Say You're Sorry

by Sarah Shankman

  “You don’t say! That’s my family’s pattern, too. What a coincidence.”

  Then, in my mind’s eye, I could see a long table set for twenty-four, Alexander’s silver and mine intermingling. Wedding cake would taste the same from both.

  But then a bright red flag of danger unfurled. For, it warned, this was not only a man, but a handsome man, and a Realtor to boot. Worse than lawyers. More devious than used car salesmen. Lower than pond scum, lower even than architects.

  I stared out at bowered Whitland Avenue, flush with fine old homes. “Let’s go back,” I said. “This neighborhood is far too rich for my blood.”

  Alexander raised his right hand from the wheel and held it out like a traffic cop. “Wait,” he said, then pulled into a driveway which opened through a tall green wall of hedge like a secret door.

  A long looping drive cut through grass which grew ankle-high, old grass, sedge, grass that had never been cleared by the bulldozer, never plowed, ungrazed native grass, grass that had been here before the first English settlers. The apple trees were more than a century old. Plums. Pears. And, at the end of the drive, a stone house which looked as if it, like the grass, had simply sprung from the earth.

  “What is this place?” I wondered.

  “It was part of a farm.” Alexander pointed with long arms in either direction. “All the rest of it was sold off, but this has remained, the house and three acres. The owner died a few months ago, one year shy of a hundred. The place needs work, of course, but it has very good bones. Shall we go inside?”

  I couldn’t. Out of the car, I plopped down on a stone step, oblivious of my good black skirt. I was dizzy with longing and damp with fear.

  This could not be good, the voice inside me said. You didn’t emerge from your cocoon after five years, simply say I want, and then have your heart’s desire handed to you on a plate by a Russian portrait painter, no less, with a cleft in his chin into which your little finger would fit perfectly.

  “Are you all right?” Alexander frowned with concern.

  “I’m overcome.”

  “Ah,” he sighed and sat down beside me. “I thought you’d love the house. What are you afraid of? Tell me.”

  Well, now. That was the question, wasn’t it?

  I was afraid of love. I had loved William and lost him. I had loved my apartment, and it had burned. I had loved Mother, and she had tossed me like a throw pillow through her many marriages. If I allowed myself to fall in love with this house, and something were to happen to it, well, I didn’t think I could go on. I simply couldn’t. Even now, I could hear Father’s rifle racking like distant thunder.

  Finally, Alexander broke my long silence. “Do you tango?”

  “What?”

  “I bet you do.”

  He stood and drew me to my feet, placed a hand at the small of my back, and, humming a familiar Latin tune in my ear, danced me into the house of my heart’s delight.

  *

  I couldn’t afford The House. The asking price was exactly twice my budget, twice what I’d received from the insurance company.

  Alexander said, “You don’t have to pay cash for the whole amount, you know. All you need is a down payment. We’ll get you a mortgage.”

  “Well, that’s a grand idea,” said Jack, Stepfather Number Five, “if you can make the payments.”

  “What do you mean? Isn’t it like rent?”

  It was, except it was considerably more, my rent having been a pittance. Besides, what bank was going to give a mortgage to an unemployed hermit?

  “We could lend you the money,” said Mother, “though if you went back to work, you could easily qualify on your own.”

  “I wasn’t planning on that, Mother.”

  I can hear you thinking, What a lazy woman. But it wasn’t indolence. I just couldn’t. I wasn’t yet ready to go back into the world.

  “Welllll,” Mother drawled. “We’d love to help you, you know….”

  I hated it when she used that tone. My anger got the best of me and I flung words at her. “Alexander said I could get a mortgage, so I’m sure I can.”

  “Alexander?” Mother’s ears perked like a collie’s.

  “Alexander Persoff, my Realtor.”

  “Alexander Persoff, the portrait painter? The one who did Mimsie Stovall’s portrait? And Sally Touchstone’s?”

  “Probably,” I allowed.

  “Oh, Georgie Ann.” Mother swooned. “He’s everyone’s favorite extra man. Very handsome, I understand.”

