One Good Friend Deserves Another

by Lisa Verge Higgins

  “You like the painting.”

  Wendy started. His low voice came from just behind her, like a warm breath against the nape of her neck. She wondered how long he’d been there. When she’d first arrived, the older woman in the next booth selling hand-painted pots had told her that the artist had slipped away for only a moment. Then Wendy had lost herself in the painting before her.

  “I’m stunned, Gabriel.” She mustered her professional voice, a nice solid wall between them. “I’ve been standing here trying to figure out how you captured the light so well.”

  “I washed the whole thing with a pigment I found in this art store in Rockport, Massachusetts,” he said. “It has crushed seashells in it. Gives it a sheen.”

  He came to her side, blocking her from the frisky gusts of summer wind that billowed the sides of the tents and sent crumpled food wrappers skittering along the grass. He wore dark jeans and a black graphic T-shirt, but she couldn’t see any more out of the corner of her eye, with the wind whipping her hair around her face.

  She focused on the large canvas propped up on an easel before her, depicting a collection of ordinary glassware. Four glass vases clustered on a windowsill. One was small and sleek and crystal clear. Another was classically shaped but shockingly scarlet. Exotic curves marked the third, in emerald green. The last stood behind, tall and arrow-straight, an earthy shade of amber. It was a simple painting of bottles. But light poured in through the painted window and seeped through the various colors, setting each one aglow. The whole effect was one of glorious contrast, of beautiful fragility.

  “This reminds me a little of Derondi Raffick,” she murmured. She sensed the turn of his attention. “You wouldn’t know him. I’m afraid he’s struggling still. I met him when I worked in the city. His work was more abstract than this.” She’d been unable to sell Derondi to anyone but herself. Her inability to close a sale was the fundamental fault that hastened the end of her art gallery career. “He used bold, tropical colors but he painted them with clarity and an edge, as if they were cut from stained glass. This painting reminds me of that.”

  It reminded her, too, of the first time she’d seen Derondi’s work, dragged into the studio by the frighteningly skinny artist in paint-spattered jeans and a T-shirt so big that his shoulder jutted out of the stretched collar. She’d been struck by the contrast of the richness, clarity, and color of his work compared to the world-battered appearance of the man.

  It was a truth that always unhinged her. Artists were fearless. They poured their whole selves on canvas.

  “I’d like to know how he managed that. I use a thin oil. It can be tricky, temperamental.” His voice dropped. “I’m glad you came.”

  The familiar frisson washed over her, that tingling intensity of awareness. At the museum these past weeks, this had been her sign to back away, to beg off because of work, to end their conversation—whether it be about art or work or his son—because their banter had unwittingly slipped beyond some dark line.

  But now his job at the museum was finished. He was no longer her contractor, she his client. Here, under this open sky, they were together in some sort of fluid in-between zone, their connection uncertain and dangerous.

  “I was curious to see what you would paint.” She gestured to an image of candy-red geraniums straining toward an unseen sun, and then another, of a bowl of sea glass in a pool of summer light. “Your talent…it’s astonishing.”

  “Those are strong words, coming from the assistant curator of a museum.”

  “A regretfully small, very conservative museum,” she corrected, pulling her hair off her face again as the wind whipped it around. “A museum without a wing for contemporary art. The last time I suggested an exhibit of local artists in the foyer, the board balked.”

  “Let me guess. Jesus in urine?”

  “Not quite that bad. Just nudes. Lots and lots of nudes.”

  “I imagine that wouldn’t go over well with school groups.”

  “No, but I’m sure the seniors would have loved it.” She avoided his eye a little longer by squinting more closely at the painting, seeing how the green bottle now looked motherly, the scarlet, like a young girl growing into womanhood. “This is like a puzzle to me. The longer I stand here, the more I see.”

  “Stop. You’ll give me illusions of grandeur.”

  “I can’t possibly be the first to say this to you.”

  “You’re different, Wendy.”

