He thought of the picture of her on State Street in Chicago.
“Young and dreamy and foolish,” she said.
“And beautiful,” he got out.
A moment later, she said, “Do you think your father and Trixie will come?”
“Probably.”
“I’ll ask Constance, though I bet she won’t. And Marsha Trunan is coming back to Memphis anyway, I think. And then there’s Aunt Clara and Uncle Jack. Which means the senator and Greta.”
“Couple of my old friends, too, maybe. It’ll be large enough.”
This time there was a lengthy pause. It created in them both a pressure to speak.
“I think I’ll have another one,” he said. He got up and brought the bottle back. He was deciding that he might get drunk, since she clearly had no intention of seeking him. Pouring more for himself, he said, “Want another touch?”
“No, thanks, I’m gonna go back to bed when I finish this.”
“It’s so good to know that we don’t have to go away from each other.”
“I know.”
He felt himself bending inside toward initiating things. “Guess that’s why I don’t feel pressed.”
“How ‘pressed’?”
“Oh, you know — that sense that we have to use the time. For instance — just for instance, you know, that we don’t — we don’t have to make love tonight. We can wait until tomorrow, or the next day. There’s no time pressure because we don’t have to go away from each other the way it always was before.”
She understood what he wanted her to do, and couldn’t produce the will to make the gesture. She took the rest of the whiskey, put the glass down on the table, leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, and went back into the bedroom. In the dark there, she wrapped herself in the blankets, curled into a ball, eyes closed, listening for movement from him. She heard the bottle clink against the lip of the shot glass. Off in the Memphis night, a train sounded. Her hands smelled of the whiskey, and she realized it was her own breath on her fingers.
Later, when he came in to lie down, he was careful not to wake her. He told himself things would be all right. It was true that they did not have to hurry or force things. He lay there thinking about the days ahead, when they could take the time to learn all over how to be at ease with each other.
Do You Take This Woman
1
She’d had four relationships. The first lasted almost five years and was generally supposed by everyone, including Iris and the young man’s rather large Italian American family, to be an engagement. His name was Constantine, and everyone called him Connie. She had met him in Provence, at the end of her first week there. He was a tall, blond, serious boy who loved the beach and had beautiful light blue eyes. He had come to France from his home in California to spend part of the summer with his older sister, who was studying in Provence. Natasha was with him almost continually after their first meeting. When he left to return home, he gave her a ring he had bought in a little store on a visit to Paris. They were together. He was going to get a degree in history. She would finish college and join him. Before he left, they spent time planning things, and one afternoon it occurred to her that she wasn’t having any fun. He could be so somber about things, and all of the history he knew — or, more accurately, what fascinated him most about it — concerned the depredations, the atrocities. He knew about these things in great detail, was nearly fetishistic about them. And of course there was no playfulness in him. They fought all the time. The long-distance relationship they ended up having — he in San Francisco, and then in Chicago, and she in France and in travels through Europe and finally in Washington — seemed better and less stressful than being with him every day, and far easier than the stratagems and antic posing she got from the other young men with whom she occasionally found herself socializing. After college, she wanted to explore and see things and live in other cities, and so when she broke off the “understanding”—as her grandmother called it, probably taking her cue from Constantine’s family — she felt relieved.
There were two other relationships, both full of exhausting emotional storms.
When she met Mackenzie she was several months past the fourth one — poor Constantine again, who showed up from a stint as a history teacher in an American school in Spain. He was seeking her as a wife, and she almost went with him. But over the years she had seldom given thought to marriage. Friends accused her of supposing snobbishly that it was an estate for young women of a certain sociological type. But that was far from true. She was too suspicious of abstractions to take such notions very seriously. It was just that finding a husband had never been a concern, had never been something she sought in and of itself, not even with Constantine. She enjoyed her freedom and the progress she was making with her painting, though she hadn’t sold enough to come near supporting herself. In fact, it was his desire to support her that pulled her toward him that second time. But she refused him again and went on with life. And did not give it much thought. She was adventurous and smart, and the milestones, whatever they would be, would come whenever they would come.
She had embarked on her own study of the great watercolorists, had discovered Xie He, the art historian who lived in fifth-century China; his Six Principles of Art described ideas about modes of expression that had been passed down from master to student since antiquity: The first part of the sixth principle essentially was to know and emulate what preceded you as an artist; the second part was directly copying nature. But she was impatient with nature, with still lifes and landscapes and paintings of barns and lakes and fields and even city streets. She had discovered a feeling for the faces in photographs that did not seem posed so much as staring out, as if the frame of the photograph, its border, were the border of a window someone had simply glanced out on the way by. So many of the pictures she found in the bins in the antiques stores were posed, family members smiling into other sunlight, and the sunlight, of course, looked like a rainy day. But there were also very many — more than she expected to find when she first began to think of them as windows — people who did not really know how to be in front of the new invention. And so the best subjects for her paintings were the old daguerreotypes and sepia plates from the first few decades of the existence of the camera as a means of recording things. And the challenge was giving them color without cheapening the expression.
Once, in Rome with Marsha Trunan on one of their journeys from Provence, they had walked a long hallway inside the Vatican Museums where many sculpted heads were displayed, hundreds of them, human countenances, a lot of them showing the effects of age and excess, rendered with such exactness that you felt the urge to reach out and touch them. It was almost as if your fingertips required tactile evidence that these features were made of stone and not flesh. All the faces looked blind, the pupils and irises the same stone color, and the guide said this was because the paint had worn off centuries ago, and these were the faces of nameless well-to-do citizens of Rome. Marsha spoke about not being able to stop looking at the blind-seeming eyes, but Natasha kept staring at the ears, the jawbones, the pouches under the eyes and the sagging chins, the lips and nostrils and brows. Even the hairlines.
It was the ordinariness of the faces themselves, the people as they were, from antiquity, that fascinated her.
Faces. And in those years she had painted so many, miniatures and full-size ones, and she dreamed about faces and watched them and believed she had begun to discover in her portrayals something she might express about the thousand nuances of human feeling. She kept the work in a big portfolio that she took with her through various au pair jobs, and the year and a half she spent as assistant to a travel writer named Ben Eldridge, who treated her as a student and hit on her and said cruel things to her about her “little works of art.” She even took photographs for him of chapels and doorways and country towns in Provence and in Italy and Turkey and North Africa. And when his wife joined them for the trip to Morocco, Natasha endured his overweening benevolence, like a kind of hopeless bribe for her silence, which she did keep. At the end, she even listened to his wife complain about his general slovenly ways and his uncleanliness.