John D. MacDonald
Nothing Must Change
At noon Carol heard the creak of the bed in the next room, heard Max’s vast awakening yawn. She turned on the gas under the coffee, then stood holding the handle of the dish mop so tightly that her fingers hurt. Max had come to bed just before dawn, after a roaring shower, bringing with him the faint tart odor of the thinner he had used to clean the oil paint from his fingers.
When she had gotten up, she had looked upon his sleeping face, the face that had been for the past three weeks the face of a stranger. Three weeks; this time, the cool-eyed, quiet withdrawal had lasted longer.
Carol heard the soft slap, slap of his old slippers as he went down the hallway and into the studio that had been the kitchen shed until he had cut the window and skylight.
She realized that she was holding her breath, wailing, hoping for an end to the lonely weeks. The coffee began to make a whispering sound.
“Carol!” he shouted. “Carol! Come here!”
With shaking hand and with a great joy in her heart she turned the gas down and hurried to him. “I’m coming, Max,” she called. It seemed an endless time since she had heard that warmth in his voice. Now the time of strangeness was over, and once again there would be laughter and love and their intense togetherness.
He stood in his shorts, his wide brown back turned toward her, his shoulders tensed, feet planted. The canvas was big, bigger than the last. He had turned it so the noon light struck it.
“I dreamed I did it the way I wanted to do it,” he said, his voice tight in his throat, exultant. “I walked in and it was here.”
She looked at it with the peculiar dismay that all his paintings gave her. If she had dared to criticize it aloud, she would say, “It’s too big and bright and harsh and ugly and... and I don’t understand it.”
“It’s nice,” she said, in a small voice.
He turned quickly, the tooth-white grin on his tanned face, the uncombed black hair across his forehead. The grin softened, and he put his hands on her shoulders, kissed the tip of her nose. “Hello, darling,” he said.
“Hello, Max. Hello, husband.”
“I said it was going to be of a flower this time, and maybe you thought of rosebuds in a vase. Not a thing like this. Not a fleshy, anatomical, hungry flower growing in a jungle of light instead of form. You wanted a pretty flower.”
She felt herself blush. “No, Max.”
He laughed hugely. “It’s done, by God. Break my arm if I reach for a brush. I’m starved. I want to eat, swim, walk forty miles, get drunk, sing and make love to you. All at the same time.” He kissed her tenderly, and then so hard that it hurt her lips.
He sat at the kitchen table and watched her as she cooked his eggs and bacon. She could feel his eyes on her.
“Patient Carol,” he said softly. “Where have you been for three weeks?”
“Right here.”
“Waiting for me to come back from a far place. Three lost weeks. I look at you and say they weren’t worth it. I look at the canvas and say they were. But you look happy now. As if lights had gone on behind your eyes. Now you can stop worrying about poor Max and those dreadful daubs. Poor crazy Max spinning in a humming silence like a twenty-cent top, slapping good paints on good canvas in a meaningless pattern.”
“I didn’t think that at all,” she said primly.
As she brought the plate to the table, he pulled her down into his lap. He stared very intently and very soberly into her eyes. “You’re right for me,” he said. “So very right for me. All the warmth of you and the love. I can feel it around me, my darling, even when I seem so far away. I can work with that love around me. Without you, I’d shake apart like a broken machine.”
She looked up into his young eyes under the fierce black brows. His intensity always made her feel soft and weak.
“I love you,” she said, like a child saying something memorized.
“I can say I love you, too, but this isn’t the way I can say it best. Some day, when I know enough, when I can make my hands and eyes do what’s in my mind, I’ll put love on a canvas. I’ll put it there so strong and bright that you’ll never look at it without having it take your breath away. I promise that, Carol.”
“Max, I—”
“Coffee, woman!” he said with mock ferocity.
She sat across the table from him and watched him eat. He grinned at her. Max was larger than life, more alive than any person she had ever known. Her family, all her friends, had always been so careful to underplay their lines, subdue all emotions, move primly through an orderly world. Maybe that was why she—
She went to the front room and got the letter, brought it to him. He looked quickly at her. “What has frightened you?” he asked.
“No, Max. I’m not frightened. Read the letter.”
He glanced through it quickly, looked again at the return address. “Lasson!” he said. “Greta Lasson. Where have I heard that name? Don’t tell me.” He snapped his fingers. “Articles. She writes about painters and painting. Criticisms of shows. She’s big-time.”
“We were roommates at Smith,” Carol said evenly.
He looked at her intently and then grinned. The grin faded quickly and was replaced by the owlish look of a natural mimic. He imitated a prissy, lisping female, dealing cards: “It is my deal, isn’t it, darling? Did you count my natural canasta? Girls, I have the most exciting news about Carol Prior! Well, you know how she remarried only a year after her husband died. Married some perfectly mad painter type just years younger than she is, named Max Cheventza. Some sort of a foreigner. We’ve been so worried about dear Carol, holed up down there in some sort of fantastic shack on the Gulf Coast of Florida, with that unscrupulous person who claims to be a painter living on her money. Well, dear Greta has agreed to stop in on them and bring Carol to her senses. Oh, dear! Did you have to freeze the pack?”
The laughter brought tears to her eyes. “Please, Max. Please!” she pleaded.
He jumped up, went to the doorway, came strolling back with one hand on his hip, a delicate sneer on his lips. He went to the chair where he had been sitting and extended a languid hand.
“How do you do, Mr. Cheventza! I’m Greta Lasson, you know. The famous Greta Lasson? I’m dying to see your work. But dying!” He glanced around the kitchen, wrinkling his nose. “Terribly quaint, Carol. Just too terribly, terribly quaint.”
Through laughter she protested, “But Greta isn’t like that at all! She’s nice, really.” No, Greta wasn’t like that. Greta was tall, with a long cool face and level eyes and an almost fanatic honesty.
He sat down and picked up the letter again. “She’s arriving on the sixth, eh? When’s that?”
“Today, Max.”
“Today! Can’t we head her off? This was to be our day, Carol.”
“I don’t see how. She’s driving through to Sarasota.”
He stretched, pushed the empty coffee cup away. “So be it. Climb into your suit, lady. We’re going swimming, anyway.”
Two hours later, as the sun had slid halfway down the western sky, she sat on the beach and watched Max come in through the surf line, swimming hard. He came up across the beach toward her, lean and tall and strong. He paused to shake water from his ear.
She thought of Greta. Greta would be... She was a year younger... thirty-two now. It had been two years since she had seen Greta, at Charles’ funeral.
Poor Max, with his pathetic pride in his work, his confidence that it was good. It wasn’t difficult to see what was behind Greta’s visit. Max’s analysis had been almost frighteningly correct. She could hear one of her old friends saying, “While you’re in Florida, Greta, why don’t you stop in on Carol and see if you can straighten her out? You know — pry her loose from that confidence man she married.”