The Drowning Tree

by Carol Goodman

  “Do you work for the gallery?” I ask.

  She smiles down at me from the height of her dragonfly heels and I can’t help but feel that I’ve offended some Aztecan deity with my question. “My gallery is in Manhattan, but I’m also on the board of ArtHudson, which funds this gallery, and I’m volunteering as a docent for this show. I believe in supporting local artists whose work reflects the indigenous landscape. Buchwald’s pieces combine references to Hudson River school painting and more modern sources—for instance, Dan Flavin’s light installations. Flavin lived for a while across the river in Garrison and collected Hudson River school paintings …”

  “Yes, I saw an exhibit of those recently at the Vassar College Art Gallery.” I’m lying. I saw the announcement of the exhibit and meant to go. Something about this woman’s elegant bearing and well-meaning tutelage makes me want to assert my own knowledge and credentials. I remember this about art shows—the temptation to say something pretentious and disingenuous. I’m wondering how to escape the talkative docent when she spots someone more interesting over my shoulder and hurries away without saying good-bye.

  I stand for another moment in front of the canvas and read the little card affixed to the wall by its side, which explains that the painting’s title, Water Lightning, comes from a term used by Cambodian fishermen for the patterns of light reflected on the trees that stand in the drowned forests of Tonle Sap Lake. The next two paintings, following the same theme, are called Drowned Forest and Dancing Trees.

  The gallery has been partitioned with alternating panels so that foot traffic moves through the space like a meandering river. In fact, the paintings in the next space are titled Bend in the River I, II, and III. Not only are they tonally bluer than the first painting, but the reflected light waves that play over their surfaces are slightly bluish. The lights in the water basins must be tinted.

  There’s only one painting in the next space and it’s called World’s End. Blue water tinged with green fills the entire canvas. Looking at it has the dizzying effect of staring into a whirlpool and I back away as if it might suck me into its maelstrom. I start to retrace my steps back to the front of the gallery, not sure if I’m disappointed or relieved that I’ve gone through the whole show without running into Neil, when I notice a small sign pointing down a short flight of stairs. NOT THE END, it reads. So World’s End isn’t the end. I recognize Neil’s love of wordplay and his fondness for the last word: he always loved codas and epilogues, afterwards and envoys.

  The steps lead to what must have once been a porch that is now glassed in. One whole wall is a window overlooking the Wall Kill. The paintings in this room are smaller and less finished—delicate oil sketches of pond life: water lilies, reeds, wild irises, fish swimming underwater. Many of them are signed with the little tree insignia that Neil used to use as his sign, but it’s become an abstract, almost calligraphic insignia. Instead of rectangular basins lining the walls there’s a round basin—its copper gone green with corrosion—at the center of the room, filled with water lilies and live carp. The lights at the bottom are either tinted green or turn green as they shine through the delicately veined lily pads.

  Moving from painting to painting, I’m so mesmerized by the detail and the finely nuanced shades of light and color in each gemlike study that I barely notice the couple who have come in behind me. At least until I recognize the voice of the tall docent comparing Neil’s works to Frederick Church’s oil sketches—part of the same exhibit at Vassar I lied to her about attending.

  When I’ve come full circle I turn back to take in the whole room: the steady green light pouring upward from the central basin like a fountain scattering not droplets but these exquisite emerald paintings. This is what comes after World’s End—a still, green pool at the bottom of the river. I want to shout at the docent that it doesn’t matter if the work reminds her of Flavin or Church. What matters is that it’s beautiful and calm and, above all, sane. But I don’t shout because as I turn, the man with her turns, as if we were caught in the same current, and I see that it is Neil.

  HE LEAVES THE TALL DOCENT IN MIDSENTENCE AND STRIDES ACROSS THE ROOM toward me. I have just enough time to notice that his hair has darkened from pale straw to a more ordinary light brown and that his face is rounder, flesh filling the hollow shadows that used to lurk beneath his eyes and cheekbones. But his eyes are the same arresting blue green, and he walks with the same loose-limbed gait that I noticed the first time I saw him at the Cloisters—and that I thought I recognized in the figure behind the window at Cooke’s.

