Middle Age (35 page)

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J C O

relief of course it wasn’t a human being, but the carcass of a white-tailed deer.

A doe. Partly decomposed. Much of the belly and torso was missing, cruelly torn away by predators, but the head remained, the slender neck craned far to one side and the mouth frozen open in the anguished pose of the dying horse in Picasso’s
Guernica
.



I   Marina Troy’s thirty-ninth year, unexpectedly and more or less contentedly she lived alone in an isolated stone house in primitive surroundings in the Pocono Mountains, in northeastern Pennsylvania; in Damascus County near the crossroads town of Damascus Crossing of which, only a short time before, she’d never heard.

It was madness! It was to be the great adventure of her life.

From her arrival in September through the remainder of the year Marina immersed herself in completing Adam Berendt’s fragmentary constructions. You could not really call these “sculptures”—they were embryos she would bring to life. By turns she was exhilarated and despairing. It was a risky thing she did. She’d set aside plans for her own work, indefinitely.

This was far more urgent work. Some mornings she woke inspired, suffused with energy and a need to begin work immediately, still barefoot, in her flannel nightgown with a sweater twined around her shoulders, and her mouth still tasting of sleep; other mornings, when autumn rain pounded against the windows of the drafty stone house, she woke groggily to a sense of oppression, as if a weight lay upon her chest, a heavy dark-furred creature the front of whose bullet-head she could not see.
Yet it has
a snout
.
It sucks at my breath
.
It has small beady yellow-glass eyes
. She had to push the furry creature from her in order to fully wake. She would lie then breathing hard, panting, in the unfamiliar bed, blinking and staring at the unfamiliar ceiling, for some minutes until she recovered her senses, and remembered where she was, and why.

Damascus County, Pennsylvania. In an old summer house built of stone, on forty acres of hilly, wooded land, this lonely beautiful impractical place deeded to her by Adam Berendt. Yet she was coming to think it a legacy. Left to Marina in Adam’s will.

Bequeathed to my friend Marina Troy
.
Beloved friend Marina Troy who
has survived me
.

Middle Age: A Romance



She knew what they were saying of her in Salthill-on-Hudson. Where has Marina gone, why has Marina behaved so recklessly, is Marina in a state of shock, is Marina in a state of mourning, how can Marina break away from her own life, her responsibilities, is it true she’s going away for a year to live alone, and—why? Marina’s heart beat in indignation, imagining. She would not explain or defend herself. She was determined. She’d made her decision. She would break with her anesthetized Salthill life. So Adam had described it—“anesthetized.” No more! Her house on North Pearl Street was leased to tenants, she’d hired a capable young woman manager for the bookstore, she’d resigned as personal executor of Adam Berendt’s estate, not wanting to learn more of Adam’s private, secret life.
I
will remember the man as I knew him
.
I will never surrender that
.

Once Marina was fully wakened and out of that deep seductive clinging sleep and once she’d begun working in the studio at the rear of the house, the narrow windows now cleared of vines on the outside, and cobwebs on the inside, and sunlight, if there was sunlight, entering from the east, she felt much stronger. It was a fact, she was happy. Now she’d so radically sim-plified her life, she was happy. She’d come to Damascus County with the original intention of working on her own art, which she’d abandoned years ago in her twenties, and she fully intended to take up her “own” art again sometime in the future, only just not yet. “This is more important. This is crucial.” She felt that she was arguing with Adam himself, and she would convince him. Entering into a trancelike state, working tirelessly. She was not inventing. This was “restoration”—“divination.” No objects she added to Adam’s uncompleted pieces, no scrap metal, or plastic, or broken glass, or tree limbs, were merely her idea. On the studio walls she’d taped photos of Adam’s finished sculptures back in Salthill (as it happened, among the few things she’d packed to bring to the Poconos were these photos, for Marina hadn’t wanted to go away without mementos of Adam’s work) and often she stood staring at these for long periods of time, almost unseeing, under the spell of their mystery.
Come to me
.
Enter me. Give life to me!

