Souvenir of Cold Springs (36 page)

“
Es muy bonito!
”

“
Gracias
,” Peggy said.

“From you hahsbeend?” Bernarda asked, smiling.

“
Si! Si!
My husband. Very good, Bernarda.” She nodded ecstatically. She would have liked to embrace Bernarda. They stood smiling and nodding at each other, admiring the ring, and then Peggy went down the hall to her room. With difficulty, she pulled the ring off her finger and held it in her palm.
Hahsbeend
. The quick tears slipped down her cheeks. Pathetic, she thought. You poor pathetic girl. She put the ring away in a drawer and went out for her walk.

By October, when there were forty-nine days left unblotted on her calendar, and when she was becoming embarrassed by her ungainly shape so that walking was no longer a pleasure, and the afternoons stretched out long and blank like the mornings, Aunt Alice asked her at teatime if she would like to come to the studio and pose.

“We'd get the stove fired up nice and hot,” she said. “I know it's hard to sit still during these last months, but you could take plenty of breaks. And we'd pay you the going rate, of course.” Aunt Alice smiled at her, sipped her tea, and said, “A pregnant model isn't something you come across every day. We'd all love to do you. We'd consider it a rare opportunity. And it would only be for a few days—a week at most.”

Peggy stared at her. “You mean in the nude?”

“Of
course
in the nude.” Her aunt leaned back in her chair, still smiling, and fitted a cigarette into her ivory holder. She exhaled a long stream through her nose. “We're all women, after all, and I promise you we'll keep it very tasteful and modest. And anonymous. We'll turn your head—like so.” She clamped the holder between her teeth like President Roosevelt and reached out to tilt Peggy's chin. “After the first few minutes, you'll absolutely forget that you don't have your clothes on.”

“How do you know I will?”

“Oh, I've done a bit of it myself.” Aunt Alice tapped ashes into her special ashtray—a pair of green marble cupped hands—and her smile became reflective. “Posed for friends back in my student days. That sort of thing.”

Peggy tried to imagine her matronly aunt arranged naked in some arty pose, surrounded by students. She laughed. “Aunt Alice, I'm shocked.”

Her aunt said, “You'd be surprised at how natural it feels.”

She couldn't imagine her aunt, but she could imagine herself: she had a vision of herself as a painting, naked, her skin gleaming, her head tipped back, her breasts lifted. She felt her heart begin to race.

“Think about it.” Her aunt put down her cigarette and smeared jam on a piece of shortbread. “You don't have to decide now.”

Peggy said, “No,” and pressed her hands to her heart. “I've already decided. I'll do it.”

She began posing
at the studio every afternoon. In the cold bathroom, she changed out of her clothes into a silk kimono supplied by Claire, and sat as they arranged her, slumped on a sofa at one end of the room by the window. “Okay, dear?” Aunt Alice would say, and Peggy would let the robe fall. “Good,” one of them would say. “Lovely. Just move that hand a little more forward on your—good. And tilt your head just—yes—up? Up a wee bit higher? Good.”

She knew her aunt's friends better now; she was comfortable with them. And she no longer minded the smells; the nausea from earlier in her pregnancy was gone. She posed in half-hour shifts, sitting with one hand on her belly, one hand dangling, and her face turned toward the window. If she cast her eyes down she could see her hard brown nipples and the white swell of her stomach with its rivers of blue veins. Under her hand she could feel the baby move. When she saw it pushing out against her skin, a little bulge that came and went around her stretched-tight navel, she turned her eyes away again, watching the white sky and, in the distance, black and red rooftops, the Colt Tower, and the gray-green of the Bay. Out there, miles and miles distant, was Hawaii. She dreamed of going there with Ray on her honeymoon, the two of them browning in the hot sun, wearing flowers, eating fruit that dropped off trees at their feet.

