Back at the boarding house I said to Webster: “So… how about that portrait of Lincoln in Ted’s parlor?”
She shrugged. “Nobody’s perfect. Anyway, I don’t know about you, but a man who admires Lincoln is my kind of man.”
I said darkly, “Ah, but does he… does he?” and left it at that. I wasn’t supposed to rock the boat. It was up to me to try to keep Ted’s friend entertained. The friend’s name was Arturo Whitman, and he and Ted were a team — Ted sold the jewelry that Arturo made. I could see how Arturo might not be the best salesman; he was big and shaggy and not a little gruff. More often than not he knocked both our wineglasses over on account of waving his hands about too much while talking about the parallels between Robespierre and McCarthy. He had tawny, heavy-lidded eyes, and he wasn’t very good at dancing, but I couldn’t help liking it when he held me in his arms. One evening when Ted and Webster were playing footsie and talking about Guatemala (Ted was describing parts of it he’d been to, and Webster chipped in with “Sounds divine!” and “I’m awfully jealous!” and “I’d sure like to see that for myself someday, Teddy…”), Arturo and I just sat there watching the rain wrap the window round and round in a trembling veil. I heard the raindrops say, “I have a daughter. She wears red amaryllis blooms in her hair”; then I realized it was Arturo talking.
I looked across the table. He smiled. Not at me, but at the window, as if he saw her there. “Last month it was forget-me-nots,” he said. “And before that, yellow everlastings.”
“I bet she’s pretty.” The safest remark I could think of.
“Her name’s Snow,” he said, as if that explained it all. He checked his watch. “Her grandma will have put her to bed about ten minutes ago.”
“It’s early. How old is she?”
He frowned. “She’ll be six tomorrow.”
“Ah. Is it all happening too fast?”
“No, it’s — fine. The birthday present she’s asked for is a tall order, though.”
“Lemme guess: a pony.”
“I almost wish it was. Two more guesses.”
“Uhm… an enchanted object. A lamp with a genie in it, something like that.”
“Not exactly,” he said, after wavering for a moment.
The next guess was inappropriate, I knew, but I was too curious not to give it a shot. “A mother.”
He stared. “You’re good.”
“It’s just… you said it was a tall order.”
“Yeah.”
He closed his mouth tight after saying that one word. I figured he only kept coming out on those dates of ours because Ted was blackmailing him — he always looked so relieved when it was time to go home. On the boarding house doorstep I halved a cigarette and lit Webster’s half, then mine, so we could have a quick couple of smokes before going in for the night. Arturo’s wife had died a week after giving birth to his daughter, Webster told me. Childbirth complications. He’d been a history professor at Boston University at the time. But he took Snow and went away, he still wouldn’t say where. Wherever it was, he’d learned to work metal there; when he came back two years later, he set up a workshop in his home.
“What was his wife’s name?”
“Julia, I think.”
“You’re not sure?”
“He doesn’t really talk about her.”
“And have you met the kid?”
I’d reached the end of my cigarette half before she had, and Webster grinned as she blew smoke past my ear. “Who, Snow? Sure. She’s a doll.”
There was a misunderstanding between Arturo and me. An unspoken one, and how do you correct those? It happened at Ted’s place, when I was transfixed by that god-awful portrait. I stayed standing in front of it for longer than I actually looked at it. Time ticked by and I faced the portrait dead-on without seeing it at all. Had anyone asked me what it was that I could see, I wouldn’t have been able to tell them. It was almost as if I’d left the room. I say almost because I could still hear Ted trying his best to wet blanket Webster’s Halloween costume idea.
“This year — wait for it — this year I’m doing the telltale heart.”
“And how do you propose to dress up as a heart?”
“Oh, I’ll just paint myself red all over and wear a red hat, silly. And I’ll tell tales.”
“That’s just plain cryptic. Anyhow, didn’t the telltale heart throb horrifically loudly?”
“Oh, that’s hardly difficult. I can throb horrifically loudly right now, if you like.”
“Be my guest.”
“Buh-boom,” Webster began, in a deep voice. “Buh-boom, buh boom.”
I was smiling. My eyes came back into focus and that was what I saw — a face I recognized, smiling. I’d been looking at myself in the picture frame the whole time. The smile turned wry, I scanned the room without turning around, and there was Arturo Whitman. The left side of him, to be precise. The rest of him was out of the picture, but there was a look of steady dislike in that left eye of his. He seemed to think he’d caught me practicing being fascinating.
He was pretty sarcastic with me after that, when before he’d been almost kind; he took to replying to any little observation I made with “Indeed,” and he got even worse a couple of dates later when I fell into a similar trance only to come to and discover that I’d apparently been contemplating my mysterious smile in the back of my dessert spoon.
Our misunderstanding worried me. I thought: I should talk to him. I should tell him it isn’t vanity. If it was vanity, I’d have been able to disguise it, all this insipid smirking at myself. Other women did it all the time; it was just that they didn’t get caught. No, the only behaviors we can’t control are those caused by nerves. I rehearsed an offhand explanation. It began with the words: “Hand me some nerve tonic, Whitman.” But I didn’t know for sure that it wasn’t vanity running the show. What I did know was that I wouldn’t be able to stand it if I tried to explain myself in good faith and his only answer was “Indeed.”
The other two date nights Webster and I spent with bachelors eligible enough to stop Ted from taking her for granted but not so eligible that he quit competing. As for me, I knew I was onto a good thing. I was guaranteed three moderately fancy dinners a week, including dessert, and I was mingling with the locals. The only cost was a little of my pride. I had one dress that was fit for a dinner date, a deep red shantung number the rat catcher’s girlfriend had outgrown. Each time I went to a restaurant, that dress came too. My dates cracked jokes about it, and I acknowledged the jibes with an affable but distant smile. Every other young person I met was an apprentice at this studio or that workshop. The potters scrubbed up pretty well but never managed to shed every last bit of clay; there’d always be just a little daub of it on their chins or wrists. My favorite potter, whose name I forget, said, “Awww, not again,” when I told him there was clay on his forehead. He said: “You know how possessive clay is.” His tone of voice made me wish I could agree with him. As far as he was concerned, he was talking about something as true as thunder, as true as his thumb. So clay leaves hickeys. Who knew…
I told Arturo Whitman about it, just to make conversation. He shrugged, and said: “You should go back to New York.”
In my head I counted slowly to five before answering. “Oh, I should, should I?”
“Yup.” He cracked his knuckles. Maybe he just felt a little stiff at that moment, but as a gesture made while telling someone to leave town, I didn’t like it.