Luck (7 page)

Nora is absolutely sure of her instructions to Sophie: damned if those villagers, townspeople, should be able to
observe him in the perfect vulnerability of his death. Philip wouldn’t have minded—he might even have enjoyed the attention—but Nora minds, and that’s what counts now.

That’s interesting: that it’s only what she wants that counts.

Interesting, and unspeakably lonely.

Here’s a large aspect of grief: something finished, but in unfinished form, as if they were on the phone and Philip abruptly and for no good reason hung up. Half the conversation of her life is suddenly gone. From now on there will be silence at the far end of each sentence. Nora’s regretful body thrusts hard beneath Beth’s sheet—now, now she would pitch herself at him. She is alarmed to hear herself whimper. There is no one but her to hear that sound either.

Is it true he died in his sleep? Or did he waken in panic and pain, trying to flail but failing, desperate to be rescued, unable to waken her beside him, sleeping as she was, as she would have thought, like the dead? He would have been furious, and vastly injured, that in the moment he most needed her, Nora left him to die on his own in the dark.

Or perhaps he just buggered off. Not so different from, say, her father whistling out of the house and into the more expansive world of, according to Nora’s mother, whiskey and the arms of stray women. Can death be a similar whim? It’s not impossible to see Philip, a man given to impulse, choosing on the spur of the moment just to amble into eternity. Maybe he looked at her sleeping soundly beside him, and shrugged, and took off. There was no particular evidence he might be inclined towards that, but her mother always said she foresaw nothing either.

Whatever happened, sleep must be more perilous than Nora could have dreamed, containing far more dangers than even those terrible nightmares of Sophie’s that make
her cry out, waking everyone. Too bad that didn’t happen last night. Philip might have been saved. Instead, at some accidental point in the darkness, life turned right over. Fucking Philip, how could he?

Shock, physically electric, shoots straight through Nora’s body, giving fierce, surging notice that every part of her, top to toe, is affected by this. Every part hurts. Were there signs, did he mention last night that he didn’t feel well, was not as sharp as he might be? No, she’d have heard him and asked questions. Beth would have got up from the Scrabble game and made him one of her teas.

Maybe he felt perfectly fine and just fell into bed, fell asleep, then found himself tumbling much further. Maybe there was no flailing, no panic, no rage or injury. No intent either. Accident, happenstance only.

Something happens, or fails to, a moment is gained here, lost there, and the result can be anything: joy, desire, inspiration, tragedy, pleasure, loss. Her first grinning Philip was happenstance also, the endpoint of an earlier randomness which was itself an outcome of triumph.

Also, wherever she looks there’s a thoroughly lodged, intricate twining between Philip and work, and what happens to that now? Work is what Nora does. What she does saves; saves her, if nobody else. She would even have said, maybe, right up till this morning, that work would be worth any sacrifice; but she would never have meant this one.

At least it isn’t as if Philip’s death is connected in some sacrificial way to her work.

Or—who knows? Awful second thought—maybe it is.

All she has ever meant by sacrifice is choice really, the weighing of one thing against another. It’s not so hard to sacrifice—choose—if desires are clear, and what have Nora’s
desires been but Philip and her freedom to work, in that order or not, nothing very dramatic or drastic?

Even poverty, one choice and sacrifice, was not only relative but a circumstance of relative youth. When Nora was twenty-five she was still very poor, as well as distinctly unknown. She was living, barely, above a sandwich and variety store in a cramped apartment where she slept, ate, and experimented with attaching fabrics to canvas, bedecking painted figures with beads and embroideries. She was interested in the relationship of colours and textures, as well as figures and shapes, as well as certain ideas, but no one lives on colours and textures and shapes and ideas. She was beginning to suffer rat-gnawings of desperation, not only financial. Not everyone appreciated what she was trying to do. Her only public mention to that point was in a newspaper review that called her contributions to an artist-run show “vivid and intriguing, but ideologically idiosyncratic.”

Well, thanks.