  She stared more fixedly at the canvas, unnerved by the change in his voice.

  “You and I have similar tastes,” he explained. “Every day in the museum, you stop in front of that little painting by Jervis McEntee, the one where the light is on the mountain.”

  “I love that canvas. It’s bright. Hopeful.” She gestured at his painting with her chin, trying to focus the conversation where it belonged. “Like this.”

  “If you’re not careful, my head will swell, and I’ll end up quitting my job, uprooting my son, and taking out a second mortgage.”

  There it was again, that teasing vibrato, the light tone of voice that he used whenever their conversations veered to intimate territory.

  “Well,” she said. “I wouldn’t want you cutting off an ear or anything.”

  “Or losing myself in an absinthe binge in some Montmartre café.”

  “That does sound destructive.”

  Then, forgetting herself, she turned to face him, unprepared for the impact of those upturned eyes, the broad cheekbones, the flattened bridge of his nose, the exotic beauty of him bathed in the gauzy light of the overcast day. Thick fingers of wind tousled his hair.

  Between them came a sudden stillness, a sharp contrast to the bustling activity around them—a young mother racing a stroller through the grass to make her child laugh, the whirling chaos of a vendor working his wares at a nearby wooden-toy booth, and the ringing of bells from handmade wind chimes being knocked about by the breeze.

  With a slow, uneven breath, she absorbed a thought: A man shouldn’t be allowed to look like this.

  Then she dropped her gaze to the graphic on his T-shirt: a smaller version of the very painting she’d been admiring. She told herself that a sailor could stave off seasickness by keeping his eyes fixed on the horizon. And she could stop the seismic shaking of her world if she just fixed her sights on returning their relationship to professional parameters.

  “I still have some contacts in the art world,” she heard herself saying, in a little rushed voice. “It’s been a while since I worked in the city, but I know at least one gallery owner who’d be interested in looking at this.”

  Something in his demeanor shifted. It was an imperceptible thing, like the slow ebbing of the wind. He squinted at the overcast sky, as if he were more concerned with the weather. “I can’t ask you to do that, Wendy.”

  “I want to do it. My favorite thing to do, in my wild city days, was to find new talent.”

  She felt a sudden, piercing ache for those days. For the unpredictability and the first excited rush upon seeing something new, something exciting, something exotically different. Like this painting.

  Like this man.

  “I can’t do gallery openings.” He shoved his fists in his pockets and tilted back a bit on his heels. “Evenings are difficult.”

  Because of his son, she suspected. The one he spoke of with such affection, the one he left the museum early to pick up at school on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. The son whose mother was never mentioned, but also, apparently, never around.

  “My friend Roger will love you even more if you act the recluse,” she said. “It adds a little mystery.”

  Then he looked at her with the strangest expression. He looked as if he was about to speak but then his jaw went tight. In the uncomfortable silence, she slowly began to realize that her offer of help must have sounded condescending. That in her attempt to solidify the ground beneath her feet, she’d shifted the conversation from a discussion between equals to casting hers
elf in the role of the rich patron—and him as the poor struggling artist.

  She was saved from her own awkward attempts at apology by a few splatters of rain. Gabriel opened his palm, saw the moisture on his hand, and then squinted up at the sky. A thrumming patter swept across the field of canvas booths, the undeniable sound of a hard summer deluge.

  “Oh, no,” she murmured. “Can I help—”

  Before she could finish her sentence, the skies opened. He moved into action. He seized the big easel, painting and all, and hefted it around the wrapping table to stand it against the pole on the far corner of the booth. Panicked, she glanced at all the propped paintings and seized a smaller one, folded the easel flat, and followed his lead. He plunged back out, pulled in two more while she slipped out of the protection of the booth to seize another one as rain pummeled her shoulders. She bumped into Gabriel as he passed with two more crushed in his arms.

  All around them, vendors pulled in their wares or drew in the jangling canvas flaps where they’d hung racks of beaded jewelry, children squealed while racing out of the maze, and couples jogged past, hunkered under twisted umbrellas, their feet sending up sprays of mud.

