A Mind of Winter (19 page)

Barnaby eyed me oddly, as if caught between avoidance and approach. It was the first time I’d seen him look uncomfortable, and it intrigued me. And then, I could see that he’d made some kind of decision: not to listen to what I was saying, not to hear the story, after all.

“The townsfolk were going to have a lynching. No matter that one of the sharecropper’s cousins as much as owned up to the rape, with little more than a slap on the wrist as punishment. They found a young black man and the sheriff booked him, though he conveniently forgot to lock the door of the prison hut. You can imagine the man’s fate.”

My fellow weekenders were clearly disgruntled. A few polite and unconvincing remarks were made about the importance of my work in the South, but within very short order, the group dispelled, off to other distractions. Barnaby and I took leave of the green room along with the last of them. He offered me his arm; gingerly, I took it.

Outside, I drew my shawl around my shoulders. We strolled to the edge of the patio and Barnaby leaned against the old silver birch. Its dangly pods released a handful of delicate gray-green seed flakes down on our heads.

“I’m not sure how much longer I can stand this,” Barnaby said, looking at me with smiling eyes.

“I could spare you any more accounts of the South,” I responded.

“I’m not talking about your stories.”

Barnaby put his hand on my waist and drew me toward him. The sureness of his reach stilled everything, snatched away my confusion. He had, of course, failed my test; there was no question about it. But in that moment, it no longer mattered; the very notion of a test seemed childish and absurd. I smiled back, allowed myself to be brought close. There
was
something marvelous in those eyes, behind the easy charm. And then, this recognition: that I liked what Barnaby had turned me into.

From the back foyer, I watched as the others headed across the lawn toward the jetty, some holding bathing suits, others with long-stemmed flutes or a bottle of champagne. When they disappeared over the hump, I sat down at the piano and turned to a Chopin prelude. I floated with the music, forgot the tepid crowd and their bland remarks. The pressure, deceptively gentle, of the descent into the musical depths.

Flashes of London: actual moments bubbling forth then flattening again to nothing. The terrible charred taste after a bombing, of inhaled ash. The feel of my camera—bewildered faces in the viewfinder, as if awaiting nothing but the snap of the shutter. The awful performance of the street, with its random guttings and deletions. And later, a house—or what was once a house—before which stood a boy, who could not have been more than seven or eight. He wore a green jacket: a drab olive-gray green, a color now burned into my memory. Everywhere, as far as the eye could see, visual compositions of gripping interest and complexity.

The sudden sense, once again, of eyes. No tapping, the cane gone, now, for some weeks. I turned my head and there he was, emerging from the shadows.

“Please, don’t stop playing,” he said. I turned my eyes back to the music. Barnaby’s soft footfall behind me, the feel of his approach. And then the warmth of his hand, moving my hair away from the back of my neck, the warmth of his hand in my hair. I faltered at the keys.

“I enjoy listening to you play,” he said, his voice a whisper.

I lifted my hands, let them fall into my lap. “Are you always there? Watching? Listening?”

Barnaby said nothing, leaned down until his lips were close to my ear. I turned to face him; found, in the shadowy light thrown down by the wall sconces, that the hovering in his face was gone. Only stillness now, and a kind of pulsing certainty. Motionless, his hand there in my hair. The sound of his calm breath. As if he were breathing me in, taking in the whole of me through his olfactory sense.

I was the one finally who drew toward him. I placed my lips on his, though I had no sense of choosing to do so.

When Barnaby drew back from the kiss, his eyes were probing. “You look different,” he murmured, making warm, slow circles on the back of my neck.

“People look different when you’ve kissed them,” I replied.

Later, sitting at the dressing table, I heard the floorboards creaking in the next room as they bore the weight of Simon crossing to the bedroom. His compact frame appeared in the doorway, reflected in the mirror. I could see him watching me as I smoothed face cream into my forehead. I was thinking of the kiss—of me kissing Barnaby, of Barnaby kissing me. In the mirror, I saw my hand frozen on my forehead, as if stuck there with glue.

“You’re looking lovely tonight,” Simon said.

