Don't I Know You?

by Marni Jackson

  He flipped back to my stories and ticked the phrase “lozenge-shaped” to describe a patch of sunlight. He approved of my yearbook’s typeface. “It’s Dutch, from the seventeenth century. Not often used these days.” He liked my description of crows on a hydro wire looking like musical notes on a staff, “although crows are not really round, are they?”

  I found his attention to my lines—more attention than I had devoted to them in the first place—both pleasing and unsettling. It also made me acutely aware of my outfit that day, the blue-and-white capri pants and a blue sleeveless top with white rickrack along the bottom. For the first time I questioned my fondness for things that matched.

  “I like that,” he said pointing toward the white trim. “Does it have a name?

  “Rickrack.”

  “Rickrack.” He smiled.

  “My mother sews. She’s always adding stuff to my clothes.”

  “You’re lucky. I have an embellishing mother too.”

  Then L’Orren banged through the screen door behind us, impatient for her appointment. She carried a thick three-ring binder and smelled of patchouli oil. I ducked past her into the coolness of the foyer.

  Before lunch I went into the gallery to play the piano as usual and found John Updike examining one of Horatio Walker’s tornado-green landscapes. He beckoned me over.

  “There’s more than a little Constable going on here, don’t you think?”

  Why did he assume I understood all his references? Didn’t he know any normal seventeen-year-olds?

  “Especially that figure in the red hunting jacket,” he said, pointing to a man on horseback, scarcely visible.

  “Well, seeing things is not my forte,” I said.

  “What makes you think so?”

  Then I told him about the failed red stairs in the forest.

  “Are you sure about that? Why don’t you show it to me?”

  Reluctantly, but already excited, I went upstairs to the dorm, where I had turned the botched canvas against the wall. I brought it down to John Updike, who held it at arm’s length for some time. I had to look away. I saw nothing in it but turbulent, vegetal mud, with a raw geometry of scarlet in the middle, a gash.

  “I like what you chose to paint,” he began carefully. “The way it juxtaposes the human and natural worlds.”

  “You mean the barn and the trees?”

  His hand floated across the bottom of the canvas, as if painting over it.

  “The foreground is a little nebulous, but the overall sense of gloom is good.”

  “The forest makes me nervous.”

  “That much is clear.”

  “I don’t hate this part”—I pointed to a troubled triangle of sky visible through the tree branches—“even though it’s that weird yellow.”

  “You’re very adventurous. A chrome-yellow sky would never occur to me.”

  “Well, I only brought eight tubes of paint. Some of the others have that many different shades of red.”

  He gave the canvas back to me.

  “I know a little something about this, you know,” he said. “I spent a year at art school in England after college. If you like, I could help you. You shouldn’t give up on this so easily.”

  Was he saying that my writing was hopeless?

  “I don’t know. Art Week’s technically over.” In the next room, the waitresses dashed the cutlery onto the long tables, setting up.

  “Let’s go find your stairs after lunch. I could use the walk.”

  “Okay. Maybe Emilio would lend me extra paints.”

  “I wouldn’t involve Emilio if I were you. Meet me down by the mailboxes, where the lawn ends.”

  I raced back upstairs, where L’Orren was sprawled on her bed, writing in a notebook. She gave me a searching look but I said nothing, only changing out of my capris into something that would protect my legs in the woods.

  * * *

  Lunch was salmon patties, potato salad, and the fat, cushion-shaped tomatoes that Emilio grew behind the painting studio. John listened politely to the war widow beside him as she discussed the architecture of Normandy. He sent me a look, not quite a wink. Then everyone drifted away for Individual Work Period. I gathered up my paints and canvas and went down to the mailboxes. All empty.

  He had changed into a polo shirt with a logo on the pocket, a little black man golfing. His forearms were golden-haired and deeply tanned; this was from walking on the beach, he said. He and his family lived near the ocean, north of Boston. His wife, Mary, stayed at home with their four children.

