle something as ghastly as this.

  “And your father?” I ask. May as well spring all the family skeletons from the cupboard at the same time.

  “Never saw him again. He got out of prison and buggered off to Australia.” Colin gives a bitter laugh. “Appropriate, really.”

  “Why?”

  “Convicts. Penal colonies in Oz.”

  “What about you? Where did you go?”

  His voice turns soft. “Back to Wickham Forge, looking for you.”

  I choke and spit bits of waffle on the table.

  Colin offers me a glass of water. “Claudia told me you’d gone to America. That you were married.”

  “She never said a word.”

  “I begged her not to.”

  “Oh, Colin.”

  “So I put your memory on hold and tried to get on with my life. I did a stint in the army, got married, had a kid, got divorced.” He looks at me. “But I never forgot about you, Jilly. Never.”

  “Then why the hell didn’t you write me from Scotland?”

  “Because you deserved better than me. I had no money. No home. I had nothing to offer except trouble. My mother was suicidal, my father was in jail, and I was—”

  His voice breaks and his shame is so palpable, so intense, I can’t meet his eyes. My coffee’s gone cold, but I drink it anyway.

  “How did you find Keith and the others?” I say.

  “I was at a computer show, trying to figure out what software to buy for the lodge, and Hugh was one of the salesmen.”

  “Did you recognize him?”

  “That bald head threw me,” Colin says, “but when he smiled, I knew it was Hugh. He sold me the right program and invited me to Keith’s party. I almost didn’t go, but thank God I did.” He wipes his mouth with a napkin. “That day was a turning point for me.”

  Our waitress bears down with the check and more coffee. I cover my cup and glance at Colin, but the light has gone from his eyes and he’s retreated some place I can’t follow.

  He stands and lays a twenty on the table. “Is this enough?”

  “Plenty,” I tell him.

  Across the street, two men are shoveling the sidewalk. A biting wind rips down Bay Street. Icy rain stings our faces. Colin shivers and pulls up his collar.

  “It’s a lot colder here. Colder than Scotland.”

  * * *

  “I’d like to explain about that phone call,” Colin says, coming in from the porch with an armload of wood.

  I stuff newspaper and kindling in the grate, stand up, and wipe my hands across the seat of my jeans before collapsing on the couch. I’ve been wondering when he’d bring this up.

  Colin lights the fire, then comes to sit beside me. “I travel, quite a lot, for my business. The lodge is Shelby’s department. I buy and sell property. Small hotels, mostly. That’s how I make a living.”

  “I see.”

  “So when I’m away, I always check in. Tell them where I am and when I’ll be back.”

  “Okay, so where are you supposed to be now?”

  “Ireland.”

  “Then I’ll have to send you back with a shamrock,” I say. “Or this.” I pick Anna’s card off the coffee table and hand it to him.

  “You don’t let things get you down, do you?” he says. “Or maybe
you do, but don’t show it.”

  There’s no answer for that. “Tell me about your wife,” I say.

  He sighs. “I’d rather tell you about Shelby.”

  Guilt taps a finger on my conscience. I push it away. It’s not my job to worry about Colin’s common-law wife.

  Is it?

  “Sure, go ahead.” I plump a pillow and settle back.

  “I was a mess when we met. My marriage was over and my self-esteem was ten feet under. Shelby dug it up, nourished it. She helped me believe in myself again and I owe her for that. We traveled, we built up the business. Then we drifted apart. Probably my fault—most things are—but we don’t do anything together any more. We’re a couple of strangers who share the same house.”

  Do they still share a bed?

  Colin puts his hand on my thigh and I trace the veins with my finger. “Looks like an old man’s hand, doesn’t it?” he says, smiling. “Shelby’s hands are smooth.”

  “She’s young.”

  “That’s the problem,” Colin says. “The age difference between us is bigger now than it was when we first met.”

  “Yes!” I punch the air with my fist.

  Colin leans back, startled. “What?”

  “You. You’re a man who finally gets it.”

