“Do you see microscopic things in the sky?” Andrea asked me.
I looked at her and laughed. “What did you just say?”
“When you look at the sky, do you see things like tiny black threads?” Andrea paused, squinting. “I guess they’re distortions of your eye. It’s like you have to look a certain way at the surface of your eyes.”
I stared at the sky, so bright and pure, its blueness verging with the sea. I saw nothing at first. Then I stared harder and narrowed my eyes. Black filaments, like strands of hair, rose and fell into the ocean. I blinked, and the black threads swooped like a flock of birds.
“There are also these points of light,” Andrea said.
I looked until the sky began to sparkle slowly. Little crosses or stars. I laughed and told Andrea I was seeing visions. I felt happy in the way you do when another world has been opened to you.
“This is how I occupy myself when I’m feeling bored,” Andrea said.
I stretched out and closed my eyes, sinking further into the warm oblivion of sun and sand. My eyelids could not shut out the radiance, and I felt I was dreaming, my body turning into light and air. When I opened my eyes, I saw the same view of beach and sky, more vivid and distinct than anything I could have imagined or remembered.
Andrea’s voice was as low and insistent as the surf receding from the shore. “Do you sometimes have moments,” Andrea said, “in which you’re walking down a street and everything is normal, but then for no reason at all everything takes a turn and things become unreal? It’s like you’re more distant from the world. Detached. And everything is new, more present. It’s like the surfaces of things have been peeled away, and you’re seeing something, trying to understand it, for the first time.” She picked up a pebble and placed it in the palm of her hand. “I don’t know why I’m saying this,” she said. She searched in the sand for more pebbles, and then showed them to me. “What do you think?”
There were three pebbles in her hand, a translucent yellow, a rose, and a milky gray. “Very pretty,” I said.
“I think I’ll take these home.”
“Are you going to look for seashells?”
“I’m not so interested in those.”
It was midafternoon by the time we crossed over the breakwater again and returned to town. When we were two blocks away from the colony, I spotted Martin ahead of us, turning down Laurel Street. I quickened my pace, hoping to catch up with him, but Andrea would not be hurried, and I had to slow down. We drew closer, and I realized I had been mistaken. It was not Martin at all but someone taller and thinner, with a frayed satchel and a patch of fabric on the seat of his pants. The man walked slowly ahead of us, like a convalescent, a gentleness about him that made me want to step lightly behind. An older woman approached, and he stopped to talk to her, showing her his book.
“Martin!” I said, and he turned around to look at us. Even now, I don’t know why I had ever doubted it was him. Yet he had seemed different walking up the hill alone. The woman said good-bye, smiling at me as she passed.
“You know,” Martin said, his eyes widening slightly as he tapped me on the arm with his book. “I wanted to tell you something. Something to do with a discovery of mine about the seaness of the sea.”
“What is it?”
“Oh, it’s too long to go into now.”
“What are you reading?”
He showed me the cover of his book.
“But you’ve already read The Waves,” I said.
“Well, you know,” he said, shrugging slightly. “It’s the novel of despair.”
I laughed, and we talked about Virginia Woolf as Andrea walked silently beside us. When we arrived at the colony, Andrea moved away without saying good-bye, and I felt sorry for having forgotten her. “Andrea,” I said, “are you going already?”
She put the can of Coke she had been drinking into the trash. “Well, I can go,” she said in her quiet, acerbic way, and she climbed the stairs slowly and retreated to her studio.
In April, the visual artists at the colony had a group show at the local art museum. Everyone crowded into the Driftwood Tavern for food and drinks an hour before the opening. Tea candles spread out before us like stars, and I sat between Martin and Andrea, the three of us looking down the long table at the other artists immersed in conversation. All these lit, transmuted faces. A napkin caught on fire in front of me, and I stared at it until a filmmaker extinguished it in his hands. Everyone clapped. When we asked if he had burned himself, he said that his skin was resistant to flames.
Martin was intently cutting his chicken when he asked Karine, who sat across from him, “If you could push the art button or the happiness button, which would you choose?”
“The art button, of course,” she replied coolly. “Who here believes in happiness?”
Then I asked, “Who do you think is happiest here among us?”
Martin began to rank the people at the table, from the most depressed to the most happy. He put me toward the bottom of the list near the people who we knew were manic-depressives, and he put himself toward the top. When he mentioned Andrea’s name, I glanced at her, wondering if she was listening, but she only continued eating her steak and sipping her wine with the calm inevitability that marked everything she said or did. “Andrea is healthy and immune!” Martin declared. “She goes to the top of the list!”
“How do you know that, Martin?” Andrea said quietly, looking at him. “You don’t know me. Or anyone else at this table. How can you know something like that?”
Martin’s eyes softened, and the rest of us fell silent. We could hear the uneven patter of rain outside, and from the window we saw silver glints falling. A few, including Martin, pushed back their chairs and went out to smoke, and I whispered to Andrea that Martin was only teasing.
“Susan, I would be grateful if you didn’t tell Martin my business,” she replied.
As we walked to the museum, Andrea stayed close beside me, carrying her funereal umbrella. “What is it you don’t like about Martin?” I asked her.