  “Holy cow,” I said, “that’s a lot.”

  He laughed. “Yes, it is. That’s partly why we left Manhattan for the suburbs. That and the fact that New York is overstocked with writers and agents and other weisenheimers.”

  The forest, crosshatched with deadfall and nettles, was not easily penetrated. I showed him the shy white three-petaled trilliums, the “provincial flower,” illegal to pick. We struggled on.

  I had a moment of panic when I couldn’t find the stairs. Had I invented them? But once we had leaped over a boggy ditch, there it was, the ghost barn with its dark cavity. One slumped wall remained, like the hindquarters of a lame animal.

  “I see what you mean,” Updike said. “Nice.”

  As I set up my easel he sat nearby on a stony ledge, the remnants of some enclosure. The staircase seemed duller and less meaningful to me than before.

  “If I can suggest something,” he said. “When you look at it, try to banish the words ‘stairs’ or ‘barn.’ Just keep looking and let what you see flow onto the canvas.”

  I did as he said and it helped. I lost track of the literal thing and only received its presence in the dappled, trembling light of the forest. The stairs became shrine-like—an Incan altar or a broken letter of the alphabet, some forlorn human shape rising out of green decay.

  John sat in silence as I painted. Not silence—birds darted among the treetops and sang their repetitive, ardent songs. We shared a spell, the charm of work going along. I no longer felt apart from things.

  When we emerged from the forest I held the newly wet canvas away from my white pants. I stole another glance at it; yes, it was better, it was all right now. It might even be the beginning of a story, although its meaning was still obscure to me.

  As we crossed the deep sward of grass I saw with a sinking heart that Emilio was in his glass-walled studio, painting. He glanced up and gave us a curt nod.

  “See you at dinner,” John said with a little salute as we parted.

  * * *

  That night, after the expedition to the Shell station to throw stones at the sign, as everyone was heading for bed, John Updike came to the foot of the stairs.

  “Miss McEwan?” he called up to the dorm. I think he meant this as a joke about our teacher-student relationship.

  I came halfway down the stairs.

  “I brought these for you.”

  He handed me a short-story collection, including one by him, and a slim anthology of Canadian poetry called Love Where the Nights Are Long. “I just reviewed this,” he said, wagging the poetry, “and thought you might like it.”

  I thanked him and went back up to the dorm, where I kept my light on long after the others had fallen asleep. First I read his story, about a teenage boy who worked as a cashier at the A&P. Three girls in bathing suits come in and cause a stir. There wasn’t much to it. And it had so many details, especially about the way one girl let the straps of her suit fall down her shoulder. Did he see me in such detail? The thought made me nervous.

  I opened the poetry book. P. K. Page, Irving Layton, Milton Acorn, Al Purdy, Leonard Cohen. “As the mist leaves no scar on the dark green hill/ So my body leaves no scar on you/ nor ever will…” In school they taught us only British or American authors, and I didn’t know that such writing, full of snow and longing and places that I recognized from my own life, was allowed. The love poems struck me with the force of samizdat, something clandestine and illega
l.

  The next day, I found a picnic table near Emilio’s studio, where I set up my portable green Olivetti to do some serious work. Not the boring details of five minutes in my boring day, here in Doon where nothing happened; instead I was going to write a play about three women—but in fact, they were all aspects of one woman! The “real” woman sits on a bench at the front of the stage and does nothing. Behind her, two women talk to her, representing her hidden thoughts and everything she can’t bring herself to do or be. I had read a play by Harold Pinter, and had seen a Little Theatre production of Edward Albee, so this premise felt modern and edgy to me. I wanted to write something out of the ordinary to impress John Updike.

  “This is an intriguing start,” he said when I showed him the three pages I had managed to type. “But don’t forget that in the theatre, things happen. It might be a good idea to include an event.”