Strange it seemed to her, unfair and unjust, that Adam Berendt hadn’t been recognized during his lifetime as a sculptor of genuine talent. His work should have been represented by major galleries. It should have been purchased by major museums. If only he hadn’t lacked ambition! Surely Adam had been as gifted and original a sculptor as Raul Farco, whose work he’d purchased anonymously for the arts council. Surely he was as American-idiosyncratic as Rauschenberg, and in his more austere pieces

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J C O

as powerful as Henry Moore . . . “But it’s no good to think in that way. It’s demeaning to Adam.”

As time passed two pieces of Adam’s, reproduced in the photographs, exerted a strong influence on Marina. The “natural crucifix” made of a grotesquely twisted oak limb, with oddly shaped rocks and stones at its base, and the six-foot “American Laocoön” of translucent plastic, which seemed, even in the photograph, to be constantly changing hues as if living, breathing. Yet while Marina recalled this large unsettling construction in Adam’s studio as heroic, in this space, which was smaller and less brightly lit, it seemed to have acquired a taunting, malicious air.
Catch me
if you can
.
But you will never catch me
.

But Marina was not directly copying any of Adam’s existing work. She was not!

When she completed these sculptures, if they seemed to her of merit commensurate with Adam’s previous work, and not an insult to his memory, she intended to find for them a New York gallery of distinction. It was a bold, risky thing she was doing, unprecedented. The Poconos work of Adam Berendt, as these pieces would likely be called, would be recognized immediately as by Adam Berendt, yet it would be entirely new, unique.
Works of Berendt the man had not lived to create
.
A
miracle
. Marina would have to acknowledge her role in their creation, for to fail to do so would be to commit a forgery, but in fact as she worked she emptied her mind, conscientious as a Zen monk in meditation, of her personal ideas, memories, reflexes, impulses, that she might be guided by Adam’s vision. She’d brought a number of his books with her, and at mealtimes and in the evening she read avidly; and reread; committing to memory certain of the passages Adam had underlined in Plato, Ovid, Blake, Walt Whitman, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Were these clues to her lover’s deepest, most elusive soul, he’d never revealed to Marina Troy—

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.

What hours, O what black hours we have spent

This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!

And more must, in yet longer light’s day.

When she worked with Adam’s sculptures, she felt his power directed through her nerves and fingertips. For long hours she worked entranced.

Middle Age: A Romance



She was only part-conscious, all her life was in her fingers. If she happened to glance up at a sudden movement outside the window, at the edge of the clearing, or in the forest, or in the sky beyond Mount Rue, she scarcely registered what she saw. For she saw
inwardly
. As her fingers worked, she might hear, or seem to hear, a vehicle approaching her house, along the rutted drive; she might hear a voice, rising in the wind yet immediately fading; she might catch a glimpse of a fleeting figure (human?

animal?) at the edge of the woods. Yet she was protected from alarm, she could not be distracted.

Through the autumn and into early winter Marina worked in this way, and was happy. Slowly, very slowly she was making progress! It was her strategy to focus upon an individual piece of Adam’s at a time, conceiving of it as a riddle, as a heroine in a fairy tale is confronted with a riddle she must solve, or suffer what fate, she didn’t wish to know. This work she built up slowly, expanding it, deepening it, then when she hit a snag moving to another, and to another, for she hoped to bring the eleven pieces to completion more or less simultaneously. Adam had worked this way, on numerous pieces in sequence, in varying styles and modes.

Until her head spun so she wanted to laugh. Her senses were dazzled.

Until at last (by mid-afternoon) she was emptied of the vision of the other who inhabited her, for the time being.

A   , the furry weight on her chest. Pressing its snout against her mouth, to suck away her breath. Flattening her breasts against her rib cage. She would suffocate! Yet the creature was warm, strangely comforting. She tried to lift her arms, to embrace it. Its fur was long, rather coarse, the hue of wood smoke, thickening for the upcoming winter.

S    the doorway Marina contemplated her handiwork.

The fragmentary stunted things she’d found in the old stone house were beginning to take shape, to be of interest to the eye. Maybe.

