“If there’s a better time,” the young man said.
“No, no, no, no, no. Now is fine,” he said, but he could hear at the other end of the gallery, Sally was making those sounds he knew for the mewling preamble to I’m sad. I’m tired. I’m sorry, though she didn’t mean it. Clive moved his chair closer to the young man, saying, “I’m not going to look back at her.” But he was looking back. Yesterday in a flirtatious coat, she had swayed for attention. Look at me, listen to me, help me: the tedious refrain to Sally’s song of herself. Her neediness unsettled him or was it unseated him?
But he talked on. He had given so many interviews in his lifetime: Clive had grown up in Boston, which was as far as he went besides acknowledging he had had parents. He liked to hint at having known harder times as if his impeccable academic background had come by way of scholarships. “I’ve a brother and a sister, both older, not artists.” He had loved to draw from the beginning, but from whom had he inherited his gift? His mother, yes, she had had such ambitions.
“I should add my father was an architect of some distinction.” Why did he say this now — a fact known but not uttered by him in past interviews — why except that Sally was present and he hoped she was listening, oh, how many times had he told his daughter yearning was all very fine but only the doing counted?
Sally banged the book shut.
Clive said, “My feeling about form is that it’s discovered. My friend P. A. Ricks says the same is true of fiction — not an original idea.” Yes, Clive knew a lot of writers; his wife, Dinah, was a poet.
If Dinah could see now how Sally lumbered around the glass island to look at the gallery’s paintings, Dinah wouldn’t wonder at his reluctance to see more of his daughter. Clive called out, “I don’t think Torvold wants us in his offices, Sally.”
Why did he have to speak to her as if she were twelve years old?
To have an awkward daughter came as a surprise. How often Sally stood too close to a person, bumped into railings, stumbled. He was afraid for her — and for the glass table and the cylindrical vase of calla lilies. She should not be near anything that wasn’t planted in the ground.
What was on his mind, the young man asked, when he painted the white horse series?
“Not much,” he said. “The palette changes.” That was vague; he turned quotable. The horses were the visual equivalent of his state of mind at the time he painted them. The source of his pain was too petty to relate. “When I was in California, I did a lot of sketches of horses. Horses are very beautiful to me, even the most ragged has a soulful expression.”
Sally loved the horses; she had one of the paintings.
“One winter when my wife and I were housebound, I painted the horses. All the different shades of white outside and inside were a comfort and a drag.”
“So the landscape informed your ‘white’ period?”
“Death,” Clive said, “informs everything I see.”
Were artists relevant, could they instruct?
That was not the point. When he was painting, Clive said, he wasn’t thinking about meaning; he was looking to feel something.
Clive had said all there was to say, and if the young man had to end on a light note, well, he could finish the interview with a description of the scene, old man in the foreground and, behind, the suggestion of a woman on a Barcelona couch; both just strokes of paint, faces vacant.
“You’ve been more than generous with your time,” the young man said, and he stood and looked to the other end of the bleached wood and white gallery and waved good-bye to Sally, who came forward after the young man had left.
“I called Dinah,” she said. “She said you’re going to invite a complete stranger to live in the Bridge House for the summer.”
“Isabel Bourne is not a stranger.”
“I bet,” Sally said.
*
Ned was in Boston, or so he had told Isabel when Clive came to the White Street loft. He came with chicken soup and wonky cheeses packed in grass, the Easter-basket kind.
“Wasted on you,” he said. “I know your type.”
“What was it reminded you of me?” she asked him.
He had been thinking of her. He wanted to paint her. She would have time alone, too, to write. She could stay in the Bridge House.
“But your daughter. .”
“The Bridge House is mine,” he said. He described an old house, barely furnished; the kitchen counter tin and patched in places. The house was empty for a couple of years while the original owner was in the nursing home. She was the last of her line. “For a while it looked as if the house might be left to fall but a goddaughter was willed it. She sold it from afar, cheaply. There is no bridge. Dinah made up the name: the Bridge House for a house without a bridge. Our own house doesn’t have a name. We’ve a stone wall, a barn for me to paint in, and Dinah’s garden. Why are you smiling?”
“What about your wife? What about Ned? Why do you think I would do this?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Clive said. “Most people I invite say yes.”
Noisy moths battered the barn light in her brain as he talked about firefly season. Not to be missed, and the light, especially in the afternoon, in the late afternoon, he described the way it turned their bedroom pink.
“Why are you telling me this?”
The phone rang and rang and rang until the answering machine clicked, and they heard Ned saying, “This should make you happy. .” before Isabel muted the machine. “I’ll find out later,” she said, “and it won’t make me happy, I’m sure.”
“But be happy now,” Clive said. “Come sit next to me. I’ll be quiet.”
In Clive Harris she had found a new album in which to put any pictures she wanted: a white pitcher of cream on a round table, covered in a checkered cloth, two skinny French park chairs unevenly settled on the pebbled path. Where was this? France, Spain, Italy? France. Nice — Neese. To say nice seemed cornball, but that was Clive to her.
“I am not nice,” he said. He was thinking of Sally, poor Sally and the drab adjectives he used whenever he spoke of what she was but might have been.
An only, lonely daughter. “I am one of those, and Ned is an only, too. Maybe that’s why,” but she didn’t finish.
Clive’s brother was unwell but his sister was in remarkable health. “We speak on the holidays,” he said. “Dinah sends her something she’s dried or canned or sewn along with an explanation about whether you wear it or eat it or hook it on a nail. Last year she cured Nepeta—catnip — and sent it to Gwen, who has a Maine coon the size of a bear. Bangor’s his name and he’s old and sleeps all the time, at least he did. Gwen sprinkled Dinah’s cat elixir on his paws, and instantly Bangor was a new man, gurgling and bumping around the house, positively happy, humming.”
She was humming, too, with her arm held out and Clive petting it as he talked his way closer. He held her breasts, assessed what parts of her there were to be assessed, unbuttoning, pulling her shirt off her shoulder. “Let me admire,” he said, and he looked for what seemed a long time, and she looked down, too, at a small lacy triangle of a brassiere, a cocoa-colored whiff of lingerie. Clive’s hand against her collarbone, she took it up and put it against her face and smelled him in a brandy fume of sensations before his hands against her head guided her downward to disappointment: Why did it always end like this with that musty part in her mouth?
“Ah,” he said, finished, “you wish it could be more.”
“I don’t know.”
“I know,” Clive said, using his shirt as a towel.
He left not long after. He left saying nothing more of Maine but that he wanted Isabel to know he was, as ever, an admirer. He would like to paint her.