We Are Water (23 page)

When I looked up at the deck, I saw the daffodils. The sun was shining so brightly on those yellow blooms, they looked almost electric. Before, while we were having our coffee, I’d gone back into the house and gotten them—had put them on the table in front of Annie. She’d said nothing but had smiled, fingering them. I’d meant to wrap them in wet newspaper and give them to her to take with her, but in the excitement about the painting, I’d forgotten.

Back inside, staring at Joe Jones’s freaky painting, I recalled something else I hadn’t thought about in years—something that had happened when Andrew was what? Fourteen or fifteen, maybe? When I’d gotten home from work that afternoon, Annie had met me at the door, fit to be tied. “Do you know what I caught your son and his friends doing out at their ‘clubhouse’ this afternoon? Sitting up on the roof, smoking marijuana! I made them come down and I could smell it all over them—in their hair, their clothes. I sent the other boys home. Then I picked up the phone and called their mothers. I told Andrew he was grounded for a month. And you’d better back me up on this, Orion! Don’t you dare pull any of this bad mom, good dad stuff!”

I assured her that, although I wished we could have discussed Andrew’s punishment before she doled it out, I would back her. Still, Andrew and his buddies hadn’t done anything
that
terrible. God knows, I’d done my share of experimenting when I was their age. But Annie had her Irish up, so I didn’t dare suggest that she might be overreacting to the situation.

“You know what
I
think we should do?” she’d said. “Pay someone to go out there and bulldoze that goddamned house down to the ground. Have you noticed how the roof sags in the middle? Do you know what could happen if they started horsing around up there and it fell in under them? Somebody could end up with a broken back or a broken neck or worse! Can you imagine the lawsuit if something like that happened? Or if one of those boys—Andrew, even!—had gotten killed? We’d never forgive ourselves.”

“Sweetie, relax,” I said. “Take some deep breaths.”

“Oh, you and your deep breaths!
You’re
not the one who has to worry about what goes on around here all day long.
I
am. And if I want to get worked up, I’ll get good and goddamned worked up!”

I told her I’d go up and read the riot act to Andrew. And that the next day—Saturday—I’d go out there and board up the windows, put a padlock on the door. She nodded, still scowling. Climbing the stairs to Andrew’s room, I thought, well, this is just what I need after a long day’s worth of listening to the college kids’ tales of woe: to come home to a half-hysterical wife and a kid who may be turning into a doper.

“Yeah, but Dad, it’s like having the Gestapo for a mother!” he protested.

“That’s bull. You’re just mad because she busted you.”

“But a whole
month
? Nobody else’s parents are this strict!”

“No? Well, I guess you got the short end of
that
straw.”

He flopped facedown on his mattress, squashed his pillow over his head, and groaned. I heard Marissa before I saw her standing in the doorway. She was harassing her big brother with an impromptu ditty. “Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Andrew’s in troub-le.”

“Hey, you,” I told her. “Am-scray.”

But Andrew had bounded off his bed and was chasing her down the hallway. “Shut the fuck up, you little brat!” he screamed, flying after her down the stairs. Marissa was screaming, too—more theatrically than from fear.

“Mom! Help! Andrew’s trying to hurt me! And he’s swearing, too!”

And from the kitchen: “Andrew Joseph Oh! You’re in
enough
trouble with me as it is! Don’t you dare lay a hand on her!” I had to grab her wrist to stop her from whaling on him, and when I did she freaked. Yanked her arm back and stumbled backward, sobbing. “Hey,” I said. “Annie? It’s okay.”

“Don’t you
ever
grab me like that again!” she screamed.

At supper that night, Ariane shared the good news that she’d gotten a 96 on an algebra quiz and that, in her French class, her group had placed first in their Parisian culture presentations. “That’s great, honey,” I’d said, a little less enthusiastically than I’d intended. Pouting into his plate, her brother mumbled, “Yeah, way to go, Brainiac.” Annie’s attention was drawn to Marissa who, with her straw, was blowing bubbles in her milk. “What have I told you about not doing that?” she asked, slamming her hand on the tabletop. “If you don’t cut it out, I’m going to reach over there and smack you one!”

“Go ahead,” Marissa said. “I’ll just report you for child abuse.”

