Light of Day (22 page)

“Do you think Isabelle knows?” Anne asked, giggling in Jack's ear.

“Isabelle is wise in the ways of love.”

“But is she wise in the ways of parenthood?”

Deep in July, Anne was in a rage to finish the paintings. Sleep had become a tolerated inconvenience, there were no more morning conversations. She ate her meals at her easel. Dressed in shorts and halter top, dots of paint in her hair, she worked alone in the night solving the problems of the first canvas. Muscles sore, her face pale, soaked with the day's perspiration, she would stretch out on the floor for a few minutes, close her eyes, then get back to work. By the time Danny woke up, Anne was barely able to stay awake. She had not the slightest patience for the milk in the face and scrambled eggs on the floor, and would reach for Danny's plate just as he raised his hand, or grab the cup of milk and spill it down the sink. “Not today.” While Danny kicked and screamed.

Jack was not in any better mood, and barely managed to wait out Danny and his morning tantrums until Isabelle rode to the rescue. “If he doesn't give it a break…”

Anne could only shake her head. “I know…I know…”

By early August, Anne was seeing some progress on the second
painting and looking less desperate. She was more patient with Danny, laughing when he threw food in her hair. She and Jack even made a game out of it, and Danny seemed less contentious. This was also the beginning of a rainy spell that drenched the grass, turned the yard into a small swamp and kept Isabelle at home. “Her mother slipped on the front steps and Isabelle has to take care of her,” Anne told Jack. “It will be at least a week, most likely longer, before she'll be back. She didn't seem terribly optimistic and, truthfully, neither am I.”

“We'll work something out,” Jack assured her.

What they worked out was a schedule: Anne slept during the day, as before, while Jack stayed up with Danny. By late afternoon, Jack slept for a few hours and Anne took care of Danny. In the evening, after Danny went to bed, Jack got his writing done.

Those first few days, Jack and Danny played inside the barn, or rather Jack watched Danny jump and roll around the deep piled hay, roust barn swallows, examine empty nests. Danny ran through labyrinths of straw, wrestled with creatures made of old burlap and his imagination. He never stopped moving, never stopped talking, while Jack laughed at the pratfalls and somersaults and dive-bombs, laughed at the nonstop patter, the narration of what had been conquered, built, destroyed. But by week's end Danny was not so easily entertained and Jack was no longer amused, the sound of Danny's voice had become just so much noise against the background of rain, his antics no longer held much surprise or delight. And the only thing Jack was aware of was feeling tired. Tired of the rain and the summer, tired of waiting for Anne. Tired of Danny.

The inside of the barn, the inside of the house, the word “inside” itself, had taken on the meaning of prison. The word “outside” took the form of invective. “Outside,” Danny would insist, as the rain beat against the roof. “Outside,” as they stood together at the window, watching the downpour. “Outside,” while Danny sulked on the barn floor, and nothing held his interest; where the air was damp and saturated, and the gray, formless sky hung like the weight of oppression itself.

They awoke to the sound of dripping rain, fell asleep to its inces
sant, unchanging slop and splash. They might have been living inside a leaky faucet. The shutters swelled with humidity and wouldn't close. The sheets and blankets felt as though they'd been dipped in brine. The ground was mud soup, which clung to them in the house, caking door-jambs, ringing the sink and tub, sticking to shoes and clothes. The dense and stagnant moisture was a constant presence, like a foul odor, like a fungus.

“I'm starting to take the weather personally,” Anne said, but she never stopped working, a cup of coffee at her side, hair flecked with paint, eyes red and tired.

When it was Anne's turn to watch Danny, he would rush into the big room calling out, “Play, Mummy. Play.”

“We'll play later. Mummy's very busy right now and needs some quiet time to do her work.”

“No,” Danny screamed.
“Play,”
and he emitted nerve-splitting screeches.

“You're quite maddening today,” Anne told him.

Danny answered with yelps and shouts, forcing Anne to stop work, sit on the rug and push his trucks around, cut out paper figures and animals from construction paper. When Anne went back to work, Danny demanded,
“More.”

“Come on, Danny, give Mummy a break.”

“Play,” Danny insisted, like a little emperor.
“Play.”

