A Piece of the World(46)

All the things that most people fret about, Andy likes. The scratches made by the dog on the blue shed door. The cracks in the white teapot. The frayed lace curtains and the cobwebbed glass in the windows. He understands why I’m content to spend my days sitting in the chair in the kitchen, feet up on the blue-painted stool, looking out at the sea, getting up to stir the soup now and then or water the plants, and letting this old house settle into the earth. There’s more grandeur in the bleached bones of a storm-rubbed house, he declares, than in drab tidiness.

Andy sketches Al doing his chores, picking vegetables and raking blueberries, tending the horse and cow, feeding the pig. Me sitting in the kitchen beside the red geraniums. Through his eyes I am newly aware of all the parts of this place, seen and unseen: late-afternoon shadows in the kitchen, fields returned to flower, the flat nails that secure the weathered clapboards, the drip of water from the rusty cistern, cold blue light through a cracked window.

The lace curtains Mamey crocheted, now torn and tattered, blow in an eternal wind. She is here, I’m sure of it, watching her life and stories transform, as stories will, into something else on Andy’s canvas.

ONE CLOUDY DAY Andy blows through the door with a grim expression and stomps up the stairs without stopping to chat as he usually does. I hear him banging around up there, slamming doors, swearing to himself.

After an hour or so of this, he plods back down to the kitchen and sinks into a chair. Mashing his palms over his eyes, he says, “Betsy is going to be the ruin of me.”

Andy can be dramatic, but I’ve never heard him complain about Betsy. I don’t know what to say.

“She’s decided she wants to restore an old cottage on Bradford Point for us to live in. Without even consulting me, I might add. Damn it all to hell.”

This doesn’t strike me as entirely unreasonable. Betsy told me they’re living in a horse barn on her parents’ property. “Do you like the cottage?”

“It’s all right.”

“Can you afford to fix it up?”

He shrugs. Yes.

“Does she want you to help?”

“Not really.”

“Then . . . .?”

He gives his shaggy head a violent shake. “I don’t want to be shackled to a house. The way we’re living is perfectly adequate.”

“You live in a barn, Andy. In two horse stalls, Betsy said.”

“They’re fixed up. It’s not like we’re sleeping on hay bales.”

“With one child and another on the way.”

“Nicky likes it!” he says.

“Hmm. Well . . . I think I can understand why Betsy might not want to live in a barn.”

Picking at a patch of dried paint on his arm, Andy mutters, “This is what happened to my father. Houses and boats and cars and a dock that needed constant repairs. . . . You get in too deep, start hemorrhaging money, and then you’re making decisions based on what will sell, what the market wants, and you’re ruined. Goddamn ruined. This is how it starts.”

“Fixing up a cottage isn’t quite the same as all that.”

Andy narrows his eyes and gives me a curious smile. Except for my unhappiness with his portrait, I’ve never really disagreed with him. I can tell it startles him.

“I’ve known Betsy since she was a girl,” I say. “She doesn’t care about material things.”

“Sure she does. Not as much as some women, maybe. But I would never have married those women. You bet she cares. She wants a nice house and a new car . . .” He sighs heavily.

“She’s not like that.”

“You don’t know, Christina.”

“I’ve known her a lot longer than you have.”

“Well, that’s true,” he concedes.

“Did she tell you how we met?”

“Sure, she was bored one summer and started coming to visit.”

“Not just to visit. She knocked on the door one day—she was only nine or ten—and came in, and looked around, and set to work washing dishes. Then she started showing up every day or so to help out around the house. She didn’t want anything for it. She was just being . . . herself. She used to braid my hair . . .” I think about Betsy pulling the clips from my long hair and working through it with a wide comb, patiently teasing out tangles. My eyes closed, head tilted back, the sky orange inside my lids. The strands of hair caught in her brush threaded with silver. Her small hands strong and firm as she separated my hair into three strands and wove them together.

Andy sighs. “Look, I’m not saying she isn’t a lovely person. Of course she is. But girls grow into women, and women want certain things. And I don’t want to think about any of that. I just want to paint.”

“You do paint,” I say with rising impatience. “All the time.”

“It’s the pressure I’m talking about. It’s hard not to be—influenced.”

“But you aren’t. You wouldn’t be. It’s all about the work, you always say that. She always says that.”

He sits there for a minute, drumming his fingers on his knee. I can tell there’s more he wants to say that he isn’t sure how to articulate. “My father loved all that stuff, you know. The trappings of fame. It just makes me angry.”

“What makes you angry? That he valued that stuff, you mean?”