Gradually, her pose would become less comfortable. Her back would begin to hurt, she would have to pee. She would hold out as long as she could, then say, “Could I take a rest?” There would be an apologetic flurry: the women plopping their brushes into jars of turpentine or water, Aunt Alice stepping back from the clay. One of them would pick up her robe and hand it to her, and they would cluster around her, telling her what a good model she was, what wonderful skin, what an expressive hand, what a good line from neck to shoulder. She would study their work—they didn't mind. She found it less strange than usual, as if her naked pregnant body had grounded them in reality. Claire's watercolors were quite pretty, really—all sort of misty and blue; and even Cora, though she painted in strident reds and purples, seemed to have captured something, some restless violence that Peggy understood. Her aunt's clay sculpture was clever, the way from one angle she looked heavy and awkward and from another dreamy, graceful, catlike. It was to be called
The Future
.

“Of course, I've barely begun it,” Aunt Alice said. “But it's just a matter of proportion, once I get the masses down, then I—” She made a smoothing motion with her hand and stood looking at it, and Peggy would make a trip to the bathroom, drink some tea, walk barefoot around the room looking out of each window in turn, and then return to the sofa, let the robe drop, and listen to the dabble of brush in water, the desultory conversation of the women.

Don't tell anyone
, she wrote Ray.

Not that you would
—
I can just see you telling everyone you had a letter from me! But here's my secret. I've become an artist's model. Aunt A. is sculpting me in clay, and the others are painting me, two in oils, one in watercolor. Yes
—
in the nude! It's all very respectable, I assure you, but I find it rather thrilling, I don't know why. Or maybe I do. I seem to be one of those girls for whom this condition is particularly becoming. And it's very nice to be admired. Maybe I can get one of the paintings and bring it back and show you what you're missing!

While they worked, the women talked in little spurts. They talked about the problems of German artists, the Munich conference, the situation in the Sudentenland, and then moved gradually, inexorably closer to home, to their husbands, their students, their children—all of them except Aunt Alice had at least one child, mostly grown up. As the days went by they drew Peggy into their conversation and it turned, gently, to her
predicament
. Sitting in their midst with her clothes off, she was another person—beautiful, brave, adult—and one afternoon, all in a burst, she told them something about it. How the man involved was unavailable at the moment. How marriage was out of the question just now. How he stood by her, wrote every week, missed her dreadfully. How good he was, such fun, and handsome—not unlike Cary Grant. How infernally complicated things were.

There was a silence when she was done. She couldn't turn her head to look at them, but she heard that their hands had stilled, their brushes stopped. Then one of them—Frances—said, in a shocked, hushed voice, “But the man is a heel!”

She did turn then, in confusion, and stood up without asking for a break. She picked up the robe and put it on and faced them. “That's not true,” she said. “He's wonderful.”

“Oh, yes—wonderful!” Frances twiddled her brush in the turpentine and wiped her hands on her smock. “My dear girl, I don't know who this man is, but he's victimized you. Taken advantage of you and abandoned you. What is he? Married?”

She flushed and said nothing. Let them think it. Frances came over to her and put her arm around her shoulders. “He's told you lies, you poor darling. Oh, it's so unfair what men get away with.”

Peggy said, “No—”

Aunt Alice said, “Frances, dear—please. Don't start making assumptions. We don't know the whole story, and I'm quite sure Peggy doesn't want to tell it to us.”

Peggy looked at her gratefully, then wondered how much her aunt guessed. Certainly she knew about Caroline's engagement to Ray Ridley, and knew he traveled for Pepsi-Cola, and she must have seen the mail for Peggy in envelopes from hotels.

“It's really none of our business,” her aunt said.

“But it is infuriating,” said Cora. “Not that it's necessarily true in your case, Peggy—that you've been seduced and abandoned, all those clichés. I don't mean to imply—but it does happen. Remember Helena Porter, Alice? Lord, she wanted to keep that baby. But she gave it away—what choice did she have? That's the real scandal, that society makes it impossible to keep the child. I'm sure you feel that, Peggy.”

