Luck (5 page)

Imagine the sensation, the appearance, of a man tremoring overhead, growing rigid and remote, imagine feeling him, watching him, die in your hands—Sophie has never had people die in her hands in such a stupendously personal way.

Real flesh covers real people. There is such a thing as real smell, and real touch. Nora, who illustrates flesh, is a step removed from all that, and her model Beth must be at least two steps from any skin but her own. But Sophie, Sophie grew careless, or was forgetful, or hungry, and now look what’s happened.

Soon Phil will be not solid or sheltering or precise but in a state to flow through her fingers, be tossed about by a breeze. People take on new forms periodically. Sophie has. Now it’s his more radical turn.

There might be sympathy, if also a tinge of contempt, for a well-intentioned woman shattered by far-away sorrows as seen on TV, but there’d be none for a snake-hearted woman sneaking through hallways, skulking across the backyard, taking advantage of silent moments, now left holding a bag of huge secrets. A secret is only good if at least two people are keeping it. Poor Sophie, mourning hers, grieving for skin—but no, no sympathy for that either. It’s a tough, judgmental
world. She supposes the rock in her throat is what she deserves.

She straightens. This won’t do. Phil’s death is only one of many, many, many scattered over the earth today. That god’s-eye perspective ought to be comforting: what’s the loss of one man, however clever his hands, measured against the world’s huge, genuine tragedies? But how offended Phil would be by the notion that the weight of his life comes up short in comparison. And he’d be right. Either every death counts, or no death does. Which religion calls despair the most terrible sin? Doesn’t matter. Even at this moment, Sophie knows the difference between grief and despair. Grief is running into Phil’s room this morning and learning from Nora’s scream, her distraught, pointing finger, that he has died overnight. Despair is … something else.

And then there’s mere shock. It was exceedingly harsh and abrupt to suggest sorting through Phil’s closets and drawers, and Sophie’s sorry about that. But then, it was an excessive moment.

She’s doing the best she can, honestly.

“It’s a completely different thing,” Phil said, and Sophie believed him. “It’s totally separate.” Nora was with him for almost seventeen years which is, yes, a lot more, and different, than a couple of months. Seventeen years, fifteen of them in this house, is day after day and night after night of custom and habit, not to mention hostility, not to mention inspiration, not to mention consolation. It’s many views, encounters, moods, words and tones.

But, “I love you,” he said to Sophie.

Now, whatever he promised Nora, whatever he told Sophie, he has upped and left both of them, hasn’t he? He has slipped away as if he were one of those unmanly men
who say they’re going out for a beer and never return. Widowhood can take several forms, not all of them open or righteous or kind. Nora can be one sort, Sophie another—one more thing that will have to be fine in its way, fair enough.

A
steady diet of mortality and morbidity and grief and bewilderment is not to everyone’s taste, so it’s a good thing, a happy break, to find that Beth is a whole different story.

Indeed, Beth is floating, Beth is lighter than air, Beth is helium-hearted as she rises upstairs, grasping the banister to hold herself down, weighting her feet to unsteady floor. She is about to make her bed and darken her room so that Nora can rest because, with Sophie off making funeral arrangements, Nora turned to Beth in the kitchen and asked, “Would you mind if I borrowed your room for a while? I’d like to lie down, but I can’t face my own.”

“Of course you can.” Beth leaned forward and touched Nora’s hand. “You can have anything. Just give me a minute to change my clothes and close the curtains. Maybe you’ll be able to sleep.”

“Maybe I will.”

Philip is neither here nor there, really. Beth did not feel joy in his presence and does not feel grief in his absence. If she is guilty of anything regarding Philip, alive or dead, it is merely
of a relatively minor ill-will. But that scream this morning—Beth leaped from her own bed. To the rescue! Turned out Philip was not hurting Nora, at least not in any predictable way, but then, he never hurt Nora in predictable ways. He failed to protect, though. He did not scrupulously defend, his loyalties were divided; whereas Nora warrants a gladiator, a knight with full armour, sharp sword.

Opportunity presents itself.

Is Beth drunk? No, but something much like that.

The air in the house is light, too, like Beth, like April, not deep-summer August. Except for a lingering tinge of crisp toast—and whatever possessed her to eat so much bread, so much anything?—the atmosphere is pure, rarefied, intoxicating. Oh, Beth could skip to the top of the stairs, she could slide down the banister, she could skitter through every room, a jolly gaunt mouse on tip-tapping toes.

