A Charmed Life (6 page)

“It was another put-up job,” said Miles, cool as a cucumber.
“I
was little brother this time. She got the idea it would be nice for me to lock her out, and she set me on to do it. She woke me up from a sound sleep and told me she was in love with Sinnott and dared me to put her out of the house.
I
was the patsy.”

“I can
understand,”
finally said Jane, after a very long silence, “that she provoked you, Miles. But did she actually tell you, in so many words, to lock her out of the house? It doesn’t sound like Martha.” Warren nodded eagerly. “No question about it,” said Miles. “It was the case of her brother all over again, don’t you see?” explained Helen. “She put the idea in Miles’s head.” Warren sighed. He thought Miles was lying, and this depressed him terribly; it meant Miles was a person he could no longer talk to honestly. At the same time, he pitied Miles; he supposed Miles half-believed the things he was saying, though even a rather dumb soul, like himself, could see plumb through them and realize that all that about having forgiven Martha was a lot of hooey. Warren could not imagine that if he and Jane should ever separate—even if it were Jane’s fault—he would ever say such awful things about her.

And he guessed that was a limitation, in a way; he lacked the bravado to tell such a big lie. He was old-fashioned. He had liberated himself in his painting, and he and Jane had engaged in some pretty daring experiments in bed, but socially he was no pioneer. Probably, at bottom, he was as big a scoundrel as Miles; in his heart, perhaps he really wanted to beat up women and brag and lie and was just the prisoner of his inhibitions. The psychoanalyst had shown him, five summers ago, that he was full of unreleased aggressions; the cramp he had developed in his right hand cleared up like magic when the analyst proved to him that it was not a painting block but plain muscular tension; the Coes had been having a little boundary dispute with their neighbor, and what Warren really wanted, underneath, it turned out, was to punch the fellow in the jaw. The analyst had opened his eyes to a lot of things; all moral values, to the analyst, were just rationalizations: ego massage. Warren’s own values came from an identification with his mother and from being the class underdog in a sadistic military school, where they used to tear up his water colors and make him do dirty drawings. Any values he had learned that way were probably subjective and specious; no doubt he was just a bottled-up bully who overcompensated in the other direction. And yet you had to live with your values, Warren stuck to that, though he had been awfully interested to get the analyst’s point of view. Your rationalizations, darn it, were part of you too. Even if he knew he was a pharisee, he still leapt up when a woman came into the room. And it still made his blood boil to hear Miles spin a theory at Martha’s expense, though of course he was just as much of a hypocrite himself to sit there and smile when he wanted to kill the guy. Probably a worse hypocrite, as Jane would be able to tell him, when they talked it over together: the reason he was so hopping mad was probably a selfish one. He did not want to admit that Martha could be dishonest because he
needed
her honesty: she was the only person in New Leeds, outside of Jane, who understood what he was doing in his painting.

“Warren did her portrait last month,” Jane was saying. “Oh, I should love to see it,” murmured Helen. “Shall we go and look at it, Miles?” Miles made a sound of consent and heaved himself up from the sand. “Is she still so lovely?” Helen asked, arranging the baby in the bag. Warren watched her wanly, almost forgetting to help. She was bound to be disappointed in the portrait-people always were. They looked at his paintings and said, “Oh,” in a surprised tone; when he explained the theory behind them, they listened but kept glancing uneasily back at the canvases, as if they could not find the connection. For a moment he suspected Helen of insincerity: did she really want to see the painting or was she only interested in getting Miles moving? The afternoon wind had risen and the little cove was full of wavelets. Miles, warmly dressed in wool muffler, wool shirt, and tweed jacket, might never give a thought to the fact that the baby could take cold. If it had been Martha, Warren reflected, she would have
told
him they had to leave on account of the baby and Miles would have said, “Nonsense,” and they would have had a fight. But Helen, the Coes agreed, was a better manager; she tried to lead Miles without his knowing it, but she never argued, they noticed. If he said, “Nonsense,” she said, “Yes, dear,” as if she honestly welcomed the correction, even when Miles was in the wrong. Warren sometimes wondered whether this was altogether good for Miles; he would hate it, himself, if Jane tried it.