“Yes,” Peggy said. “It's—” She made a vague gesture and excused herself to go to the bathroom. She sat on the toilet, her face burning. The baby: no: nothing could make her think about the baby. There was nothing to think. As far as she was concerned, the baby didn't exist. The bulges under her hand, the fluttering kicks that she knew were tiny, perfect fingers and toes, were not to be considered, were not to be seen as little Thomas or little Judith.
Ray
, she thought in a panic. She put her head in her hands. It was like the night on the balcony, all the lights going out, a mist over the moon.
Ray
. But what could he do? There was Caroline, and his promise to her. What had happened was never meant to happen, they were swept away, it was Fate, it was no one's fault, she had wanted it as much as he—more,
more
…

Tears rolled down her cheeks. It was partly that she was constipated and her back hurt and everything was so strange and she couldn't sleep enough. Oh, if only it could be over, so that she could go back home and fight for Ray on equal terms with Caroline. Or almost equal. Caroline was so beautiful. It was hopeless to compete with her there, she would never be pretty like Caroline, not if she worked on it for a hundred years. But Peggy knew she had something else: sex. She loved doing it, and would do it anywhere: in the backseat of Ray's old Dodge, in the woods, in Ray's ice-fishing shack on the lake, on the floor of his mother's garage—once, standing up, in one of the men's changing rooms at Sylvan Beach, while Caro and John and Nell sat on a blanket not fifty feet away.

She knew Caroline didn't like it because Ray had told her so.
She's cold
, he had said.
Not like you. All she cares about is how she looks
.

And all I care about is this
, Peggy had said, and they had laughed, kissed, pressed their bodies together.
This this this
—

She wiped the tears from her eyes with toilet paper. She stood up and, breathing deeply, looked in the mirror over the sink, watching the frown between her eyes disappear. She made herself smile at her reflection:
pretty, so pretty
, everyone said it. Things would work out. It would all take time, but time was what they had: months, years—forever. Ray wasn't making enough money yet to marry anyone, and Caroline was only nineteen, still in college. Their engagement was vague, indeterminate. It would get more so as time went by. He and Caro would drift apart naturally. There was no need for a blowup, Ray said. No need to send everyone into a tizzy. Caro would become impatient with a fiancé who was always out of town, she would think twice about marriage to a traveling man. They were young. Time, time would take care of everything.

She came out of the bathroom red-eyed but smiling. The women were standing around the stove, looking her way with anxious faces, and she knew they had been discussing her. Frances came up to her and said, “Forgive me, Peggy. I have no right to meddle. I'm turning into a terrible old busybody.”

“That's all right,” Peggy said. “Really. I imagine it would seem hard for most people to understand.” She lit a cigarette, shook out the match, and threw her head back to exhale. “Not for me, though. I mean, I know it's complicated.”

“Well, it was especially rude of me, when you've been so kind about posing for us.”

Peggy smiled. There was Frances's canvas, on which she was a vague rounded figure. The chair and the window, by contrast, were painted in photographic detail.
Everywoman
, Frances had said in explanation. The specifics don't matter, just the condition.

“I like posing.”

“That's what makes you so good at it,” Frances said. “You're so completely relaxed. That's very rare.”

Cora put her hand on her arm. “It's true,” she said. “You've been a gem. A wonderful opportunity for us. And frankly, I think you're very gallant, my dear. I have no doubt that you'll keep your young man in line. My personal opinion is that he'd be mad to let a sweet girl like you get away.”

Peggy's eyes filled again with tears. She expected Cora to embrace her, but instead she gave her hand a hard, masculine shake, which made Peggy giggle, and then each of them shook her hand in turn, laughing with her, as if it were a ritual in Caroline's silly sorority.

Back in position, the robe at her feet, she felt happy again, and comfortable. They hadn't condemned her, hadn't called her stubborn and stupid and loose as her mother had. They had condemned Ray, and though they were wrong and didn't understand the situation, a kind of elation came to her because of it. She was appreciated, sympathized with, admired for her courage. And, yes, she would talk to Ray. Things must change. The situation had gone on long enough. He had to face it—behave like a man! She smiled, imagining this conversation. Poor darling Ray. She would be firm—yes—but she would say nothing until she was lying in his arms, sure of her power. And not in some freezing ice-fishing shack or backseat, either; he could damn well take her to a hotel.
You could ask me for anything right now
, he had said once, his trembling breath on her neck, their bodies linked.
I couldn't deny you
.