Middle Age (36 page)

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J C O

East Stroudsburg, and such drives, which she tried to see as part of her meditation as an artist, required a considerable amount of gas. She understood that she was becoming, in Damascus Crossing, population four hundred, a figure of speculation. “Miss Troy”—“the woman who lives on Mink Pond Road, alone.” She tried not to notice the garage attendants observing her when she parked to use the phone booth, furtive as a woman slipping into a port-o-john under the scrutiny of male witnesses.

At other times, not wanting to brave the men’s stares, Marina made her calls from County Line Realty, also in Damascus Crossing. This was the agency that for years had overseen Adam Berendt’s property as a rental, provided services and a caretaker in the owner’s perennial absence.

An aggressively friendly middle-aged woman named Beverly Hogan seemed to be the sole agent, running the business out of a small simulated-redwood ranch house festooned with banners that flapped in the wind, like frantic applause. Marina worried that County Line had no business, in these off-season months; except for Beverly’s compact Toyota, the graveled lot was nearly always empty. Beverly Hogan was the first person Marina had become acquainted with in Damascus Crossing and had provided Marina with invaluable information. (Including the names of

“highly recommended” rodent and insect exterminators, for instance.) She’d insisted that Marina use one of the agency phones “gratis” for local calls; long-distance calls, Marina was invited to make on her card. That Marina hadn’t a telephone was a matter of aroused concern to Beverly as if Marina were a headstrong young girl in need of an older woman’s good sense. Except for her overeager social manner, her excessive makeup and perfume and inexpertly dyed ash-blond hair, Beverly Hogan reminded Marina of certain Salthill matrons: rich women ravaged by loneliness as by sexual desire, afflicted with a compulsion to talk as physical as a tic, with mysteriously remote husbands and grown children who’d proven disappointing. What good-hearted women these were, how generous, how kind and solicitous; and how one fled them, with stammered apologies and averted eyes. Several times since Marina moved into the stone house, Beverly had driven out uninvited, alarming Marina by knocking on her front door, and when Marina at the rear of the house failed to hear, tramping cheerfully through the tall grass to knock at the back door. “Just to see how you’re getting along, Marina. If you need anything.” Marina had not encouraged these visits, and felt guilty afterward. She would rather have made her telephone calls in the outdoor booth smelling of urine, but she
Middle Age: A Romance

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understood that Beverly kept close tabs on Marina Troy’s movements in Damascus Crossing, and would be hurt and resentful if Marina didn’t drop by her office from time to time, to confirm a gratitude she didn’t feel.

Beverly Hogan was the kind of woman you might not wish for a close friend, but you would certainly not wish for an enemy.

Always Beverly gripped and shook Marina’s hand, as she was doing now, on a blustery November afternoon. Always she asked, “How are you, Marina?” intently raking Marina’s face with her sympathetic eyes, behind red plastic glasses. Her attentiveness was oppressive, Marina knew she was being memorized. Her innocuous calls to Salthill were perhaps being overheard and memorized, too.

While Beverly typed away rapidly on a computer, Marina made a swift call to Molly Ivers. A surprising good week for book sales, Molly reported, considering the lousy weather; and things were sure to pick up as Christmas approached . . . When Marina hung up the phone, there was Beverly with two cups of instant coffee and peanut-butter cookies, homemade.

She said, with the air of one not liking to interfere, “I’d miss you, Marina, if you didn’t drop by to use the phone, but like I’ve said,
I
couldn’t live without a phone on the premises. And out in the woods like that. I’d have one connected before winter sets in, if I was you.”

Marina murmured, “Yes. I probably will.”

“The first real snowfall, you could be isolated.”

“Yes.”

“It’s a friendly community here. We look out for each other. Lots of families go back generations.” Beverly told tales of widows—living alone—on remote roads like Mink Pond—an elderly aunt of hers, who’d had a stroke—and a neighbor checked in on her, and saved her life.

“Dialed nine-one-one from Aunt Louise’s kitchen. But she had to have a phone, you know. To make that call.”

“Oh, I know. Beverly, you’re right.”

“There’s not somebody you don’t want to be calling you, is there, Marina?” Beverly’s eyes opened wide in disclaiming a wish to intrude.