Still, he admired Helen for her selfless devotion, and he undertook to answer her question seriously, as they walked along the beach, back to the house. Helen had the baby; he had the knapsack with the lunch things. Miles and Jane brought up the rear, walking slowly: Jane was looking for driftwood. “Jane could tell you better,” he said. “I look at her as a painter. She has a lot of animation in her face. An academic painter, with late baroque light effects, could make her very arresting. That’s the way I would have done her in my early phase: a smoldering little saint with fair hair and white skin and black eyes. Some people might call that beauty. But when you study her you see that her face is asymmetrical. One profile’s classic; the other’s irregular. The eye is narrower and longer; the nose has a little bump; the mouth twists. Personally, I find that profile a lot more interesting. You can see her medical history in it, for instance. She must have had adenoids as a kid and she’s astigmatic and she learned to eat on one side of her mouth when she had a tooth out in her early twenties. The layman doesn’t notice these things.” He stooped to pick up a sand dollar, examined it, and put it in the pocket of his canvas trousers. “In the old days,” he continued, with a sideways glance at Helen, “they used to think they could tell a witch if the profiles didn’t match. Jane would have been burned. That’s what got me started noticing. One side of Jane’s face is reflective; she even has a tiny cast in that eye, and there’s a funny droop to the mouth. The other is active and practical. It’s awfully interesting stuff when you get onto it. Women, I find, are more two-faced than men, which is what the human race has always thought anyway.” Helen smiled vaguely. Her own parts were rather curiously assembled—small, round head, small ears, large legs, large, full long neck—though she was a pleasant-looking woman, taken as a whole. “John Sinnott,” added Warren, “has the most regular features I’ve ever seen. His profiles exactly match, which is frightfully rare. And the features are small too, cameo-cut, though he’s a tall man. It’s a French Renaissance face. Probably Norman blood.” “You’re interested in ancestry?” said Helen. “Oh, terrifically,” said Warren. “I suppose it’s the southern side of me. Ever since I started these new portraits, I’ve been studying anthropological types. Jane took her major in anthropology. We’ve been looking up some of the old books on phrenology too—wonderful stuff.” He sighed. “Those old boys knew a lot that we moderns have forgotten. Have you ever gone into phrenology?” Helen shook her head. “Try it some time,” advised Warren, over his shoulder, as he began to scale the sand cliff, holding out his left hand for Helen after he had got a foothold. “Of course, I know you’re busy,” he added apologetically, pulling her upward, “with the baby and the house. But I’d love to know what you and Miles thought of it. I have some heads and charts in the studio; I’ll show you, if you’d like.” And he hurried ahead, bending back the briars to make way for Helen and the baby.

The Coes lived in a modern house that had been designed for them by a cousin of Jane’s. It stood on a bluff, overlooking the open ocean; the Coes now wished they had built in a hollow, the way the old settlers had, for the situation was very windswept, and nothing but dune grass and dusty miller and wild beach peas could get a footing in the whirling, shifting sand. In their early years, they had tried to keep a goat there; Jane had read that goat’s milk was terribly good for you and they were going to write to the Trappists for their receipt for cheese. But the goat was not happy; the reindeer moss, Jane concluded, was bad for it, and they had had to give the poor animal away, before she perished, to an eccentric old lady, one of the local characters, who was a zoophile and ran a sort of pound for all the discarded animals of the neighborhood, chiefly the half-wild cats the summer people abandoned. Yet the windy, barren, desolate setting had, it turned out, one unexpected advantage. Beaten by the storms, the house had weathered, so that it now seemed to belong to the landscape. The squat rectangular building, with futuristic hardware, painted gray originally and topped by a roped-off sun-deck, now looked like an old-fashioned wooden icebox that had been wintering for generations on a New Leeds back porch. The Coes liked this effect and assigned credit to themselves for not having fought Nature. Everything fitted in, the worn tarpaulin covering the sundeck, the goat’s post—even the cylindrical bottled-gas tanks by the kitchen door, which looked so unsightly against a traditional house—harmonized with the main structure and with the sand heaped around it and the patches of reindeer moss and the gray sea birds circling above.