  He was right. It was a play in which absolutely nothing took place. The woman never even left her bench! But hadn’t that worked for Samuel Beckett? Didn’t he bury one of his characters up to the neck in sand? What about his play where one character is always saying, “Well, shall we go?” and then nobody moves? I flounced up to my dorm and pulled out my canvas with the whirling pine tree. Screw writing. I could always paint.

  “Miss McEwan?” John called up the stairs after lunch, which I had skipped. I showed myself at the top of the stairs.

  “How about a walk?”

  I said nothing, but went and got my insect repellant, and also my red jacket with the navy patch pockets and the nylon hood rolled up inside the collar. I came down the stairs, vaguely aware that the other students might notice us slipping off during Individual Work Period. We headed across the back lawn without saying a word, complicit already, and trudged up the road, cresting the hill, where we would soon be out of sight of the others.

  The cicadas shrieked. When I looked back at the house and the cottages behind it, that little world seemed somnolent and far away. I tried to restrain myself from chattering nervously. I had already alluded to Larry.

  “Your boyfriend must be missing you,” John said.

  “He’s not actually my real boyfriend,” I answered, feeling it at once as the treachery it was.

  “Oh?”

  “I just don’t want to hurt his feelings.”

  “That doesn’t sound promising.”

  Two could play this game, I thought, turning toward him.

  “Your wife must miss you too. With all those kids.”

  “Yes. But I think she’s also secretly relieved to run the house as she likes when I’m away.”

  “Larry writes me every day,” I said, rolling my eyes. My callousness knew no bounds.

  We reached a cemetery and turned into it. The path faded into uncut grass and scatterings of wildflowers, yellow and white. Most of the old tombstones were drifting down into the earth. A bunchy-looking tree stood in the middle of the cemetery, laden with small green apples. We sat under it. I had on my second-favorite seersucker shorts and was careful to avoid any mushy fallen ones.

  “Did you get a chance to read any of that poetry?” he asked.

  “Yes, I read it all, last night.”

  “And?”

  “I loved it.”

  “Good. I’ll give you more.”

  “And I read your story about the A&P boy too. It’s very well written.”

  At this he smiled.

  “Burlington has an A&P too,” I added.

  In the shade of the tree, the ground was a little damp. To avoid getting a wet spot on my shorts I jumped up and went over to a tombstone and read the epitaph aloud. “‘Here Lies our Belov’d Annabelle/Who Is with the Angels Now.’ Look at the dates,” I said; “she was only fourteen years old when she died.”

  He came over to read it and we stood together, arms touching. As I brushed away some vines that were creeping over the inscription, he took my hand and inspected the back of it.

  “What’s this?”

  “Warts,” I said. I withdrew my hand. “I’ve had them since I was ten.” There were three on my ring finger, small and white, scarcely noticeable, but I was self-conscious about them.

  “In the Middle Ages, people thought warts were caused by someone putting a curse on you, and that a charm could cure you too.”

  “Witches, you mean.”

  “For instance, they thought that driving nails into an oak tree could prevent a headache, or that wearing a ring made from the hinges of a coffin could heal cramps.”

  He ran his fingers over the pale bumps with their mottled, brainlike surface. “What do you think—shall I try?”

  “I don’t know. The doctor burnt them with some frozen liquid stuff last year but they just grew back.”

  He brought the back of my hand to his lips. That’s when I got scared. The sound of a truck laboring up over the hill, unseen, grew louder. I turned and began walking quickly toward the gate.

  “But you have to believe in the spell, or nothing will happen,” John said, right behind me.

  “What is it with you and things happening?” The truck driver with his load of lumber sped past us without a glance at this ill-matched couple walking single-file in the afternoon heat.

  “It’s a perfectly good beginning for a play, Rose,” John said. “You just need to keep working on it.”

  When we reached the grounds of the school, we made our separate ways into the house, him through the back door. It was understood that we had embarked on something secretive. Up in the dorm, L’Orren was sitting cross-legged on her bed writing in her notebook with a thick-nibbed fountain pen.

  “Where were you?” she asked. That girl did not beat around the bush.

