Marino’s is on the other side of Brooklyn, and in the end it takes them fifty silent and cologne’d minutes driving through revolving strips of Ethiopian, Russian, Italian, Hassidic, and Puerto Rican neighborhoods to get there. To her dismay, they are told there will be a forty-five minute wait, but Julius hands Larry-from-Lundy’s card to the maître d’ to give to Dean, and they are immediately seated in the prime booth of a black and pink Art Deco room with vertical strips of mirror on the walls. Julius pre-orders the chocolate soufflé, requests another round of martinis, which, when they arrive, he announces inferior to martinis in the city. It’s the vodka, he tells her, they try to pass off the cheap stuff. He lists better restaurants in Manhattan he will take her to. Over the penne arrabiata he inquires with circuitous and excessive delicacy how old she is and then seems both surprised and disappointed at almost-thirty-five; she feels briefly guilty, as though she’d deliberately sought to tantalize with the false impression of fertility and youth. She reassures him of her ability to impersonate twenty-something with the story of how she still gets carded in supermarkets when she buys wine. He seems cheered and charmed, too, by the fact that she purchases her wine in supermarkets, and promptly orders three glasses of the restaurant’s finest cabernets, in order to cultivate her palate. She pretends to be able to discern a difference and insists on drinking down the three glasses by herself, to avoid his getting drunk and aggressive or getting them killed on the drive home. When she asks how old he is, he coyly tells her the year of his birth and makes her do the math.
Fifty-seven, she figures. No, fifty-eight.
“Most shells have a life span of about two to fifteen years,” she says. “The larger ones live longer, they can make it up to seventy-five.” My father is only sixty-six, she thinks.
“What, sweetheart?”
“Thank you very much for dinner,” she says loudly.
“Yeah, pretty lucky I found you out there today, on the beach,” he says, looking happy. “Thought that was probably you, sitting there. I knocked at the door, but no one was home. Pretty lucky.” She doesn’t point out the lack of luck involved—that if she hadn’t been sitting on the beach, she likely would’ve been in the house. She decides to let him think he has found something.
When he offers her a sip of his after-dinner Frangelico she gulps three times.
Her seatbelt is unbuckled five houses down from Nana’s, and when he slows then stops the car she leans in quickly to peck him on the cheek; he clasps the back of her head with his abalone-thick hand, holding her face against his for an extra moment.
“You want to maybe have dinner Friday? I’ll know tomorrow if Cuba’s happening this week or not, I’ll call you.”
She hurries into bed without toothbrushing or face-washing; his cologne, cloying and stale, she finds when she awakens in the morning, has transferred from his face to her cheek, to her pillow, to her sweater, and drifts through the rest of the house, mingling with the curry for days.
SHE LOOKS FOR mussel shells. Most are broken; all have been snapped into halves. After two hours’ search she comes upon a perfect, intact bivalve; its sides are still held together by a fragile, drying ligament, but strained apart, gapped like castanets or a Munchean scream. She peers inside, but any trace of meat is long gone. There is something mythological here, something insightful and interesting; she remembers what she thinks is a Greek philosopher’s theory of male and female halves, once joined together in human form, now split apart in two drifting, searching sexes. She examines the empty and strained shell, noting its creamy nacre is worn from exposure, its hard beryline surface starting to fade, its chipped edges, its halves shaped like swollen, elongated tears. She hurries the mussel home. By the time she’s rinsing sand from her feet on the front porch she can’t conjure up what beauty or resonance she saw in the shell, only that it’s lusterless, and tacky with dry salt, and so decides instead to first make herself some scrambled eggs for lunch. Also, her head is pounding, from sparing Julius all that alcohol the night before, and so she opens a bottle of beer.
She passes through the cool dark hallways of the house, climbs the creaking stairs—Why does Nana need all these family photos everywhere? she thinks—to her corner bedroom, winces at the sudden glare of sun through all those windows. She has already made the bed, as she has conscientiously done every morning, stretching the chenille coverlet smooth. She has already put yesterday’s clothes in the hamper, already tidied the bathroom and aligned her toiletries and hung her towels, and neatly laid out her brushes on the nightstand. She has already swept up the traces of sand that always seem to creep into her room, despite the careful rinsing of her feet when she enters the house from the beach.
All right, she thinks. You’re all ready to begin. She selects a canvas, positions it perfectly on her easel. Mytilus edulis, she thinks, looking at her gaping shell. The common blue mussel. She seizes a tube of pthalo blue, punctures it open.
There. You have begun.
Then dioxazine purple. Aureolin yellow, viridian, ivory, iron oxide black. She studies the moist little squeezings of color on her palette. Even with the employee discount she’d spent a fortune on these studio-sized tubes in her wooden case: Old Holland, the best. Excellent strength of color and lightfastness, no cheap fillers, their pigments still fine-ground by old-fashioned stone rollers and mixed with cold-pressed, sun-bleached virgin linseed oil, each tube packed by hand. She has recited that to customers for over ten years, using her old college canvases as example and display, and, before quitting, purchased herself this grand spectrum. She must be careful not to waste them, all these rich colors.
The sun through a picture window reflects off the virgin canvas in a harsh, hurtful way. A blank canvas is awful, an insult, she thinks. A sin. You must overcome the sin of the blank canvas.
She seizes a brush. It is a ragged, windy day; sand flecks the window glass and the wooden frames are rattling in their sockets. She sets the brush down, contemplates the mussel, its faint pearlescence, then, determined, punctures one more tube and squeezes out a healthy dollop of rose dore madder. She picks up a palette knife, dips its edge, taps, makes pretty red dots on the palette. Like smallpox, she thinks. Measles. A coughed spray of consumptive blood. Focus, Sarah, she tells herself. Stop playing around. Carpe diem yourself. Seize this opportunity to express and define who you are, now. Fresh start.
She puts the palette knife down, swigs beer, and looks out toward the ocean. A seagull hangs, floats in reverse for a moment, fighting the wind, then flies away beyond her view. At the seam of horizon and sea is a large ship, a tanker, she decides, or some kind of freighter. A liner, maybe a cruise vessel. She thinks of buying an illustrated book about ships, all the different kinds. The ship slowly crosses the three picture windows, absorbing the afternoon. When her cell phone rings, once, then twice, she doesn’t answer it. You should have at least sketched the ship, she thinks, too late, as it passes from her last framed view. She gets up, rinses her unused brushes in naphtha in her bathroom sink, props them head-up in jars to dry. She scrapes the red from her knife, wipes it, sets her palette aside. The image of a ship, perfect in its wandering free, floating ship-ness. A floating seagull. Or the ocean itself, the view from your window, the waves and all that beautiful sky. A simple seascape. You should just paint whatever you see, at the moment, in the moment, to get you started. Set you on the path. Why don’t you just do that? Like a prompt. Yes, that’s what you’ll do. She rips from A Collector’s Guide to Seashells of the World several color plates of the more florid, exotic shells and scotch-tapes them, careful not to give herself paper cuts, over the framed photos of Nana Pearl’s family hung in groupings on the walls of her room.
The humming, relentless sound of breaking waves is beginning to get on her nerves. It is starting to feel as if two conch shells are clamped on her head, trapping the sea’s whispery rise and falls against her ears.