Moon Over Edisto

by Beth Webb Hart

  Mary Ellen went to work at an antique restoration shop on King Street, and she gained a reputation about town for being the master of antique frame restoration. Her employers were a couple who had relocated from Brooklyn, and while they were a bit on the solemn side, they appreciated Mary Ellen and she was grateful to have the chance to use her hands and whittle out her own little niche.

  It had been almost eighteen years since Charles sat her down and broke the news to her. She’d been on a few dates early on, during those first several years, but then she started declining invitations, and finally no more were extended to her. That was that, she’d supposed. Good-bye romance. Hello to the second half of life. The solitary half.

  She’d felt an odd blend of sorrow and satisfaction when she heard that Charles’s law practice went down like the Hindenburg shortly after the divorce. All he wanted to do was live out on Edisto and paint and hole up with his new, young love. Thankfully, Mary Ellen had inherited a little something from her family after her mother’s passing just a year after her father’s, and while she was by no means wealthy, she could certainly live comfortably enough with her salary and her little inheritance.

  She stood at the kitchen sink, looked out at the newspaper on the table in the garden, its pages lifting slightly in the gentle breeze, and the thought crossed her mind: I could buy a ticket and fly up to Julia’s show tonight. To surprise her. But, again, she hated to fly. Every time she’d been to see her, she’d taken the train and it was a good whole day’s trip. Maybe I could just go. Be there by early evening. She finally had a computer and knew how to use the Internet. Preston had set her up with one so she could keep up with them via Facebook. There were sites where you could just go buy a ticket and be gone the same day. She could pop a Valium (she had a few left over from her root canal) and just do it, couldn’t she?

  As she stood at the kitchen sink watching a blue jay in the birdbath in her garden, one of the small panes above her sink shattered. Mary Ellen shrieked and jumped back. She looked down to find the orange rubbery ball in the same cereal dish she had placed in the sink. And there were shards of glass all over her windowsill and countertop.

  She put her hands firmly on her hips and marched right over to Nate Gallagher’s house and rang the doorbell.

  He took a step back when he saw her. She must have been a sight—frizzy hair and bathrobe stained and splattered with berries and breakfast, white eyelet bedroom slippers.

  “Now look here, Mr. Gallagher.” She presented the ball to him and forced him to meet her eyes. “That child on your premises has dropped his ball not only in my cereal bowl while I was eating in the garden but through one of the glass panes of my kitchen window.”

  She could feel the perspiration on the back of her neck. It suddenly felt as muggy as an August afternoon.

  Something clattered to the floor in the back recesses of Nate’s house and he turned back for a moment before facing her again with his jumpy, bulbous blue eyes. Was he suppressing a grin? She could feel a hot redness rising on her neck. Why, the nerve!

  He scratched the back of his neck and squinted. “I . . . uh.” She had never known him to be speechless before. Still, his tone was loud and clipped. He called over his shoulder, “Sky! Get over here.”

  The boy dragged himself to the front door, stopping short of the threshold. He stood behind his tall grandfather and peered out from behind the old man’s elbow where his own hand was cocked on his hip. The child seemed to be trembling. Suddenly, Mary Ellen felt both ridiculous and a little sorry for the chewing-out the kid would receive. “Did you knock out Mrs. Bennett’s window?”

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  “You don’t know, eh?” He shook his head and pointed up the stairs. “Get on up there, and I’ll deal with you in a few minutes.” The boy turned and trudged slowly up the staircase.

  Nate Gallagher took another look at her and started to chuckle. She turned in a huff and walked back toward the sidewalk, calling out to him, “I’ll send you the repair bill.”

  “Fine!” he said. “And I’m sure you’ll threaten to sue me if I don’t pay it, right?”

  Mary Ellen stopped in her tracks. She could feel her temples pulsing. She took a deep breath, refastened her belt, and turned back for a moment. “Perhaps I will,” she said, glaring into his pockmarked face with fury.