That was right about when Max and Lily arrived from France via England and opened their gallery. Coming from Europe spoke, she hopefully supposed, of either sophistication or of up-to-the-minute, on-the-edge taste. New eyes, anyway. Worth a shot. Nora walked in with a selection of slides and two of her actual works, then waited anxiously through a two-month silence that some days felt like a good sign, other days not. This was her life, didn’t they know that? Or care? Should she call them? Should she walk downstairs and ask for a job in the sandwich and variety shop, preferably a night shift so she could continue to work upstairs in daylight but also continue to eat? She jumped each time the phone rang. The time was coming, not that far off, when she wouldn’t be able to pay for the phone.

At last, Max called. In his flat, slightly accented voice, he said just, “Come in. Lily and I will discuss your work with you.”

In those days the gallery had one very large room, one lesser one and an office. There were canvases on the floors of each space, but facing the walls, about to go up or already down. Max leaned back in his chair, hands folded over a belly that was capacious even then, and tiny, silvery Lily leaned forward in hers, hands at palms-up rest on her desk. “Welcome,” she said. “Tell us about your work,” Max said.

What about it, exactly? They’d had two months to see for themselves. Still, Nora made her little speech, glancing towards Max but letting her eyes rest on Lily, about definitions of art and of craft and her desire to apply both. Because, she said, “I tend to think distinctions between them are basically arbitrary. As far as I can see at the moment, a stitch is as critical as a brushstroke. So differences are more a matter of who gets to decide what is art, not what art actually is.” Did that sound dogmatic? As if her real interests were merely political? “I like to make possibilities larger. I want expansion. Some kind of whole-heartedness.”

“The images,” Max said. “We notice they are primarily domestic. That is your interest, is it?”

“Well no, not really. Partly, but not entirely. Mainly they’re what’s in front of me to work with.” But what would elegant, portly Max, or Lily in her tailored royal-purple silk blouse, know of tiny dark kitchens and pieces of cantaloupe like slices of sun?

“I see,” Max said austerely. Then, “We do think you have promise.” Deadly word,
promise.
So that was that.

Till Lily smiled, and turned her hands over, flat down on the desk, a silent gesture with the effect of a gavel. “And so we would like an invitation to your studio to make selections
and discuss dates for your first show with us. Perhaps not one all on your own at this point but, as Max says, your work has good promise”—not exactly what he’d said, but perhaps what he’d meant, surely his own wife could interpret him accurately—“and we would like to see you well launched and properly nurtured.” Nora felt herself flush, then nearly launched herself across their desks to embrace them; Lily, at least. Max was still scary. A show, even if not one all her own, and talk of nurture implying a long term, and safety—no wonder she practically danced off down the street.

And no wonder she wished she’d told someone about being summoned by Lily and Max. She hadn’t, for fear of creating an occasion for mournful, intolerable pity, but now she had an occasion for celebration and no one at hand. She spun happily into a coffee shop a few doors from the gallery, clutching her news to herself—and whose familiar face was that at a window table, glancing up?

“Lynn?”

“Nora?”

Lynn, yes. Long-lost and, to be honest, mainly forgotten high-school acquaintance. Still, how cheerful, running into anyone known. “Want to join me?” asked Lynn. “I’m just taking a break between classes.”

She was still in university, nearly finished a graduate degree in French literature. From high school Nora remembered a skinny girl with the slumpy sort of shoulders that went with being embarrassed by height. She played basketball. What else? Didn’t matter. Now she was slender rather than skinny, willowy rather than slumped. She’d been married for almost two years, and she and her husband had recently acquired a downtown rowhouse. “Oh my God, the mortgage, we’re petrified. But I’ll be teaching soon, and I’ll do
that at least till we have kids, so we figure we’ll be okay.” She asked what Nora was doing. “That’s great,” she said, sadly failing, in Nora’s view, to grasp the splendour of Nora’s news.

Still, a sense of occasion and a benign sort of nostalgia caused them to make an appointment for lunch. Nora would meet Lynn at her recently acquired home. “You can meet Philip,” Lynn said, “before we go out.”

Happenstance, accident, random cause and effect.

Three days later Nora pressed the doorbell of a tiny white-stuccoed house attached in each direction up and down the block to other tiny white-stuccoed houses, and found herself facing a lean, grinning, nude man.