I put down the little porcelain jar and, in the mirror, our eyes met. Simon was smiling an open, direct, unfamiliar smile. There it was, the kind of openness I so often longed for from him. The merest glimpse of it; I shuddered that it should be now,
now
—not an hour after the kiss at the piano, the only moment of infidelity in seven ecstatic, disorienting, painful years of marriage to a man I continued to love with a fearful intensity that thrilled and unbalanced me. I waited, tightening the lid onto the jar, watching the stealth return to the balanced contours of Simon’s face. I reached for a tissue to wipe off my hand. Simon disappeared from the mirror and I listened as he walked back into the sitting room, puzzling over the image that had come to mind of a long dark passageway, a door cracking open, a knife of yellow light.

When Simon told me he wanted to remain in Manhattan the next weekend—that despite his efforts he found Ellis Park too much of a distraction from his work—I felt relieved; it seemed somehow right that I should go there alone.

I enjoyed the drive up; I cruised along slowly, leaving the radio off. After arriving, I took a long bath, then lay down, intending a five-minute nap. I awoke to find I had missed dinner. I dressed and made my way to the green room. I knew when I saw Barnaby sitting there alone, leafing through a copy of
Life
magazine, that he was not expecting anyone else to appear, and that he had been waiting for me.

Up until that moment, everything that had passed between us was connected with an Ellis Park event: a party or dinner, breakfast on the terrace, an amble in the woods or croquet, the storytelling evenings. Now, looking at Barnaby, I had the sense that Ellis Park and everybody who comprised it—the guests and servants, the stable hands, the endless stream of delivery men—had been a kind of scaffolding upon which we had, without realizing it, constructed something that could now exist on its own. The metal frame and planks could be removed; the structure behind it was complete.

“The troops have deserted,” Barnaby said, closing the magazine and placing it on the coffee table.

“So I see.” I stood in the doorway. We looked at each other.

“Marvelous pictures,” he said.

“You like factories?” I asked.

“I worked in one once. Long time ago. Buttons.”

I laughed.

“You wouldn’t think it, but they’re actually rather complicated.”

“Of course. They could be large or small, have two holes or four.”

Barnaby rose and moved toward me. It was as if we both understood that this room had served its purpose, that we no longer needed it and were free to leave. He reached over and touched the top button of my blouse with the tip of his forefinger.

“There’s more to it than that,” he said, letting his finger drift up to my cheek. A long pause. Then: “I missed you at dinner.”

“I took a nap. I guess driving up by myself made me sleepy.”

“By yourself?”

“Simon decided to stay in the city.”

“I see,” Barnaby said, reaching across me to the wall and flicking off the lights.

He took my arm and we headed downstairs, along the hallway, and into the morning room, where French doors opened onto the patio.

I had no idea where we were going, though once we stepped into the mild air it was clear, from the decisiveness of his step, that Barnaby had a destination in mind. I held onto his arm and we glided across the lawn. We cut through the vegetable garden and took a path that ended at a shed, beyond which stretched an uninviting wilderness. Barnaby unbolted the rusty door, struck a match, and led me around bits of machinery to a door at the back. This he unlocked with a key he took from his trouser pocket, and we emerged onto a tiny path, which cut through the thick brush and had to be taken single file.

Barnaby led the way, reaching behind with his arm to steer me along. Around us, the ringing silence and clinging green scent of leaves. And a sense of uncanny precision—as if even this woolly terrain, in all its disorder, were part of some larger scheme, left wild as a contrast to the carpetlike lawns and the driveway with its trained canopy of leaves: calculated, somehow, down to the squawking of magpies, the menacing slow circling of hawks, the scramblings of rabbits and squirrels away from their slithering fork-tongued foes.

We walked for some time in silence. And then: something glinting above a thicket in the beam of the new moon. We wove through the dense arbor and there it was, a glass structure the size of a large room with a pagoda-shaped roof. Barnaby pulled a second key from his pocket.

“I didn’t even know this place existed,” I whispered.

“Oscar keeps it a secret,” Barnaby replied, turning the key in the door.

The storm, the one they called Eleanor, took us all by surprise. It plucked the pier from its pylons and dashed it against the rocks, littering the cove with giant splinters. Early July, during one of our midweek visits to Ellis Park, Simon and I had the house virtually to ourselves. On weekends, Oscar had begun to spend more and more time alone in his study, though he still attended to his hostly duties. During the week, he more or less handed the running of the place over to Wallace, emerging from his rooms only briefly in the late evening to share a nightcap. Then, he would smile his wry smile, but he was unable to disguise the gauntness of his cheeks, the black patches beneath his eyes.