Marina, what about your own work?

This is my work, Adam!

Your own work, I said
.
Marina
.

Adam, this is my work
.
Have faith in me
.

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J C O

O     in the kitchen, a scarred but handsome old piece of furniture pushed against a window, she was accumulating odd objects, as she’d done years ago as a girl. A giant gray moth with hieroglyphic wings. Hawk feathers, tiny bird skeletons, buttons, a wooden baby’s rattle she’d found in the barn. The green-glass eyes she’d prized out of the rubber doll in the marsh. Sometimes eating her first meal of the day in the afternoon, ravenous with hunger, Marina contemplated these objects, too.

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T  M  to Salthill were on business. Once a month she spoke with the real estate agent who oversaw the rental of her North Pearl Street house, and each Monday promptly at six .. she spoke with the capable young woman who oversaw the bookstore in Marina’s absence. Marina hadn’t yet had a phone installed in the old stone house, stubbornly and superstitiously she resisted. For even an unlisted number would make her vulnerable to unwanted calls.
And in lonely weak
moments, calls I don’t want to make
.

Vaguely she’d promised her women friends she would call them, but that didn’t seem possible, now. They would have wished to give her advice.

(For what are women friends, except givers-of-advice both wanted and unwanted.) She would have found herself impersonating “Marina Troy,”

and doing a poor job of it.

The young bookstore manager, Molly Ivers, was resolutely cheerful, upbeat. Business in the quaint little woodframe store on Pedlar’s Lane was

“good”—“not bad, considering the lousy weather”—
“really good”
—
“fantastic.”
A popular Salthill mystery novelist, with a
New York Times
bestseller, had dropped by the store at Molly’s request and signed a stack of books, thirty-two had been sold in a few days. Marina in her remote outpost in the Pocono Mountains, speaking from a pay phone, agreed.
“Fantastic.”

She meant to be upbeat as her employee who was ten years her junior. She meant to be upbeat as a way of not arousing Molly Ivers’s concern. Yet it did all seem—fantastic. To sell thirty-two copies of a book, or two; thirty-two hundred, or -thousand. To sell, to peddle; on Pedlar’s Lane, you were obliged to peddle; what did this mean?
What begins to elude, Adam, is
meaning
.
My former life
. Marina recalled her love of books since girlhood,
Middle Age: A Romance

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so much more innocent than her passion for art, but she could not now comprehend how this love had been mixed with trying, or wishing, to sell them. For when you sell, quantity matters. Quantity is the point of selling.

If it isn’t, why are you in business? And what exactly is
business?
Like Socrates, Adam had asked such questions involving the obvious. But questions involving the obvious are the hardest to answer.

“Marina? Are you still there?”

“Molly, yes. Such good news!”

“Next week Sallie Bick is coming in. The food writer? To sign books and meet people. I’m opening the store, Sunday from two to six. I’ll be serving some refreshments.” Hastily Molly added, “It won’t cost much at all, Marina. The author is going to provide the food.”

“Molly, that sounds wonderful. I wish I could be there.”

An awkward pause. Even Molly Ivers who doubted nothing doubted this.

Molly said, lowering her voice as if someone might overhear, “There’s a man named Roger Cavanagh, who drops by? The lawyer? I guess you know him? He always asks about you.”

“Does he!”

“He’s a good customer. He always buys a hardcover book. But he seems concerned about you.”

“I’ve told you, Molly. Just tell him I’m away.”

“Marina, he knows you’re away. But he wants to know where.”

“ ‘Away’ is enough explanation.” Marina felt her face flush with annoyance, chagrin. “I must hang up, Molly. Someone is waiting to use this phone.”

He will track me down someday
.
He will make me fall in love with him
.
But it
won’t happen! It will not
.

I D C, Marina sometimes made calls from a public phone booth outside Pryde Gas & Auto Repair, where since September she’d become a regular customer; when the stone house on Mink Pond Road grew too lonely, and too confining, after hours of work in Adam’s studio, Marina had to escape by driving to the Delaware River and back, or up into the mountains, or to a discount shopping center outside