  “I am?”

  Trying not to sound foolish, I explain my hangup over middle-aged men and younger women, and I’m barely finished when Colin grabs me. His mouth silences mine.

  I guess he understands.

  “Why didn’t you ask Sophie for my address at Keith’s party?” I say, coming up for air.

  Colin kisses my nose. “I didn’t think you’d want to hear from me.”

  “But when Sophie invited you for lunch—”

  “—I took a chance. I had to see you. I wanted to see if that old magic’s still there. It is, isn’t it, Jilly?”

  I nod, too choked up to speak.

  “Then do you suppose,” Colin says, “we could pull off a miracle and turn back the clock?”

  “Why not?” I bleat. “All it takes is a screwdriver.”

  Colin puts a hand on my lips.

  Oh shit, I’ve done it again.

  “Jilly?”

  “Yes?”

  He unbuttons my shirt. “Shut the fuck up.”

  * * *

  Colin asks to see my work. “I still don’t understand what you do, exactly,” he says. So I lead him into my office, pull out my portfolio and fire up the computer.

  “These are great,” he says, thumbing through my Archibald sketches.

  “We have wild parrots living here,” I say.

  “You’re having me on.”

  “Am not.”

  “Prove it.”

  “It’ll mean going outside.”

  He shivers. “If those birds can take it, so can I.”

  I bundle Colin into one of Alistair’s old ski jackets and a pair of warm gloves and take him outside.

  “Look, up there.” I point to the top branches of a tall silver maple in my neighbor’s side yard.

  With no leaves to disguise them, the parrots stand out like green gauntlets. Obligingly, they squawk, as if to show they’re not aberrant bluejays or mutant crows.

  “How do they survive?” Colin asks. “This isn’t exactly the tropics.”

  “They’ve acclimated. They’re all over—San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta.” I grin at him. “Here, in balmy Connecticut.”

  “What do they eat?”

  “Birdseed, nuts, fruit. Last fall, I saw ten of them gorging on Lizzie’s pear tree.” I pause. “Which reminds me. We’d better get a move on. We’re going there for dinner.”

  “Will she serve pears?”

  “Only if we show up wearing feathers.”

  * * *

  The McKennas’ house is ablaze with lights, including those still in the evergreens and there’s a wreath, trailing pine cones and berries, clinging to the front door. By American standards, the house is old—built just after the Revolution—with narrow clapboards, a massive chimney, and haphazard additions whose proportions shouldn’t work, but do because, as Fergus often points out, builders back then knew how to build houses.

  “Currier and Ives,” Colin says. “All it needs is a sleigh—”

  “—and a couple of horses.” I climb out of the car and my feet crunch on corrugated snow.

  “Hang on,” he says, taking my arm.

  Lizzie’s front porch is guarded by twinkling rhododendrons the size of woolly mammoths whose leaves—starched by the cold or perhaps embarrassment over wearing Christmas lights in March—have curled into pencils. Frost rimes the edges of ivy and reminds me of salt on the rim of a margarita glass. I hope Fergus is in full bartending mode because I could use a stiff drink. I’m a bit worried about Colin meeting my friends. Suppose he doesn’t like them … or they don’t like him.

  * * *

  “Why didn’t you warn me he was this good looking?” Lizzie says the minute she and I are alone in the kitchen. Fergus has taken Colin off to meet the gang—Lizzie’s daughter, Paige, and her husband, Joel; Harriet and Beatrice. The kids are playing, noisily, upstairs.

  “I take it you approve?”

  She grins. “Can I have a turn?”

  “This one’s all mine,” I say, relaxing. “Besides, you’ve got Fergus.”

  Lizzie pulls a face and hands me a plate of mini quiches, hot from the oven. “Feed these to the masses and bring me a drink. Fergus is making margaritas.”

  “Thank you, God.”

  “No, thank Beatrice. She brought the tequila.”

  A burst of laughter erupts from the living room and I hear Beatrice say, “—because changing lawyers in the middle of a case is worse than swapping deckchairs on the Titanic.”