Warren’s studio, into which he now showed the guests, stood fifty feet away from the main house. It had a two-story window with north light, which at present was obscured by three army blankets tacked up to keep out the cold. There were cushioned benches around the walls, lamps, a station-stove, and bookcases put together with bricks and planks. Warren was a very tidy man, and the corner in which he painted—pinning back the blankets-was impeccably neat; an oblong of floor around his easel had been swept with a hearthbroom he kept for the purpose. But the rest of the large room was a dusty, cobwebby jumble; he never heeded it unless they had company, but then he felt a quick embarrassment, seeing the shamble through their eyes: Jane’s mother’s piano, which they never used, blocking a side window; the pair of rusty English bicycles propped against the wall; the ping-pong table, covered with a stained sheet of canvas; the broken washing machine; the deep-freeze that had proved impractical because the electricity was so uncertain during the stormy season; the electric doughnut-maker and the combination waffle iron and sandwich grill, the roto-broiler, the mixmaster, the special pizza machine—all the gadgets sent Jane by her gadget-minded family perishing here as in a boneyard; the sun-faded draperies from the big living-room window; the badminton set. It was a comic spectacle, Warren ineluctably knew; Miles could hardly keep from guffawing, and he did not blame him. Smiling apologetically, he got out the whisk broom and began to brush off the cushioned benches so they could put the sneezing baby down; he used the feather duster on the piano. Removing his kerchief, flushing, he explained for the hundredth time that a modern house did not have much storage space. “Damn fool,” he said, vehemently, “pardon my French, I ought to have had the sense to build a two-story garage.” He knew the Murphys were thinking that it was Jane’s fault and he hated them for thinking it; at the same time, he mildly and politely desired to share their mirth. Miles was prowling about the room, studying the derelict objects with the air of a scientific connoisseur. “What, for God’s sake, is this, Warren?” he demanded, pointing to the infra-red broiler that Jane had got last Christmas, when they were trying a high-protein diet. Warren explained how it worked or, rather, he gamely joked, how it
had
worked. Jane was in the house, getting a tray of drinks, and it gave him a queer feeling to be jesting so boldly without her, almost like an escapade.

“Why, it’s a regular cemetery of their hobbies,” Miles expatiated to Helen. Warren gently smiled. “That’s what John Sinnott told me,” he agreed. “He says I should do a painting, ‘The Artist in His Studio.’ Only he thinks I should call it, ‘The American Artist in His Studio.’” “Ah,” said Miles, nodding. All at once, his belly began to heave. “That’s good,” he cried, slapping his thigh. “Damn good!” He shook his handkerchief open and wiped the tears from his eyes. Dust flew. Warren waited courteously till the temblor of mirth had subsided. Thanks to Martha’s explanation, he was able to see what John and Miles saw: a satiric canvas, after Titian, in which he himself, the artist, a tiny dusty figure, was pushed into one corner, while his wife’s scientific gadgets and games and decorative fads monstrously took over the foreground. But to him, as he had tried to make clear to Martha, the objects in the room were not ridiculous, though he could see how in the aggregate they might appear so, to an outsider. To him, they evoked exciting memories, of midnight feasts shared with Jane, bicycle trips, skating on winter ponds, ping-pong rallies, doughnuts and cider; the piano made him think of Jane’s mother, and the deep-freeze recalled the hurricane two years ago when the electricity had been off three days and the road blocked, and they had lost nine gallons of assorted ice creams, which he and Jane had poured into buckets and taken on foot to the goat-lady. And it was not Jane’s fault that the appliances broke down; it was partly the climate—the sea air was bad for machines. She was not a good housekeeper, but, darn it, he admired her for that. All the women in her family had been fanatic housekeepers, and Jane had had the gumption to rebel. Martha had shrieked when Jane admitted that Warren had not had an ironed shirt in three years, but if he did not mind, why should Martha object? He would rather have Jane’s companionship than a stiff shirt any day. So he always said, and what was more he
meant
it. In his young days, he had been quite a dandy: he had carried a stick and yellow gloves and had his clothes made by a Turkish tailor. But those days were over. He had let Jane give his things away to a refugee without batting an eye. You could not dress like a stuffed shirt in New Leeds unless you were a dodo. It was John Sinnott, actually, that New Leeds chuckled over, when he came to parties in a dark business suit and white shirt. And Warren did not go to the city often enough any more to make it worth while to own a city suit. For those rare occasions, his gray corduroy, with a necktie, looked perfectly all right, especially if Jane touched up the shirt collar for him. In fact, as Jane told him, he looked much more the artist in that soft material.