  “I went down to the bridge for a walk. I’m having trouble with my opening scene.”

  “We missed you at lunch,” she said unconvincingly.

  It soon became evident that no one in our class was a writer of any real promise, so John busied himself organizing entertainment to fill our evenings. He found some National Film Board shorts in the parlor cabinets, and we screened them on a tacked-up bedsheet in the rec room. There were two live-animation, stop-motion films called Neighbours and A Chairy Tale by Norman McLaren—little comic parables about the childishness of human conflict. Like the love poems they made a deep impression on me about what is possible in art. I didn’t think playfulness and humor were allowed.

  We found some records on the basement shelves too, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, and Ravel’s Bolero. L’Orren and the novelist danced around the Ping-Pong table to the orgasmic pulse of Bolero, eyes closed, waving their arms like seaweed, a sight that mortified the rest of us.

  Earlier that day L’Orren had spent a good two hours with John, going through her narrative cycle of poems about an Inuit woman who wants to become a hunter like the men, but is stoned to death by her relatives instead. For some reason the two of them met in the greenhouse. I could see them both from my perch on a window seat in the dorm. I was working on my assignment that day, a descriptive scene about nature using no figures of speech. This I found challenging, as I believed similes and metaphors to be the sine qua non of fine writing.

  I had a good view of her facing John, braiding and unbraiding her hair. Through the streaky glass I could see him, occasionally laughing, tipping back in his chair. After a long time L’Orren left the greenhouse and strode toward the house, hugging her binder with a hopeful, preoccupied air.

  I had moved over to my bed by the time she came into the dorm.

  “How was your meeting?” I asked.

  “A-mazing. He wrote his thesis on Robert Herrick and I have this whole sonnet cycle about the metaphysicals.”

  I worked all afternoon and sat at the opposite end of the table from John at dinner. He looked tired and bored. The war widow was sitting next to him, talking steadily, sometimes tapping the back of his hand. I felt sorry for him, stuck with all these amateurs. I left the table before dessert was served and in the hall I heard h
is chair scrape back.

  He caught up to me by the big newel post at the bottom of the stairs.

  “Miss McEwan. Feel like an excursion later on?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe. If I get my work done.”

  “Work now, then meet me at the greenhouse at ten. Wear something warm.”

  L’Orren came into the hallway and gave us a look.

  “Prepare to lose!” said John, and he headed downstairs to play Ping-Pong with her and Axel, the claymation man. But instead of finishing my story I left the house and walked down to the bridge to watch the swollen river run. Then I came back to the house to use the communal phone in the hall to call Larry.

  He was working in his dad’s car dealership for the summer and he missed me tons, he said. “There’s a brand-new 1961 LeSabre here with room in the back for both of us,” he said.

  “I miss you too,” I said wanly, although it wasn’t the least bit true. This is how you marry the wrong person, I told myself.

  “I have to go now, Larry, I’ve got work to do.”

  “Bye, doll,” he said. “Be good, and if you can’t be good, be careful.”

  * * *

  “You’re not going to read late again are you?” said the war widow, who slept in the bed next to me. It was almost ten p.m. She had her hair up in pink brush rollers and wore a quilted blue housecoat and sock-slippers with leather soles.

  “Actually, I think I’ll read downstairs for a while. I’ll just take a blanket.”

  “You won’t need insect repellant in the parlor,” she observed. I had my sneakers on and a roll-up stick of 6-12 in my hand.

  “The screen door has holes in it,” I said, and gently closed the door. I almost flew down the stairs; I was about to write my first love poem, my first Best Canadian Short Story. The narrative of the night, rich with similes and metaphors, raced ahead of me. All I had to do was catch up to it.

  * * *

  The lights were still on in the painter studio, where I could see someone moving around. Emilio probably, he liked to work at night. I circled around the back of the lawn to the greenhouse, which was dark. No sign of John. I thought about Larry, and my parents, and felt a little sick. But maybe he just wants to talk, I thought. Maybe he’s just missing his family.