Glass Grapes (12 page)

She tried to point out to him the tricky consequences of kindness, but he just didn't get it. She, however, wanted to get this idea across, although if you'd asked her why, she couldn't have explained. It had mostly to do with his ex-wife to whom he was, at least as far as she could tell, devoted, patient and very kind. She, the one doing the explaining, thought he should be respectful and polite, but did he have to go out of his way. After all, the divorce was final, they had no children, no pets, and no debts. It should have been over, she thought.

It turned out they did have, however, a vast array of furniture, more couches and chairs and lamps and rugs and bureaus and plein-air paintings than she had ever seen. The ex-wife was a flea-market junkie. Every Sunday she set out with a wire basket on wheels to the Rose Bowl flea market and came home laden with art treasures. She was passionate about it and had thought early on in the marriage that eventually and with coaxing,
he would become passionate too, that they would do this together and, she had imagined, would gaze in rapture at the tree which in the odd painting she'd picked up last week looked positively anthropomorphic, a cypress, curiously bent and dull green. It was more than beautiful, this throbbing thing. Something tore at her heart, lit up her skin, propelled her into the next week when she could do it again. And she had done this every Sunday of every month of every year they had been married until their house, now his house, was filled to the brim and overflowing into the garage, the storage shed, the basement.

She had left him because he had no taste and also, she proclaimed, no passion.
What are you up to, what do you want, I mean, really want,
she asked with fervor.
You can't just wander in the world hiking and liking only trees. It's too vague; it isn't enough.
The one explaining the cruelty of being kind said that just liking trees was fine with her, and so he and she got on well in a mild but satisfying sort of way for the most part, except for his kindness and refusal to confront the issue of bag and baggage.

The ex-wife had moved out into a small apartment in Santa Monica.
It's for the air,
she said and breathed with satisfaction the way people who live on the other side of the 405 freeway do. Soon she had filled up the small apartment with paintings of trees, the painted kind being, as she explained, far more real and valuable. She had, everyone had to admit, a quite splendid
collection and she hung the walls with them and stuffed them under the couch and put them cheek by jowl and just everywhere until it was impossible to move except in the narrow passage between front door and kitchen. She invited him over for viewings and she kept on. Later, she called from the road. She had five large framed ones and the oak table had to be bought, had to be carted home, had to be lifted into the back of her SUV and he had to help and he, being kind, did.

Not only did she not give up her passion for collecting, she also refused to give up her passion to convey to him her passion for collecting and for the beauty of the painted trees, the artificial color of the foliage, the arrangements of shapes and vacancies, the ways in which they were, she explained carefully, superior to trees in general. Tears formed in her eyes. She called him to meet her for lunch. Over tomato sandwiches she went over the composition of the newest painting in great detail. She so wanted him to understand. Just try to see it, she said. Just try. Her eyes were bright. Like the gleam of paint in the corner, he thought, and wondered why he had had such a thought. He wondered why he had never seen it before and why it made him feel, as he rarely felt, unsettled.

The one doing the explaining about cruelty and kindness wanted to move in with the man with the ex-wife, but she wanted, she explained patiently, to move into a house they could make their own, not one laden with the paraphernalia of another, the mirrors of another,
the draperies and rugs and tastes of another.
She needs to get on with her life by herself, you know,
she said.
Couldn't you,
she asked,
get her to clear out?
But the man couldn't explain why not.
You don't want to hurt her, is that it? I don't, of course,
he said,
want to hurt her,
although that wasn't exactly it, he knew; he just didn't know how to explain.
It's her passion and her life. It's what keeps her going, I don't know what she'd do without it, and well, I couldn't take it away, now could I,
he asked. He didn't, he realized without knowing why, mention what he'd seen in the corner of the painting, the gleam that kept floating disconcertingly before his eyes.

You wouldn't want me to, would you? I would,
she wanted to say, but it was the wrong thing to say or at least the wrong time. So, instead, she tried to explain, as if explaining would straighten things out, that if he kept on being kind, his ex-wife would never strike out on her own, would always call on him at inopportune moments, would continue to dominate his life,
our
life, she slipped in, although it was a word neither had used before. Her usually mild voice moved in the direction of complaint. She said,
You need to do something,
and he said he would but he didn't and she tried again to explain that his being kind was a kind of cruelty, and he said,
You don't understand,
which she didn't.

