This was on the journey to Morocco — the last one, because his commission was over. And it was on this last trip, somewhere between Istanbul and Rabat, that she lost the portfolio. Three different airlines, and none of them ever located the large canvas bag it was in.
She spent two grieving months back home in Memphis, and finally Iris got her the job in Washington. It would be temporary, Iris said, and only for the purpose of saving money to return to the south of France. But, withal, it was also an answer to what Iris believed was an unhealthy stasis, since she was no longer painting very much and did not like much of what she did paint.
So she went to Washington and started working for the senator and found that in fact aspects of the work absorbed her. Life grew pleasantly full, and after a few months she began searching out the faces in the old family photographs again, looking in antiques stores up and down the Shenandoah Valley, and painting the series of smaller portraits, actually framing them for herself and putting them on the wall in her apartment. They were like company on some nights; they gave her a warm feeling of involvement in her own becoming. She spent weekends quite happily working on them. But the job and her life in the city began to get in the way, and more and more weekend evenings were spent going out and being with people, much of it stemming from her responsibilities in the senator’s office. On some weekend mornings she went to flea markets in the valley and set up a little station to sell her work. One weekend an older lady bought five paintings at fifty dollars apiece. And on others she sold one or two. She always put the money in savings. But then it was winter again. And the mornings were free. She was young, and perhaps she had grown a little lonesome. The cost of living in the city made saving very hard to do, and though she kept her goal in mind, the difficulty of saving enough to make the leap and leave the job eroded her will to do the small things necessary to approach the possibility.
The affair with Mackenzie had begun on a campaign trip to Gulfport. They sat up late sipping bourbon in the hotel bar, and he began telling her what was happening at home: heartbreak and borderline lunacy, his wife’s fanaticism, the delusions — the woman’s belief that she possessed a form of second sight and was having visions of past lives. The visions were becoming more frequent and more bizarre. He said they were sleeping in separate rooms, staying together only for the boy. Natasha was just twenty-nine, in her third year of work in the senator’s office.
Mackenzie was uncomplicatedly fun because he was married and appeared to think of her as a friend. She felt the same. She spent time with him at various functions of the senator’s in the state. They made each other laugh.
But then that evening in Gulfport, there he was, telling her all those too-personal details about himself.
“We were so young,” he said about his wife. “We didn’t really know each other.”
Natasha listened with an increasing sense that a line had been crossed. It had been crossed when she remained behind with him at that late hour in the hotel bar. But he was such a good friend. And with the whiskey blurring her thoughts, she was moving beyond the line anyway, looking into his mournful eyes and beginning to be in love.
An hour later they were in his room, and they spent the rest of the night there. She woke with a little start and felt a rush of guilty remembering, the bedsheets clinging to her body, his legs touching hers, too warm, too close. She had the sense that she must find a way to make things right and then swooned toward sleep, half aware of him stirring next to her. He sighed and coughed and moaned and came to, obviously upset and anxious, claiming disbelief that he could ever have let it happen. But he also held her, and they saw the sunrise from the window across from his bed. The quiet and their soft breathing plainly were calming for him, and he spoke of their life together as if the night had been a source of some overwhelming discovery and truth. Breaking off with his wife would take time. There was his son to think about, and the boy was already emotionally confused, already spending too much time with video games, computer gadgets, fantasy, and goth. The responsibilities of a father were so complicated in these times of collapsing values. He went on in this vein, and Natasha believed that he meant what he said.
As the weeks and months went by, she fell more deeply in love with him, and before long she was spending her nights alone, writing him long letters and poems and admonitions that she never sent, pleading with him to do what he kept saying he would do and what he kept putting off because of the pain it would cause. She threw the letters away in the mornings. It was humiliating to look at them.
And she had completely stopped doing the watercolors.
Once, she told him she did not want to see him anymore, and he began calling and begging, swearing that he would make it so they could be together like any other couple. He sent her little cards and flowers and left phone messages, and after more than a month of this, they returned to the pattern as it had been: seeing each other as his schedule permitted, she often spending her own money to fly whereever he was on assignment.
All that ended with the phone call from the wife.
And what followed, she believed back then, was the worst year of her life, the thing she had found respite from with Faulk.
Michael Faulk, the man with whom she felt she had at last discovered what love really was — that happy inner blaze, the passion that let her breathe fully, and gave a shimmer to each hour. She would never have believed that she could love like this, where the whole world seemed divided in two: on the one side, away from him, the tiresome and gloomy city; on the other, where he was, all intensity and life, vividness and humor, and fascination in the littlest things.
2
They had set the date of the wedding for the first Saturday in October, the sixth. Natasha made calls instead of sending invitations. There wasn’t time for anything else. Constance Waverly and Marsha Trunan were coming, as were Aunt Clara and Uncle Jack. As Faulk had expected, Senator Norland and his wife said they were bound by other, long-standing commitments. They sent a large bouquet of flowers and a five-hundred-dollar gift certificate from Pier 1 Imports.
Iris placed the flowers in the middle of her dining room table.
They watched the president’s speech to a joint session of Congress that Thursday, the twentieth, where the president demanded that the government of Afghanistan hand over all the terrorists and declared the war on terror. The newscasters talked about the sense of a threat inside our borders, and how people were dealing with it.
Iris said, “Maybe we should all move to Jamaica and just stay there.”
The mention of the island turned something over under Natasha’s heart. She said, “Can we turn the TV off? Let’s do something fun.”
“Any ideas?” said Faulk.
He put off starting the job at Social Services and worked all the following week on the house, painting, building bookshelves, working outside on the rose arbor and the lawn, planting flowers in the dog run, a surprise for Natasha, he thought, until she saw what he was doing and joined in. The work calmed them both. They went on with daily tasks, and even so their trouble was always there, unspoken. For Natasha, the toil was beautiful, and she would look at her own hands patting down the earth around the stem of a plant and realize that she felt none of the fear. Such moments would unvaryingly cause it to come rushing back at her, and she went on working until slowly it would begin once again to subside.