“Who’s Karl?”
“The artist?”
“Oh.” They both laugh. He says, “I’m Luther, by the way.”
“Manon.”
“It’s nice to meet you.”
She smiles.
“Well, I’d better get back to work. I’ll see you around, huh?”
“Yes.”
Luther raises his tray and turns sideways to slip between two groups of talkers, then glances back at her. “Manon?”
“Right.”
He grins and eases himself into his round. Manon smiles. A lot of people don’t get her name the first time around.
She works her way into Karl’s circle and he introduces her around as “the brilliant new artist we managed to snare before some place with real money snapped her up.”
Lupe decides to make a pond for the roof garden with left over plastic sheeting and stones. She and Manon dig out a hollow in the dirt, line it with plastic, fill the bottom with pebbles from the left-over pile. Ira the landlord, who is impatient to sow some seeds, points out that it will have to be filled by hand in the dry season. Lupe smiles with implausible sweetness and says she knows. When he bustles off on other business, Lupe goes downstairs to fill the bucket at the garden tap, leaving Manon to haul it up on the pulley. The first time, Lupe fills the bucket too full and gets a muddy shower when Manon starts to pull (her swearing sounds more fiery than her salsa) so after that she only fills it halfway, which means Manon is raising and carrying and pouring and lowering until dark. She doesn’t mind. The sky is a deep arch of blue busy with evening birds, and there is something good about working with water, which has voice and character but no form. The wet pebbles glow with color and the water swirls, the pond growing layer by layer, dark mirror and clear window all at the same time. She goes to bed with that image in her mind.
At the end of winter Manon and her sister dug out the stream at the bottom of the tobogganing hill, as if by their excavations they could hasten spring. The packed toboggan run stood above the softer sublimating snow, a ski-jump track grubby with sled-marks. They walked down this steep ramp, stomping it into steps with their boot soles, and at the bottom frayed their wool mittens by terrier digging. The ice revealed was a mottled shield over mud and sand. Suspended brown leaves made stilled layers of time out of the fall’s spilling water. Although Manon and her sister would never drink from the summer stream, they broke wafers of ice free from the edges of stones and reeds and melted them on their tongues. There was always a muddy, gritty taste. The flavor of frogs, Manon’s sister insisted, which made Manon giggle and squeal, but did not prevent her from drinking more ice. She always looked, too, for the frogs buried under ice and mud, waiting, but never saw them. The first she ever knew of them was their tentative peeping after dark in the start of spring.
Luther is behind the counter when she returns to the ice cream store a day or two after Karl’s opening. He has a cheerful smile for the succession of customers (the store is busy today) but lights up especially when he sees Manon standing in line.
“Hi!” he says. “Vanilla, right? It’ll be just a second.”
“I’m in no hurry,” she says. He has lovely eyes, dark and thickly lashed.
“So, Manon,” he says when he hands her the dish, “can you stick around for a little while? My dad’s out on a delivery, but he wanted to talk to you, and he should be back soon.”
“Talk to me?”
Luther grins. “We have a proposition to make.” Then, as if worried he has been too familiar, “I mean, about work, about maybe doing some work for us. As an artist.”
There is a boisterous family behind her deciding on flavors. She smiles and shrugs. “I’ll be around.”
“Great,” he says. “Great!” And then the family is giving him their requests.
Engaged by curiosity, she doesn’t mind sitting at the narrow counter shelf at the back of the room. She feels as if last night’s work, last night’s idea, has turned a switch, shunted a trolley from a siding to the street, set her running back on the tracks of her life. A happy feeling, but precarious: it is, after all, only an idea. Even good ideas sometimes die. But this idea inside her head has met its reflection (perhaps) in the ideas of the ice cream family, and this, she feels, is a hopeful thing. Hope, like inspiration, is fragile, and she tries to think of other things while she eats her ice cream and waits for Luther’s dad.
He arrives not long after she has finished her bowl. The store has emptied a little, and after a brief word with his son he comes around the counter and suggests she join him at a table. He says his name is Edward Grant. “Call me Ed.”
“Manon.”
“That’s French, isn’t it?”
She nods.
