Middle Age (74 page)

“I’m happy. I’m alive. I’m
home
.”

S ’  to drive the Jeep into the village. She’d bicycled instead. On Pedlar’s Lane quickly entering the bookstore, hoping that no one would recognize her. She wore khaki shorts, a green T-shirt, canvas shoes. On her head a white cotton cap. Her legs were long and tanned, her hair unnervingly short. The bell above the door tinkled and there was Molly Ivers in a denim jumper and new stylishly tinted glasses, shelving books in the nearly empty store, staring at her. “Mar
ina?
” The women embraced self-consciously. Never had Marina Troy and Molly Ivers embraced until this moment. Molly had known that Marina was returning to Salthill, but would have assumed that Marina would call before coming into the store. Yet Marina hadn’t; Marina hadn’t called anyone yet. Molly said, more in surprise than in reproach, “Marina, your hair. You look—

younger.” Marina laughed. “Younger than what, Molly?” Molly was embarrassed, her cheeks reddening. “Than you used to be.”

The women had much to discuss. They would require hours, several days of talking, considering. Marina had been thinking (she confessed) of selling the store; but after stepping inside, seeing it again, she felt the old tug of affection; an almost familial affection as if here, too, in this quaint little crooked-floored shop, she was coming home. For what were books but Marina’s earliest friends. Children’s picture books, and in time adult books, which were (you might argue, in Adam’s Socratic manner) artful variants of children’s books in which fantasy has become reconstituted as

“realism.” Marina did love books, she loved the smell and feel of books, new hardcovers in their glossy jackets, quality paperbacks festooned with

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J C O

enthusiastic snippets of praise like the tiny shouted voices of friends, almost inaudible. Now Marina was an “artist” but—how realistic was it to suppose that she could support herself, or even wish to support herself, on her art; how realistic was it to suppose that she could endure long periods of isolation another time . . . “If I had the money, know what I’d like to do? Buy the place next door. Break through the wall. Expand the store, add a café, like everyone else. Display more books. Children’s books. A children’s nook. More art books. Display art. Sell art. Bring more people in!” Marina had taken Molly out to dinner in a restaurant a safe distance from Salthill, the women were sharing a bottle of wine and laughing a good deal and discovering to their mutual surprise that they quite liked each other, though, strictly speaking, Marina was Molly’s employer.

Boldly Molly said, “Marina, you have lots of rich friends. Maybe one of them would like to invest?”

The women laughed together like schoolgirls.

A M   on “completing” Adam’s sculptures, her life began to change. She’d failed, but there was a surprising relief in failure. Such relief! Marina had not known. Her own work came now spontaneous and uncalculated, fueled by this relief; at times it seemed to spring directly from her fingertips.

The first of her visions was Night. The predator lynx. The creature of the woods, and of her bed. In a rush of emotion Marina created Night in repose, standing, seated, ready to pounce, creeping low against the ground, devouring prey. Night’s eyes were widened in cruelty, half-shut in ecstasy.

Marina made no effort to suggest Night’s thick, beautiful pelt, but composed Night of shiny things, as if perversely. Screws and bolts, nails, keys, metal buttons and zippers; bits of steel wool and glass. In one of the pieces, Night’s eyes were two slightly mismatched watch faces, stopped at different times. Like a predator Marina tore apart dolls purchased at yard sales and used hair, glass eyes, face fragments, tiny fingers and toes. She used feathers, bones, the shellacked carcasses of large moths with black markings on their wings. She used Polaroid images of rabbit carcasses, part-devoured, and strips of shellacked newspaper pages smeared with rabbit blood. She used strands of her own winey-red hair. She used mummified mouse remains. These many objects were ingeniously glued upon a wire mesh outline of Night. There was an air of innocence, even cockiness,
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about Night. Even when holding his mangled prey aloft in his jaws, in triumph. For Night was
he who is
. Comprised of
objets trouvés,
he was the stylized shape of a creature. You stared at Night and smiled. The cruel tearing jaws were but the jaws of romance, made up of screws, nails, bolts, zippers. The mad-glaring eyes were but clock-eyes. You could touch this creature, even pet him, and laugh at the intricacy of his construction.