  As he slammed the door, she huffed back to her wrought-iron gate. Just as she was unfastening it, Jane Anne Thornton came power-walking down the sidewalk in her wide-brimmed straw hat and her hot-pink running suit, with her little apricot poodle, Daisy, at the end of the hot-pink leash.

  “Why, Mary Ellen,” she said. “You look like a wreck. What in the world have you been doing?”

  Mary Ellen shook her head and muttered that she couldn’t talk now, then she marched back into the house where she caught a glimpse of herself in the foyer mirror—purple-blackish-splattered bathrobe, droopy brown eyes, no makeup, and frizzy gray hair.

  “My word,” she said aloud. “Who in the world is that old woman?”

  CHAPTER 3

  Julia

  Of course . . . you can’t go.” Simon’s voice was fading in and out of her cell phone. She ducked into a quiet alleyway off of Prince Street and stuck her finger in her ear to hear better. Simon was in London visiting his two teenage boys, and she’d been playing phone tag with him for a couple of days.

  “I know.” She swallowed hard and felt her ears pop. She was dizzy from hardly eating anything since Marney’s visit. Or maybe it was her nerves about the opening night of the exhibit. She just hoped there was no panic attack in sight. It had been a year since she’d had one.

  “You’ve got your Fulbright, we have our trip to Istanbul.” He exhaled and she could tell he was smoking, a habit he seemed to fall back into each time he ventured to London. “It’s impossible, Jules. And frankly, the farther you stay away . . .” He faded out for a moment. “Southern gothic dysfunction . . .” Then he was gone. Call disconnected.

  She stared at her iPhone, at Simon’s image on the screen. He was feeding the mallards in Central Park with his poplin suit pants rolled up to his knees and his canary-yellow bow tie with thin blue stripes untied. He had a kind of spiked, just-rolled-out-of-bed, salt-and-pepper hair she adored. He was looking at her out of the corner of his eye, grinning through glossy red lips as he threw a bread crumb toward the murky water.

  Her phone quacked. It was the ring she’d selected for him.

  “Hey.” She tried to hide the weariness and fear in her voice. Simon didn’t seem to respond very sympathetically to weariness, and he’d never seen one of her full-blown attacks. She had told him about them, but he didn’t really believe her. He claimed she was the one and only artist who had her act together, who was sane and—even more astounding—adept at both order and self-control.

  Plus, she’d issued a fairly clear ultimatum before he departed last week. “Propose by the first of the year or it’s over.” And she didn’t want to add weary and panicked on top of pushy. Especially since he was an ocean away surrounded by well-coiffed prep school moms and young female artists vying for his attention at every turn. Simon was an art dealer—a very successful one as of late, as he recently landed an exclusive relationship with the pop artist David Hockney—and every aspiring artist longed to catch his eye.

  Julia knew Simon wasn’t sold on the idea of marriage. He’d ended a particularly nasty one over a decade ago and was still licking his wounds. Plus, he could hardly keep up with his nearly grown sons and all of their school and sports events. He Skyped every Sunday night with each of them at their separate boarding schools, and she could tell he felt saddened and guilty about the literal and figurative distance between them.

  But Julia was ready to settle down. She was thirty-nine. Her clock had been ticking for years and now more than ever she wanted a lifelong, committed companion and—dare she say it—a child.

  “Your art is your child.” Simon had thrown the remark out a
few months ago like an inexperienced fly fisherman, hoping for a lucky snag.

  She’d taken a deep breath and stared him down with her serious green eyes. “Okay,” he’d said. “You’re not going down that easy, are you?” He’d shaken his head and muttered in his charming British accent, “Blasted maternal instinct.”

  Marriage and children weren’t things she’d always wanted. Her parents’ split had spooked her good, and she took great pride in the fact that she’d been able to make it on her own in one of the most elusive fields in one of the most cutthroat cities in the world. But there was a desire she just couldn’t shake—a desire to be a part of something more than just her individual life, to be a member of a family, to be a nurturer—and time was running out. Time was one of the few factors in life she had very little control over, and she knew when she had to yield to it.

