“Good God,” Chap said.
“Over the years, I’ve tried to think about this,” Mrs. Brikel said. “I don’t mean Mrs. Pepin in specific, but the prejudices people have that they never examine. I don’t mean to be superior in this matter. I can remember picking on a scrawny girl when I was a child just because she was thin and funny-looking. There are two things that continue to mystify me in this life. Prejudice, and why some people are drawn to other people. Drawn in so they want to tell them things. It comes as a great surprise to me that I seem to be one of those people that other people need to say things to. When our local minister was contemplating a divorce, he told me about it and swore me to secrecy. He said that if he had the courage of his convictions, he’d be gone from town soon enough, and that then he wouldn’t care what I said. But for one year, the minister was still in town. It was almost another six months after that before he divorced his wife and moved to Michigan, I think it was. And shortly thereafter Mr. Brunetti moved to town. When he was returning a snow shovel he hinted at some things about his life elsewhere. Eventually he said quite a few things, although I don’t consider that we have the sort of relationship that I can even ask how things really are with Mrs. Brunetti.” Mrs. Brikel was rubbing her knees with both hands. She saw that he was looking at her hands and stopped. “But I don’t mean I don’t have some ideas,” she said. “As I’ve thought about it, I think that people see that I’ve been dealt some problem cards in life, and that here I am, dealing with the situation. To me, that’s just the way you have to live — the best way you can. But tell me if I’m wrong here. Do you think that because of my son being something of a trial, people think I’ve learned something from the experience of raising him, and that I could say something that might help them in times of stress?”
“That makes sense,” he said. Once he spoke, he realized he had spoken too quickly. She was going to distrust such an automatic answer. She was going to stop talking to him just when he was trying to formulate something important to say to her. Just when his curiosity was piqued about Lou Brunetti’s life.
“Of course,” she said, “I can imagine that I’m making it too complicated. It might just be that people see you have one kind of problem, which makes people feel less guilty about presenting you with another one.” She dropped her hands to her lap.
“Let’s have a cup of coffee,” he said.
She took her sunglasses off the top of her head. She looked out the window, as if he hadn’t spoken, then gently pushed the arms of the glasses above her ears.
“Let’s go on to the next town,” she said quietly. “If I’m going to be gone awhile longer from my son, let’s go somewhere that’s new to me. Someplace where I’ll feel like I’m really away from him.”
“Who do you talk to?” he said. The car that had been riding his tail passed, cutting sharply in front of him to avoid an oncoming truck.
“Sometimes I talk to my son’s father,” she said, “but he has a wife and family. I can’t quite pick up the phone and talk to him.”
“He remarried?” Chap said. He was nervous. Why had he asked a question when he had already been told the facts?
“He’s always had a wife and family,” Mrs. Brikel said. “There was never a time I was married to the father of my son.”
5
“You keep looking away,” Ben said.
“I was looking at that table over there. Tired tourists not knowing what to eat.”
Ordinarily, she did not eat fried food, but Fran loved the fried fish platter at this restaurant. Each time she and Ben returned, she ordered it. “And obviously it feels strange to be seeing you again,” she said. She took a sip of iced tea. Before they went on vacation, she had established the lie: that she was being interviewed by a design firm that might want her to handle the graphics for a big new Boston hotel. In fact, she had already gotten a commission to do the artwork for the hotel’s brochure. She did not think she would land the large part of the account, though.
“Have you been drawing in Vermont?” he said.
“I’ve just been batting around the house,” she said. “It must seem like a real vacation, though, because my city driving reflexes didn’t come back to me. And the air is killing my eyes.”
He nodded. His cup of black coffee sat on the table untouched, steaming. His right hand was on the table, a few inches from the saucer, absolutely immobile.
He picked up the cup and took a sip.
“Chap and I are getting along very well,” she said.
“I can’t see why somebody wouldn’t get along well with Chap,” he said. “Such an upbeat fellow.”
He infuriated her. They had been together only ten minutes, and already he was violating the rule of not criticizing the other person’s mate. The four of them had crossed paths half a dozen times over the years. Boston — and the art world — was only a small game in a small town, when you came to think of it.
“I did do a still life,” she said, deciding not to let him spark her anger. “I’d hoped the house would have interesting spaces and that things …” She frowned in concentration. “That things would call out to be sketched. But the house is strange. A lot of it is empty space, like the kitchen, and when you do find things you might draw, they look too predictable. Like duck decoys. Or the collections of things they have.”
“What do they collect?” he said.
“More stuff than you could imagine. I was in his study and closed the door behind me, and there were shelves behind the door holding blue Fiestaware. Imagine finding that behind a door?”
“So you went into his study to snoop, huh?” Ben said. A year before, Ben had been a sort of mentor to her. She had taken one of his classes at night. As a former teacher, she liked the way he was always one step ahead of any student, however advanced the student might be. Now she tended to think that he just didn’t listen.
“I went in because I heard a noise somewhere in the house, coming from that direction.”
“But if there’s a prowler, you’re never supposed to close doors behind you,” he said. “You haven’t watched enough late-night movies.” He took another sip of coffee. “What else do they collect?” he said.
“Why are you so interested?”
“Because I’m a visual sort of person,” he said. “I like to be able to imagine where you are.”
She smiled in spite of herself. When he said he was “visual,” he was alluding to a pronouncement someone had made about him at a cocktail party. They had found the drunk’s interpretation of Ben’s raison d’être particularly funny. They had gone late to the cocktail party, and arrived sober, because they had been making love.
“I used to collect powder horns,” he said. “I still collected them when I was in college. They were what my grandfather collected, but after a while I couldn’t see the point in buying powder horns and putting them in boxes.” He finished his coffee and looked for the waitress. In profile, Ben was the most handsome man Fran had ever known. Though she had met him as a grown woman, she still had something of a schoolgirl’s crush on him. The waitress was coming toward them with a pot of coffee. “The way some of them are embossed reminds me of certain drawings of yours,” he said. As the waitress poured, he said: “I should dig some of the good ones out and send them to you.”