It’s the absence of bass voice, heavy feet and sheer bulk that already lightens the house. Philip would have stomped around and banged doors if he’d pictured disappearing like this. What Beth glimpsed in his newly grey face this morning was nothing: like clay before it’s been cast into something useful or beautiful. Or like Beth’s own face some early mornings before she has prepared herself properly. A little too naked and raw is what she means, an encompassing vacancy. Beth could nearly feel sorry for him, but not quite. He was Philip after all, that leech, that appendage, that anchor now lopped from its attachment to Nora, unweighting her, leaving her free to fly upwards, helium-hearted herself.

Not yet, of course. Patience, patience. Everyone’s still in the process of adjusting to a day no one expected, Beth does realize that. Nora is not away having a long lunch with Philip and Max. Sophie is not doing the laundry, or washing the
kitchen floor (which now, with all the toast crumbs, needs at least a good sweeping), or paying bills, although she is spending a lot of time on the phone. Beth is not curled up in the living room with her new, lavish gift to herself, a huge, heavy, illustrated encyclopedia of herbs and roots and certain flowers and their various combinations in compresses and teas. There’s always something new to learn, no matter how long and intensively a person studies a subject; and also knowledge itself evolves and expands. It’s very complex. Has anyone noticed that fevers and chills, colds and aches, don’t last long in this household, and that none of the women has had cramps in the nearly two years since Beth arrived? It’s ages since Beth herself has had a period at all, with or without cramps.

If she’d known, she might even have saved Philip last night, if he’d asked, if she’d cared to.

Instead, right from its start, this day went off its predictable course. No wonder that in the tension of the moment, Sophie threw up. Sophie’s brilliant red hair is gloriously full of itself, every unruly strand with its own buoyant texture, good to touch, good to hold—of course Beth was happy to hold it and help. It’s useful that Sophie, recovered, is organizing the funeral, since Nora seems disinclined to and Beth would not know where to begin. Everyone has their own purposes. For her part, Beth will know how to bring Nora tea, and wine, and how to stroke her hair and embrace her shoulders and draw her head into the long space of Beth’s throat. Nora, with her neat dark cap of hair, her quick little plump body with its quick little plump limbs, will be glad for Beth’s angles, the sharp weaponry of her bones.

Oh, Beth has some high, wild hopes today.

She has spent enough time, several hours, in black. Much is silently spoken by shape, colour and style, and obviously
she’s not going to change into colours of jubilation, no bright yellows or reds or even purples or greens. The gossamery, pewtery dress that dips at the neckline and floats to mid-calf will be appropriate but not entirely grim. It will be respectful but not actively mournful. Another great thing about the language of shapes, colours and styles is that it can mislead, even lie.

There are subtleties to beauty. Mysteries, too. Also worries. Beth is nearly thirty, and takes care to cream and massage her skin upwards, and not to smile or frown too hard or too often. She keeps herself thin. She concocts her strange flaky teas. She is aware—how could she not be?—that Sophie and even Nora prefer to suppose she notices little beyond her own beauty, but they ought to know better. Anyone with her knowledge of complicated combinations of teas can’t be any more dense than a pharmacist or a chemist.

Still, beauty suits her. For the most part, it allows for smooth sailing.

Beth’s room is the smallest of the three bedrooms. She likes it to be as spare as herself, and to that end painted it a flat startling white when she arrived. Her bed is white-painted metal. Her dresser, however, and its matching chair are tulip-yellow, and so are the frames around the mirror above it and the full-length one attached to the closet door. That’s about all the furniture there’s space for. There are gauzy white curtains at the window, but also dark blue drapes to draw over them. Beth likes the effect, which seems to her to contain a whole day, the white and yellow of daytime, the blue darkness of night. She hopes Nora, too, will find it restorative.

This is a special occasion. Well, obviously; but ordinarily in this house, people’s rooms are their own private spaces.
Ordinarily Beth can sit at her dresser and stare into that yellow-framed mirror for as long as she wants, massaging her skin or scouting for changes. Tiny lines. Small witherings. She will look like her mother, her future is more or less prefigured in old photographs, or would be if Beth kept any old photographs here. By the time Beth was born, a latecomer to her parents’ lives, her mother was no longer a beauty, but pictures showed, among many other things, a filmy child dancing around a living room; a glamorous bathing-suited teenager, one hand on slim hip, at a beach; a young woman solemnly posed for high-school graduation, blonde hair, fluffy as Beth’s, framing unsmiling features that were open, or empty, at any rate inviting to any interpretation at all.