  Simon had wrinkled his thick brows during one of their first marriage/baby conversations, batted his long eyelashes, and narrowed his pale blue eyes. “Ah, Jules, really? I’m too old for all of that diaper changing and stroller lugging. I’d never make it.”

  “You’re forty-nine,” she’d scoffed. Then she listed the new families she knew with fathers over fifty. She came up with three, but one of the men was in the hospital getting over a back operation to repair a crushed disc, so that didn’t really help her case. “I’m sure you’ll survive.”

  SIMON, ON THE OTHER END OF THE PHONE ON THE OTHER side of the ocean, cleared his throat. “I’m sorry I can’t be there tonight.”

  “It’s okay,” she said, but her stomach tightened while she rounded the corner toward Prince Street where the gallery sat two doors down, the enormous paintings in the front window casting square and rectangular shadows on the sidewalk.

  “Call me as soon as it’s over and tell me all about it.”

  “All right. I’m walking in the door now,” she said. “Tell the boys hi for me.”

  “I will, my love.”

  When Julia crossed the threshold into the mod warehouse space, she noticed dozens of white calla lilies around her portion of the exhibit in the far left corner.

  Her phone quacked. It was a text from Simon. Like them?

  They were her favorite. Yes, she texted back. TY.

  He quickly responded, I love you. I know it will be a great night.

  Despite her stomach knot, she smiled at the long lilies like giant celery stalks with white, papery teardrops on the ends.

  “You have quite the admirer,” Ava said. She was the assistant to Kent Risen, who ran the gallery, and she had that typical young, supermodel-fresh-off-a-Milan-catwalk look: jet-black hair pulled back in a sort of 1920s low bun, short silky dark dress, a sort of black and deep purple combination that highlighted her shockingly long legs, high black heels that crisscrossed the Achilles’ and buckled around the ankle.

  Julia felt like an unsleek midget next to Ava. She wore her golden hair down and hadn’t bothered to dye the few gray streaks that had recently surfaced, and she sported her maize-colored, off-the-shoulder cowl-neck dress with a thin, gold chain belt. She should have worn higher heels, but she knew she’d be standing all night, smiling until her cheeks hurt, laughing at patrons’ jokes and answering questions. She went with a slightly scuffed pair of olive-green round-toe boots she’d bought in Paris in her twenties. She just hoped they were so old that they’d come back in style again.

  The art exhibit was titled “Young New York Artists.” She didn’t consider herself a young artist anymore, and she certainly wasn’t a Manhattan native. She was sharing the gallery with four other artists. The two youngest would surely be getting the bulk of the patrons’ and the media’s attention. Etienne’s paintings were surreal—tall men with peacock feathers and French pastoral vistas with bread loafs and chickens and false teeth and missiles coming at the viewer in an almost 3-D effect. Chih-Yang was Taiwanese, and he painted only with black ink on rice paper—his images were of the human body always morphing into some sort of concrete object: a rocket, for instance, or a smartphone. Compared to them her neon geometrical shapes were uneventful. The other artist, Joseph Sanchez, was an old grad school friend and he had made his mark creating 3-D images from found objects. In his current exhibit he had several portraits of presidents. There was an Obama with a bicycle wheel for a head, a George W. Bush with a nose made out of little plastic army men, and a George H. W. Bush on a Lite-Brite screen with a head full of shining little yellow bulbs.

  Julia—quite by accident—was a little bit of a legend in the Manhattan art world and so she wasn’t entirely surprised to be invited to participate in this exhibit. Her legendary status wasn’t so much because of her artwork but more because of two events that were passed around by word of mouth from one struggling artist to the next: Peter Tule, a notoriously successful artist in the early nineties, had tried to force himself on her in his studio (as he had a reputation for doing to his female minions). Julia crashed a large, wet canvas over his head, then stormed out of his studio for good. Tule had to call a friend to help him extricate himself.

