A Charmed Life (15 page)

Martha lifted a shoulder. “You might as well tell me to stop thinking about myself. I can’t. If I think about him or her, I think about myself. If I think about myself,
they
pop into my mind. It’s degrading. Do you think about yourself a lot, Dolly?” “Constantly,” smiled Dolly. “In terms of reprimand.” “I know,” said Martha. “I wonder if these other people do. I can’t make out. If they did, you’d presume they’d make some effort to improve their messy lives. So probably they don’t. I like your shells,” she added, examining an arrangement of graduated seashells that Dolly had picked up on the beach. “You did it for pleasure, I imagine. If it were I, I would do it to make somebody admire my ingenuity.” She sighed and got up. “And the irony is, Dolly, that nobody here cares. They don’t know the difference. All my silly efforts are wasted on them. You should have seen the vicomte yesterday: the soul of phlegm. And I was hurt. Imagine. I wanted him to like our furniture.” “Why
shouldn’t
he?” said Dolly indignantly. Martha laughed. “I love you, Dolly,” she murmured. “You’re so
loyal.”
She hesitated. “Thank you for coming up here,” she said quickly. “I know you did it for us. Forgive us for bullying you.” “All my friends bully me,” said Dolly cheerfully. “Anyway, Martha,
I
admire you. You don’t have to force me to, either of you. But you do make me feel inferior. You always have. When you’re here, I burn the muffins.” She pointed with the fork to the charred remains on the hearth. Martha’s fair-skin colored. “I didn’t will that to happen,” she said. “Honestly. I’d much rather you didn’t burn them. I love perfection in my friends. I don’t grudge you the seashells or having a better character than I have. It makes me happy.” She pondered. “Isn’t there such a thing, any more, as a healthy rivalry, a noble emulation, like the Olympic Games or a contest of bards? Does it all have to be poisoned, nowadays? This horrible bohemian life you see up here, with lily cups and beards and plastics—it’s real leveling, worse than suburbia, where there’s a frank competition with your neighbors, to have the newest car or bake the best cakes. I can understand that. I’m like that myself. But here nobody competes, unless there’s a secret contest as to who can have the most squalid house and give the worst parties. It gives me the strangest feeling, as if I were the only one left in the world with the desire to excel, as if I were competing, all alone, on an empty stage, without judges or rivals, just myself—a solipsistic nightmare. ‘That way lies madness,’ as old Dr. Hendricks used to say, remember, in freshman philosophy. In Juneau, Dolly, there used to be a madwoman who rode up and down the streets on a bicycle, wearing a sort of circus costume, tights and a red jacket, and white paint and rouge. I feel just like her when I walk down the main street here, in a dress and stockings; everybody stares—I’m anti-social. The other day, in the First National, one of the local beldames actually plucked at my arm and asked me why I wore stockings. ‘Nobody does up here,’ she informed me.

“You always were a rebel,” said Dolly. “You’d be the same if you lived in Scarsdale.” “No,” said Martha. “If I lived in Scarsdale, I wouldn’t care what the neighbors thought. And I wouldn’t want to reform them.” “You want to reform these people?” asked Dolly, with a quizzical smile. Martha nodded. “Of course. I’m trying to set an example. It’s not only vanity; there’s also a corrective impulse. ‘Let your light so shine before all men.’ That’s the very height of my folly. John and I are making ourselves ludicrous with our high-toned ways. I know it but I won’t desist. It becomes a form of fanaticism. They can kill me, I say to myself, grandly, but they can’t make me be like
them.”

Dolly remained seated on her stool by the fireplace, watching Martha arrange her gray cloak. “You won’t believe it,” said Martha, “but I don’t want to have a selfish life. I hate this obsession with myself, these odious comparisons. I want to live for somebody else, for ‘humanity.’” She gave a droll smile. “You have John,” pointed out Dolly. Martha frowned. “That’s just the trouble,” she said. “He won’t let me live for him. He wants to live for me. It leaves us at a peculiar deadlock. I keep telling myself that if we could only have a baby, everything would be changed. I felt certain that when we came up here, I would ‘conceive,’” The habit of speaking in quotation marks was one the two young women had acquired in college; Martha had trained herself out of it, professionally, but when she was with Dolly the mannerism reasserted itself.

“Maybe you will, Martha.” Martha shook her head. “I’m thirty-three. A little too old really, for a first baby. And years ago I had an abortion. It may have done something to my insides. Anyway, it’s probably wrong to have a baby as a ‘solution.’ One ought to have it for no reason, just for itself.” Her hand was on the doorknob, but she still lingered. “Come to dinner tomorrow. I’ll cook something vainglorious for you. Maybe we’ll go mushrooming first. John has found a new kind. And we have some beautiful poisonous ones, waxy yellows and exotic carmines, that we thought you might like to paint. The poisonous ones, naturally, are the prettiest.” She was speaking, all at once, very rapidly, in a disjointed manner. Dolly looked at her wonderingly. “Thank you for the tea,” added Martha. “Thank
you
for the tarragon,” said Dolly, slowly getting up. “I really must go,” said Martha, still not moving. “John will worry. That’s the disadvantage of your not having a telephone. Dolly,
are
you lonely here?” “I
like
it,” said Dolly.