Anne would search for a toy that might occupy Danny, then hurry back to her painting, and when the toy no longer mollified Danny, she would sit at her easel, index finger raised in the air, “just one more minute…Mummy needs one more…” while Danny banged his trucks together or called out “Mummy…Mummy…” and Anne tried to squeeze in another minute's work before she stopped to roll a ball, or make up a game for them to play for another few minutes, or sing Danny's favorite song: “I went to the animal fair/the animals all were there…” before, “Now, let Mummy get back to work and we'll play again later.”

“Play. Play, now, Mummy.”

“In a minute.”

“No.”

“You're just going to have to
wait
.”

“No.”

“Yes. For God's sake.
Yes,
Danny.”

Some days, Anne was able to keep Danny busy with modeling clay made from flour and water; she made him sock puppets, which he soon tired of.

At the end of the second week, Danny would do nothing but sit in his bedroom and cry, or crouch alone in the closet. He'd have sudden tantrums and throw his toys around, race through the house, knocking down lamps, climbing over the furniture, stomping up stairs and down, until Jack managed to distract him for a few brief minutes with a balloon or a stuffed animal, then Danny would call out for Anne. And all day and all night it rained, sometimes in heavy cascades streaking the window, sometimes in a slow, nagging drizzle, the air dead calm. And all the while Jack and Anne grew more intolerant and impatient, pulling Danny off the furniture, leaving him to sulk in the closet, letting him sit in his room and cry.

“I'm beginning to think of this as our summer of discontent,” Anne said. “I don't know what more we can do for him.”

“If he'd just let us finish, we'd be able to—”

“If he'd just let us finish.”

 

One afternoon in the middle of the third week, Anne's painting nearly complete, she and Jack noticed a new sound: Silence. The rain had stopped. The sun was out, a dry wind cleared the sky, and everyone's spirits were lifted. Now Danny could play outside, damp grass and mud be damned. The next morning he and Jack drove to town and ate ice cream while they shopped for cheese and bread and wine and sausages. Then back to the house to play some more under the welcome warmth of the August sun. Danny was laughing again, he found amusement in everything offered to him. The simple sentence “Look, Daddy” took on the sound of poetry, a song sung loftily.

“At last,” Anne told Jack, “we can all breathe again.”

Those days held all the pleasures of a holiday, and Jack could not
help feeling a sense of disappointment and deflation when Isabelle called to say she'd be returning to work the next day. He kept Danny outside a few hours longer, kept him up a few hours later that night, until they both fell asleep side by side in Danny's bed.

It was the sound of Anne's voice that woke Jack. “It's finished,” she whispered in the dark. “Come look,” and led him into the big room. She was shivering with exhaustion.

He told her the painting was magnificent. He said it was her best work ever. They opened a bottle of their best red wine. Jack drank a toast to her. They drank a toast to the summer days ahead “free of all hard work.” They drank a toast to the painting, propped it against the wall, studied it in silence and raised their glasses again.

“I was considering using a smaller canvas,” Anne said, “but I wasn't certain if that really suited the work.” She sounded pleased with herself when she said, “In the end, I decided to stay with the large canvas.”

In the end, it wouldn't matter.

It happened that morning. They'd been up all night, and were now drinking their coffee outside by the trees. The air smelled of dew, the leaves shimmered in the sunlight and the grass was tipped with crystal.

Anne asked Jack to take another look at the canvas, in daylight, when he had the chance, “and tell me what you really think of it.” She took a deep breath and rubbed her eyes.

“I've already told you what I really think. Maybe you should get some sleep. Maybe you should sleep all day.”

“I'm too excited. Too exhausted. Too…I don't know.”

They stood there, feeling the morning grow warm around them. They hadn't heard Danny get up. They hadn't heard him when he was in the big room, not that he was making much noise. And if they had, would it have alerted them?

Maybe they would have looked at each other and said, “He's u-u-up,” with mock dread, and laughed, waited a moment and called to him. Maybe they would have gone inside a minute before they did. But they didn't hear him, they didn't go inside a minute sooner. They saw only the destruction.

The painting lay flat on the floor and Danny was sitting next to it,
an opened tube of ocher paint by his knees. His cheeks and nose were dabbed with green, his neck and arms were streaked with red and umber, his hands, the tiny hands that once looked so unimaginably small and fragile, were smearing paint across the canvas. The colors that had been crisp, the depth and perspective that extended to an infinite vanishing point, the light that appeared to radiate outward from the canvas, appeared to be manifested by the paint itself, were now a blurred mass of brown swirls, blacks and hideous violets. The imagery was unrecognizable. Destroyed. Unsalvageable.

Danny looked up and stated proudly, “I paint, Mummy.”