“I’ve got a cousin in New Orleans.” He shrugs that aside. “Anyway, about this proposition. We’ve been working to expand our catering business, but we haven’t had much to spare for advertising. Word of mouth is pretty good for the kind of business we do, but lately I’ve thought even just pamphlets we could hand around would be good. I know Luther said you’re a real artist, so I hope I’m not insulting you by asking. I just thought how everyone can use whatever work they can get these days.”
“I could use the work. I mean, I’d be happy to, only I don’t know much about graphic design,” Manon says regretfully. “That’s computer stuff, and I’m pretty ignorant.”
Ed shrugs that off too. “We’ve got a computer program. What I was thinking was maybe you could come up with a picture for us, not a logo exactly, but an image that would catch peoples’ imaginations, and then,” he takes in a breath, as if this is the part that makes him uncertain, and he is suddenly very much like his son, “maybe you could paint it for us, too, here in the store. So what do you think?”
Manon eyes the melting-sherbet walls. Luther takes advantage of a lull and comes out from behind the counter to wipe down the tables. He leans over his father’s shoulder and says, “So what do you think?”
“We can pay a flat fee of five hundred dollars,” Ed says. “And materials, of course.”
“Well actually,” Manon says, “I was thinking maybe we could barter a trade?”
Ed looks doubtful. “What kind of trade?”
Manon smiles. “How about some space in your freezer?”
After that, everything becomes folded into one.
The savor of Ed’s cinnamon rolls mingled with the watery smell of acrylic paint and the electric tang of the first trolley of the cool and limpid morning.
The busy hum of her classes, that she feels she has stolen from Karl’s, except he gave his advice freely, as a gift.
The gritty sweat of work in the park, sunshine rich with sawdust, and after, the cool of conversation and bitter beer.
The green sprout of tough roof seeds, careless of season, and the plash of birds bathing in the pool that has to be filled by hand, and the recipe for Lupe’s mother’s salsa that calls for cilantro fresh from Manon’s garden bed.
The cold enfolding fog of the freezer and the chirp and crackle of ice as another layer of water gets poured into the wood and plastic form.
Vanilla, dusk, and Luther’s smile.
And somehow even time. The southwest corner of the park has been cleared to reveal a terrace floored in rumpled bricks and roses. The tree of winged fruits and ripening birds burgeons on Ed’s and Luther’s wall. The form in the freezer is full. And there is a message on Manon’s telephone. I can come, I can come after all! The train arrives at dawn, call and tell me how to find you—
Manon’s sister arrives on the first trolley from the station. The early sky is a blue too sweet to become the furnace glare of noon, a promise that delights though it does not deceive. The demolition crews have taken their jackhammers to another street, leaving quiet and a strange soft carpet of turquoise where the pavement used to be, the detoxifiers that will leach spent oil from the earth. Manon walks to the trolley stop, happy to be early, and then stands amazed when her sister climbs
down, balancing a belly and a bulging yellow pack.
“Elise!” cries Manon. “You’re so big!”
Elise laughs and maneuvers into an embrace. “You’re so slender! Look how beautiful you are, so fit and tanned!”
“Look how beautiful you are!” Manon says, laughing back. The sister’s known face is new, round and gently shining, warm with the summer within. Manon takes the pack and says, “You must be so tired. Are you hungry? Or do you just want to sleep? It’s only a couple of blocks.”
“What I really need,” Elise says, “is a pee. But we can wait if it’s only a couple of blocks.”
“Two and a half,” Manon says. And then, “We!”
They link arms and laugh.
While Elise sleeps, Manon walks to the ice cream shop where Ed and Luther are waiting. Margot, Luther’s mother and Ed’s wife, is also there. She and Ed have collaborated on a feast of a breakfast, eggs scrambled with tomatoes and peppers, fresh bread and rolls, peaches like soft globes of sunrise, cherries like garnet jewels. There is so much food they can feed Edgar when he comes with the park crew’s truck, and Lupe and Marcos when they finally show up, almost an hour late. Edgar can’t get over Manon’s tree on the sherbet-colored wall, he keeps getting up to stand with his back to the counter and stare at it all over again. “There’s something new every time I look,” he says. When Lupe arrives she stands next to him to admire Manon’s work, while Marcos slumps sleepy-eyed over the last of the eggs.