The two young women’s eyes slowly canvassed each other. “One more thing,” said Martha, hurriedly, in an offhand tone but holding her friend’s gaze. “About the baby. It occurred to me last night that the reason I wanted one was because of them.” Dolly dropped her eyes. “You mean the Murphys,” she muttered, staring at the floor. Martha nodded. “They have a baby. I want a better one. It stands to reason. I never thought seriously of having one till we came up here.” Dolly’s figure stiffened, as though a pain had shot through it, as she listened to this abrupt confession. “You mustn’t say that,” she admonished. “I know,” gravely agreed Martha. “If I ever
should
have a baby, you must promise to forget that I told you. It may not even be true.” She tossed the last phrase off lightly and stood on tiptoe to give Dolly a kiss. Dolly received the kiss absently and remained where she was, leaning slightly forward, like a pillar, as she heard the door shut and Martha’s quick, lively step crackle the twigs in the path outside. The horn played a flourish, in farewell, and the pond sent the sound back, a distant airy cadenza.

Dolly drew her thumb slowly across her jaw. She frowned. Her neat dish face wore a mazed look of consternation. She shook herself, dog style, and went, still frowning, to pick up the tea things. “You must not be
shocked,”
she said to herself aloud, in stern bell tones, as she headed toward the little kitchen.

SIX

“Y
OU MUSTN’T BE SHOCKED
by anything. That’s the first lesson for the artist,” said Sandy Gray, seriously. He was a tall Australian with a brown beard who had formerly been an art critic on an English magazine. He was wearing a black wool shirt, black dungarees, and black wading boots and was knocking out a black pipe on Dolly Lamb’s table. It was mid-morning. Dolly had been painting, on the ridge outside her house, when she saw a strange man striding through the pond toward her, cutting down the pickerel weed with a hunting knife as he went. She shaded her eyes to watch him, but he ignored her anxious figure, while making straight for the spot where she was standing—like a guided missile, she fancied. A mild, half-humorous fear crinkled her forehead. She was readily dismayed by the most ordinary encounters; everything for her was numinous—the butcher with his cleaver, the hunter in the woods. Her virgin heart feared the Angel Gabriel in the milkman, bumping along the road in his truck, and did not dare refuse the milk, cream, eggs, and butter he offered her, far beyond her small wants. Behold the handmaiden of the Lord—she lived meekly in the age of fable, amid powers that had to be propitiated. The intruder today, in a black visored cap, swashing through the pond, advanced on her like a superman from a comic book or the man from the telephone company; in either case, the same perplexity presented itself: who was to speak first? “Hello,” she called out bravely, when he was twenty feet away. “Hi,” he retorted and flailed his way up the slope to her easel. He studied her painting in silence, scratching his ear. He then walked into the house in his wet boots, followed by Dolly. “I’m Sandy Gray,” he stated, in a voice that took her aback by its softness. “Have you got a cup of coffee?” “Only instant,” confessed Dolly. “That’ll do,” he answered. “Fix us a couple of cups.”

Out in the kitchen, as she put on the water to boil and measured out the coffee, she could see him, hunched on her studio couch, reading her copy of
Art News,
his black cap pulled down and his hunting knife stuck in his belt. Dolly was perturbed. Apprehension had told her who he was even before he had introduced himself: a typical backwoods blowhard, according to John Sinnott; a horrible boor, said Martha. He was a former Communist, it seemed, who made sandals in the summertime, for the tourist trade, and rode a motorcycle and used to feed his children on peanut butter and send them to school barefoot, till the S.P.C.C. stepped in. On no account, warned Martha, was Dolly to give him any encouragement, if he dropped by to call on her. His fourth wife had just left him, and he was on the prowl again. He would want to be neighborly and to advise her about her painting, but he was only after liquor and somebody to cook his meals for him.

