Inheritance
Dale Bailey
HOW YOU HAVE ENDURED it all these years, I cannot say. Even now that he is dead, I can feel his presence in this house,, this room. It rises in wide waves from the things I've arranged across this table. The diamond ring in its dusty jeweler's box. The black and white photograph of the woman, really just a girl. The close-written letter, yellow now with age.
I could touch these items if I wanted to. If I wanted to, I could lift the letter to my face, smell that musty resonance old paper gets, that gust of antiquity and gloom. And something else, something I must be imagining: a hint of dime-store perfume, the kind a girl might wear. Surely it cannot have survived so long.
But I won't touch these things again. Not until I burn them.
I'll try to be clear if I can.
You need to know that I've lied to you about some things. I am married, though I told you otherwise. And I'm not nearly as obscure as I have led you to believe. I am an artist of sorts -- though I'm not a painter, not the kind of painter I wanted to be anyway, and that's partly why I came here. So if I lied when I told you I was an artist, I told the truth in my way. Also, in some respect I told the truth when I said I wasn't married. Because the truth is, when I said that, I had decided -- or I was in the process of deciding -- that I didn't want to be married. That's the other part of why I came here.
Well, that's all changed now. That's why I'm writing it all down. So I can understand. I'm going to put it all down as clearly as I can remember it.
I need to understand.
This house came to me as such events befall orphans in tales, without hope or expectation, in the hour of my greatest need. I'm sorry if this sounds dramatic.
My parents -- my adoptive parents -- died eight years ago, when an interstate trucker strung out on speed dozed off behind the wheel. In the days after the accident, I had this recurring dream of the truck as they must have seen it in their last conscious moments: three tons of metal careening across the median strip at eighty-seven miles an hour. The dream filled me with intense, paralyzing fear: not of pain, but of the imminence of a disaster I could foresee but not prevent. The dream-wreck occurred with adrenalized leisure. Time ceased to flow at the normal rate. I could perceive everything, but I could act on nothing.
At this time I was twenty-five years old, newly married, just graduated from art school. Already I had learned something of the accommodations our dreams demand. Instead of selling my paintings in trendy Soho galleries as I had vaguely intended, I found employment doing movie posters and covers for cheap paperbacks. The work was enjoyable, often challenging, the money good -- but I knew it wasn't art. In those days, I still told myself I would continue with "real" art, but in my heart I already knew this to be a lie. The death of my parents came as simply another of life's brutish surprises.
It did not make it easier that I had been adopted. I remember thinking that twice in my life I had lost all at once what most people lose piecemeal over the span of a lifetime. I had twice lost my family. Of the first time, the first family, I remember nothing. The second time I cannot forget.
I have tried not to think of these things. Until these recent events, it has been easier than you might think.
It's odd how things start. I'm thinking right now of an old nursery rhyme, the one that goes, "For want of a nail, the shoe was lost; / For want of the shoe, the horse was lost," and so on, all the way up to the loss of the kingdom -- "All for want of a horseshoe nail." I remember I once heard a teacher cite this rhyme as an exercise in false logic. Now I'm not so sure.
I don't know where this begins. Maybe when that trucker smashed across the median strip and crushed my adoptive father's Honda like an empty soda can, or maybe further back, when my mother-- my biological mother -- gave me up for adoption, or maybe {still further back} when my father's cursed seed found purchase in my mother's womb. Or maybe that's just as ridiculous as it sounds. Maybe it begins with my first dawning suspicions of Cynthia back toward the end of the summer, or -even more recently -- with the house, this fairytale inheritance, like something out of a third-rate novel.
Maybe it begins with the phone call.
AT THIS POINT -- the point of the phone call Cynthia and I have been married for seven years, one month, five days, a few hours. A week ago, this figure would not have entered my mind. Now I can think of nothing else.
I do not know the man on the phone, an old man by the sound of him, but he identifies himself as a lawyer. Simon Borden. In the space of a single moment all the oxygen rushes from the room. I grope for breath. I am thinking: Cynthia, oh, Cynthia.