It is not necessarily the case that a man will be at his best undraped; some camouflage of chubby portion or dangly bit may be wise, at least for first impressions, but not with Philip. He stood in the doorway fully formed, golden and lithe. Nora stepped back briefly; then, irritated at being so transparently startled, stepped forward again. She did not fall into the trap, either, of looking only into his grey-tinged blue eyes, but allowed her gaze to roam, coolly taking in the square-planted feet, the calves and thighs curling with a moderate crop of dark hair—nothing actually furry or unfortunately bear-like, she noted—long arms, a hand still braced on the door, chest and stomach muscularly but not aggressively outlined, and of course his penis, pinky-purple and wavering, evidently undecided about whether to remain at rest or to rise to an occasion it could, it seemed, already sense.

“I’m here for Lynn,” she said.

“You must be Nora. I’m Philip.”

Lynn’s husband. Not for long.

Lynn, walking fast, click-click on little heels into the front hall, was fully dressed in forest-green linen trousers, matching
blouse, golden bracelets. “Philip!” she cried. “Good God,” and turning to Nora she said, “Honestly, I just never know what he’s going to do next,” and there was a pride in her tone, a self-satisfaction that rendered Nora unsympathetic.

Nora and Lynn went off for their lunch; nothing monumentally life-altering happened as immediately as that. But something did happen and obviously they then failed to pursue their old loose, unnecessary acquaintanceship. They were all young. Domestic shufflings, while awkward, weren’t necessarily excruciating. Everyone involved still had plenty of future, no need to resent whole wasted decades. Naturally a certain array of emotions required display, there was the usual script to follow of injuries suffered, delight achieved. Lynn’s role, for instance, was to be bitter. “Betrayed,” she cried dramatically, and repeatedly, to many, many people, “by my husband
and
my friend.” As if Nora had been her only friend, as Philip was her only husband. As if Nora had really been her friend at all.

Philip said it was Nora’s assessing regard on the doorstep that first intrigued and appealed to him. “No flinching or blushing.” Later he was drawn by “your brightness, and that drive and desire you have. Also your tits.” As for answering the door naked, he said, “Well, you know what we’d been doing. Probably because I was trying to make Lynn run late. Or wanted her to stay home—one of those power-plays you won’t fall for. And maybe to embarrass her. And to test her old pal. And then there’s the fact I can just be kind of a pig.” His smile was winsome, designed to contradict his own words; or, if Nora failed to grasp that much, intended to humbly seek praise for his frankness.

The mark, one of the marks, of the stray: the conscious adorability, the obsequious, vulnerable, soft-belly exposure.
Beth was a stray; Sophie too, in her way. Was Philip as well? Surely not.

He was large and beautiful and bold. Nora was small and optimistic and brutal. He said that when he married Lynn almost two years before he opened that door, “It didn’t quite feel right, but I didn’t know why. Now I do.’ And what can, or should, stand in the face of right feeling? Certainly not wrong feeling. So, goodbye Philip-and-Lynn.

Now, goodbye Philip.

Quite the abandoner he has been.

Is this swift transformation to rage normal when somebody dies? Because Nora is suddenly furious.

It has been her conviction that once over her own admittedly fierce hump of rage and betrayal, Lynn’s life went just fine. She remarried, an evidently compatible and clever man who does something financial. He has been more agreeable than Philip on the subject of children—it was contentious, Philip said, that he was firmly opposed while Lynn was so keen she spoke of babies as if they were already formed up inside her, hammering to get out. The sort of thing, it seemed to Nora, that should be discussed before marrying, although hardly her place to say so. Now Lynn has two triumphantly out-of-the-womb, into-the-world children who must be getting into their teens. She also not only has several degrees but teaches something or other to do with languages at university.

Sensibly, Nora asked Philip before they married, “Do you think it’s mutant that I seriously do not care to have kids? Can you foresee changing your mind? Because I can’t see changing mine.”

“No,” he said, “and no. Thank God,” and got himself a vasectomy. In so many matters, large and small, they were—well,
soulmates
would be excessive, and Nora opposes excess
in most of its forms, but at least they were in general and on large issues highly compatible.