It takes all of them to lift the form full of frozen water. They crowd into the freezer, breath smoking extravagantly, and fit poles through the pallet that makes up the bottom of the form. Edgar opens the freezer’s alley door and the back of the truck, and in a confusion of warmth and cold the seven of them jockey the heavy thing outside and up onto the truck bed. Margot and Lupe massage their wrists. Edgar, in the back of the truck, leans against the crate-like form and says, “Wow!” Manon grins in secret relief: she had wondered if they’d be able to shift it at all. But now everyone except Margot and Ed pile into the truck that farts and grumbles its anachronistic way through the green streets to the park.
Elise declares herself to be amazed at the city. “I thought it would be all falling down and ugly. But look!” She points out the trolley window. A grape vine weaves its way up a trellis bonded to tempered glass and steel, drinking in the reflected heat of noon. “It’s like that game we used to play when we were little, do you remember? Where we’d pretend that everyone had vanished from the earth except for us and everything was growing back wild. Remember? In the summer we used to say the old barn was the town all grown over in blackberry canes.”
Manon remembers. “Like a fairy story. Sleeping Beauty, or something.”
“Right! And I’d make you crawl inside and wait for me to rescue you.” Elise laughs. “And we’d get in so much trouble for ruining our clothes! Good thing no one ever knew where we were playing, we’d never have been allowed.”
The trolley drops them at the northeast corner of the park. Manon leads her sister through the half-wild tangle of chaparral and jungle gyms.
“I can’t believe you made this whole park!” Elise says.
“There’s still a lot of poison oak,” Manon says absently.
Elise breathes in dry spicy air. “It smells so good. Ooh, what is that, it’s like cough drops only delicious?”
Manon laughs. “Eucalyptus trees.”
Elise’s belly slows her down and her nap is still mellow in her, or maybe that’s pregnancy too. She is happy to stroll, to stop and sniff the air, to peer after the jay she hears chattering in the bush. Manon keeps starting ahead, she can hear people talking and laughing on the rose terrace, but then she has to wait, to pause, to stroll, until she is ready to burst like a seed pod with anticipation. But finally the path takes one final curve and it is Elise who looks ahead and says, “Oh look, I wonder what’s happening.”
Manon takes her sister’s hand to urge her on.
Amongst the determined roses a crowd of people mills. There are people from the park crews, people from the art school, people from the ice cream store, people from the city who have come to see the new/old park, people who were passing by. At the heart of the crowd, on the center space of the rose garden where a fountain once had played, surrounded by a lively ring of children, stands Manon’s sculpture. Free from its wood and plastic form, it gleams in the late morning sun, an arc of ice, a winter stream’s limb, an unbound book written on sheets of time. The sunlight fingers through the pages, illuminating the suspended branches of red and green madrone, the butterfly bouquets of poppies, the stirred-up stream-pebble floor: layers and depths all captured by the water poured and frozen one day after another and already melting.
“Did you make this?” Elise says, her eyes unaccountably bright with tears.
“Yes,” says Manon, suddenly shy.
“Oh,” says Elise. “Oh.” And carrying her belly she pushes gently among the children to drink.
VARIATIONS ON A THEME
1916:
The main stairway of Masters Hall was a funnel for sound. Music from the practice rooms on the third floor, voices and odd, semi-musical sounds from the lecture rooms on the second floor, conversations from the ground floor foyer: they all spun through, mixing and clashing like water in a narrow channel at the change of tide. But that was the wrong metaphor, Berenice thought. She paused on the second floor landing, her music folder hugged against her breast, and looked out the tall leaded window. Green lawn, red maples, the roofs of the town just visible through the thinning leaves. Low blue hills were visible farther yet, but no ocean, no naked cluster of masts, no seagulls hanging on the wind. Homesickness swelled in Berenice’s throat, tasting of brine. She stared fixedly at the blurring scene and prayed no one would come by to witness her tears.