Perhaps I say it aloud, for Borden says, "What? Cynthia?"
When I say nothing -- what can I say? -- he says, "I don't know any Cynthia, Mr. Nicholls. I'm calling in regards to an estate."
"An estate?"
"An inheritance," he says. "A house. Some property, too."
"There must be a mistake," I say. I am at my desk in the upstairs studio where I work: a bright skylit room with windows facing east and west and counters littered by tubes of paint and galleys and sketches. I turn to the window and gaze blindly at the Bay. I see that dream truck I have not seen in years, a leviathan smashing heedless as fate over the median strip.
"My parents died," I say. "There's no one else to leave me anything." Borden shuffles papers. "Those would be your adoptive parents, correct?'
"That's right."
"Have you ever tried to find your real family, Mr. Nicholls?"
"My real family died eight years ago. If you mean my biological family, the answer is no. Why should I?"
"I'm calling on behalf of a biological uncle,' Borden says. "His estate, rather. Lucius Kemp. It seems he hired an investigator to find you. He never contacted you?"
"No."
"Well, it appears he found you at any rate." He hesitates. "Your uncle...passed away a bit over a month ago. His house, his farm -- he left all of it to you. Even his pick-up."
"Where did you say you were calling from?"
"West Virginia."
"And the farm?"
So I have an uncle. A week ago this news might have sparked my interest. A week ago it might have moved me.
"Mr. Nicholls?"
"Send the papers to my lawyer," I say.
As I give him the address, the garage door starts up beneath me. Cynthia. I reach over and lock the door. I will tell her I am working.
None of them want me to go -- not my lawyer, not my agent, not my wife.
We can have the house appraised, my lawyer tells me. We can put it on the market. You never need to go there.
You have a deadline, my agent says. You have a contract.
When I tell Cynthia, we are in the kitchen.
"Sell the house," she says from the sink. "What do we need with a house in West Virginia?" She cannot bear to look at me when she says it. She speaks with her face turned down and away, one quarter profile. I can see a delicate curve of cheek, a sliver of upturned nose, a fringe of eyelashes, fuzzed blonde with twilight. I notice she has used the pronoun "we."
On the stove, pots bubble and simmer. A loaf of fresh bread cools on a rack. Spicy smells drift in the air. Cynthia cooks to dispel anxiety. We've been eating well.
"I'm going down there," I say. "I need some time to think."
"You can't just run away from this," Cynthia says.
"You did," I say.
You did, Cynthia.
That's what I'm thinking during the long drive, my headlights probing the swarming dark. Hours on the highway, down and around D.C., 1-66 to 81 South, then west on 64 into desolate and uncharted territory. The broad highway into West Virginia strikes me as anachronistic -- a contemporary blight on these ancient hills. But for the highway and the occasional blaze of small towns hidden in the valleys, the terrain looks as it might have looked two hundred years ago. Unspoiled. Untouched.
Forbidding.
I exit into darkness. Not even a McDonald's or a gas station, just the gray thread of a twisting two-lane road. I am thinking: You did, Cynthia. You ran away.
It's all so banal I can hardly bear to recall it.
Cynthia in tears as I pack my car: a suitcase of warm clothes for autumn in the mountains, a beat-up box of oils and brushes I've hardly used since art school, a sketchbook, an easel, two or three clean, beckoning canvases. I've packed a few groceries, but I leave the thermos of coffee and the paper sack of sandwiches she's made me for the trip.
"Don't you have a deadline?" she says when she sees the canvases.
"Not anymore."
"What about your contract?"
"What about it?"
As I start the car, she leans in the window. "Please, David. Stay. We can work this out."
"I have to go."
"Goddamnit, David, I'm sorry."
I don't know what to say to this.
She says, "You can't run away from this."