One Sunday she suggested they take a hike and look at trees in the nearby mountains and he would have liked to, he said, yes, he would have, and he said this in such a way as not to hurt her feelings, except he
had promised to be on call in case his ex-wife couldn't get the garden set she'd hoped to find at the flea market home without help.
She's been after it for quite some time,
he told her.
It's what she says she really wants more than anything and the dealer promises it will be there today. There is no garden at her apartment,
the explainer explained, and then she found herself caught in the folds of what she was saying.
There is,
she went on helplessly,
only a garden at your house.
And she finally understood, without its being explained, something more about the extraordinarily tricky nature of kindness.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments.

—William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116

Too grim is what we all thought about Sam, Samantha, too caught up in endeavors to be artistic, thrusting poems at friends and strangers alike, ignoring the everyday stuff of what can be gathered up, the babies and jam jars and peaches from the front tree and this year finally the figs. I want it all—the sideboard, the antique mantel, the optician's equipment, the plein-air paintings, the tools, the copper pans, the hostas and cyclamen and agapanthus. Sonja says stop. She says stop cramming up the rooms, give some to the kids, but I can't stop, can only stop the pounding in my chest when I stand for a moment before going out the door and count up the plants growing to the edge of the greenhouse, the rugs now piled thick on top of one another, the rare and
the ragged, playing their geometric patterns off against one another.

What I can't do, even after my now half days at the office and my regular tennis matches with Jay and even riding the bike around the pond, is sleep.
No sleep for the wicked,
Jay says. I wish more of them lived nearby. Instead they've taken on careers in other cities calling home to report on Chicago's architecture, the movement of the film business to Canada, the cost of apartments in Manhattan. I've bought a new rug in acid green, horsemen buried in the edges, holding up spears and running around the periphery. The days are full in July. Sonja sits in the garden. But I can't, can't sit or read as I used to. Now only the news in brief, only the stories of refugees, moving from place to place, restless, unhoused. All they own left behind, one parcel, one bag. And I can't sleep. The edges of the room are filled with hands gesturing to music, moving in the air. My heart pounds and ribbonlike shadows run along the floorboards.

In the side room at the museum, there are drawings of the bony and veined hands of men, lifting, falling. I turn on the light and look at my own hands, the veins prominent, age spotting the skin. Sonja sleeps early and late, falling asleep in front of the TV, sleeping past nine until she's up to walk the dogs, gathering gossip from the neighbors, paying the gardener and napping under quilts piled at the foot of the bed. It's not that I worry about anything in particular. It's not that I have bad dreams.

I drove her to the wedding those many years ago. She, Sam, wearing gray and scribbling in a notebook as she was always scribbling things, taking notes, writing aperçus. What a waste, I thought, she could have a life and in the moment I thought that I could be it, but like all that happened to her then and later, I was, I realized, more imagined than real. Not that she lacked all affection, but it seemed the affair was imagined, the ways we sat together reading
Anna Karenina
aloud were imagined, something she couldn't grasp but only pass through—a scene in a play, some occasion for which she invented lines, remembered, replayed. She'd make a garden, if she ever thought to make one, without color or flowers. Sonja comes into the room with flowers, with branches of pussy willow, with gifts wrapped in pale tissue, with another find.
Look,
she says,
I just picked it up on my way home,
and I look at the colors on the glass plate as she holds it up to the light—pink figures dancing around a maypole.

It is night. My calf muscles cramp. Too many games of tennis, I tell myself, wait until Wednesday to play again. My neighbor recommends bone meal. I want morning to come and the world to start up, hate the loss of what is collected on the table under the lamp, what would show up if I turned on all the lights and flooded the shadows, edged the particulars. I want to run my fingers on the velvet upholstery, to hold the ancient bowl and feel its underbelly of soot.

Why does one think of strangers one doesn't really know. Samantha, Sam with her boyish head and niggardly
ways, hands so frail as to seem useless. They fluttered about my shoulders those many years ago until I held them just to get them to lie down flat. They gestured, unsettled and ill at ease, reaching for something, picking up a pencil to scribble. Once Anna's child wanted to go to the aviary at the zoo; birds and butterflies alighted on our shoulders and in our hair. I was twenty again and Sam's hands fluttered in stripes of henna, yellow, the pollen from the iris running across the back of a cat. Why should I think of her, imagine colors on her frail hands, her silly ways, her sad and wasted life. Her handwriting was spindly, fine, peaked as her hair. I wanted to wrap her hands in turban cloth, to buy her something.