  He stops a few feet away from me and says nothing, only looks at me—really looks at me, in a way that, I realize now, no one ever has except for him—as if he knew everything about me in an instant but still thought there was more to look for. The way someone might look at a view of the ocean.

  Then he nods as if I’d just said something he agreed with. “I’m so glad you came, Juno. I’ve been hoping you would since Dr. Horace told me you came to Briarwood.”

  The old Neil would have said I knew you would come.

  “I’m glad I did. Your paintings—the whole exhibit—is amazing. They’ve taken my breath away.” The last bit is not an exaggeration; I find I’m having trouble breathing. I stop and gulp air as widemouthed as the carp in the copper basin.

  Neil looks around the room as if he’s just remembered that he’s at his own show and smiles. “Thanks. Thanks a lot.” Another surprise—Neil used to greet praise with a scowl and a litany of queries: “What do you mean? What exactly do you like about it? Doesn’t it bother you that—?” And then he’d list all the flaws he saw in his work and in himself and in the world in general. “I was lucky to get this space and ArtHudson’s support to do whatever I wanted with it.”

  At the mention of her organization’s name the tall docent, who’s been mooning around the copper basin like a lovesick nymph, wanders over toward us. “How could we not when your ideas were so brilliant,” she says.

  “Juno, this is Regula Howell. Reg, this is my … an old friend of mine, Juno McKay.”

  Regula, a queen. The name fits her.

  “McKay? Isn’t that the name of the firm that’s doing the restoration on the Penrose Window?”

  When I tell her it is she tells me that she’s a Penrose alum—class of ’77—and that she’s heard from Gavin Penrose that I’m one of the “best glass conservators in the valley.”

  “Well, we’re still a pretty small operation …” I’m about to list all our liabilities, but instead I take a cue from Neil’s gracious acceptance of praise, “… but growing. We’ve got a brilliant glass artist from Mexico—Ernesto Marquez—and a new commission for an installation at the Beacon train station.”

  “Juno’s a very talented glass artist,” Neil says. “She had a piece in the juried show at Urban Glass last year.”

  I stare at Neil, speechless. I’m not sure what stuns me the most. The fact that he knows about the Urban Glass show or that he’s put the words glass and artist together in the same sentence. He used to condemn my forays into glassblowing and stained glass as reversions to craft—a waste of the time that could be spent painting. Fortunately, my silence is covered by Regula launching into a paean on the glass artist Dale Chihuly. “Have you seen the ceiling of the Museum of Glass in Tacoma?”

  “No,” I tell Regula. I haven’t managed to jet out to Washington State yet.

  I look at Neil to see if he’ll surprise me on this one, too, and reveal that he’s made the trip but no, he tells Regula, he hasn’t, but he did read about Chihuly’s “Seaform Pavilion” in the Times and had agreed with Chihuly’s ideas that the boundaries between art and craft have blurred since the 1960s and that artists now choose the medium that best suits the ideas they want to express. “I think that glass is an amazing medium for exploring notions of flux and instability because it’s not truly a solid or a liquid and it’s always in motion.”

  Regula Howell is nodding away eagerly at Neil’s co
mments, seemingly unaware that Neil has been steadily maneuvering us all over to the sliding glass doors at the far side of the room. With one hand on the door, he points to a man and woman across the room. “Aren’t those the curators from Dia: Beacon you wanted to speak to?” he asks.

  Regula swivels her head in the direction Neil’s indicated, her amber earrings swaying like fruit in a wind-tossed tree, and Neil opens the door and propels me out onto the deck in one fluid movement. He steers me toward the buffet table, where he hands me a tumbler of red wine and takes a bottle of Pellegrino water for himself and a handful of almonds and dates. “Let’s go down there,” he says, pointing to a bench beneath a willow tree on the banks of the Wall Kill, “or we’ll never get any privacy.”