And now, as the early morning dark presses down and down, I am thinking, You did, Cynthia. You ran away. My headlights skate across the pavement, across signs and denuded trees that loom over the road like sentinel giants. Here and there, the forest draws back. Sleep-darkened houses crouch in the steep fields.
I am lost.
I stop in the middle of the deserted road and study the map by the dome light. I turn it two or three times to see if a new perspective might help. I study Borden's typewritten directions. I drive on.
Cynthia's face hovers before me, at the limit of my lights. It is her face as I saw it when I confronted her -- glistening with tears, her beauty distorted by sorrow and regret.
"I'm sorry," she said then. She said, "How did you know?"
There must have been a thousand little things, an incremental perception, confirmed at last. Oh, she was careful. How did I know? I might have told her that she began to look through me instead of at me. That when we made love she wasn't there. That she had a glow about her I hadn't seen in years. I might have told her any of these things or all of them, but I didn't. I said nothing, for it didn't matter how I knew. It only mattered that I did.
"I love you," she said.
That's what I'm thinking of when I finally find a landmark I recognize from the directions: a gray wide-slatted barn in a declivity below the road, its tin roof painted with a weathered advertisement for Red Man Chewing Tobacco. Nothing else in sight, not even a house. I might be the first traveler to happen across the barn in a decade or more.
From there it's easy enough. The gas station/general store; two or three miles of scoliotic road, overhung with barren trees; the gate marked NO TRESPASSING. The car jolts over the rutted driveway. In the gray dawn light smudged over the horizon, a mix of evergreens and deciduous trees looms up. And then the trees fall away and the house emerges, a low, rambling stone house with a long front porch and wide, clean windows that throw back the morning light.
I stop the car and get out. A bird calls somewhere.
I start down toward the house, and it feels like coming home.
How did you know? Cynthia had asked me.
How do you ever know?
EVERYTHING IS as I have requested: the key under the mat, the electricity and phone activated. According to my watch, it is six thirty A.M. I call Cynthia.
"I've been worried sick," she says.
"I got lost."
"David, I've been thinking. Maybe I could come --"
"Not yet," I say. "Not now."
I hang up and look around the house. Lucius Kemp. My uncle. There is a certain novelty in having family, in seeing here this visible evidence of his life-- this house, this farm. Like discovering a new continent within yourself, a vast temperate zone you did not know existed, though perhaps at some level you have always known or sensed that it was there, ripe and undiscovered. For a moment, I can almost forget Cynthia in the simple pleasure of discovering this home I did not know I had.
"Who are you, Lucius Kemp?" I say, to hear the sound of my voice here. I shout aloud: "Who are you?"
Nothing. My voice rolls back to me from uninhabited rooms. Like shouting aloud in a graveyard, I think. And then I think: What nonsense. But I do not shout again.
The house is not large: a kitchen with a door into a cellar; a common room with a table, a sofa, a fireplace; two bedrooms and a bathroom off a hall. I fetch my bags from the car, two trips across the gravel drive, into the silent house, down the hall to the larger bedroom. On the second trip, I stop to study the photograph of a woman atop the bureau -- a girl really, her clothes and hair the fashions of another age, her beauty too, a soft rounded voluptuousness women don't possess these days. I think of Cynthia, lean and tall and small-breasted, her body like an athlete's. And then -- because I don't want to think of Cynthia -- I put the photo down, this woman who must have been my aunt.
In the kitchen, I find a can of Maxwell House. I brew a pot and stand out on the porch to watch the morning creep golden down the ridges, across the naked trees. That bird has started up again, away over the hill beyond the barn. The air is chill with a hint of winter coming on. But it feels like home. It feels like home.
I leave my clothes in the suitcase, atop the bed in the spare bedroom. My uncle's clothes are in the closets and in the drawers and I'm not certain what to do with them. For now, I want to leave things as I find them. For a time, I want to be a ghost here. I want to make as little impression as I can on this house, these possessions. Now that I am here, curiosity has seized me. I want to search him out in the things he owns, the way an archaeologist might reconstruct a culture from an arrowhead and a shard of broken pottery. Who is this man? Who are you, Lucius Kemp?