Why can't I sleep, I ask myself at breakfast and vow to cut back on wine and red meat, to exercise more and get the gears fixed, to pick up those green glasses Sonja wants on my way home. The light comes in the window and the coffee comes up in the espresso pot and I burn my fingers lifting the scalding milk. Last week at dinner we all ordered the Merlot we had last night and toasted the now pregnant Cely and looked forward to another addition to the clan. Today I celebrate with a stack of new shirts from Filene's basement and I remember the green glasses. But Sonja's not home and the present seems heavy in my arms. The note reads:
Gone to be with Cely. Will call tonight. Back tomorrow. Xxx. S.

How are you,
she said, for there she was ringing me up on the phone.
Where have you come from, Sam,
I said,
putting the green glasses on the counter.
I'm in town,
she said,
for Tina's wedding and on my way to a meditation retreat
or a something I didn't catch, not that I didn't hear the words just that it seemed so adolescent, Californian, typical. What irritated me so about her? Even her goodness was irritating, her hours spent sitting at the side of the sick and dying, her poorly paid job at the hospice, her certitude. Fussy, I thought.
How are you,
she said, in a way that always made me think she was laughing at me, at us, at all of us now about to be gathered again under the tent with the glasses of champagne.
I can't sleep.
Now why did I tell her that. So I hurried on,
I just bought a Volvo, deep red and chromey, you'd like it,
I said. What did I care whether she liked it or not. I hadn't seen her since when, since Charlie's illness four years ago when she came to town to sit at the hospital bed, ghoulish attraction to death I thought.
Could we meet for coffee,
she asked.
How are the children? Sonja? Blooming,
I said,
blooming. We're all blooming. Why not come by for dinner—I'll just dash to the store at the corner; we've got veggies in the garden; just come, it's a perfect time.
She only had two hours she said, but she'd come.

At night the quiet is edged by dreams. My father a lolling head, my father without memory, without words, his hands worrying the sheets, signaling to someone standing behind me, someone not there. His face now only a photograph, cheeks tinted a rosy pink. But in the dreams we are held for a moment in a geometric
shape that is unbearably meaningful but so abstract that I can't quite see it. I start. I stare into the lamplight. Every night my father is there mouthing words I can't hear. I smell the antiseptic corridor, see the thin ties on his hospital gown.

She's as thin as ever. Seems as if she could blow away in the wind. Her haircut is worse than ever, one ear is pierced with four earrings—a woman her age. And the fingers all have silver rings. What can she be thinking, I wonder.
I've been thinking of you,
she says. She's only drawn to those in need, I think, and how could she—she who is so clearly needy herself—see me in that light?
I'm so glad to see you,
she says.

As the day faded, they sat in the kitchen, he making a salad and grilling a bluefish, she drinking iced tea. He poured himself another glass of Merlot. He felt drawn to her and to the night he feared, and, unsettled by this, he tried to give her books he'd collected, but she said she couldn't carry them, was off to a meditation center, wanted only the one knapsack. Despite her size she looked strong enough, but he demurred and offered wine now he was on to a new bottle. She shook her head and pulled her own chopsticks out of her backpack. I like to carry them, she said. How could she have come to this, he thought, carrying her own utensils around like some sort of hippy and piercing her ears and carrying knapsacks like a child on her
way to school. And why did he want to reach out and touch her head, her skull beneath her feathery hair, this sexless creature he had once slept with, laughed with, teased, seen as like them all.

After they ate they sat in the dim light and he for some reason unavailable to him didn't want her to go. I have to go now, she said. I always go to bed before ten. I'll see you tomorrow at the wedding. I can't sleep, he said. Why did he tell her this. It slipped out of him. She put her hands over his. She looked as if she were seeing something as clearly as he could see through the glass slides. They fluttered at first as he remembered and then were still. That was it. She put her hands on top of his. He felt oddly pinioned and even more oddly released. Then she left. That night he dreamed he was in a garden. It was abstract and unrealized, but quiet and still, and he slept and dreamed it all night long.