“Or maybe you moved here, to—get away? From?”

Marina laughed ambiguously, blushed and shook her head. The hot coffee burnt her mouth. She picked up a cookie and crumbled it in her fingers.

“People wonder, you know.
I
tell them, an adult woman has a right to her own life. Her privacy.”

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J C O

“I suppose so.”

“An ex-husband, maybe? My sister, what she went through with her ex! ‘Court injunction’—the least of it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“
I’m
sorry. Guess who has to hear about it.” Beverly smiled grimly, adjusting her glasses. Inside the bifocal lenses her eyes hovered like small fish. “Gory details. There’s two kinds of men: the ones who all they can

‘get up’ is the remote control, and the ones who go crazy and want to kill you, they ‘love’ you so much.” Beverly laughed loudly. Marina heard herself laughing in Beverly’s wake, like a smaller vehicle pulled in the wake of a speeding larger vehicle, out of control. Shrewdly Beverly said, “You have the TV connected, do you? I know there was a set in the house. Nice one.”

“Yes.”

But was this true? Marina couldn’t remember.

“The reception won’t be what you’re used to in the New York area. Out here, in the mountains, you need a dish satellite. Like we have.”

Marina nodded sagely. At a point in this oddly intense conversation enough wisdom would have been communicated, and the older woman would release the younger. Marina’s eyelids fluttered. How tired she was!

She’d begun work early that morning, in a soupy slate-gray dawn, had despaired of all she’d managed to do through the day, beginning to be frightened that she was deluding herself, and bitterly disappointing Adam. How had she imagined she was capable of “restoration”—“divination”—what madness!

Beverly, seeing that Marina’s thoughts were drifting away from her, yanked them back in her cheery-commandeering way. “Marina! You bought that wonderful old house from Mr. Berendt directly, I guess? No agent?”

Marina hesitated. “Yes.”

“Or did Mr. Berendt list it with an agent in New Jersey? I never heard.”

“No. I don’t think so.”

Beverly nodded mysteriously. “A true gentleman, he was. But not what you’d call easy to read.” When Marina said nothing, Beverly continued, pursing her lips, “We were all real shocked to hear—he’d passed away like he did. Only in his fifties.”

“Yes. It was—unexpected.”

Middle Age: A Romance

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“Of course, we didn’t see much of Mr. Berendt, the past few years. He had a busy life lots of other places, I guess! When he’d come to Damascus Crossing it was for weekends mostly. He never hunted or fished and he never came in the winter to ski. He’d be alone, mostly. One summer he stayed for a month, he was a sculptor? That’s what he was?”

“A sculptor, yes.”

“But not statues. He didn’t make statues of people. It was more what you’d call modern. ‘Abstract.’ Hard to figure out.” Beverly sighed. She’d been eating cookies in delicate bites, as a way of not devouring them with Marina looking on, and crumbs clung to her ample bosom. “You’d wonder what it is, makes a man care about things like that? Of course a great artist, like Picasso, makes
money
.”

Marina smiled. What was this leading to? She felt both uneasy and hopeful. Beverly had known Adam Berendt at a time when Marina had not known him; a younger Adam, remote now in time. She said, lowering her voice as if someone might overhear, “There was something sad about that man, wasn’t there! In his face. His eye that was blind, and his other eye that was so sharp-seeming, like he saw inside you. I came out once and asked him, point-blank, that’s the way I am sometimes, I asked him about his family, did he have kids, and—know what he said?”

“What?”

“He said, ‘No and yes.’ ”

“ ‘No and yes.’ What does that mean?”

Beverly laughed sadly. “Damned if I know, Marina.”

How clearly Marina could hear Adam Berendt telling this woman
No
and yes
. Meaning
no
he had no children of his own,
yes
he had children in another sense.

Beverly said shrewdly, “He liked dogs.”

“Did he!”

“There was a handsome dog, he had. A shepherd. One of those older Seeing Eyes.” When Marina looked blank, Beverly explained, “You know: dogs for the blind. They only use them for a few years, then they’re ‘retired.’ They only want young dogs. So you can get older Seeing Eyes, they make excellent pets. At a place in Stroudsburg you can get them. Mr.