At mid-morning, I set up the easel in the common room. I will work here, in the early light. I place the sketchbook atop the table, lean the canvases against one end of the sofa. But I'm not ready to paint. That will come.
In the meantime, I wander about the house, exhausted from the trip, but wired with caffeine and nervous energy. I think, and for the first time in a week I do not think of Cynthia.
By noon, it has all caught up with me: the trip, the stress of the break with Cynthia, the exhaustion of the drive. In the bedroom, I claw down the sheets. In the moment before sleep seizes me, I have a fleeting thought, an illumination.
Is this the bed he died in?
Once, twice, three times in as many days I speak with Cynthia. Three conversations fraught with strong emotion. I want to come down there, she says. I want to work this out.
But I have my wants, I have my desires.
"What about him?" I ask.
Do you still see him every day at work? Do you find time to sneak away at lunch, to rut like animals in cheap hotels? Do you?
"It's not like that. It never was."
"Then how is it?"
Is it love, then? And isn't that worse?
"Are you still seeing him?"
"Of course not, David," she replies, but by the catch in her throat I know that she is lying.
I stop answering the phone. I listen to it ring and ring, another noise in this house of noises. I can hear them when I sleep and sometimes when I'm wakeful. The shrill wind desolate among the hills. The house settling around me. Voices. I hear voices, faint and faraway, like whispers from another room. I cannot make them out. Sometimes when I try to work I'll find that I have dropped my pencil and pushed my tablet away. I'll wake to myself, hands flat against the table, straining to understand. How long I've been like that I cannot say. The voices hasten into silence. The whole house gathers, listening.
I get up, push my things away, wander restlessly about the house and grounds. In three days, I've explored everything. The house, looking much as it looked the day I arrived, crowded with my uncle's clothes and furniture. The cellar, two dirt-floored rooms separated by a thin partition, each lit by a single bare 100-watt bulb that dangles from the unfinished ceiling. A furnace and an empty oil drum crowd one room; in the other, I find hand-cobbled shelves stocked with mason jars of moonshine. The barn is empty but for a gutted tractor and a rusted Ford F- 150, its keys in the ignition. In the bed of the truck I find tools -- a shovel, a hoe, an old-fashioned hand plow -- and when I start the truck and take it over the first ridge, I discover the little plot he must have used to raise his vegetables. The upturned earth is red with clay -- rocky, hard land for growing even vegetables, much less for farming.
The farm is not a working farm, hasn't been for years. I top off the pick-up from the diesel tank behind the barn and jolt over the rough pastures, feeling at home in the cab of the big truck. The lumpy seat is more comfortable than it looks. The pitted steering wheel feels right against my palms. Whatever Lucius Kemp might have been w other than the drinking man to whom the mason jars of everclear offer mute testimony --he wasn't much of a farmer. Except for the garden, this land hasn't been cultivated in years. Rabbits flee pell-mell across the ridges. Once I scare up a fox. It crouches atop a hillside and glares down at me in my truck. When it stalks away, it slides into the trees like a graceful shadow.
A vision of the man my uncle must have been starts to cohere in my mind. A man grim and spare as these mountains. His house empty of vanity or comfort, of decoration, unfinished but functional. Raw. I think of the woman in the picture, the woman who must have been my aunt. This life must have been a hard life for her. Her beauty, her softness-- they do not square with the house she lived in or with the man who is forming in my mind.
And yet I find that I admire him, somehow. Admire his perseverance in wrenching an existence from such land.
One morning I start to work. In the common room, I prop the picture of my aunt over my sketchbook. I begin to block in her soft features, her eyes, but my interest in the project quickly pales. I move to the porch and try to sketch the lay of my uncle's farm.
Nothing.
