Cascade (42 page)

She met with Asa once more, a quick talk, in a corner of the lobby, to work out what was next: lawyers, logistics. Asa was less friendly, more reserved now that he had had time to really dwell on the fact of her desertion. He would be in touch, he said. He’d talk to Attorney Peterson next time he was in Cascade. She caught the eye of Mr. Washburn, who was waiting discreetly on the other side of the lobby, and walked Asa to the front door. This time there was no embrace. He clapped his hat to his head and said, with a frozen face, “I guess that’s it. I guess I’ll see you around.”

She watched him as he walked away down Elm Street, watched until he turned the corner onto Main and disappeared. Mr. Washburn appeared beside her. “When you are ready,” he said kindly.

On their way to the train station, a flatbed truck rolled by, carrying a gray-shingled bungalow that used to sit near the schoolhouse. It was a bizarre sight, and though it was tethered securely to the flatbed, Dez pulled out her pad and sketched it as if its perch were precarious. She had been having a hard time imagining the playhouse making it to Lenox intact, but seeing the house, so squat and solid, making its way down the street was reassuring.

Forty-five minutes later, their train pulled away. She craned her neck
backward to get every drop of the view, the last she would see of Cascade in any recognizable form. Her eyes began to water, but she squeezed them tight, ferociously. She couldn’t have it both ways. Crying was terribly cheap and indulgent, and if she had to choose, she would choose where she was going: back to her apartment with its river light.

W
hy did she stir it up again, just when she was beginning to think she was on the mend? Because maybe, in a way, she was the kind of person who let her emotions inspire her art. If her life so far had been trouble-free, would it have been interesting? Would she have been moved to slash at canvases with paints and brushes? Maybe not. Maybe she wanted the star-crossed passion of a Russian novel.

Back in New York, standing in front of the empty seventh canvas, she felt herself at a crossroads. She had done six Shakespeare canvases; maybe there wasn’t a need for a seventh. She walked over to the windows, looking down through the branches of the elm tree to the street. Cascade felt more fully behind her now, and with Cascade behind her, so Jacob seemed to be. And yet…he didn’t have to be. She let her mind travel seventy blocks south and once it got there, it refused to leave.

She sat down with pen and paper and kept it simple.
Please let us resume our friendship
, she wrote. That was all. She addressed the envelope to Jacob Solomon, East Third Street. East Third Street was
blocks long but it was all she had and she had to hope it would get to him.

She ran downstairs and posted it immediately in the box on the corner, even though it would not be picked up till morning. When she climbed into bed that night, she pictured it lying on the bottom of the mailbox.

She began to sketch studies for the seventh painting, letting her hand go where it wanted, lines becoming a drowning person’s last blurry view through water. At first, she just drew shapes, falling shapes, smothering shapes that submerged the subject, which was itself just a shape, then she scratched all that away and tried to portray serenity—smooth stones, soft ripples, her mother as a three-year-old, struggling to stay afloat in the Cascade River. She scratched that out, too, before settling on the first view after all.

She never did finish that painting. She scraped it down and started again many times—it never came close to being part of the Shakespeare series, but remained a depiction, never quite right, of drowning.

Six felt right anyway, she decided. Six felt like a series, like half a set of apostles.

But something in her was still restless. She stretched an even larger canvas, prepped it, and spent hours pacing in front of it, making sketches, and throwing them away. It was time, she thought, to venture downtown to the Art Students League and take some courses, get involved with other people—otherwise, why was she in New York? What was she waiting for? Summer was over. It was time she settled in.

After work the next day, she walked over to the League’s Fifty-seventh Street headquarters and registered for a life drawing class as Dez Hart. While she filled out the registration form, the woman at the desk asked if she had applied to the W.P.A. “For a government-funded program, it’s remarkably free of judgment,” she said. “Most everyone’s accepted if you’re poor enough.” She glanced at Dez’s ringless hand.

“I’ve got a job, fortunately. Are you on the program?”

“Well, no. Because I’m married. They don’t like to hire married women. But if you ever lose your job—well, it’s nice to know. You know?”

Dez stopped at the Automat for a chicken pot pie, for hot coffee, for the comfort of clean tables and bright lights. At home, two letters sat in her mailbox, and she recognized, with a certain sinking of spirits, the cream envelope, her own handwriting. But the letter was thicker than the one she had sent, the RETURN TO SENDER mark not the postman’s stamp but a scribbly hand that could or could not be Jacob’s. She flipped it over; it had been sealed shut with adhesive tape and she tore it open. Her letter was there, yes, as well as a second sheet of paper.

Friendship? You sat there with all of them and dragged me through the mud. We all make our choices, Dez, and then we have to live with them.

Moments passed, frantic moments, wondering why he would write such a thing. Then she knew: Al Stein. Jacob must have talked to Al Stein since the day he visited her flat. Al Stein who sat at the Brilliant with his wife, Judith, while Dick and Pete lambasted Roosevelt and Jews. She remembered Judith Stein in Cascade, frosty, quickening her pace as Dez approached.

What to do? What was it possible to do? The other envelope was crisp and white and bore an Athol postmark—Stan’s wife again, a letter that was less wild, less rambling, more disturbing.

You seemed a nice woman that day I met you and all the while you knew your husband had been monkeying with that dam.
Trying to fob me off with money. I won’t bother you anymore but I just want to say I HOPE YOU CAN LIVE WITH YOURSELF.

I will have to live with myself, Mrs. Smith
, she thought.
I have no choice
. She would have to live with the fact that Stanley Smith was dead, maybe because of her, that Asa had no children and would suffer the stigma of divorce, that she had no family left, that the man she wanted had married someone else, that they were expecting a baby, and that he thought the worst of her.