  “I suppose,” I said. “But why did he lie to me about getting a mortgage?”

  Confronted, Alexander said, “I didn’t quite understand that you’re not employed. And now I see that the income from your investments is not really enough. But don’t worry, Georgie Ann. We’ll find you another house.”

  I didn’t want another house. I wanted the stone house hidden behind the tall hedge, The House Alexander had tangoed me into. The House with the center hall, the big square living room off to the right, behind it a mullion-windowed dining room. I could close my eyes and see the silver dully glinting. Behind that stood a kitchen that needed a Godawful amount of work. On the other side of the hall were a library, two tiny bedrooms, one bath. You had to climb the steep-pitched stairs to see the best part. The whole second floor comprised the master suite. I’d replace the fixtures in the bathroom, tear out the mingy closets, make a dressing room. And there was a huge skylight on the north side.

  The old lady who’d owned it had been a painter, according to Alexander. Yes, I sniffed, there was still a hint of turpentine in the air.

  I wanted this house, oh, how I wanted it. It was meant to be mine. I could feel that in my bones.

  Nevertheless, a’house-hunting Alexander and I went. Suddenly, Georgie Ann the recluse was out and about every day. Alexander and I looked at tiny split-timber Tudors, redwood ranches, a dozen white bungalows with green shutters. We trod scores of sagging porches, inspected rows of sad little fixer-uppers. I became familiar with every nook and cranny of Nashville, with zoning, with the ebb and flow of neighborhoods, with furnaces and air-conditioning and basements and easements.

  But all of it was bootless. For I was not a child who could be placated with a cherry-flavored lollipop when my heart was set upon a hot fudge sundae. At the end of each day, I sank into my own personal Slough of Despond. Then Alexander would cock an eyebrow. “Shall we?”

  “Oh, yes!” I implored.

  And then, we’d fly through Music City’s streets and make that quick turn through the tall hedge like fleeing bank robbers. We’d jump from the car, tango down the walk, onto the front porch, through the door, and up the stairs where we would circle through the master suite before settling down to my portrait.

  What portrait?

  The portrait of me that Alexander was painting, of course.

  The notion had come to him that very first day as the two of us wheeled around that glorious second-story suite.

  “I love this north light,” he’d said. “And it loves you. Be still, yes, there, just for a moment. Let me look. Oh, yes, it’s a match made in heaven, this light and you. If I could just capture what I see, I know my life would be forever changed.”

  Who could say no?

  So I posed for him under that wonderful north light two or three afternoons a week. He stashed the portrait in one of the dark closets upstairs. None of the other Realtors ever found it.

  For that, I was very glad.

  It wasn’t that the painting was shameful. It was art. The thing was Alexander had chosen to paint me nude to the waist, or almost. The top of my right breast was covered by my long blond hair. Then, around my middle, there was the drape of a white dressing gown that seemed, in the narrative of the painting, to have slipped from my shoulders. Behind me, out the window, were the apple trees, the plum, the pear. They were in bloom when Alexander began the portrait. There was fruit before he finished. One glorious afternoon when I was done posing, Alexander fed m
e a handful of sun-warmed plums, the color of bruises.

  The next day, as I sat for him, I imagined what it would be like if Alexander grasped me hard enough to leave such bruises on my upper arms. Not that he had ever touched me, you understand, except for our tangos up the steps and then the occasional adjustment of a curl here, a limb there.

  I cannot describe to you what it is like to sit, day after day, half-naked before a man who considers you with total concentration, but does not, as far as you can tell, desire you. After a while I began to hear a ringing in my ears that I finally recognized as the chanting of cloistered nuns raised in endless adoration to their Lord. Brides of Christ, deprived of those most elemental of human needs.

  As the painting neared completion, Alexander grew more enthusiastic. “This is going to knock them dead,” he crowed. “I can’t wait to see their faces. After this show, just you wait, Georgie Ann…” He paused, and my heart stopped, waiting for the next words. “…I’ll never have to sell another house.”

  That was not exactly what I longed to hear.