A class was working on sight reading, the sol-fa syllables out of tune against the precise notes of a flute running scales on the floor above. Silver arpeggios and ragged chanting drifted like flotsam on the ground swell of muddled chords and voices, footsteps and closing doors. Out of the mix rose a voice of sudden, shocking clarity: Dr. Kingsley, with whom Berenice had just had a lesson, crossing the foyer below.
“—almost wonder why the school remains open. It is quite clear this war will not be over by Christmas, and by the time the young men are looking to be educated rather than killed in France, we shall have garnered the happy reputation of being an excellent ladies’ finishing school. Where will all the real students be going then?”
“I think you’ll find—” Dr. Kingsley’s interlocutor did not share the Doctor’s ringing tones: Mr. Martin, Berenice thought, who only raised his voice at orchestra rehearsals. “—that scholarship girl? The pretty red-haired—”
Dr. Kingsley said, his voice half-lost against the groaning of the front door’s hinges, “Yes, there’s talent of a kind, if you like. But what’s the point in training it when the girl will only ever play at church fundraisers and—”
The big door banged shut. A moment later, a cool wash of air drifted up the stairs, carrying the scent of burning leaves. The view of lawn and trees and town had come clear in Berenice’s sight again. She wiped tears off her face, and found her hand moving of its own accord to brush the piled mass of her hair, red as the maple leaves burned by frost. Talent of a kind. Perhaps, from a great man like Dr. Kingsley, that was something to be proud of?
The sol-fa class came in triumphant unity to the end of the sight-reading piece. The flute rippled to the end of its scale. For one strange moment, the whole musical beehive hum of the building fell away, and in that breath of silence, the air in the stairway seemed to change, to become something pellucid, crystalline, like pure water frozen in a well. In that moment, the only sound was of the breeze sifting leaves from the trees outside, and in that sigh was echoed the sough of waves. Of a single wave, green and cold with sunlight, curling onto a white sand shore. One moment, a single wave. Then a door crisply closed, the flut
e began a tedious whole-note scale, and the beehive was humming again.
Berenice sniffed, and remembered how glad she had been to win her scholarship and leave her father’s cold, cramped, grieving house, the white-washed church, the smell of fish. She turned to climb the last flight of stairs, and was nearly knocked off the bottom step by the youth who came hurtling down the banister.
“Hold fast, dearling!” he cried, gripping her shoulders. Since he was still recovering his own balance, this only served to throw her further off of hers.
“Mister Green!”
He clasped her to his breast and began to dance her in tight circles across the landing. “Master Green, if you will, for I am indeed a master of all things, including of Masters Hall. Masters of this ha-all,” he burst into song.
She pushed him away. “It’s a little early in the year for Christmas carols, Master Green.”
“It is always too early in the year. Unless it’s too late.” He smiled a ravishing smile, a beautiful boy who knew his own beauty all too well. He took Berenice’s hand, bowed over it so his white blond hair hid his face and brushed her wrist, and kissed her fingers. “Until our next meeting, Mistress Red, fare thee well.” He backed away, trailing his fingers against her palm, until his foot found a step, and then he was gone, taking the stairs three at a time.
Berenice stood, biting her lip, until she heard the great front door groan open and thud close. Then she laughed and gathered her skirt to climb the stairs.
2003:
It was an old school with new buildings. The brochure did not seem to know which fact to emphasize more, and as a consequence was a mess of mixed metaphors and much poesy about the illustrious past and the brilliant future of musical instruction. There was also a lot of bumpf about the generosity of the donor who had mostly paid for the new buildings, and about the prize-winning architecture, but there was nothing to prepare Brona for just how odd the school really was.
The construction had barely been completed in time for the autumn term, so the school grounds were still weed-choked and scarred by the tracks of heavy machines. The fence by the highway was sagging steel mesh, the main drive was rutted gravel, and there were still two portable annexes remaining from the interim between old and new facilities; and all of that only served to emphasize the weirdness of the new buildings. Huge cubes of white, unpolished stone, each one of different dimensions, were joined at seeming random, tumbled together, Brona thought, like salt crystals spilled from a cosmic spoon. Dropped down in the midst of the scarred, half-finished landscape, the school looked like an alien fortress transported complete from another world.
In the Palace of Repose Page 18