Berendt had one when he came out here, sometimes. But they die, you know. Sort of young. A shepherd is a large dog and large dogs don’t live as long as small dogs, that’s a fact. Why, I wonder?”

Marina shook her head slowly. She was feeling slightly dazed by all

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J C O

this, like one trapped in a speeding car, forced to listen to the rapid chatter of its driver.

“It’s a tragedy if you get to love the dog. You get attached.”

“Yes. I know.”

Marina half shut her eyes: seeing Adam, in shorts, his muscled legs tanned and hairy, squatting to hug Apollo, and the dog lavishly licking Adam’s face. She’d felt an absurd pang of jealousy, knowing that Adam dared show his affection, his really boundless, boyish physical affection, with one of his dogs. To have touched Marina Troy in such a way would have been impossible for him.

Marina’s eyes stung with tears, surreptitiously she brushed them away.

Sharp-eyed Beverly Hogan saw, of course. Possibly she’d been nudging Marina toward this moment.
Now I know: you loved him
.
And you knew
him no better than I did, you stuck-up bitch
.

Marina glanced at her watch. She hoped she was freed now, she could leave. The sky above the mountains was an alarming mass of bruises, there was a taste of snow in the air. Beverly walked her to the door with an invitation to drop by for coffee, for a drink, for a meal anytime, at Beverly’s home which was close by; and to think about getting a phone, seriously.

Marina murmured a vague assent. She was seeing those stunted unfinished pieces of Adam’s awaiting her at the back of the stone house, like aborted embryos they were, reproaching her for failing to give them life.

Beverly was saying, in a warmly reminiscent voice, “I took Adam Berendt to a farm auction once. Beautiful big old ruin of a brick house on the Delaware. He bought some things. He had money, just in his wallet.

One of the things he bought was this ring.” And she thrust it into Marina’s face, a glassy dark amethyst in an intricate silver setting; she wore it on the third finger of her right hand, amid other, less distinctive rings.

Said Marina quietly, “It’s beautiful.”

“It is.” Beverly continued to hold out her fleshy hand, frowning at the ring, smiling a hard little gratified smile. “Everybody says so, that’s ever seen it.”

Why is it when I’m inside this stone house I have come to love I can’t remember
what it looks like from the outside
.
And when I’m outside I can’t remember what
it looks like on the inside
.

Middle Age: A Romance

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Why is it I keep losing my way
.
The things in the back room
,
taunting me
.

The views from the windows don’t seem to mesh somehow
.

Mount Rue has been lost in mist for days
.

My breath catches in my throat
.
The heavy furred warm thing on my chest
in the night
.
Damp muzzle against my mouth
.
Sucking
.

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S,   good days. Very good days!

It was not madness, what she was attempting. She could distinctly see, yes, she’d made progress. These past twelve weeks.

She woke early and was filled with energy, inspiration, hope. She sloughed off the doubts of the night, splashed her face with cold water and smiled at herself.
Marina, dear!
Adam’s encouraging voice. In the studio she worked through the morning, into early afternoon, she refused to be discouraged, she refused to be despairing, it was true she was groping and uncertain as a blind woman, yet by degrees the blind woman was finding her way.

There came a thin scratching at one of the windows behind her, on the far side of the room. Like fingernails, or claws, against glass. Not a loud sound but rather more tentative, questioning.

Marina? Whose house?

And sometimes, trying to concentrate on her reading, she was distracted by sounds directly overhead. Floorboards creaking, almost imper-ceptibly. She’d shut off those rooms for the winter, of course no one was there.

One night she heard voices in the near distance, coming from the direction of the barn. Mixed with the wind. The wind! Always lately there was wind. Marina shook her head to clear it, confused. She’d been reading Adam’s copy of Pascal’s
Pensées,
and was feeling Adam Berendt’s nearness as she hadn’t felt it in some time, his voice that was quiet, bemused, teasing, yet kindly.
A mere trifle consoles us, for a mere trifle distresses us
he’d underlined in red ink and in the margin of the page marked
Yes!
And, which made Marina smile,
All the unhappiness of men arises from the single fact, that
they cannot stay quietly in their own chambers
. But there came muffled laughter from somewhere outside, a man’s coughing. And silence.