Erect tufted ears fashioned of—mummified mouse hide? A jewel-glisten on—a crimson felt tongue? “This guy, you call ‘Night,’ is my favorite of all the pieces,” the owner of the Open Eye would say, touching the head of the sphinx-lynx, as if familiarly. “There’s a lot to this concept, but don’t ask me what.”

Those winter mornings in the Poconos, Marina worked on Night, and her mounting excitement and pleasure in the curious, unexpected shapes forming beneath her fingers came to obliterate her fear of the nocturnal creature itself. By degrees, Night ceased to crouch on her chest. Night ceased to suck at her mouth. And after Night she created an even larger figure, and a more congenial one: an obediently seated German shepherd,

“Apollo,” composed of dark shiny things, or shiny things darkened with stain, with flashbulb eyes and a pink plastic tongue lolling from his jaws.

She made big roosters of actual fowl feathers, painted extravagant rooster-colors, glued to wire mesh frames. Their eyes were mismatched dolls’ eyes, their feet were razors and spikes. She made deer, fawns, bear cubs, twin raccoons, a coyote and cub. In all, she worked on more than thirty Dream Creatures, and of these she was satisfied with twenty-two.

She asked the owner of the Open Eye if he truly thought these things might sell.

“Yes. I do.”

“Because they aren’t ‘art’—exactly?”

“They’re ‘art.’ Don’t worry about that.”

“But,” Marina was thinking rapidly, “do you think—Adam would have liked them?”

“Adam would have loved them, you know Adam.”

“I’m not sure that I do. That I did.”

“Adam would have loved anything you did, Marina. Adam loved you.”

M : the dark-haired man was Roger Cavanagh.

She stared. She’d stopped dead in her tracks. There was Roger

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J C O

Cavanagh whom she hadn’t seen in a very long time, lifting a baby out of its stroller.

Whose baby? There was no one else around. Yet the baby couldn’t be Roger’s—could it?

Suddenly Marina recalled: Molly had alluded to a rumor about the man she’d called Cavanagh, the rude, pushy lawyer Cavanagh, a mildly scandalous rumor of Cavanagh having become involved with a much younger woman, and having a baby . . . Hurt, Marina had blocked out the rumor immediately.

Now she stared, and stared. Oblivious of her though she was only across the cobblestoned Quaker Street from him, Roger was painstakingly, just slightly clumsily, removing the baby from its stroller preparatory to placing it, in a baby seat, in the rear of his car. Marina saw Roger Cavanagh as she’d never before seen him. He seemed to her young, invigorated; a figure of mystery. How fey and contrived her Dream Creatures, set beside Roger Cavanagh and his baby.
He has a new life, and I have no place
in it
. Yet, impulsively, not caring that he might rebuff her, or look with distaste at her wispy hacked-off hair, she came forward, smiling happily.

“Roger! Hello.”

For a moment Roger Cavanagh squinted at Marina Troy in the bright Salthill sunshine, without seeming to recognize her.

“Marina?
You?
”

F  , things happened swiftly between them.

O M W:

T A

I    as the most horrific fate suffered by any individual in Salthill-on-Hudson since the infamous tar-and-feathering lynchings of the s.

And it would happen on historic Old Mill Way, to the rear of the beautifully restored eighteenth-century Colonial property known as the

“Macomb House,” or, alternatively, the “Wade House.”

O   before Lionel Hoffmann’s fatal accident, Camille overheard her husband speaking on his cell phone in a low, urgent voice.

“Are you certain, Doctor? You’re telling me the truth? I can take it.” Lionel paused, breathing hoarsely. Over the long, humid Salthill summer his asthma and sinus condition had worsened, despite the numerous medica-tions he was taking. “I’m
not
—infected? My blood is
not
—‘positive’?”

Another pause, and the harsh angry breathing. “But can I believe you, Doctor? Oh, God. I don’t know whether to believe you.”

Such anguish in Lionel’s voice! Camille was stricken to the heart, hearing. She stood hidden against an exterior wall of the guest house; Lionel stood, leaning on his cane, on the flagstone terrace behind the house, near the pool. Though it was October, the air was warm and sunny; the pool was heated, and Lionel tried to swim in it frequently, for therapeutic reasons. For personal reasons, and to protest the incursion of Camille’s

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dogs into the house, Lionel had moved into the guest house at the start of the summer.