  “She’s in good form,” Lizzie says.

  I lean against the doorway and study Harriet’s new partner. Wearing a shapeless tweed jacket, baggy linen pants, and topsiders with no socks, Beatrice French looks more like an upscale bag lady than the highly-paid chemist she really is. Sturdily built, with cropped salt-and-pepper hair, Bea has unremarkable hazel eyes, a nose that’s too long to be called elegant, and a radiant smile that transforms her face from plain to stunning. Her humor and kindness are legendary. I can see why Harriet loves her. Colin’s at the buffet table, talking to Joel. I unload Lizzie’s hors d’oeuvres and ask how he’s doing.

  “Fine,” Colin says. “Joel’s telling me about Claudia’s squirrels.”

  “Really?” I turn to Lizzie’s son-in-law.

  “Don’t read too much into this,” he says, “but the guys in marketing would like to see more. Do you have any?”

  “A couple. I’ll send them to you next week.”

  Kids swarm through the room. Beth, her younger brother Tyler, and Anna are squealing and laughing and being pursued by the pink-faced nanny from Holland. A brass candlestick goes flying off the credenza. Lizzie walks by, picks it up, rubs it against her thigh, and puts it back.

  Under his breath, Colin says, “Are the children always this noisy?”

  “No, they’re usually much worse.”

  He makes a noise in his throat.

  “I’m kidding,” I say.

  “They’re not eating with us, are they?”

  Fergus claps Colin on the back. “Heaven forbid,” he says. “They’ve had pizza and ice cream upstairs. Probably wrecked the joint by now.”

  Lizzie calls out from the kitchen. We’re to take our seats at the table. Paige asks Harriet how things are going at the courthouse and this launches another round of Bea’s legal jokes.

  Everyone laughs, but Colin barely smiles.

  Beatrice leans across the table. “Are you an attorney?”

  “I run a hotel.”

  “In that case,” she says, rubbing her hands with obvious glee, “have you heard the one about the innkeeper’s daughter?”

  I try to catch Bea’s eye but she’s off and running and once started, there’s no stopping her.
Harriet, glowing in pearls and green silk, intervenes by asking Colin about the lodge.

  “It must be fabulous to live in a house as old as that,” she says.

  After a couple of false starts, he loosens up. So, finally, do I, especially when he has everyone chuckling with a story about two elderly couples from California who muddled up their room numbers and climbed into bed with the wrong spouse.

  “Don’t the locks work?” Fergus asks.

  “Not always. It’s a really old house.”

  Three scrubbed, shiny-faced, pajama-clad children are ushered in by the nanny to say goodnight. Anna hugs her mother and blows me a kiss. “What did the snail say when he rode on the turtle’s back?” she says.

  Harriet groans and nudges Bea. “See, I told you it would rub off.” She turns to her daughter. “Okay, what did the snail say?”

  “Wheeeee!”

  I laugh so hard, soup threatens to come out my nose.

  When we’re through stuffing ourselves with boeuf bourguignon and debating the merits of restoring old houses, Paige and Harriet decamp to the kitchen.

  They return with a cake.

  Fergus sings Happy Birthday. The others chime in and I blush.

  Colin says, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I forgot.”

  “Jill’s lying,” Lizzie says. “She’s in denial.”

  Chapter 18

  Sands Point

  March 2011

  We light the candles and watch one another undress, and for once, I’m not ashamed of my middle-aged body. Tonight my hips aren’t wide, they’re generous. My soft stomach is smooth and sensuous, and I’m proud of my full breasts that never passed the pencil test. Colin runs his fingers over them, around my nipples, teasing them to attention. He traces circles on my belly and probes between my legs, pushing them apart and licking me until I feel like a glove being turned inside-out, one finger at a time.

  I lose track of my orgasms.

  Giddy and helpless and covered with sweat, we collapse in a tangle of arms, legs, and sheets. Colin looks at my alarm clock. “Is this the right time?”

 

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