“My daughter thinks I’m an aging hippie and my husband’s an irresponsible loser.” Alex and Vincent sat inside, at the kitchen table, after clusters of annoying bugs had chased them off the porch. She told him about Felicity, the daughter she had during a brief relationship before she met Anthony.
“The day of her wedding, she tells me I’m a disappointment because I didn’t register her for Royal Doulton china at the gift store in town.”
“Do people still do that?”
“Apparently. And I blew it. That, and I didn’t bother getting my hair done.”
“Are you supposed to?” Vincent sat sideways, along the table’s edge, his legs stretched out, crossed and relaxed. He ran his index finger slowly along the top of his wineglass.
“Her fiancé’s mother did.” Alex took a few gulps of wine and a little ran down the corner of her mouth. She wiped it with the back of her hand. She was certain that Vincent noticed the drooling and now thought of her as some hick who can’t even manage to keep the wine in her mouth.
“Do you think you’re a disappointment?” he asked.
“Is this therapy?”
“I thought it was a conversation.”
“Sorry.”
“For what?”
“For being accusatory.”
“You’re so formal.” He made it sound like a request, an invitation to stop the verbal dance of the defensive and the guarded. Her shoulders dropped to level comfort. There was nothing to lose. Her pride had been replaced by vanity, and vanity was something she was more than willing to part with.
“I talk to myself. Out loud. Occasionally.”
“I know, I’ve heard you.”
“Is that a sign?”
“Of what?”
“That I’m losing it.”
“I doubt it.”
“I sometimes think I am.”
“So.”
“What do you mean — so?”
“So what if you’re losing it? What difference does it make?”
None. None at all she wanted to say, and mean it. Sure, she could be eloquent, even dazzling with words, captivating onlookers at a gallery opening with talk about enticing nuance and engaging manner, throwing in something about the unending delight and the fullness of form of the impasto style. So what if she ended up walking the streets in town blurting out incoherent excerpts from her internal prose, about unreachable happiness and sagging breasts, and the sound her rubbing thighs make.
“I guess it wouldn’t make any difference,” she finally said, “because you no longer care when you lose it, do you?”
“The only thing you’re in danger of losing, Alex, is your idea about what life was supposed to be.”
During their conversation, Alex thought she saw him gazing into her eyes for long periods of time. She couldn’t be sure, though, because she kept looking away — at the antiques around the room he’d refinished himself, at the aluminum kettle sitting on the stove with a small dent in one side. She could picture Vincent making himself coffee in the morning. She wanted to be there — in the morning — to walk up behind him and put her arms around his still-flat waistline.
When she went to the bathroom upstairs, Alex caught a glimpse of his bedroom and the rumpled mess of sheets on his bed. She wanted to climb in and stay forever. She returned to the kitchen feeling as though some sort of intimacy had passed between them.
He didn’t kiss her when she left, didn’t suggest she come again. He thanked her for an interesting evening and walked her to her truck. It seemed like the wrong ending for the kind of intense conversation they’d had — the wrong piece of footage edited onto the final moment of a film about a completely different night. Alex drove home replaying their conversation over and over again in her mind.
It wasn’t until she pulled into her driveway that she remembered she hadn’t bothered calling Anthony to let him know where she was. The light from the studio was still on and she hesitated before she walked towards it. She decided she’d tell him someone from the market invited her over at the last minute, that she didn’t call because she didn’t want to interrupt him. He wouldn’t pry, or be suspicious. She was sure of that. She’d never given him reason to be before. Besides, nothing happened.
The morning after the evening she spent with Vincent, Alex was picking tomatoes from the field beside the house. Her knees were soaked from the wet earth. It had rained in the middle of the night — a heavy rain that woke her up and sent her downstairs, where she sat in a chair in front of the painting Anthony gave her years before. She had stayed there until it was time to go out to garden, holding a glass of cognac in tired hands she admitted needed more touching, more stroking — less time holding things together, patting someone’s back, and framing someone else’s soul
“Visual innocence,” she said on her way out the door, a pair of garden gloves and a few baskets under her arm. She could no longer look at a field and simply see a field. She saw a carpet of green, which seemed to stretch into forever, and herself, standing at the other end, tiny and insignificant, holding an empty basket. “Nothing is as it once appeared.”
Almost two weeks passed by before Vincent asked Alex over for a drink again. She accepted and told him she’d like to take a walk through his fields of sunflowers. It sounded like the romantic idea of some young virgin who thought love and sex had more to do with setting than anything else — she wished she hadn’t said anything.
Vincent seemed to like the idea, so she stopped second-guessing herself. They packed up a little early that day and ignored the questioning looks from the other farmers who saw them leave at the same time.
As she followed Vincent out to his house, she knew then that she would make love to him. She also knew she’d feel guilty about it later. But she told herself, she’d learn to live with it. She had learned to live with so many other things.
At least there would be pleasure before pain, she rationalized, and she hadn’t felt pleasure for a long time. She was used to rationalizing — accepting Anthony’s art as more important than her own desire to return to the canvas, dismissing his lack of affection towards Felicity as a lack of genetic connection. The list went on, but even Alex had grown bored with it, tired of the impossible task of keeping peace at any price.
Would it have made any difference if she hadn’t bothered rushing in to clean up the mess all those years? Would more blood have been spilled? Would more unspoken truths have been heard by knowing souls? Pity the woman, she thought, who thinks she’s made a real difference in the lives of those who don’t even notice her slipping away.
Just that morning, after the sun came up and Alex came in from the field with arms full of tomatoes for the market, Anthony had offered to wash her hair with the rainwater they collect in a barrel behind the house. She couldn’t remember the last time he offered to do this. It had once been a weekly ritual — a prelude to lovemaking and quiet mornings spent talking about all they wanted to do with their lives, together. It eventually waned to a monthly, then yearly event, trailing off to non-existence like the mysterious figures in the painting he had given her, now hanging in the living room.
Alex