Agnes Mallory (30 page)

But the first thing I did, I admit, when I got outside, was wander round the house to the studio side. Just curious – I wanted to see if I could look in through the windows and see what all the secrecy was about. I passed by with a great show of innocence, hands in pockets, glancing all around. The windows were all hung over, though, with stained canvases. Stepping back, I saw, on the slope of the roof, two plexiglas bubbles through which she got this precious light of hers. So that was that. I set off on my own to explore.

The day was fine. There was a fresh, poignant undercurrent in the breezes. A path of spongy duff angled down westerly through the woods, and I took that, marching briskly. Hut, hut, good exercise, good for the mind. A little sweat to ease the wracking woe-is-me routine.

After a few minutes, I became aware of the steady hiss of the river off to my left. I could see it then through the trees, foamy and rippling over its rocky bed. I figured I must be approaching the Swimhole; my flower handbook wouldn't be much good there, so I turned off at a dog's leg I saw and headed deeper into the forest.

The biographies of Agnes go on forever about these acres, her property, and its importance to her, the place-names she gave. Roland gives poetical interviews from his Hollywood home, and art school girls make pilgrimages, and every other year or so some jerk waxes half-smart on its effect on her work or even its symbolism in her mind, God help us. But for all that, it was a magical place, I felt it right away. Maybe it was her, the way she loved it, the way she moved in it, as I'd already seen, as its creature, in such off-handed communion. Also, though, there were patches of it that simply resonated in the mind somehow. They were beautiful, but they were so weirdly familiar and effortless too, like just one more grand view on a picture postcard. You couldn't admire them, you could hardly really
see
them at all. They just drew you in, fairy-tale fashion, to some zone of natural imagination, as you moved along.

I felt the effect even then, as I headed down this narrowing trail. Low hornbeams and half-sprouted elms closed over me to form a descending tunnel. It thickened and gloomed as it curled around, and I could see ahead where it opened again into a sedate medallion of mote-hung gold. Anyone can imagine the metaphors, the symbols – this shadowy passage into radiant light – it's all been done; it's a small industry these days. But they botch up the fact of it, the feeling of it. Because it was somehow all so
known
already; it was defiantly unremarkable.

I collided with the fabulous web of a tiny spider. and, dragging the sticky silk from my lips, bowed out of the tunnel and into what she had called The Meadow of Wildflowers. It was a great, stout crescent of grass bordered by forest on three sides and by low hills along the northwest fringe. It was very green, and wonderful with sprays of purple, and yellow and white – loosestrife and goldenrod and Queen Anne's lace, that is, with white moths and monarchs bobbing around over it, and gnats dancing in the beams from the sun, which had sunk now to the crest of a hill.

I walked out into it, bugs springing from the grass before my feet and chittering and rattling all around me. Redwinged blackbirds ditching their blinds and making for the trees as I came on farther. And I reached the center of it, where the colorful meadow was all around me, the hills and the trees and so on. And again, it was all so placidly present, so
there
, it felt, within as well as without, that it really beggared thought; so beggared thought, in fact, that I found it a bit hard to bear.

So I got me out my book, I did, and started naming off the flowers. Kneeling over clover with a scientific frown, chucking the bellflowers with my finger. Sticking my shnoz in the milkweed and watching the grubs shimmy up its boles. That reminded me of Agnes and her monkey statue with the worms in it. And looking up, I noticed that the whole place brought Agnes back to me in the way she hadn't herself. The old times were with me now: the stream in back of her house, the walks home – the ache of regret, too, which I guess was part of what I'd come for.

Well, after enough of this, I could stand the place a little better. And I got to my feet, and the sun was just down, and the sky was royal blue with an undulent line of tangerine above the hills, and what do you know? I was one serene Harry suddenly. Or at least a more solid Harry, a more actual Harry, who had a real, calmer sense of his situation, who knew the score. I did know it, to my surprise. There really wasn't much mystery to it, after all. I had a pretty good sense of what would happen next – with the Feds, I mean, and the newspapers, and my wife. I realized I had to call my wife too. She'd be terrified I'd killed myself or something. The doofus. I could've kicked my own ass, just panicking, just running out on her like that.