Back inside, I sip coffee. I sit in a straight-backed kitchen chair, my hands flat against the table. Listening. That whispering has started up among the empty rooms and I am listening, straining now to make it out. After a while, I find that I have taken up the pencil, that on a fresh sheet I am sketching in the outlines of a face that is lean -- or better, gaunt. A face hungry and unkind.
In the kitchen, the phone rings and rings.
The whisper keeps on, at the very edge of hearing, verging on subliminal. What it says, I cannot know. The phone rings and rings.
Go to hell, Cynthia. I'm working.
At last the phone falls silent. I sketch and sketch, my coffee grown cold.
I am not alone here.
This the first thought that enters my mind when I wake late, well after dawn, after eight o'clock, after nine. My good work habits -- the lifelong discipline of a man who has been self-employed since college --have vanished, evaporated in less than a week alone here. Oh I work, yes. I work when the spirit seizes me, as I eat and sleep and wake now. Today, I wake at 9:36 A.M. I gaze at the hands of the Big Ben alarm clock my uncle left on his night table. The long hand ticks forward a notch. 9:37.
And I am not alone.
The thought presents itself, fully formed, in my mind -- not the product of rational consideration, of logic or even evidence. Simply a feeling. An intuition. I am not alone.
I sit up. Sheets and covers pool in my lap. I shrink within the soft flannel shirt I have stolen from my uncle's drawer, within his worn-out sweats. Listening.
And there it is. A sound from the common room -- not the furtive, fearful rustle of a person trying to be silent, but the simple grace of a person gifted with quiet -- a person who moves quietly not for a reason, but simply because that is the way she moves.
The way you move, though I could not know it then.
I dare not breathe. The silence and the isolation seem to close around me. Four days now without human contact, with just the arbitrary detonations of the phone. Four days in which I have seen no living creature but the birds, the rabbits, the predatory fox.
From the common room, I hear that sound once more, and now I recognize it. Someone is turning the pages of my sketchbook, flipping through it slowly and thoughtfully, with a pause to examine each of the penciled studies. Now I know what has jarred me from sleep: this familiar sound, only half-perceived. I am not alone.
Cynthia, I think. Cynthia, I am sure. Cynthia, I tell myself as I throw back the covers and creep down the narrow hallway, silent myself, oh silent, creeping in my stocking feet. I am thinking: Cynthia. Godamnit, Cynthia.
But it is you.
I did not mean to startle you, and now, remembering, putting it all down -- putting it down so I can make sense of it -- now I know that I did not frighten you, that I could not. Could 1.?
But you turn with a little half-gasp, a hiss of in-drawn breath. You clutch at your breasts as if to show me how I scared you. You say, "Oh! You startled me!" And then, with a guilty glance at the sketchbook: "I mean I knew you were here because I saw your things. But I didn't expect --"
I am across the room without thought. I close the sketchbook firmly, as if to say: You have no business. No right. Is this how we are to communicate, like players in a silent film, with a series of flamboyant, wordless gestures.?
"I made some fresh coffee," you say.
I say, "Who are you?"
Who are you? Who are you with your sad face and your housedress from three decades past, your old-fashioned apron, homemade from a flour sack.? I can see the print heave along the shelf of your bosom (Beeman's Best Self-Rising Flour), the silver chain that dangles there, the handworked locket. I can see your long fingers, your bright nails, see you tremble as you steady yourself against the table. And what I want to know is: Who are you?
You say, "There's fresh coffee."
I can smell it.
Now that my heart has settled, now that I know you pose no danger, I am aware that the room is cold. Perhaps this is a harbinger of winter in these mountains. And so I add a stroke to that portrait of my uncle that has been taking shape inside my head: he was a man who could survive such winters. I think of him snowed in here, in his spartan home. I think of the ranked jars of moonshine on their basement shelf. I shiver with the cold.
"Coffee would be great," I say, and you can feel it palpably, the relief that floods the chill room, our mutual relief that despite the fact that we are strangers, despite the fact that you are standing in my uncle's home in my home -- without an invitation or a word of explanation --despite all, we have decided to be friends.
