The High Season(78)

“I don’t remember.”

    “All I’m saying is? You really, really loved me once, okay?”

Doe sipped her coffee. “I remember a picnic,” she said. “I was maybe ten? You were still with Steve then. I got a nosebleed. We didn’t have any tissues, so you stuck a tampon up my nostril to stop the blood. I started to cry. You and Steve just about pissed yourselves laughing. You made me walk all the way to the car with a tampon up my nose. Past all my friends.”

“You always remember things wrong.”

“You were the one operating on a six-pack that day.”

Shari picked up Doe’s plate and scraped the happy face and the waffle into the trash. She poured herself more coffee and stood at the window, looking out into the yard. Doe picked up her earbud and put it back in. She muted the volume.

“You got it wrong. You weren’t ten, you were eleven. It was after Shane. Here’s what you forget about that day. That’s when I was drinking, really drinking. And Steve was an asshole. Admitted. But when I was alone I wanted to kill myself. I took you to the park that day because Steve the asshole told me I was unfair when I told you Shane was your fault, he said that could really fuck up a kid. So he wasn’t an asshole all the time, okay? I made your favorite sandwiches. Tuna with crushed potato chips. So, okay, we got a little drunk.”

Shari gave a wave to Shannon and Shawn, standing on the lawn cradling two zucchinis the size of newborns.

“That’s the thing you should focus on, the picnic,” she said. “You dwell on the negative constantly, that’s your problem. I don’t know what you’re afraid of.”

“What?” Doe asked.





47


RUTHIE WASN’T A sailor, but you couldn’t live in Orient without knowing one. Once she had asked her neighbor Josh about the worst trouble he’d ever been in at sea, and he described a squall that had blown up so quickly it had overtaken him in minutes. “In weather, everything is hard,” he’d said. “Sometimes you have to work to separate water from air. You’ve got to be comfortable with losing the horizon.”

Classic sailor understatement. Turning “storm” into “weather.” Would that work for her? Could she turn “crazy” into “temporary derangement”?

She’d lost her horizon line. It had been like this since Lucas had come to dinner at the playhouse that very night (typical of him to invite her to dinner and then assume she would cook it) and they’d mapped out the only way it could work. A picture painted at the same time she’d worked in Peter’s studio, a portrait: one of the Dowagers, Lucas had said.

Ruthie remembered the painting in Daniel’s house. The Dowager Series was Peter’s winking nod to misogyny, as though Peter had been in on the joke. Of course he had, but the ultimate joke was that he actually was a misogynist. He delighted in punishing women; Ruthie was well versed in his methods, as were all his female assistants.

    She transported the brushes, paints, and canvas to the pool house. Told Jem she was looking for work and turning back to painting as a stress reliever. She bought canvas and painted again, terrible paintings since she was just repeating what she used to do. When she wasn’t painting, she was on the computer, scrolling for work. Applying to jobs within a two-hour commute. Calling old friends to nose around and find out what was coming up. Maybe she could freelance. There was a job in New Mexico, a job in Texas. She wasn’t ready to apply yet. She was hanging on to her turf.

Lucas had thought twenty million would be under the radar as a sale target. She would take what she would need and no more, enough to write the check to Mike and then buy another watch for Carole. Any more than what she needed would be too much. She was already having trouble sleeping at night. She dropped into dreamless, deep naps in the middle of the day.

There was an “Important Watches” auction coming up in November, including one with the same make and model as the one she’d lost. She would have to confess, but at least she’d be able to hand Carole a watch.

She kept her own painting on the easel in case Jem walked in. Peter’s was kept in the closet.

First the primer, an individual mix, a little glue mixed in. Painting the blue background had been easy; she’d mixed it a thousand times. A wash of color, laid on with a thin brush. A critic had called the blue “severe clear,” a kind of blue sky that pilots knew. The blue sky they’d seen on 9/11. Clarity and depth all at once, what infinity must be like. Now it was just known as Clay blue. Just as everybody knew an Yves Klein blue, they knew a Clay blue.

It was his secret sauce, his glop, he called it, a precise mixture of paint and medium. She painted for him when he had the shakes, when he’d had a bad night, when he didn’t feel like painting. She went from mastering the color to capturing the line.

    He had his own line. Almost illustrative, so irony was there, as well as freedom. He laid down a grid and projected the photo. In his portraits the skin color of white people had been compared to a newly born piglet, though the critic who coined this had most likely never seen a piglet unless on a plate.

When the Upper East Side ladies, with their Altoid breath and their beautiful shoes, came to have their Polaroids taken, the assistants would fetch espressos and springwater, and often disappear if the vibe sometimes changed to seduction. Many would tumble, hoping his brush would be kinder to them than he was. It never was.