So I sighed. I gave the meadow a last once-over. A magical spot it was, absolutely.

And then the sky went a shade darker and the big empty place began to seem kind of creepy, so I hied it the hell out of there.

Incredibly enough, our heroine was still locked up and malleting away when I got back, lamplight now seeping under the studio door. But then, just moments after I came in, she seemed to give over. I heard other noises briefly as I replaced her wildflower book on the shelf – sweeping maybe, and some heavy piece of furniture scraping the floor. And then the bolt thunked back, the door opened a little. She slipped out, and with her back to me, shot the bolt home once again.

Christ, what was she building in there, a vampire? Whatever it was, it had sure drained her. All that morning's vim was history. She looked limp and weak, her tan a thin layer over sunken cheeks and deep pallor. And she seemed irritated to see me waiting for her, as if I were one more problem than she could tolerate today.
This is the woman who wrote those letters to me
, I thought.

‘You okay?' I said.

‘Tired.' She tried to smile, brushing her hair off her forehead. ‘Why don't you pour yourself a drink while I make dinner?'

‘No, that's all right.' I was a purified, natural man now, see; no more booze. ‘Well, on second thought, what have you got?'

I had a beer, leaning on the kitchen rail with the bottle. Watching as she shuffled wearily from refrigerator to stove. She made Spanish omelettes, pretty expertly it looked like. I'm attracted to domestic women, and the sight of her cooking fueled my warmth for her and my vague fantasies of escape.

I told her how I'd gone to the meadow, which seemed to brighten her up a little. A few times as I described the experience, she lifted a smile to me and said, ‘Yes. Yes.' But then she'd sink away again, and go on about her work without speaking; blinking with exhaustion sometimes, or coming to a stop for a moment, forgetting what she had meant to do.

She was silent for a long time too as we ate together at either end of the rude wooden table. I was pretty much out of conversation myself and there were longer and longer lapses: the sounds of metal forks on clay plates, the miserable concentration on grains of rice and scraps of egg, the steady traffic of frogs outside and the crickets between the floorboards. All depressing as hell, because I wanted so much to be with her, to feel close to her, not to be alone.

Finally, and with an effort I think, she raised her face. But she regarded me none-too-pleasantly and her voice was hollow and wry. ‘So?' she said. ‘Are the police after you?'

I nodded. ‘I would think so, by now.'

‘You're not a murderer or anything, I hope.'

‘No.' I leaned back heavily in my chair with a second bottle of beer. ‘Just a scumbag basically. Overlooked some minor political bullshit, took some illegal gifts, cheated on my wife. You know the routine. The screws want me to rat on Bugsy and Big Al.'

‘Uh huh. And will you?'

‘No.' This is what I had decided in the meadow. ‘I actually hope they nail the bastards. But I'm not turning them in to buy out of my mistakes. Ricco squeals on no one.'

She kept up the sardonic tone, but I could see she was suffering in those live-wire eyes. I hated this. ‘Will you have to go to jail?'

‘I don't think so. To be honest. They haven't really got that much on me. I didn't do that much. They'll just lean on me, make sure it all gets in the papers. And I'll be disbarred, probably.'

‘What about your wife? What'll she do?'

I shrugged. ‘Forgive me, I would think. I couldn't bear that. I'll have to leave her.'

‘Do you love her?' I didn't answer. ‘Ah, you do,' she said. ‘She was made for you. You adore her.'

She was studying me with unnerving directness, so I studied her back. High cheeks, deep eyes, thick lips and a beakish sort of nose, all intense and overpowering. Not beautiful. It was her energy that made her so desirable, I figured. Or maybe the beer. I sure wanted those cut-offs gone just now; I wanted in between those muscular legs of hers.

‘I do have to call her,' I said.

She gave a tired snort, sitting back from her empty plate. ‘You'll have to take the truck into town. My phone's been cut off.'

‘You're joking.'

‘This morning. About ten minutes after you called me.'

‘Because of money?'

I think she considered lying about this. She turned in her chair and glanced at me sidewise. It made me feel my position: this nostalgic fugitive intruding on her years of solitude. But she gave in. She said: ‘Oh, it was on purpose, more or less. Roland's been badgering me. He's getting annoyed. You know, he has some big offer to go to Hollywood and score a movie. He doesn't know what to do with the kid.'