  “Here, put those back there,” Gabe said, slapping two more paintings on the table before she could grab another. “I’m pulling the flaps.”

  While Wendy braced the bigger easels and paintings as securely as she could against the far back of the booth, Gabe unhooked the booth’s canvas flaps—heavy with paintings—and folded them in, knocking the fringe flap over the grommets to protect the paintings from rain. He gathered the last of the smaller easels and leaned them against the table before cutting in to where she stood, in the small space between the back booth wall and the bristling forest of easels.

  Trapped in the little canvas tent, she asked, “Are they okay?” She finger-combed her hair off her face. “Is there anything I can do?”

  “If we wipe them, they should be fine.” He grabbed two clean rags from a box under the table and tossed one blindly toward her. “Especially around the edges.”

  Wendy set to the work, clicking the frames against one another as she swiped the beaded water away while the rain pounded a fierce rhythm on the roof. A rumble of thunder rolled in the distance. They both looked up, as if they could see through the roof to the sky. And then, after a brief snagged glance, Wendy returned her attention to wiping a frame.

  She thought, with a tremor, We may be here for a while.

  And she became keenly aware of the close confines of the space, humid with the pounding rain and cluttered with table, easels, paintings, boxes…and a tall, looming, strangely quiet Gabriel.

  She shook out the rag violently, searching for a dry corner, reminding herself she was a Wainwright, socially finished at Miss Porter’s School for Girls, and surely she could make polite conversation with Gabriel for just a little while longer, until the rain ebbed and she could, with grace, say a last good-bye to him, his art, and his exotically beautiful, unforgettable face.

  “It’ll pass,” he said, as if he could read her thoughts. “I saw it on the Weather Channel this morning.”

  “Occupational hazard, I suppose.” Another rumble of thunder rolled above them. “How much do you trust your weatherman?”

  “I trust my senses more. I can smell it.” He collapsed one of the smaller easels, making a careful pile on one side of the table. “This is like an abroholos. A summer squall. Strong, soaking, but quick.”

  “I guess we’ll just have to see.”

  “You should stay for a while.” His voice was tight, as he continued to methodically wipe the frames. “Then you can leave without getting soaked.”

  She hazarded a glance toward him. His back was toward her. The bent nape of his neck was beaded with moisture, and the rain had darkened his shoulders and back with an elongated V. And suddenly she found herself resisting the impulse to move across the space that separated them. She found herself battling an urge to wrap her arms around him and place her forehead on his shoulder blade.

  Then she squeezed her eyes shut and did that dangerous thing: She dared to envision Gabriel in Parker’s place, sitting on the floral couches of the club parlor and eating lemon cake with her family. It was a reverie she found herself drifting into in the wee hours of the night, when sleep loosened her grip on her good sense. Inevitably, the whole scene morphed into some twisted Tim Burton version of Alice in Wonderland, where Gabriel swelled too big for the room and the teacup shattered in his hand.

  “I hope this rain doesn’t mess up your schedule too much,” she said, wincing as if she’d been pelted by shards of china. “You wouldn’t have happened to have brought a book or something?”

  He shook his head.

  “Not even The Sound and the Fury?”

  He paused, a rag hovering just above the glass.

  “It was in your tool box,” she explained. “I couldn’t help noticing you were reading it. It’s one of my favorite books.”

  “My sister gave it to me. She said it would help me better understand my son.”

  Wendy tried to puzzle that out. The Sound and the Fury was a difficult book. She couldn’t quite make the connection between it and a young boy. She stood in confused silence, acutely aware that he was continuing to fold and unfold the rag.

  “My son,” he said softly, “is autistic.”

  She paused in her wiping. She turned toward him. Not once in the last month had he said anything about his son having any sort of disability. She thought about all the comments he’d made and suddenly remembered the special school his son attended on the weekends, and his comments about how difficult his son could be to handle, about how grateful he was that his mother-in-law lived nearby.