He did not
need
any encouragement, Dolly inwardly cried. He seemed so at home that it was she who felt like the interloper. When he had finished his coffee, he took his cap off, tossed it on the couch, and walked up and down her small living room, his thumbs stuck in his belt, examining her effects just as if he were alone in the house. He opened and closed the door to her bedroom, glanced up the chimney flue, picked up a picture postcard and scanned the message on the back of it. He stood for a long time staring at the books in her makeshift bookcase, lifted out one, riffled through it, and replaced it, upside down. During this inspection, not a word was spoken. Dolly’s soul was outraged, but her tongue refused to move. She did not know how to forbid him the extraordinary liberties he was taking. He behaved like a higher authority with a warrant to search out evidence of her personal tendency. As she sat, meekly watching, a thread of silvery humor wove in and out of her thoughts, tracing a delicate embroidery. At the same time, suspense began to mount in her; her heart beat faster under her pale-blue shirtwaist and golden chamois jacket. She could not escape the thought that he was here to pronounce a judgment.

On the driftwood table, by the window, there was a bowl of poisonous mushrooms, brought her by the Sinnotts, which she had set up to paint. He bent down to smell them and made a noise of disgust. “Corrupt and dainty,” he said, in his soft, breathy voice. “Throw them out. They stink.” And before Dolly could protest, from her footstool by the fireplace, he had taken the dish from the table, opened the screen door, and flung the deadly mushrooms out into the pinewoods. “Damn you!” cried Dolly, jumping up indignantly. “You’ve just ruined my still life.” She confronted him, quivering, her arms akimbo, while he watched her, unperturbed, from his greater height. In a minute Dolly fell back, discountenanced by the grave look of his deep-set eyes, which swept back and forth, slowly, across her face, like two searchlights set in the bushy camouflage of hair and beard and brows. Having lost her temper and sworn at him, she found herself mysteriously translated onto a plane of intimacy, and she listened, a little bemused, as he proceeded to give her a lecture on decadence, with illustrations drawn from what he had found in her dwelling. The fact that he claimed to “know” her without even knowing her name imparted a sort of dreamlike solemnity to the home truths he was telling her; he descended on her like some meddlesome old prophet twitching the sleeve of a busy monarch with a message from on high.

“Stop hoarding,” he said gently, pointing to her collection of seashells and to the starfish arranged in a graduated series on her mantelpiece. “It’s your own shit you’re assembling there, in neat, constipated little packages.” Dolly’s cheeks suddenly flamed. She was as a matter of fact given to constipation and she felt as if he had peeked into her medicine-cabinet and found the bottle of Nujol. Moreover, she detested coarse language. The British, she told herself dutifully, were less nice in their speech than the Americans. But even as she strove not to mind, not to be insular and puritanical, tears sprang to her eyes, and she had to wipe them away hastily on the sleeve of her jacket.
“Are
you shocked?” he asked with a face of polite inquiry. When Dolly nodded mutely, he stood pulling his beard and frowning. She expected that he was going to leave, in disgust with her, and she found that now, contrarily, as always seemed to happen, she wanted him to stay. “You’re angry with me,” she ventured in a small voice. He shook his head. “I try to be honest,” he explained, “and I hurt people, like an abrasive. I want to sand them down to their essentials, scrape off the veneers. When I saw your picture, out there, I knew I had something to tell you.” “You
liked
it?” she said wonderingly. “No. I hated it. It made me want to spew.” Her work was sick, he told her—cramped with preciosity and mannerisms. Underneath, he discerned talent, but it was crippled, like some poor tree tortured out of shape by a formal gardener. She needed to be bolder and freer.

Dolly frowned. She had heard this from every one of her teachers and she supposed that it must be true. But it wearied and confused her to be assured that there was a vital force imprisoned inside her that was crying to be let out. How did they
know,
she used to mutter to herself in secret outrage. If there was anybody else inside her—as far as
she
could testify—it was a creature still more daunted and mild and primly scrupulous than the one the world saw. For years, she had been trying obediently to be bold and free in her work, and the results had always been discouraging, even to her counselors. When she “let herself go,” her paintings got big and mechanical; she painted drearily, in the style of the teacher who had advised her to be herself. She was tired, moreover, of being told she had talent. She had come to feel that it was like a disease that she toted from doctor to doctor, seeking a new opinion, a new treatment. Her last teacher, whom she had stayed with a year, had been a neo-romantic; before that, she had had an intra-subjectivist and before that, a magic realist. And it was always the same story. Each began, enthusiastically, by undoing the errors of his predecessor. That was the easy part, but what came next, supposedly—the leap forward, the breakthrough—never was accomplished. She parted from each master sadly, with the knowledge that she had disappointed him. Perhaps it was her money, Martha had lightly observed; perhaps she was like the rich young man in the Bible, who could not accomplish
his
breakthrough unless he sold all he had and gave to the poor. … Dolly resented this suggestion; she had been thinking about it in the last few days, pacing up and down the wooded path with her hands dug in her pockets. Everybody, she felt, had been trying to change her, to take something away from her. For the first time, all alone here, with her teeth gritted, she had dared think that it was
she
who had the right to be disappointed. In the silence of her house, her heart murmured against her teachers and well-wishers;
they
had promised miracles and then let her down.