In the kitchen, I pour coffee into a cream-colored ceramic mug. The earthy smell draws me down into myself, out of the chili incorporeality of the room. The first sip plunges me into the absolute physical essence of my being. For the first time in days or maybe weeks, I seem to inhabit every cell of my body, and I realize suddenly that I have been walking around untethered from myself -- my intellect as unconnected to my flesh as that of some disembodied brain in a third-rate science fiction movie -- since first I became aware of Cynthia and her other man, since, for the first time, I was sure. A warm swell of appreciation rises within me, appreciation for this coffee and the woman who made it. I realize with a start that all this time that I have told myself I would not think of Cynthia, I have been thinking of nothing else. She has been down there in the abyss of my being, unacknowledged but shaping the flow of my thoughts, as influential and unseen as some fathoms-deep ocean current.
Hands cupped around the warm coffee mug, I return to the common room. I half expect you to have disappeared as swiftly and silently as you came, but there you are when I return, prim on the sagging sofa, your legs crossed at the knee. I pull a chair from under the table and sit down across from you.
"I'm sorry for frightening you."
"No, I'm sorry," you say. You nod at the sketchbook. "I didn't have any right, not without asking."
"As far as that goes, I might say you didn't have any right to be here at all."
"I didn't expect anyone to be here."
"You didn't notice the car?" You glance down. I stare at the pink fissure of scalp where your dark
hair parts in the middle and falls straight to your shoulders.
"You knew him, didn't you?"
"I knew him."
"Lucius," I say. Lucius, the mysterious Lucius Kemp. Who else? Who but an...intimate (what other word can I use?) would have a key to the house, would simply let themselves in, uninvited? And now I try to get a fix on your age, but it defies me. You might be twenty-five, you might be thirty-five. Certainly no older. But too young, I think, too young by far for the man I've begun to flesh out in my imagination -- the man who was married to the woman in the photograph, surely no less than thirty years ago and probably more.
"Luke," you say. "That's what I called him."
"You knew each other for a long time." Then it comes to me: your youth, his age, your presence in this room. The key. "You worked for him, didn't you? Cleaned for him, looked after him?"
"I should go," you say. You stand and reach into a pocket beneath your apron. "I'll return the key. I'm sorry to disturb you."
I stand, my hand outstretched. "Please, no, it's okay. I want to know about my uncle, I want to know about...Lucius." I cannot bring myself to call him Luke.
"Maybe you could clean the place for me..." I hesitate, the way you do.
"Emily," you say.
"Emily. And I'm David. I'll pay you, Emily -- whatever he paid you, what do you say? Keep the key, all right?"
"Fine, then," you say, and I see you for what you really are: poor. I think of the darkened houses I saw as I drove in. I think of the weary store and gas station, the only business I saw for twenty miles or more, and I know that you are poor, that everyone in this area is poor, and that you must be glad for the work. I even admire you a little -- the easy way you have of saying, "Fine, then," and preserving thus your pride, as though it doesn't matter, when work, any kind of work, must matter very much.
I reach for the photo I've propped on the table, the woman and her soft-focus old-fashioned beauty, and this is what I say: "This woman -- do you know who she is?"
But it's like I haven't said a word. You turn away, you gaze out the window into the gray fall morning, you don't even answer.
FAMILY. Emily Clark.
Such a simple name, so prosaic, and yet when you are gone, departing as silently and mysteriously as you came, I am left with nothing but mystery. For an hour, two hours, three I have accomplished nothing. I follow as you move about these quarters that need no dusting or sweeping or straightening. This house is almost monastic in its order and simplicity -- without flourish, or vanity, or decoration.
Another stroke added to my mental portrait of this man I did not, could not know. Flesh of my flesh. Blood of my blood. Family. "Who was Lucius Kemp?" I ask you.
You shrug. You say, "He could be a nice man," leaving unspoken the obvious corollary to such a statement: Most times he wasn't.
