In the two months they had been seeing each other, Alex made a point of not talking about Anthony too much. Partly out of guilt. Partly out of her own need to live for a brief time without him at the back of her neck — something she could only achieve when she was with Vincent, making love in his rumpled bed. The cold nights had forced them inside, reluctantly abandoning the golden fields
“We can’t expect someone to like everything we do.” Vincent’s detached tone was similar to the tone he had used the week before, when he suggested that Anthony might not be having affairs with the women he paints, that perhaps the turn-on was in not touching them, that he used the sexual energy merely to paint. At the time, Alex didn’t respond. But what he had said had been nagging her ever since.
“What are you saying, Vincent, that I expect too much? That I’m too demanding because I wanted my husband to come to the beach with his family?”
“No. I’m not saying that. I’m simply saying that other people — even our partners — don’t always like the same things we do. It’s just a fact of life.”
Alex stopped walking.
“I don’t understand why you feel the need to take his side all the time. What is it? Guilt? Or you just can’t help yourself. You have to psychoanalyse everyone who crosses your path?”
“I’m not taking his side, Alex.”
Vincent moved towards her and reached out with one of his hands.
“I don’t need this from you,” she said, stepping back. She walked away from him, briskly, for several hundred feet, before she looked back. When she finally turned around, she saw him sauntering along the beach, looking out over the lake. He wasn’t in any rush to catch up with her.
As she watched him, the sun peaked out from behind a cloud. It was harsh in its sudden mid-afternoon entrance, the first it had come out all day. It had been trying earlier, when they were still sitting in the shell of the cottage at Lakeshore Lodge, where the mood of the day had taken an odd, uncomfortable turn and they seemed out of place with the rest of the history of the place.
Alex turned away from the sight of Vincent walking along the beach in the sunlight, closing her eyes for a fraction of a second, allowing Vincent’s after-image to appear — the outline of his body in bright yellow lines with trailing dots of light all around. She continued walking down the beach, slowing her pace a little, letting what had passed between them make its way out of her. And then it came —
Lady in Oil on Canvas: Her after-image was painted in half-drawn multiples of herself, in reds, yellows, and blues, in the middle of the white canvas. On the right, she was dance-like in her motions, her arms sweeping towards the sky. In another image on the left, she was sitting, her legs bent, and her head lowered, resting on her knees. In the middle, slightly above the other images, she was walking away with her arms at her side, into the wilderness of the stark white forever.
She was all of them and they’d been staring back at her from the wall in the living room, where she lives with the man who painted his wife, a wife who failed to recognize the basics any artist knows. Who forgot about primary colours and after-images, and how the eye makes up for what is missing.
On the beach, the sun disappeared from sight again, behind a cloud that promised to move on before their eyes got used to its flat, soft light. Alex looked back at her footprints in the sand. Her feet had always been too large for her liking. Anthony used to say that was because she carried the world on her shoulders and she needed the support. Alex only saw the impressions they made in the sand and thought about how they’d be gone the next day.
“Washed away.”
She stopped long enough for Vincent to catch up and they walked the rest of the way in silence, while the waves rolled up along the shoreline in a continuous, cautioning roar — never dipping or quieting, never telling her what to do.
Chapter Five
In August we watch ’night, Mother with Sissy Spacek and Anne Bancroft. Delaney brings it. She tells us she couldn’t think of what else to get. Besides, she says, she needs to keep her head in the stories of mothers and daughters, for the sake of her documentary, which she has set aside for a few hours.
“I need the break,” she says. And I almost believe her until I catch sight of the note on the videocassette cover and see “porch scene” and “couch scene” scribbled at the top in her neat and tidy writing. She has already made a list of scenes she wants us to replay.
I expect complaints to come from every corner of the room when she announces the movie she has brought with her — most of us were depressed for a week the first time we saw it. But no one says a word. We are all in some kind of end-of-summer funk. The nights are getting cooler and darkness falls earlier. I still haven’t heard from Ben and have weakened and started calling, but he’s never there. I am thankful and disappointed all at the same time.
“How’s the documentary coming along?” Storm asks.
“I agonize over it,” Delaney answers. “Did you know Sally agreed to be in it?”
“Reluctantly,” Sally adds.
“What’s it called again?” Alex asks.
“When Women Lose Their Mothers,” Del says.
“It’s the first in a series,” Sally jokes. “The next one will be, When Women Lose Their Fathers, and I’ll be in that one, too.”
A few of us smile awkwardly. Delaney heads for the bathroom. Sally rolls a joint.
In my kitchen, Alex makes an arrangement with miniature sunflowers. She reminds me that it has been a year since she first started seeing Vincent. “It goes by quickly,” she says, “when you only get together a few times a month.” There isn’t any particular tenderness in her voice, or excitement, or a hint of anything remarkable about her love affair. In one breath, she mentions Vincent. In the next, she talks about Anthony. Except for the names, I cannot hear any difference between the two.
Have I heard from Ben, she asks me. Did he leave town or something? Have I sewn the patch from his shirt on my jacket yet? She eyes me up and down looking for it, picking up on the coincidental patterns on my back — likening them to fields I’ve sewn with perennial regret. From a distance, she tells me, the fields are as clear as day, when I’m standing at the other end of the living room, or down the hall near the dining room. Anyone can see them, she says, if they forget they’re looking at a piece of clothing, at the random assembly of fabric and thread — if they can ignore all suggestion of whim or misguided direction.
Alex walks out of the kitchen, leaving me to wipe up the water drops and the clipped stems off the counter and to clear the dust she has just stirred in my head. She leaves me alone to deal with Grace, who comes rushing in to tell me in private that her novel has been rejected by another publisher and she’s about to give up and can I say something, anything, to make her feel better, to keep her going. Can I?
I walk back out to the living room with a beer in my hand — thankful that Storm is the quiet type and Jenny is at The Cottage and not here to watch the movie and hear all the talk about mothers and daughters, which puts her on edge and the rest of us on guard. Then I remember that for Jenny, a trip to The Cottage is like being stuck in the same movie, over and over again, and could just as easily star Sissy Spacek and Anne Bancroft, only it needs a cottage and a lake. And if you could take Sissy Spacek and Anne Bancroft and put them On Golden Pond, and take a little of the Elizabeth Taylor Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf character and make her part of the Anne Bancroft mother character, you’d pretty much have the movie of Jenny’s life. Only it wouldn’t end in less than two hours. It wouldn’t end at all.
I settle into my chair with Del’s note and my aging remote and I’m ready to rewind the porch scene and the couch