Beth has her father’s slightly wonky left eye, though, with its pupil aiming marginally rightwards. The thing about beauty not everyone realizes is, it mustn’t be flawless. There are other qualities involved, among them the kind of imperfections that cause people to look more closely, and more kindly as well, than they would look at perfection. That’s what Beth’s mother said, and it seemed mainly true.

There was the wedding album—all that white! When it comes to clothes, white would not be her mother’s—or Beth’s for that matter—most flattering colour; also the colour, it appeared, of regret. “I married too young,” Beth’s mother said. “I didn’t wait to see what other opportunities might arise.” She suffered as a result a vast and prevailing disappointment with not only Beth’s father and his limited career maintaining and repairing big trucks, highway rigs, and his habit of shooting live things from the sky in his free time, but with the splendours that might have been her own but were not, due to being cut short, perhaps by love, perhaps something else.

“Beauty is a gift,” said her mother as she drove Beth to one or another distant competition or pageant. “It would be a sin not to use it. I wasted mine, to my eternal regret, and I don’t want that to happen to you.” Naturally she didn’t mean either
sin
or
eternal
in any theological way.

Beauty is strange. It’s strange because it simply is. It’s not earned or achieved, and it’s not exactly an ambition, it’s an outcome of genes and good fortune, and even so, it’s also what you are: beautiful. Beth feels sorry for people like Sophie, who looks as if she used to at least be attractive, but has let herself go, such a waste of an amazing gift, why would anyone do that? Whereas starting with beautiful-baby contests of infancy, and right through the trophies and tiaras and sashes of adolescence, Beth was trained up in loveliness. She knows its tricks. Her father was a hunter; at least, he was a hunter two weeks a year. One of the ways Beth thinks of her body and face resembles her father’s view of his duck blind: as camouflage. Soft, flying things may fall dead around her as well.

In a childhood and adolescence of stiff competition, Beth’s talent, since a nod to some sort of skill was required, was singing. She took lessons, cultivating a feathery sound reflecting her feathery hair and her feathery body. Her usual speech, on the occasions she had to make one, had to do with ambitions to teach music to the world’s children because music was basic to life and could even save lives. It didn’t matter what she meant, which was, really, nothing at all. It wasn’t her speech anyway, but her mother’s.

“You need to be careful with people,” Beth’s mother told her. “A lot of them will be jealous you’ve accomplished so much.” Looking into mirrors here, mirrors there, hundreds and thousands of mirrors of all shapes, sizes and purposes,
Beth was utterly familiar with the details of her own beauty. She agreed to its advantages. A person works with what she’s got and what, if she’s lucky, she loves. One will bend hard over complicated algorithms, logorithms, equations, solving her own mathematical passions along with those of the universe; another with a powerful affection for animals grows up to be a veterinarian, even though medical care of animals won’t necessarily turn out to be an easy or straightforward expression of that affection. Beth is no different. She makes what she can of what she was born with. She has never exactly discerned
accomplishment
in that but, like her speech about taking music to the world’s children, it was her mother’s word, not her own.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder?
No, it’s not. There are preferences, there are standards, and over the very long historic and geographic haul, those standards shift in reasonably democratic ways. In some centuries and continents the fatter the better, rolling flesh signifying prosperity, success, worldly triumph. Or the dramatically marked may be considered more beautiful than those with plain skin. Light is more lovely than dark, or vice versa. Beauty is in all these ways the face and flavour of its place and time, so what luck for Beth to be a child, girl, young woman of her place and time, blessed with long, straight, adaptable legs, slender hips, little waist and gracefully unobtrusive breasts, flexible spine, a throat that’s long and white and vulnerable. Her jawbones are firm but not so squared that they imply unpleasant stubbornness, and her cheekbones flare out like winged sculptures. Her brown eyes, the regular one and the slightly wonky one, have unusually large, arresting pupils, and her hair is contrastingly blonde, fluffed as an angel’s. Her skin is pale and unblemished.