  “And not mildly autistic,” he continued into the silence. “Not even close. He’s not an easy boy to understand, in any way.”

  Wendy remembered that the main character in The Sound and the Fury, Benjy, was mentally disabled, and that whole first difficult stream-of-consciousness, time-warped section was written in his distorted point of view.

  “I guess,” she said, thoughtfully, “that the character of Benjy could be considered autistic.”

  “Hell if I know.” Gabriel tossed the rag on a pile of paintings and leaned a hip against the table. “As a baby, he spent most nights screaming. We thought he had food allergies. But later, there were other signs. Miguel can spend hours spinning the wheel of a toy truck. It took a while to have him diagnosed. My sister thought the book would help me understand how his mind works.”

  “Oh, God, Gabriel. This must be impossibly hard, for both you and his mother.”

  “For me, yes. For my ex-wife, not so much.”

  Ex-wife.

  “She couldn’t handle Miguel.” He crossed his arms and eyed the roof of the tent, now bowing under the weight of moisture. “The first time she found him banging his head repeatedly against the bars of the crib, she bought a one-way ticket back to Brazil.”

  Her knees went a little weak, thinking about how his young son handled the loss of a parent. “You’re doing this alone?”

  “My mother-in-law lives here. She takes her daughter’s place in my son’s life. And I’ve got him in a school—a very good school. They say there’s a window for autism, a period of time when you can pull him through.” He shrugged, a great roll of movement, as if he were forcefully shouldering off a thirty-pound pack. “My wife and I, we were just kids. Neither one of us knew what we were getting into. And Miguel would be a challenge for anyone.”

  “You must have the patience of a saint.”

  “No.” He made a humorless, strangled laugh. “That’s just the problem. With me as his father, poor Miguel is doomed.”

  “I don’t believe that. You’re doing an incredible thing, raising him alone at home. There’s no teacher, no doctor, no therapist, better than family.” She turned back to the easels, wiping blindly, as he tilted his head in growing curiosity. “I mean, being alone must make every little decisi
on so hard. Whether to take him out to a park, face the curious looks of strangers—”

  “I gave up caring about that a long time ago.”

  “And the routines.” She twisted the rag, letting the water drip onto the ground. “I know how important they are to kids who struggle to figure out the world. You must feel like you’re walking on a high wire trying to keep that in balance. I can’t imagine.”

  “Sounds to me like you can.”

  She’d said too much. She was dangerously close to bringing up Birdie, and all the turbulent emotions that went along with her. Then, just as suddenly, she didn’t give a damn.

  “I have a sister. Her real name is Sarah Catherine Livingston Wainwright. But when I was six, I called her Birdie, for the way she flapped her arms when she got excited.”

  Birdie loved to swim, she loved to fold paper, she loved to paint with her fingers. Wendy’s job, for most of her youth, was to get Birdie ready for bed. She’d done it every evening until she went off to boarding school.

  Gabriel shifted his weight against the table. Quietly, as if afraid to upset the paintings or stop her from speaking.

  “She has Down syndrome, and not the kind you see on daytime TV. She also has what’s called an endocardial cushion defect in her heart. She has trouble with her kidneys and hearing problems. She’s mostly deliriously happy, but sometimes she becomes frustrated with her limitations and expresses this in ways that most of the world would not consider socially acceptable.”

  Wendy stopped, the lump in her throat interfering with her ability to speak, remembering how she’d bounded into Birdie’s room after her first break from boarding school, bringing her back a stuffed bear wearing the pink-and-gray school colors, only to find the room empty.

  “By the time I was fourteen, my mother chose to send Birdie away to an institution in upstate New York. She was, my mother insisted, at a better place. It is a nice place, at least it seems to be. All I knew was that she wasn’t home anymore, to bring to my house what it lacked the most. Noise. Laughter. Chaos. It feels good to have someone knock over a teapot once in a while.”