It was fall but unseasonably warm, much like the evening that Jacob had come and gone. She wanted to get a cab, or run down to Third Street
and find him, but she couldn’t do that. She could only write another letter and try to get through to him. She sat down and wrote honestly and clearly. She explained that Asa had been hurt and angry.
You saw him that night, in the jail. Dwight said he was like a stunned deer. Like he was full of buckshot, Dwight said.
She explained that Asa had threatened to destroy the playhouse, and that she had agreed to stick by his side until the talk died down, to save Asa’s reputation.
I don’t know what Al thought he heard that night, but he did not hear a single derogatory word from Asa’s mouth or from mine. In fact, once all that talk started, Asa and I left. As I look back now, maybe that wasn’t enough. Maybe it wasn’t enough to say nothing, to not stand up for you and your people, but I was in an impossible situation with Asa, which you must appreciate
.
I am your friend, Jacob. Regardless of whether I ever hear from you again, I am always going to be your friend, I’m always going to admire and love you. I can live with a platonic friendship but I can’t live without your friendship. I can’t live without you.

That last line looked melodramatic but she let it go. It was honest; it was how she felt. Then she slid it into an envelope, addressed and sealed it, and went straight downstairs to the street to mail it. She didn’t hesitate; she pulled the handle down, pushed the envelope in, heard its soft fall, the clang of metal.

Back in her apartment, she flopped down on the bed, staring up at the plaster ceiling. Radios played through open windows; people lingered outside. A broadcaster mentioned Rudolph Valentino’s name and she remembered that woman who mourned him every year, going to such lengths to hide, yet at the same time calling attention to herself by grieving so dramatically in that long black veil.

She fully planned to wallow in misery, face buried in her pillow until sleep came, sleep, that reprieve from consciousness and pain. But in spite of herself, her brain began to pluck at images—images that grew and arranged themselves in a picture that made her get up, careful not to lose it, and sit at her table. She sketched—trembling a little, eager to get the idea down, trying not to get too excited. She did only one preliminary drawing before getting out her paints. Then she faced the large rectangular
canvas she had prepped a week ago. It was as if the painting were already there, that was how clearly she saw what she painted. As if her hand were just filling in.

It took her seven days to paint
The Black Veil,
and she knew it was seven days only because the day she laid her last stroke she heard a newsboy calling for the Saturday extra and she realized it was Saturday again. The week had been a focused fog. On Monday morning she meant to phone Mr. Washburn from the corner stationery store but forgot all about work until he sent Simon Turcott down to check on her. She’d told Simon she was sick, that she’d be sick all week. Simon looked doubtful—she was an obvious picture of health—but it wasn’t up to him to judge, and besides, all the illustrators knew that Dez was ahead of schedule on her
America
postcards.

She stepped back from the painting for a full look at
The Black Veil
. The oblong, roughly bowed shape of Cascade’s town boundaries formed the background; the shape of the river basin and its tributaries suggested the look of a wrist and a reaching hand. The painting was not completely abstract, but it included a lot more detail than had many of the Shakespeare paintings: drowning victims, shapes that suggested people covering their eyes with their hands, people stoning a small man, others turning their backs on the sight. And though it seemed done, she knew it wasn’t quite finished, and knocked on Maria’s door to ask if she could buy a length of sheer, filmy veil. She dyed the veil black, turning her porcelain sink purple and ensuring the ire of her super, then laid it out on towels by the window. When it dried, she glued it over the painting so that it appeared to billow and smother the paint.

She didn’t hang it—it was too large to fit her space—so kept it propped against the long wall by the door. It was her private communiqué with Jacob, her
apologia
to him and to Stan, to Asa and Cascade.

She didn’t receive the second letter to Jacob back in the mail. She never received a response.

S
o she settled into a new phase of life. She started Art Students League classes on Tuesday and Thursday nights. Attorney Peterson sent a petition for divorce by Asa on grounds of desertion. James Lawrence King’s assistant sent photos of the Lenox site—a grassy field lined on both sides by tall pines.

It was just chance that she met Maxie again, in a hat shop on Madison Avenue in early November. Dez was looking; Maxie was buying. Dez was prepared to ignore her after their last run-in, but it was late enough in the day that the magnanimous side of Maxie’s nature had started to emerge. She lifted a lock of Dez’s hair. “Bronze and copper. Art itself,” she said.

It was clear that Maxie was attracted to women, and if a man had said such a thing she would think he was hopelessly transparent. Maxie made the situation more awkward by insisting on buying Dez the butter-yellow hat she’d tried on, though Dez protested right through the buying and the packaging of the hat by the salesgirl. But there was something ashamedly exhilarating, albeit a little bit frightening, about being a woman’s object of desire.

Out on the sidewalk, the sky was turning the color of plums. Brown leaves skidded across the pavement. Maxie lit up a cigarette. “You want to go over to the Carlyle?”

Dez hesitated. “For a cocktail, you mean?”

Maxie drew on her cigarette, amused, as if she knew exactly what was going through Dez’s mind. “Yeah.”

What was the harm in a cocktail? Maxie owned an important gallery. It was time Dez showed some ambition.

The new Carlyle Hotel was quiet and genteel but thoroughly modern, designed and decorated in the
arts décoratif
style that had defined Paris and the modern world in the mid-1920s. It was graceful and restrained in a way Dez found soothing. Why, she hadn’t been in a nice hotel in years. They pushed through a door to a dark, intimate bar full of small, sleek tables, and a pianist playing tranquilizing music. Maxie turned out to be easy company—someone who chattered nonstop, the kind of person who really just liked to have an audience. She ordered two old-fashioneds. “They invented these over at the Waldorf. They’re all the rage.”