  But most notoriously, she had been leading a group of students with another professor on a bicycle tour of lower Manhattan the morning of September 11, 2001. It was a photography class she had taught for a couple of years at Hunter with her good friend and award-winning photographer Jack Ball. They were on Vesey Street near the intersection of Broadway when the first plane hit the tower. She had immediately stopped, rounded up the students she could, and sent them pedaling back uptown toward campus. Jack stayed to photograph the images, the fire and the hole in the tower, like a bullet through the city’s face, and then there were the people who had no other choice but to jump. She remembered Jack screaming when he saw the first one leap. He ran toward the scene but was held back by a fireman. When the second plane hit, they both noticed a straggling student staring up at the two holes in the buildings as if in a kind of trance. Jack handed Julia his camera and ran for the boy as the second tower—the first to fall—came down and the plume of dust started to fill the streets, blinding everyone in its path for several blocks.

  Julia had turned then, surrounded by the thick white dust. She abandoned her bike and ran up Broadway, her hands outstretched, feeling her way around the warm hoods of cars, parking meters, and one street post after the next until she tumbled over a fire hydrant and hit her head on the corner of an old newspaper vending machine.

  She stood for a moment, her heart pounding in her ears, the pain reverberating down her spine, and then she staggered before collapsing in a building doorway, hitting her head once more on a glass door before she was completely out. She woke up some time later—maybe hours—to the sound of screams and sirens. The haze had dissipated somewhat and she could see through it enough to know which way was north. She stood up and staggered up Broadway and away from the inferno until a cabdriver pulled over, took off his jacket, and wrapped it around her head before delivering her to Bess’s old place on the Upper West Side.

  She found out the next day that the student, a daydreamy boy named Antonio Carmine, made it out, but Jack never did.

  WITHIN AN HOUR THE GALLERY WAS FULL OF PATRONS, fellow artists, friends, colleagues, and a couple of critics. Bess and Graham were there. Graham brought some friends from work. Some fellows from Goldman Sachs who thought it might be interesting to do the art scene on a Friday night before having a few appetizers at Nobu. Bess brought some friends from the school board and the Junior League. Julia had painted some of their children’s portraits when she first came to the city and was strapped for cash. They all seemed to be trying hard to act interested.

  “I’ve bought Ice Cubes,” said Bess’s friend Elise. “I’m going to put it in the children’s playroom.”

  Julia looked again at the painting of four rounded squares, one on top of another, in a tall glass. She was glad to see the little red sold dot by the painting’s title. The other artists had already sold a few before the event even started, but she hadn’t. She smiled a
nd chuckled a little. “That’s great. I hope it works for you there.” Julia had envisioned the painting in a funky living room or foyer of a modern office building, but she’d been around enough to know that the people who liked her paintings and the places they intended to hang them were almost always a surprise.

  Her boss, Max Dial, the chair of the Hunter College art department where she taught, shuffled over to her. They both turned to look at her neon-pink painting of a hexagon. “Looking forward to Budapest?”

  “Yes.” She turned to face him. He was a gentleman—not so much like a father figure but more of an older brother. She said what she knew he was thinking. “I know I need to find something new.”

  He nodded kindly. Her work was stale. They both knew it. And she couldn’t spend the second half of her life painting neon-colored geometrical shapes.

  He patted her back gently. “You’ll find it, Julia. I have complete faith in you.”

  She smiled at him.

  “Just don’t let the administrative stuff bury you the way it has buried me.” He was ready to retire, and he was sure she would become the department chair, though there would be a fight as a couple of other professors really wanted the position.

  He put his arm around her. “The poets are right, you know? Time really is a thief.”

  She looked into his watery eyes, and he stepped away, pulling his handkerchief out of his pocket and patting his face. He had lost his wife in a car accident a few years back, and he had yet to come out of his grief. He pointed to a group of critics around one of her paintings toward the back of the gallery. He nodded that way as he stepped toward the door. “Go see your admirers.”

  Julia was making for the group when she realized she was too starving to say another word. She dipped discreetly to the back of the gallery where there was a little kitchenette to pour herself some ginger ale and gobble down a little cheese and fruit so she wouldn’t faint. While she was back there she overheard Juan Weims, the Times art critic who was staring at another one of her paintings, a circle within a circle within a circle in bright yellow, orange, and green.