“I’m going to bed down in your spare room, Francie. You’re welcome to share the bed, Freed,” he said.
“I think I’ll sleep in the attic,” Freed said.
“I’m sleeping there,” Perry said.
“I know it, asshole. I was just kidding.”
Freed and T.W. walked out of the living room, clowning, with arms around each other’s waists, swaying their hips with all the grace of cows walking on ice. Francie looked after them without saying good night.
“What’s the matter?” he said.
“I’m annoyed is what’s the matter.”
“Why?”
“First of all, that phone call. People’s mothers calling me and informing me of what’s going to happen to me — some woman I’ve never met calling to tell me that her crazy daughter and grandchild are headed for my house to stay with me.”
“Come on,” he said. “You’ve always felt sorry for Delores.”
“And all that talk about her oak table. I never asked for the damn table to begin with — she put it in my house and then she took it out, and now she wants me to track it down.”
“It’s sad,” he said. “It’s sad if she’s so crazy that she’s trying to track down a table nobody has seen for years.”
“And I’m touchy about Anita, and her talking about my dirty pictures. She’s trying to embarrass me because she resents it that I have a career, when she’s pregnant.”
He remembered going to Francie’s house once when Francie was still married, and he and Francie’s husband had sat on the mattress playing checkers while she painted. The radio was playing. People and noise didn’t distract her, usually. He liked it that when she painted, she acted like a painter: she backed up from the canvas, tilted her head from side to side, moved forward to put a small blot of paint on the canvas, stood back, smiled. He lost the game of checkers. Winning had never been very important to him, but it would have pleased him if Francie had known that he had won — if the “Aha!” had come from him instead of from Francie’s husband. Francie herself was both casual about her art and competitive. She would paint quietly, showing nothing, for many months. But if she entered a show and didn’t win first prize, she would be furious, drag out all her canvases to show her friends, pointing out how good they were. Sometimes there was some doubt in her mind — you could tell by the way her enthusiasm came out with a questioning tone — but most of the time failure made her angry, and she resisted the idea of it by talking about all the things that were done right, with originality, in her work. The first time she did that it had taken him aback — all his friends were humble, if not self-deprecating, and he had thought at first that Francie was putting him on. He probably listened to her talk about her work for half an hour with a silly smile on his face before he realized that his expression was inappropriate. Though when other people said, occasionally, that she was an egomaniac, he defended her, saying that it was mature to believe in yourself. Sometimes even Francie knew that she went on about the importance of what she was doing too much; she had a sense of humor about it, and would mock herself: she had a long gray apron she painted in, with GREAT ARTIST stenciled across the back.
He looked at Francie, slumped by the fire.
“You’re in a bad mood,” he said.
“You don’t think Anita said that to embarrass me?”
“I don’t know,” he said. He threw a chip of wood into the fire.
“Anita and her hundred-dollar boots she walks around in the snow in.”
“Go to bed,” he said. “You’ve tolerated all of us for long enough today.”
“Everybody has to be so teasing. Nobody can talk straight. Freed has to pretend he’s taking the attic. T.W. and Freed have to pretend they’re gay because they’re sleeping in the same double bed. Everybody’s got their act down.”
“What’s the matter with you?” he said again.
“What’s the matter is that it will be six months before I have a show, and nothing happens. I sit around here all day alone and I paint. When people come they want to make jokes about my being my own model, as though I’m narcissistic.”
“Your paintings are good,” he said. “You know they are. Nobody else paints the way you do.”
“You like them?”
“I admire them. They’re very good. I think you should hang them on the walls.”
In the living room there was one picture — a photograph taken by Anita of oil drums in the snow in New Jersey the winter before. It was a large 11” × 14” photograph hanging on the longest wall of the room. When Francie’s husband left, she took down the drapes and gave him the pictures from the walls. Perry didn’t ask about it because he thought he understood.
“Put some up,” he said. “You shouldn’t just lean them against your bedroom wall.”
She bent her knee and put her forehead to it. “I guess I am in a bad mood,” she mumbled. “I guess I might hang some of them up. But the earlier ones — not the ones of me.”
“Loan me one,” he said. “I’d like to hang one in my house.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“Then I’ll give you one. Which one do you want?”
She got up and went toward her bedroom. He walked behind her and noticed, as they passed the kitchen, that she had left the phone off the hook.
There was a mattress on the floor of Francie’s room. There were hooks shaped like eagles on the wall in front of the bed, on which she hung clothes. There were bamboo curtains, and in the corner there was a tall plant with four leaves at the top. He thought the room was even more depressing than the one she had lived in, in the house they had shared. Her husband had taken the furniture when he went, and although she had gone to auctions and replaced some of the furniture in some of the rooms, she had put only a mattress back in the bedroom. Seeing the clothes on hooks reminded him of the way coats were hung in his schoolroom in the winter when he was young. In place of the line of yellow boots beneath them were Francie’s self-portraits.
“This one?” she said. The painting she propped against her side was one of her best; she had painted it in front of the fire, and the pink glow of the firelight on her bare legs was just right. He looked from the picture to Francie, wanting to say that what he would like was the person propping up the painting, but the expression on her face (shy but earnest; it was easy to see that she took her painting seriously) kept him from saying anything except that it was one of her best, she should keep that one and give him another.
She shook her head. “I’ll leave it in front, and you can take it when you go.”
He touched his lips to the top of her head with a small kiss and gave her a hug and went out of the room for a drink of water, then climbed the stairs to bed. His foot felt sore, and too large for the cast. He put the light on in the attic and went over to the stool with the piece of fabric and the shell on it. He stroked the fabric and held the shell to his ear to listen to the roar, carefully holding his free hand on the material so he wouldn’t disturb her still-life arrangement. The sound inside the shell was very loud in the attic. He put it back and turned off the light bulb and lay on the bed. Like a child, he scrawled “Francie” on the fogged windowpane above the mattress, then, before falling asleep, erased it with the side of his hand.
Nobody could understand how Delores and Carl had made such good time driving, but they said they were speeding the whole way, and that one slept while the other drove. They came to Francie’s door late Sunday night — early Monday morning, actually — with Meagan thrown like a sack over Carl’s shoulder. “She had hiccups half the way here,” Carl sighed, sinking down in the nearest chair with Meagan still sprawled up against him.