I suppose I wanted to get back at her for the crack about Marianne – before I could stop myself, I said: ‘Maybe you ought to take her, Agnes. Obviously, this shit is just killing you.'

She laughed once, a sound like something falling to the ground. ‘Maybe you should just stay out of it, Harry.'

Tilted back in my chair, I raised my bottle to her. ‘Right,' I said, ‘that's what I meant.'

The night had gone colder fast, the way it does in the mountains. Agnes closed the windows while I cleaned up the dishes. She brought in logs from outdoors somewhere and built the fire again in the woodstove.

When I was finished, she was sitting on the couch with a glass of wine, staring blankly at the blaze through the stove's open door. I sat down next to her. She put her head on my shoulder.

‘Sorry, Mr Har.'

‘No, no.' I put my arm around her. I kissed the white part in her black hair. I breathed in wood and work-sweat and some feminine shampoo.

‘Evil Agnes mustn't hold you to her imagination,' she said. ‘I can't be much of a thrill for you either.' She sighed. ‘It's all just who you are in the end.'

‘God, I hope not. I haven't the faintest fucking notion of who I am. That's how I got the shaft.'

She gave a low, appealing giggle into my shirtfront – by which time, of course, my hardon was caught painfully against the crux of my thigh. An intrusion on this gentle moment, but there you are. I looked away from her to cool myself down, concentrating on the melancholy reaches of the room.

And then, as they say, it hit me: what was so wrong with the place. What was so oddly morose and somehow suspenseful, even frightening about it, as if some ceaseless minor chord echoed in its atmosphere.

‘Where's all your work?' I asked her.

‘Hm?'

‘It can't all be in the studio? I mean, you've been at it for, like, what? Five years? Seven years? Vere's da art, Chahlie?'

She raised her face to me sleepily. ‘Oh,' she murmured. ‘Don't, Harry.' She let me kiss her, and kissed me so softly on the lips that I wanted to rend my garments with the unfairness of life and with my desire.

‘I'm finished,' she whispered up at me. ‘I love you, you know. I've always loved you. But I'm finished. I'm already dead.'

It was a little tough to sleep with my hair standing on end like that, my eyes jacked wide open and the tip of my dick somewhere up around my chest. Still, I did manage to doze off around three in the morning, clutching my blanket around my chin on the sofa as the last of the fire died.

It was the clang of the woodstove door that woke me in the morning. Some time near six, with the sky just barely light. I pulled my nose out of the dusty upholstery and rolled over, squinting. Agnes was retreating from the stove to the front door as the fire snorted to life again. She was wearing a thin, ratty bathrobe of green tartan and I could tell, by the flow of her body, that she was naked underneath.

‘Ssh,' she whispered at me. ‘I'm going for my swim. Go back to sleep.'

I pulled my blanket close around me, glad for the warmth of the fire, and watched through narrowed eyes as she worked the wooden door open and pushed out through the screen. I listened to her light footsteps fading on the path into the forest, and then lay watching the orange outline around the woodstove door while the pall of fear and sadness settled over me.

Agnes, though … I was dressed and showered when she came back, and she was full of bright smiles and energy again. Rubbing her wet hair with a towel she carried, her breasts and buttocks printed in water on her robe and she all wifely unconcern. Electrifying it was, though I clung to my self-pity.

She dressed in her bedroom with the door open, while I wandered into the kitchen. I pondered the old-fashioned coffee pot helplessly and listened to the sounds of her tossing her wardrobe around, searching for an outfit.

‘Go on, old Harry, I'll do it,' she said, rushing in – in shorts now and an
I Lo Vermont
sweatshirt – chasing me away. I managed to put some butter and knives on the table, all dolefully. And she made corn bread – fresh corn bread from scratch – chattering the while about the pleasures of the Swimhole. ‘Go down in the afternoon, when the water's warmer. About three o'clock, it's perfect. You have to wear a suit then, though, cause all these fucking, you know, tubers and canoers go by,' and on and on like that. She was very enthusiastic about it.