“He talks too much.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
Andrea looked at me. “Martin says a thing, but it doesn’t mean he believes it.”
“You don’t trust him.”
“Charming people are always the worst.” We had arrived at the museum, but Andrea informed me that she was going home.
“But we just got here. Shouldn’t you be at your own opening?”
“It’s a group show. I’m not showing anything anyway.” When I stared at her, she gave a slight shrug. “People like your work, people don’t like your work. Then they stand around telling you why.” She turned away, and I watched as she tread carefully down the street, every now and then glancing down at her feet as though she expected the ground to split open and something to leap out at her.
In the museum, I stared at a defunct radiator whose bland surface Karine had decorated with neat rows of lip imprints. The lips were all the same—Karine’s?—but the color of lipsticks varied like the shades of flowers. “Where did you get the radiator?” I asked when she passed by.
Karine’s eyes widened. “I love your reaction!” she said. “That is precisely the reaction I wanted to get. The radiator is part of this very room. It is a fully functioning radiator. You never noticed it before, did you? I’m so glad. I wanted you to pay attention to the physical space we’re in, to make you really see the things you normally are blind to.”
I nodded, at a loss as to what to say next, and Karine took my hand. “You’re so funny, you know that? Always asking questions and smiling and saying ‘pardon me’ and ‘thank you.’ “ She dropped my hand abruptly and darted away into the crowd.
I saw Martin enter the room, momentarily pause to look around him as he toyed with the loose button on his coat. He was the person whose presence I desired most, yet I could not bring myself to go up to him. I walked around the museum, pretending to look at the art, until he approached me
. “So how many times have you sighed and looked up at the sky today?” he asked, lifting the end of my scarf and placing it on top of his nose.
“What did you just say?” I was worried that my scarf smelled of rain or mildew.
“My God, you only hear half the things I say to you, isn’t that right?” He laughed. “I’m too fast for you! I’m running circles around you!” And right there in the museum, he began to run in place. “So where has your plucky companion gone off to?” he asked, coming to a sudden stop.
“Andrea?”
“Your chatty friend and I have butted heads before. Do you know she tried to slam the door on my finger when I visited her studio?”
“She values her privacy.”
It was too crowded to talk in the museum, and we left the show early, heading back toward the colony. “Andrea is like a stone,” Martin said. “I don’t know what’s worse. Is it better to be numb to the world or overly sensitive to it?”
I stopped. “It’s better to feel too much, of course.” Martin looked back at me in surprise, and I laughed and took his arm. We walked back to my studio like this, my arm linked through his.
“I always think there’s something occult going on whenever I pass by your place,” he said as he entered, looking around him. He sat down at my desk and opened my drawers, examining their contents before slamming them shut again. He got up to inspect the books on my mantel, and when I returned with cups of tea, he was slipping a paperback into his coat pocket. “I’m stealing your Maupassant,” he informed me.
“All right,” I said, handing him his cup. I hadn’t any clean spoons, and he stirred his tea with a pen lying on the coffee table. “That isn’t sterile,” I said gravely.
“Ha! I am not a sterile person!” he declared, and he leaned over to kiss me. It was lovely and strange to finally touch him. His skin was soft and warm, smelling of cloves and soap and cigarettes, and I could do nothing to make the sensation less immediate, my mind slower than my body, as if emerging from a thick fog. Martin pulled me toward him, then just as suddenly released me, climbed over the futon, and yanked the lamp cord out of its socket.
The next morning I looked out my window and saw Martin fixing his car in the parking lot. He had a pitiless look about him, a forthright, unsmiling intensity, and seemed closed off in his own world. It was hard to believe anything had happened between us. I watched as he scraped beneath the hood of his car with methodical ferocity.
We passed by each other in the mailroom, and Martin greeted me with an ironic smile, which I reflected faithfully back. “Hello, Susan.”
“Hello, Martin.”
We retreated to our separate studios.
I couldn’t work. My whole being was set at a higher pitch, but what did this matter to Martin or anyone else? People knocked on your door, entered your space, then ruined your peace. I left my studio and walked down Market Street to clear my head. The sky was vertiginously blue, and the road and trees seemed to glow and vibrate. The locals and tourists were out riding their bicycles, sipping their coffee, reading the daily newspaper, and I felt that I was seeing everything from the eyes of a child or a drug addict. The world’s sharp beauty wouldn’t leave me alone. It was difficult just to cross the street.
I returned to my studio and found a piece of paper wedged into my screen door. It was a scribbled note from Martin, asking if I cared to go fishing.
Martin picked me up that afternoon, and we drove to a beach outside of town. He had brought along an extra fishing rod, which I tried to use, but it took me only a few minutes to tangle my line. Martin cast his rod sternly as if it were a whip, and in the rigid way he held himself I sensed how much he demanded from the world. Nothing would ever be easy for him. Now and then he glanced at me shyly, and I knew he felt self-conscious with me there watching.
I set down my pole and began walking. Tiny starfish had washed up along the shore, their arms contorted at various angles. They were not brittle or light but a surprising weight in my palm, all the water and life still in them. I put them down and kept walking. Sandpipers and gulls moved out of my path.