That's it. Nothing else. You move about with a kind of self-sufficient internal repose, as if there's nothing more to say.
Down the hall and through the second bedroom, across into the master bedroom, back through the common room, into the kitchen, and down the hall again -- like heavenly spheres, predestinate in orbits laid out for them by scientific law, that is how we move, in endless circuit about these silent rooms. There is nothing for you to clean. I see that now.
We stare out of windows, exchange a few words, small hesitant smiles, and I think: You are lying to me. There is nothing for you to clean, there never was, this house is like a barracks: my uncle possessed a sense of order military in its precision. Perhaps I should let you go. There is no work for you to do here. But you knew him, that's what I'm thinking. You knew him.
The money isn't much to me. The company, maybe, is.
Now we are in the bedroom. Do I imagine it, or do you too feel the tension that stands triangulated here between us: me, leaning in the doorway; and you, there by the window, gazing out; the bed between us, rumpled and unmade? Natural tension, so I think, between a lonely man and an attractive woman. Do you feel it? Do you?
"Where do you live?" I say, just to be saying something.
"Not too far from here." You do not turn from the window. You lift your hand and gesture vaguely at the driveway and all that lies beyond it. Toward the whole world.
The phone, then. The ring blasts through the silent house, startling me, but you do not flinch, you do not turn your head.
I wait, hoping it will ring only once or twice, hoping it will stop. Please stop.
The phone rings and rings, shrill, insistent, senseless as the buzzsaw of cicadas on a blistered summer day.
"I'll get it," I say, as though you made some gesture to move for the phone yourself, though of course you haven't.
In the kitchen, I lift the receiver from its cradle, annoyed that I should be interrupted, though what exactly I believe has been interrupted it's hard for me to say. I do not realize that I am more than annoyed until I hear the anger in my voice. "Goddamnit, Cynthia, I thought I asked you not to call for a while. Can you just for a day or two, just that long, can you just please leave me alone?"
I stop, gasping. At the other end, a woman speaks. Not Cynthia, but Susan, my agent. I have a sense of women all about me, entrapping me, enwebbing me in their demands. You stand apart from them, silent in the bedroom, self-contained, gazing expressionlessly into the dark clouds that just this morning have begun to mass atop the ridges. As Susan speaks, a very clear image of you forms in my mind, an image of you standing by the window, face turned to the impassive sky.
Susan says, "David, are you ready to forego this nonsense?"
"Everyone is trying to reach you. I have been. Cynthia. Your lawyer."
"I'm incommunicado," I say. I like the way it sounds.
"Spare me this crap," she says. "Can you do that? We're all worried sick. Cynthia's half-crazed. She thinks we're going to find you in a tub of tepid water, hacking at your wrists with a butter knife. She's driving everybody nuts. So can you please spare me this crap?" "Fine."
I turn to gaze out the kitchen window at the ramshackle barn, the color of a day-old corpse. Grass slants sere and brown out of the dead earth. Beyond the bright tin of the roof, clouds gather like divisions of gray-faced soldiers. A quick image of Susan's Manhattan office seizes me: cluttered and busy and lined with the art of people more famous and more talented than I am. I could be a million miles from that place. I could be in an entirely different universe.
Susan says: "What the hell is going on, David?"
"I'm retired. I'm going to try to paint."
She makes a noise that is not nice. "I don't know what your deal with Cynthia is and I don't want to know, but this is ridiculous."
"Whatever you say."
"This crap has to stop. I've been putting my ass on the line for you all week now. I don't know how much longer I can stall the people at Bantam. I've given them deaths in the family, I've given them bleeding ulcers, I've even given them the truth. And I don't know what else to give them. They want to see your ideas and frankly, David, they deserve to, because they paid for them. Comprende? They paid for them." "So what?"
"So what? It's called a career, David, and pardon me for being blunt, but if you don't stop fucking around with yours, you're going to find yourself trying to remember when you used to have one."
I lean my head against the refrigerator, and the iced surface is like a cool and ...
Januszek66