  When we’re seated on the bench I take a sip of my wine. “How’d you know I still drink red wine?” I ask. “The same way you knew about the Urban Glass show?”

  Neil blushes and I realize it sounds as if I’ve just accused him of stalking me. It’s the type of comment that in the past would have infuriated him, but now he looks more embarrassed than angry. “Yes, actually. I found out both from Christine. I’m so sorry, Juno, that she’s gone. I know it must be a devastating loss for you.”

  I look away toward the slow-moving stream and picture what we must look like—a man and a woman sitting under a willow tree like a Victorian tableau representing mourning. “That was you at the funeral, wasn’t it?” He nods. “Why didn’t you come into the chapel?”

  “I didn’t think it would be fair for you to have to deal with seeing me for the first time at Christine’s funeral. But I knew I had to go because I feel responsible.”

  “Responsible? For Christine’s death?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But why?”

  He doesn’t answer right away. Instead he leans down and picks up a flat stone from the ground and flicks it out over the creek, where it skips three times over the calm water before sinking. I’m terrified that he’s going to tell me that Christine’s baby was his and I realize that it’s what I’ve been afraid of since learning Christine was pregnant and that she’d been to Briarwood.

  I close my eyes and remember a day the three of us spent hiking on the Mohonk Preserve not far from where Neil and I are sitting right now. It was during spring break, three months after Christine had broken her leg climbing the library tower with Neil and just after the cast had come off. I knew by then that I was pregnant, but I hadn’t told Neil or Christine yet. Because Christine’s leg was still healing we’d settled on a leisurely stroll around the Mohonk trails instead of rock climbing in the Shawangunks. I thought Neil would be frustrated by the slower pace and tamer terrain, but instead he was unusually solicitous of Christine and offered her his arm on some of the steeper paths so that I trailed behind them feeling like a dowdy governess chaperoning a courting couple (I’d been reading Jane Austen for British Lit that semester). I’d known before that day that Christine was attracted to Neil but it had never bothered me that much. On that day at Mohonk, though, the sight of them together started a fluttering inside my abdomen that, even when I realized it was the baby moving, still felt like a warning. A sign that it was too late to lose Neil to anyone—even to my best friend.

  “Because of the way we used to talk about suicide back in college,” Neil says. For a minute I’ve forgotten what question he’s answering, I’m so pulled into the memory of Christine, limping but alive, on that day at Mohonk. “Like it was a sport or competition.”

  I open my eyes and I’m looking into Neil’s, which seem, at the moment, filled with the green of the willow tree, and the stream, and the thick fringe of reeds growing on the water’s edge.

  “Did she talk about killing herself when you saw her?” I ask, wanting, really, to ask when did you see her? Dr. Horace said he’d given Neil Christine’s phone number in May—only a month before Christine’s death. If that was the first time he saw her, he couldn’t be the baby’s father.

  “No, all she wanted to talk about was Clare Barovier and what I’d learned about her living in her old suite at Briarwood—what nurses and orderlies said about her and what I thought about the paintings. I asked about you, of course, and about Beatrice—”

  It’s the first time either of us have mentioned our daughter’s name and I can’t help but notice how soft and hoarse his voice is when he says her name—and that he still pronounces it in the Italian manner.

  “—she told me Beatrice was going white-water rafting this summer and it actually scared me. After all the reckless and stupid things I did when I was her age! It made me realize what it must have been like for you all these years having to be a parent on your own. You don’t know how sorry I am, Juno. About everything …” His voice breaks then and before I can think about it I lay my hand over his on the bench. He turns his hand palm up and grips mine and wipes his eyes with the other hand. I look away, not so much ashamed by his tears as by what I’m thinking: that the rafting trip was a last-minute thing because Bea knew I’d object. She waited until the day before the application deadline to tell me about it and when I realized how scared she’d been to ask me I said yes right away. We’d sent in the check only five weeks ago and I called up that same night to tell Christine that I was making great strides overcoming my possessiveness. It must have been right before she went to Briarwood and asked Dr. Horace to have Neil contact her. Christine would have already been pregnant by that time. Of course, Neil could have seen her before that, but for the time being I take it as a sign that Christine’s baby wasn’t his.