Annie’s lower lip poked out and she left the table in tears. “Well,” I said. “I don’t think we’re ever going to be mistaken for a Norman Rockwell family.” One of the kids asked me who Norman Rockwell was, and instead of going into it, I told them to get their butts off their chairs and clean up the supper dishes. Addressing Marissa, I said, “And
you
, Little Miss Smart Mouth, sweep the floor and then sit down and write an apology to your mother.” Marissa wondered why
she
was the one who had to apologize, when it was Annie who had threatened to hit her. I stared her down. “Okay,
fine
,” she muttered. Then she turned to her brother. “What are
you
smiling at, Dogbreath?”

At the entrance to our bedroom, I looked over at Annie. She was facedown on our bed. The lights were off. “Hey?” I said.

“Hey what?”

“Rough day, huh? You all right?”

I waited. “I just need to be alone,” she finally said. Later, after I’d turned off all the lights and climbed into bed myself, she rose and left the room. The next morning when I woke up, I realized she hadn’t come back to our bed all night. I found her asleep on the window seat that looked out on the back of the property. My suspicion was that the events of the day had triggered some old, unresolved stuff for Annie. Something from that rough childhood of hers that she was always so unwilling to talk about. Concerning my wife’s history, I had long suspected that she’d been abused, either physically or sexually. Most likely when she was in foster care. But from the start, Annie’s rule about her childhood was crystal clear. She didn’t want to go there, and she was adamant that I not go there either. I knew precious little about her life before the day I walked into the dry cleaner’s that first time, and that was the way she wanted it.

But anyway, good for my word, the next morning I loaded up our van with plywood and two-by-sixes, hammer and nails, and a padlock I’d picked up at the hardware store. I inched the car down the narrow packed-dirt footpath to the Jones brothers’ old cottage, steering around rocks and ruts, bending tree branches as I went. When I got to the cottage, I laid the planks across the brook, but there hadn’t been much rain that season. The water was down to a trickle. Out behind the place, there was evidence galore of Andrew and his buddies’ clubhouse shenanigans: spent firecrackers, empty pint bottles of applejack, a rain-wrinkled
Hustler
magazine. Someone had toted a hibachi out there. In the grass beside it were a rusty can opener and three or four scorched aluminum cans with blackened food on the bottom.

Inside, on the windowsill by the back door, marijuana seedlings were sprouting from half a dozen flowerpots. So those little shits were cultivating, too. The floor was littered with playing cards, someone’s ripped and stained backpack, several more skin magazines, and half a dozen roaches at the bottom of an empty Pringles tube.

There was something else in there, too, I now recalled: a number of strange-looking paintings on cardboard, similar in style to
The Cercus People.
There was one larger painting: Adam and Eve naked in the Garden of Eden. When I looked at the back, I saw that he’d painted it on a legless old card table. From that one and the ones on the floor, I realized that Andrew and his buddies had propped up the four or five that featured naked or bare-breasted women. The paintings were garish, amateurish; the women looked misshapen, more bizarre than sexy. But then again, to pubescent fifteen-year-old boys, female toplessness of any kind could rev up the testosterone. Hadn’t those saggy-breasted native women in
National Geographic
, some of them smiling toothlessly, stirred
my
ardor way back when?

I had never paid much attention to this ramshackle old place at the rear of our property, but now I looked around at what had been the Jones brothers’ home. I rocked back and forth on the buckled linoleum, ran my fingertips over the water-stained wallpaper, the enamel kitchen tabletop with its coating of dust and grit. I walked over to the ladder that led up to the crawl space in the eaves. Looked at the rope and pulley system that they had rigged up to raise and lower it. When I climbed that ladder, I squinted into the crawl space and saw them: another couple dozen or more of what I assumed were worthless paintings, plus stacks and stacks of old magazines:
Look, Life, Coronet
, the
Saturday Evening Post
. I climbed back down the ladder, stacked the paintings Andrew and his buddies had carried down, and put them back up there where they belonged. Then I raised the ladder, wound the rope around the hook in the beam, and cinched it tight. Outside again, I saw what she meant: that roof was sagging dangerously. Someone
could
get hurt. So I hammered, padlocked, and secured the place. And as far as I knew, ten years later, it was
still
secured.