  For, by now, of course, as you know, clever reader that you are, I was completely besotted with Alexander.

  I could spend a day on a consideration of any single detail of his person. Take his hair. The heft of those dark strands, the way they whorled back from his temples like lifted oars. The sweet feathering at the nape of his neck. The glistening of clean pink scalp at the part which I longed to taste. The warm sun-baked smell of the dark locks that brushed against my cheek when we tangoed.

  Mother had been right, damn her. She’d promised if I went outside I would find diversion. I had, and now I was not only diverted, but distracted almost beyond bearing. I had Alexander, I had The House, and I had neither.

  Yet, in my mind, I held them close, the two inextricably bound. I filled hour after happy hour imagining life with Alexander in The House. He would paint in our second-floor aerie while I sat and read. I could see us in the kitchen preparing dinner together. I chopped neat little mounds of onions and peppers and garlic while he sautéed and stirred and tasted. There we were, sitting side by side in matching chairs in the living room. I read the front section of the paper, he the last. Upstairs, on a night drenched with rain, we embraced and the room rocked with love, threatened to lift off, to take flight, to soar out above the apples and pears, to knock the plums into jam.

  I carried one of Alexander’s handkerchiefs in my pocket at all times. I had stolen it, of course, when he wasn’t looking. I caressed the fine lawn with my fingers, read like Braille his block-lettered monogram.

  Once, a lifetime ago, back when I was an assistant professor of English, my department chair, an old roué if ever there was one, reached in his pocket in the middle of a department meeting, and pulled out a pair of black lace bikini underpants upon which, absentmindedly, he blew his nose.

  I tried to think that I wouldn’t titillate myself in my solitary hours with a pair of Alexander’s briefs, but, had I the chance, you never know.

  It was about this time that Mother began saying, “You know I love having you here, Georgie Ann. Hope you stay forever.” When I didn’t respond, she said, “Dear, are you really looking for a house, or is there something else going on?”

  As I watched Mother’s mouth, it transformed itself into Alexander’s. You could take a walk upon his bottom lip, it was that generous. The curves of the upper lip were like the fenders of a ’55 Buick. I traced it in my dreams.

  Mother said, “Whatever you’re up to, you have to move forward or backward, darling. Forward, preferably.”

  “Yes, Mother.” I smiled.

  Then came the August day when Alexander announced, “Tomorrow the painting will be finished.” The heat had made a damp cap of his hair, waving it close to his head. He looked like Julius Caesar. “And,” he added solemnly, “I think you ought to know, there’s someone interested in the house.”

  The temperature plunged sixty degrees in an instant. I froze.

  “My house?”

  “I’m afraid so, Georgie Ann. Now, like I said, if you would only go back to work, we could get you a mortgage. Have you thought about it?”

  No. Of course not. I had convinced myself that a miracle would occur. My portrait would bring enough for the down payment on The House. Then Alexander would propose. We would live happily ever after, in The House, of course.

  Alexander said, “School’s about to start soon. Could you ask the university to take you back on? Even part-time, that would be a show of faith for the mortgage company.”

  Go back into the classroom? Speak to sweaty youth about the marriage of true minds? Why, I could no more do that than I could ankle into Kroger’s for canned peaches or plums when all the sweet bounty I ever needed awaited me at The House.

  “No,” I choked. “I can’t.”

  “You ought to think about it, Georgie Ann.”

  Then, before I had time to absorb what Alexander was telling me, August was over, and Labor Day fell quickly behind it, early that year. Sharpened pencils. Back to school. The Season had opened. Mother began planning for her annual opera pilgrimage to New York. Alexander was frantically preparing for his upcoming triumph in Atlanta. When he called, barely once a week now, it was to try to convince me to come to his show. The Callendar Gallery attracted serious collectors, he said. My portrait would be the centerpiece. Everyone would want to meet the model.

  That was out of the question, of course. Step not only into the world, but into the spotlight? All those eyes…. The very idea was preposterous.