When I turned around, Martin was a tiny sand-colored figure against the horizon.
The tide was coming in by the time I returned. Tiny fish were leaping out of the water and pockmarking the surface like rain. Martin had caught a thin herring, its back tinged with pink and green. It lay on the sand, and when a wave came in, almost taking the fish away, I scooped it up, its scales smearing onto my hand like silver flecks of paint.
The sky darkened, and it felt uneasy between us as we drove back to the colony. “Sometimes, when I see you outside, you’re entirely different,” I said. “You’re terse and brusque and aggressive.”
“Hey, I have things to do.”
“But other times, you are completely sweet and even mild. It’s like there are two Martins. I never know which one to expect.”
“Well, you need the one in order to appreciate the other. Which do you like better?”
“I like both,” I said hopelessly.
He smiled a little at this, staring ahead at the road. “Do you think we get along?” he mused. He glanced over at me. “Perhaps we don’t truly get along.”
“We do,” I said, but his question hurt.
There was an awkward pause, and then Martin said he had not smoked a cigarette for a week and that he was going crazy. When I suggested candy or nicotine patches, he blew up at me. “Can’t I have this experience on my own?” he demanded. He thought he should go cold turkey. He wanted to savor how difficult it was to quit in order to have the full experience of not smoking.
“You are the most difficult person I know,” I said. “You make everything complex.”
“But I want the opposite of complexity,” he said. “I am trying to have an experience that is not mediated by anything else.” He parked the car, and we sat in gloomy silence. “It’s like this,” he said, taking his key out of the ignition and pressing it against the windshield. “I want to touch this glass, but I am touching this key that is touching this glass. So I am not touching this glass at all.”
“Why do you have to analyze everything? Everything is a struggle for you,” I said bitterly. In truth, I was sick of artists. I was tired of complexity and contradiction, of sensitive people saying remarkable, nuanced things.
Martin opened his door to signal that our conversation was at an end. I trembled as I stepped out of his car. “Well, hasta luego, Susan,” Martin said rather breezily.
“Thank you for taking me fishing,” I said stiffly.
“Yes,” he paused. “Good night, Susan.”
There is a pleasure in having secrets, an inner life that no one knows anything about. I like the impassive face I present to the world even though I may feel a burning inside. To tell someone about my pain is to give it up. Or worse, I would have to see it grow small in the eyes of others. But not to tell anyone means that none of it has a life outside my head.
I gave an informal reading with two other writers in the colony lounge one afternoon at the end of April. Afterward Karine tapped me on the shoulder. “You are a sly one, aren’t you?” she said.
“What do you mean?” I asked, and I thought she knew about me and Martin.
“You’re not as innocent as you look, my dear. You can pretend no longer with me. I always thought you were so nice and shy, but all the while there were these merciless thoughts going on inside your head. I’m afraid of you now.”
I looked into Karine’s eyes. “Everyone always says I’m nice, but they never mean it as a compliment. I’m not nice. I don’t think I am.”
“You don’t think you are,” she said, smiling.
Martin was nowhere in sight. I assumed he had left early because he didn’t like my work and didn’t want to compromise himself by saying untruthful things about it. I felt restless and decided to visit Andrea in her studio. She was knitting a scarf and watching television, a glass of water on the table in front of her. The vase that
I had seen filled with daffodils was now empty of flowers. I sat down beside her, blinking at the television screen, where characters with the same cloying beauty loved each other under the warm California light. During a commercial, I asked Andrea how she could stand watching this stuff.
“I don’t take it too seriously,” she replied.
“But why not watch something good?”
“I get tired of meaningfulness.”
We went out for coffee and afterward sat on the beach, listening to the beating of the ocean. There was a wild, desolate smell of brine and broken shells, and strewn along the shore were moon jellies and huge tuberous roots that looked like serpents disgorged from the sea. Not far from us a ravaged seagull stuck out from the sand.
I forgot myself, then remembered myself.
Andrea was shaping mounds of sand with slow, careful hands. “Do you think there’s something funny about this town?”
The wind was sharp and cold, and I sat up, wrapping my arms tight around me. “What do you mean?”
“I noticed a man sitting at the table next to us at the café. He was looking at me, and I felt peculiar, like maybe I had seen him before. And then I remembered I had seen him before. A week before, he was standing in line behind me at the bank.” Andrea was silent for a moment. “Both times he said something about me.”
“What did he say?”
“In the bank he said, “She looks all right, but you never know.’ And in the café, he said, ‘She thinks highly of herself, doesn’t she?’ “
“Why would he be talking about you?”
Andrea shrugged. “Sometimes when I’m walking down Market Street, I feel there’s a subtle pattern to the people coming toward me and the people following behind. It seems to be random, these people walking on the street, but it’s not. It’s like everyone is pretending to be jogging or walking a dog or looking at a store window, everyone is pretending to be going on with their own lives. But all the while they’re interested, they’re watching me and picking me apart. I always pretend I don’t notice anything, but everyone is just waiting for you to give yourself away. People say terrible things about you.” Andrea’s eyes had a glassy sheen, though her face remained stony and impenetrable.
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