For an instant Anne and Jack could only stare, then Anne burst into tears, which made Danny burst into tears. The two of them, Danny naked on the floor, Anne draped against the wall, wept together.

“I must be hallucinating,” she sobbed. “I must be hallucinating.”

Jack lifted Danny away from the painting. He put his free arm around Anne. She crumpled against his body. He could feel her jaw clench and relax and clench again. The muscles in her neck grew tight. A soft whimper pushed past her lips, “I can't believe he did this. I can't…” while she hung on to Jack's shoulder, and Danny buried himself in the crook of Jack's forearm, smearing Jack's shirt with paint and tears.

Jack led them out of the house, out to the corner of the yard under the shadows of the thick summer leaves. He cradled Anne against one side of his chest and Danny against the other. Anne cried. Danny cried, and there was no way to make any of it right, no way to undo the damage. There were no words, there were only tears. The only sound was crying, Anne's thick sobs, Danny's loud bursts. Then something happened behind Anne's eyes, hard and solitary—as tears dripped down her cheeks and onto her shirt—then it was gone, and she took Danny in her arms, held his body next to hers. They were both trembling, and Danny's small hands were smearing Anne's neck and shoulders with paint, smudging her face, her clothes, her hair. Whatever comfort she needed remained unattended.

What a tableau it made for Isabelle when she pulled up to the house and sang out “Bonjour,” only then noticing the tears and trembling. She asked if there'd been a death in the family. Anne lifted her head but of
fered no answer, only turned in the direction of the big room. When she turned away, her face had an expression of utter disbelief and sadness. She pressed her cheek against Jack's face. He put his arm around her, and they stayed outside while Isabelle took Danny inside and bathed him.

“All that work,” Anne breathed. “
Gone
. I can't fucking believe it.”

Jack said, “It's not hopeless. We'll try to get some sleep, think things over and see what we can do about it.” Because he believed that they could undo the damage.

They treated themselves to a day of rest. Jack and Anne spread their blanket in the meadow while Danny ran and tumbled, as he always did, laughing and screaming, but something had changed. He'd stop in the middle of his games, run over to Anne, hug her tightly, kiss her face and arms and run away.

“I feel so bad for him,” Anne said. “He knows he's done something wrong, but he doesn't understand the severity of it, and we shouldn't expect him to.” And Jack wondered what else she was feeling. He wanted to know what else she was thinking, and what she wasn't saying. But Anne only shook her head. “I don't know. I don't know what else I feel. I don't know what else I think.”

When Anne got up to take a walk, Danny went with her and clutched her hand. When they came back, Danny crawled into Anne's lap and stared at her, he stroked her face with his fingers. He kissed her hands until he fell asleep. Anne rested her head on Jack's legs. She said, “I don't know what to do.”

They decided to cancel their trip to Anne's parents' house in Dorset so she could work through the next few weeks. Isabelle moved in with them. Anne told her, “Danny's forays into the big room are over.”

The first weekend in September, they returned to New York. Anne had finished less than half of the lost work. They hired an au pair, Madeline, to watch Danny. They made sure to keep all paints and canvases out of his reach. “I'm trying to think only good things about this summer,” Anne told Jack.

They spent the week speaking French to each other and to the waiters at Café Loup, and to cabdrivers, who ignored them. They went to
the Carnegie Hall Cinema and saw Alain Resnais's
Hiroshima Mon Amour
and
Last Year at Marienbad,
and tried to ignore the subtitles. They hosted a dinner party for their friends: Evan Lopez, a dancer with the New York City Ballet company; Brenda Susmann, a painter, who was represented by the same gallery as Anne; Steve Morgan, a sculptor who taught at NYU; Nan Roth, a lawyer, and her husband Barry, also a lawyer, who lived over on West Tenth Street, and whose son, Andy, played with Danny; Avril Stone, whose play
Hello and All That…
had been running at the Lortel for about a year and had even won a couple of Obies and was about to move to Broadway. Avril was short and thin, with curly red hair and green eyes that never stayed still, and tiny fingers that were never without a cigarette and which she jabbed in the air as she spoke. Her new play,
Shut Up, He Explained,
was about to go into rehearsal and Avril announced that she was “drinking to excess whenever possible.” They talked about Loubressac, talked about the painting Danny had ruined. In time, Nan said, it would become one of those family legends that gets dragged out with the old baby pictures, told and retold with survivor's relief.