  Neil lifts my hand and draws it into his lap and I look back toward him but keep my eyes on our hands as he turns mine over to study my palm. “You know what the hardest thing about getting better is?” he asks.

  I almost laugh. It’s such a Neil thing to say—not the hardest thing about going crazy, but the hardest thing about getting better. But I don’t laugh because what I’m thinking is: He is better, he is better.

  “No, what?”

  “It’s not knowing which parts of you are still you and which were your illness. Like being able to paint or feeling like you could fly or thinking you can leave your body at night and visit people in their dreams. For years I’ve wondered where loving you belonged. Were my feelings for you part of my ‘idealization’ problems? Were you an illusion of my madness? Could anyone be as beautiful as I remembered you?”

  I look up from our hands and see myself reflected in Neil’s eyes. Two Junos swimming in two pools of green. A double version of the dream I had last night.

  “But the minute I saw you today I knew that everything I ever felt for you was real,” he says. “It still is.”

  NEIL AND I SIT ON THE BENCH BY THE WALL KILL FOR ANOTHER HALF HOUR. I TELL him everything I can think of to say about Bea and show him some pictures from her last crew meet.

  “God, she looks so much like you,” he says, staring hard at a picture of Bea smiling triumphantly after her victory over Poughkeepsie, her arms wrapped around two crewmates. “She’s got your hair and your smile.” He looks up from the picture to me. If he notices the gray that’s crept into my hair or the lines around my mouth and eyes he doesn’t say.

  “She’s got your eyes,” I tell him, “and your build.”

  Neil picks up a flat stone and lobs it into the Wall Kill, where it sinks straight to the bottom. All this parsing of Bea’s gene traits can’t hide the fact that no matter what she’s gotten from him, what she’s never had is him in the flesh.

  I notice Regula Howell standing on the deck talking to a man and a woman—both wearing identical square-rimmed eyeglasses—but looking over their shoulders in our direction. As soon as I make eye contact with her she waves and heads down the steps toward us.

  “I guess I’d better get back,” Neil says. “Reg went to a lot of trouble to put this thing together.”

  I nod, unable to speak. For all that we’ve said in the last half hour neither of us has said one word about seeing each other again.
Is this it? I wonder, watching Regula Howell stop to take off her high-heeled sandals because they’re sinking into the damp ground. Do I want more than this? Does he?

  “Juno,” Neil says when Regula is less than twenty feet away, “I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t want to see any more of me. I wouldn’t blame you for hating me.”

  “That’s not how I feel. I’ve never hated you.” I speak quickly, trying to cram fourteen years of ambiguity and confusion into the seconds we have left. “I’ve never stopped thinking about you. I still dream about you.”

  “Really?” he asks, grinning. “I dream about you all the time.” Then his smile abruptly fades and I know he’s remembered that last dream he told me about—the one in which I slashed his paintings. I see the color drain from his face and—with Regula Howell ten feet away—I come to a quick decision.

  “Why don’t you call me next week and we’ll get together.” I say it like we’re old friends making a lunch date. “You could come over and see the studio and the factory—”

  Neil breaks in just before Regula reaches us, “I’d love that, Juno.” He squeezes my hand, which I’d forgotten he was still holding, and then lets it go. “I’ll call you next week—Dr. Horace gave me your number.”

  “Congratulations, Neil,” Regula says when she reaches the bench. I move over so she can sit down but she leans against the willow trunk instead, bending one knee and resting her bare foot against the smooth bark. The blue satin sandals dangle from one finger like expensive Christmas ornaments. “The show’s quite a success. The curators from Dia: Beacon want to meet you. They’d like to run your show in a gallery in Beacon near the museum when it opens next May.”