The Clairvoyants(10)

My photography workshop was the focus of my studies, even though I was enrolled in other courses—Romantic Poets, Women and Grief, a horrible statistics course that I might withdraw from. We were a small group, assorted and equally strange, if in different ways. When one of the girls, Sally Crowder, made the observation that we were weirdos, a few others laughed, softly, almost proud.

“Artists,” Charles Wu said. He wore heavy-framed glasses and had dyed a white stripe in his hair, like a skunk. “We’re artists.”

I said little, preoccupied with my contact sheets. For me the work was less about art than about reassuring myself that what I saw existed in some form—just enough to assuage my fears about my sanity. Still, I was welcome in this group—we were all compelled to create images out of pieces of our own unique worlds. None of us saw things the same way as the other, and even if I wasn’t sure I entirely belonged, I was grateful to be there.

I didn’t bring any of my photography classmates home with me—even though Charles Wu kept inviting me places alone, then suggesting he walk me home afterward. I liked my privacy, and I often pictured living in the entire house alone, moving freely through all the rooms, enjoying a dining room and a kitchen at the back of the house, and this idea had taken hold so I’d almost forgotten that others living separate lives occupied these spaces—the elusive Professors Whitman and McCall downstairs, Geoff and Suzie upstairs in the room next to mine. Our lives did invade one another’s in unwanted, unacknowledged ways. The floors creaked, and I listened to Geoff’s slippered footfalls on nights I couldn’t sleep—they shushed across the oak flooring, back and forth. Sometimes, at a deliberate, thoughtful pacing. At others, in a slow, anguished dragging. Once in a while I’d hear his dog Suzie’s clacking nails trailing after. Each morning, though, Geoff emerged in the upstairs hall, boisterous and hearty.

“Come, Suze! Come on, girl,” he’d say.

He was from London, and a craftsman. One day I chanced to open my door at the same time he did, and he stepped up to my doorway and peered behind me, asking if the place was working out. “Do you have any tea?” he said. “I’m out.”

“I do,” I said. “Would you like to borrow some?”

“Would you make it up?” he said. “Would you mind?”

He slipped around me and into the apartment, dragging Suzie by her leash. He sat at my little table and began to roll out a joint, the pot spilling to the floor by the chair legs. His hair was wild and gray around his ears. He wore a camel overcoat with soiled elbows that smelled of the cigarettes I’d seen him smoke furtively, like a teenager, at his cracked window.

“Maybe you shouldn’t smoke that in here,” I said.

“The tea?” he said. He reached over, cracked the window, and lit his joint anyway. His eyes were wide and dark, and I got the impression he was simply looking for someone to tend to him. In his youth he might have been the Heathcliff type—black eyes and hair, a rogue.

I put the water on the burner and stood over him in my coat.

“Sit down,” he said, taking a long drag. “Tell me about yourself.”

Suzie lay flat out with her noble head in her paws. I’d grown to accept that she would keep clear of me, and she no longer frightened me. Geoff held the joint toward me, sodden from his lips, and I hesitated, but only for a moment. I sat at the little table and he began rambling on, telling me about London and the chest of drawers he was making in his little shop on Ithaca Street, and how the woman who had ordered the chest was a ruthless bitch with a big house on the lake. Then he stopped and gave me a long look.

“Your hair is pretty in this light,” he said.

I was flattered, even if he was nearly my father’s age, and even if it felt slightly unsettling to be the object of his attention. I passed him the joint, the room sunny and filled with a languor that followed me to campus, late for class.

*

MY MOTHER SENT checks on a bimonthly basis and phoned regularly, ready with details of Leanne’s and Sarah’s perfect lives. Once in a while I’d get a call from one of them, and I’d hear the real story—arguments over a husband’s inattentiveness, a car accident after too much wine at a luncheon. I continued to send letters to Del care of the Ashley Manor facility. I’d gotten used to this method of navigating the distance between us. Like the woman at the porch party, I felt guilty, and I had been prevented from living my life by my guilt, but the more I heard about Del’s life away from me at the Manor, the less guilty I felt. Ashley Manor was a place from which she was free to come and go on a daily basis. It was also a structured environment that offered meals and medication supervision—a place she might graduate from once she felt more in control. She sounded happy in her letters and full of her usual plans to find an apartment on her own, to start classes at the University of Connecticut—all things she’d talked about before but that now seemed imminent.

I received a letter from her one day in September telling me about her new boyfriend, Rory. I was sometimes envious of her boyfriends—though she’d cycle through them so quickly, it was hard to keep track, and sometimes I wondered if, like me, she’d invented most of them. Rory, she claimed, was different. I think he is going to pop the question, she wrote. Mother is all sorts of upset, and thinks I’m crazy for considering it. But who doesn’t want a little house and a hubby and a garden full of vegetables and Peter Rabbit peering out of the shrubbery, and maybe a cat sleeping on a rug by the hearth.