It was already dark when we set out, but the lights along the pier and outlining the curve of shoreline across the Sound sufficiently illuminated our way. The first half hour, we walked in silence. The rain began slowly, light sporadic pellets that glanced our clothing and hair. It’s a strange form of company, walking with somebody side by side, and yet sunk airtight in your own mind. For a while I scrounged for something entertaining or amusing to say, but the sight of Simon’s distant, closed face withered my thoughts before they could take hold.

The storm quickly turned muscular, fisting up handfuls of sand, the rain stinging with cold. A scene worthy of a Romantic poet, I thought: morbid and ecstatic. I wondered about the opening in the sheer sandstone face, through which we usually made our way back up the incline toward the house; it had as good as disappeared.

For a brief instant the sky cleared, and behind Simon I saw the giant rise and curl of a wave. In the riot of the storm it was silent, flattening back to the sea with portentous ease. Simon quickened his pace; my arm fell away from his and he gained several yards on me. Beyond him, I spied a moving form, someone stumbling into the storm. I closed the gap between us and grabbed onto Simon’s arm.

“Look!” I shouted, pointing at the unsteady figure just discernible in the wavery wet thickness of the storm. Simon seized my arm, quickening his pace to a run. I glanced up in time to see the slow swivel backward of the man’s face. I registered an oddly mild gaze, eyes somehow unfazed by life’s troubles, before the man realized he had company here, on the stormy beach. He seemed to know me, though I’d never seen him before. He pulled his jacket more tightly about him and broke into a run.

“Hey!” Simon called out. “Come back here!” We set off in pursuit, my arm beginning to ache where Simon had tightened his grip. We continued that way for some minutes; I could feel my legs weakening. I suddenly had no curiosity about the man up ahead; I was aware only of the desire to stop moving. I wrenched my arm free of Simon and stood, watching the man disappear into what must have been an opening in the sandstone wall—our
sortie
, at last, as well. Simon turned an impatient face toward me.

“Well? Do you want to lose him?” he shouted.

“What if we do?” I shouted back.

Simon shrugged and pushed on ahead. I stood, watching his back, appreciating the grace of his movements, aware of a stark and sorrowful aloneness.

There was nothing dramatic about the evening, a week or so after the storm on the beach, when I stumbled upon Oscar’s darkroom. After dinner, back in the yellow suite, Simon and I had a fight, if one can use that word to describe what went on between us when things went wrong.

Trivial,
that was the word Simon had used. Everything here, at Ellis Park. Not that he minded superficiality—after all, we’d both found it amusing, this anthropological mission into the heart of decadent frivolity. But he was accusing me of having become tainted with it, of having become too involved, of having become trivial myself
.

I wasn’t sure what, exactly, had set off Simon’s opprobrium. I’d been in a particularly buoyant mood that evening, and had come into the yellow suite exuberant. I’d seen it in Simon’s face the moment I entered—that barbed closedness. I foolishly thought I could cheer him out of it—in any case, I chatted happily about the evening’s festivities, pretending I hadn’t noticed his mood. I poured myself a drink from the decanter on the lowboy.

“Honestly,” Simon said, “aren’t you sick of all this?”

“It’s really quite harmless. And fun. It gets me away from—”

“From what?” he interrupted, his voice almost sneering, snuffing out my high spirits, which were replaced by a panicky surge of grief.

“I was going to say from my work.”

“Oh, your
work
,” he responded, the same unpleasant tone in his voice.

Even after all these years, I did not understand the odd weather between Simon and me, the way the warmth would flow and then seize to ice. The way my own being would oscillate as a result—now expansive and hotly alive, now curtailed to a shivering, blank-eyed anomie. What I least understood were Simon’s dissatisfactions; when the weather turned sour, he saw me as all failings and faults. Try as I might to correct these, to find my way back into Simon’s graces, so that his clear, world-seeing eyes might smile again my way, I would end up feeling powerless, in the position of simply having to wait out the downturn.