V
iveca called me the following Monday with two proposals, one expected, the other a surprise. If I decided to sell
The Cercus People
and could verify with my attorney that I was the owner of the painting, she would pay me forty thousand dollars for it. It was a very generous offer, she assured me; I’d see that when I had the painting appraised. Then she moved on to her second proposal: a September swap—her apartment in New York or, if I preferred, her place at the Cape, in exchange for my home in Three Rivers for their wedding. “Please say yes, Orion. It would be such a lovely surprise for Anna.” God, the nerve of this woman.

“What about the Gardner Museum?” I said.

“They wouldn’t budge. They told me that if they made one exception, it would open the floodgates. So I thought of Plan B: a quiet country setting that would be a reasonable commute for our Manhattan friends, and your place would be perfect. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought about those deer we saw. It would be such an idyllic setting.”

I told her I was sure there were idyllic places in Greenwich or Westport, and that the commute for the New Yorkers would be even shorter. Or, closer to Three Rivers, there was the Altnaveigh Inn or Bella Linda. “Besides,” I said. “I doubt Annie would feel comfortable being married here. I imagine if you ran it by her, she’d tell you that.”

Viveca sighed. “Okay, Orion, I have to confess to a bit of benign subterfuge. This
is
what Anna wants, but she’s too shy to ask you herself.” After they had gotten back from Boston on Saturday, Viveca said, Annie had told her how much it would mean to her if they could be married at the place she’d called home for so many years, with her family gathered around her. “And that includes you, of course,” she assured me. I thought of that thing Marissa used to say when she was in high school:
Gag me with a spoon
.

I told her no.

Would I at least think about it?

I said I didn’t need to think about it. “Find someplace else.”

After I hung up, I stood there, staring at the phone. Why did I always let this woman flummox me? And why was she pushing this idea? Was it about
The Cercus People
? Was she hoping to poke around the property and maybe find more of Jones’s paintings? It wasn’t that I thought she’d do anything unethical, but that conversation we’d had about the art theft at the Gardner Museum was still on my mind. It was like that expression the college kids always used: I’m just saying . . .

When she called back two days later, there was no more mention of the house or the wedding. It was all about the painting. If I sold it to her, she could go as high as forty-five thousand, no higher. With the economy as unstable as it was, the art market had destabilized as well. If she could find a buyer for
The Cercus People
, she had to make sure she could make back her investment.

I told her I’d have to get back to her—that I hadn’t had time to get it appraised. Did I want that referral? she asked. I said no, I’d take care of it on my end. Fine, she said. Whichever way I wanted to handle it.

I brought Jones’s painting to two nearby museums. Sondra Zoë, the director of the Hitchcock, said I shouldn’t hold her to it—outsider art was not in her area of expertise—but that forty-five thousand dollars seemed to her like a fair offer. Sal Tundra, the director of the Benson Museum,
did
know outsider art, although his specialty was voodoo artists from the Caribbean. He’d heard of Josephus Jones, he said, but didn’t know much more than what I could probably find out on the Internet. Tundra, however, also surmised that Viveca’s purchase price was fair. “But you could always counteroffer. Tell her you need fifty thousand and see what she says.”

When I called her back, I told her I would consider selling her
The Cercus People
for fifty thousand. Agreed, she said. For an additional five thousand dollars, she wasn’t going to quibble. Would I be sending her the letter from my lawyer verifying ownership? I didn’t have a lawyer, I told her, and I wasn’t going to go looking for one. But I’d dug up all the paperwork from when we bought the house, and our agreement stipulated that we owned whatever contents had been left behind. “Still,” she said, “I’d feel more comfortable if I had a letter verifying that.” When I told her I wasn’t going to pay some attorney to state what I already knew, she said all right then, fine. She’d FedEx me the check that day and would hire a courier service to come and get the painting. Would Friday morning work for the transfer? It wouldn’t, I said. I reminded her that I’d said I would
consider
selling it, but I still hadn’t made up my mind and didn’t want to be pressured about it. There was a long pause on her end. “All right,” she finally said. “How much more time do you need to decide?”