Camille hadn’t meant to eavesdrop. Lionel would be furious if he discovered her. He would never believe she’d blundered into the situation in all innocence; he suspected her, she knew, of spying on him generally. In his convalescence he’d become despotic and unpredictable. He must have arranged to take a blood test in secret, given by someone other than the Hoffmanns’ Salthill physician, who was an acquaintance. Lionel was now mocking the doctor’s voice. “Why would you lie? How the hell would I know why you might lie, doctor?” Lionel said coldly. “I’m not a mind-reader. Everybody lies to me. My wife lies to me. My children lie to me, assuring me they love me—they ‘forgive’ me. As if I wanted their forgive-ness! Doctor, there’s a conspiracy here to keep me from knowing the truth, though it’s staring me in the face.” Lionel threw the phone violently from him to the flagstone terrace, where, judging from the sound Camille heard, it shattered.

Camille stood frozen against the wall of the little house. What had Lionel anticipated?
Infected blood, HIV-positive, AIDS?

Camille felt a shiver of revulsion, and of relief. At least, there had never been any danger of her being infected. For the Hoffmanns had long since ceased all “marital relations”—as the awkward phrase has it.

She smiled wryly.
That
made her life so much less emotional, and painful, at least.

Camille went away shaken. She’d hurried to the guest house to share with Lionel some extraordinary good news she’d just received, that would surely improve their strained relationship, but—“Now isn’t the time. Obviously.” One of the dogs, three-legged Shadow, who must have followed after her, limped beside her, eagerly licking her hands. Out of nowhere charged the two most recent dogs, the thick-bodied mastiffs Soot and Hungry, panting, not barking, for they’d been conditioned by a cruel master never to bark under pain of being kicked, tails quivering with unspeakable excitement. “Good dogs! But you must be quiet,” Camille warned in a whisper. “This isn’t a time for—mirth.”

S   happened, Camille had no idea how, there were now seven dogs under her protection. Seven! These were Apollo, Thor, Shadow, Fancy, Belle, and the two brother mastiffs Soot and Hungry. She
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tried to love the dogs equally, for they were anxiously aware of their mistress’s every nuance of emotion and mood, and inclined to be jealous of one another except that overt jealousy displeased her; they feared and disliked Lionel, who so clearly loathed them, and slunk away when he approached. Apollo remained Camille’s favorite, of course. (There were odd, eerie moments when the handsome husky-shepherd mix seemed to em-body the spirit of Camille’s lost friend Adam. Or maybe it was the case that Apollo bore her unspoken thoughts, her deepest wishes, to Adam, wherever he was. “Apollo! Tell your master for me that I miss him terribly.

But I have my new life now, and Adam will always be part of it.” At such times Apollo quivered with emotion, licking Camille’s hands and face, and fixing her a look that seemed almost human.) Still, Camille loved Thor nearly as much as Apollo, for the Doberman pinscher was clearly devoted to her. And Camille’s heart was bound up with Shadow, for she’d single-handedly saved the misshapen little black dog’s life. And there was Fancy, Mrs. Florence Ferris’s curly-haired white poodle, the shrewdest of the dogs and yet the most childish and demanding. (Camille laughed, Fancy was so like her own children when they’d been small: “Always needing to be the center of attention, and never satisfied.” Though Fancy had long been housebroken you would never have guessed it from the way, out of spite, she sometimes piddled urine on the kitchen floor that Camille was desperate to quickly mop up, before her housekeeper, or worse yet her husband, discovered it.) Occupying a special place in Camille’s heart was the husky, mud-colored Belle, a mongrel mix of bulldog and retriever, the most severely scarred of the dogs; Belle quaked and whimpered if she believed Camille was upset (on the telephone, for instance) or if she believed something had happened to Camille (if Camille was away from the house more than an hour). The thick-bodied, deep-chested oily-black mastiffs Soot and Hungry (as their name tags identified them) were mistreated, abandoned dogs condemned to be put down at the animal shelter because of their nervousness and unpredictable behavior, for no one would ever adopt them, and the attendants were afraid of them. (Yet Soot and Hungry touched Camille’s heart, too. She knew to speak very softly to them and to stroke their hard-boned heads at exactly the same time, murmuring identical words to each; she knew to feed them separately from the other dogs, always first, and very generously. “I realize I really have no room at home for two more dogs,” Camille said apologetically, “but I can’t bear to allow these innocent creatures to be executed. Mastiffs don’t choose their