  The night of the opening, I drove over to The House. I would sit on the steps and imagine Alexander in his glory. But when I pulled into the drive, the first thing I saw was a little strip attached to the For Sale sign. Sale Pending. I saw red, the blood flooding behind my eyes. My head threatened to explode. I uprooted the sign and tossed it into the trunk of my car. It would suffocate there. It would die. There would be no Sale Pending.

  Nor would I deign to give the matter further consideration.

  I could control my thoughts and my actions. Hadn’t I proved that, long ago? I had come that close to doing away with myself, but I hadn’t. I hadn’t killed William either. I had withdrawn, and with that, had overcome.

  So, calmly, I sat at the top of the stairs, just outside the door of the master bedroom where Alexander and I had passed so many happy hours. I thought of well-barbered men in dark suits, women in small-shouldered dresses of black and gray and taupe three hundred miles away in Atlanta, staring at my breasts. They would do it ever-so-politely, of course, with the soft murmurings with which well-bred people communicate. I imagined their eyes going wide as they looked, and their mouths making little O’s.

  I pulled a plum from my pocket. Mother’s housekeeper had brought it home from the store. I bit into the purple flesh. The juice filled my mouth, not with the nectar of summer but with a tart thin syrup.

  I sat at the top of the stairs until there was no more light, and then I felt my way out, the details of The House familiar as a lover’s bones. Back in my bed at Mother’s, nightmares stalked my sleep. The next morning I couldn’t remember much of them, but I felt queasy, as if a buzzard’s wing had brushed me.

  I held my breath for Alexander’s call. Three days later (three years, three millennia) it came. The show had been a great success, all the work sold. My portrait had gone for its extravagantly hopeful asking price. A Japanese automotive executive was taking it back to his home near Kyoto. I closed my eyes. I could hear temple bells and people murmuring in a foreign tongue.

  “However,” Alexander said, then paused.

  I didn’t wait to hear his next words. I knew what they would be, couldn’t bear to hear them from his lips. I hung up and dialed Charlotte. Then I drove out to The House once more.

  Even though I’d been forewarned, the new sign, with its red banner, SOLD, was a shock. But not for long. I uprooted it and buried it, along with the earlier sign, in my trunk.

  I wa
s sitting at the top of the stairs when Alexander found me, just outside the master suite with the wonderful northern light that I had hoped would someday awaken the two of us, entwined in one another’s arms.

  “I knew you’d be here,” he said.

  “And I knew you’d come.”

  “Georgie Ann, I’m so sorry. But it’s over. You wouldn’t do a thing to stop it, you just sat, frozen, and now the house has been sold.” He dropped a hand to my shoulder. I shrugged it off. He frowned. “You must let it go.”

  I didn’t say a word.

  Alexander sat down beside me. He took my hand. His touch was cold. I could feel the lies that he’d so carefully rehearsed coursing through his blood. They fell from his mouth like little red ice cubes out the refrigerator door.

  “I warned you,” he said, “that someone was seriously interested in the house.”

  I raised my hand and stopped his words with my fingers. Then I stood. “Let’s dance, one last time,” I said, and stood upon the hardwood of the upper hall.

  “Yes.” He smiled. “Let’s.” I could feel his relief. I was going to be a good sport.

  He’d feared, of course, that I would go mad. That I would foam at the mouth. That I would scream and roll on the floor. That snakes would sprout from my head and strike at him. And well he should fear. Had he thought I wouldn’t know?

  That one call to Charlotte was all it had taken to confirm my fears. First Alexander had stolen my image with his paints and brushes and sold it into geishadom. Then he’d used that boon to buy The House. It was that magical north light, he’d told Charlotte. It had changed his life. He simply had to have it for his own.

  Would Alexander be living in The House alone? I’d asked.

  Yes, she said. At least she thought so.

  She was lying about that, I could tell.

  And so, I slowly raised my arms to Alexander’s for one last tango. He held me close. I smelled lemons. I heard the crashing surf. My breasts pressed against his chest, unwanted, unloved. We marched in slow Argentine splendor across the hardwood floor.