Who is Maud Dixon?(21)
Florence’s mother liked to imagine a life of diamonds and gilt for her daughter. But this, this, was the life Florence wanted. A blue-and-white teacup stuffed with clementine peels. A tangle of white ranunculus in a ceramic pitcher on the windowsill. Amanda had once put a vase of those same flowers on her desk at work. The whole place looked like a painting by Vermeer. And it was cold. Chilly gusts rattled the windows in their frames. Someone had told Florence once that glass was actually a liquid that settled slowly, over eons; that was why in old houses the windows were always thicker at the bottom than at the top. Was that true? Florence didn’t care. In the same way she couldn’t understand why people were so determined to expose Maud Dixon’s identity, she couldn’t understand why they needed to pin things down, turn poetry into fact. Wasn’t poetry better? Why would you turn something beautiful into something quotidian?
Helen led Florence on a tour around the rest of the main floor: a dining room with a long wooden table obscured by books and a laptop, a small guest room with two twin beds covered in faded quilts, and a kitchen with a massive old farmhouse sink. Helen picked up the pot from a battered Mr. Coffee on the counter and poured out two mugs.
“Upstairs is just my bedroom and office and a couple of spare rooms,” she said, gesturing above her head. She set one of the cups of coffee down on the counter in front of Florence without offering milk or sugar. “You’ll be staying in the carriage house out back. It’s nothing fancy but I hope it will suit.”
Florence said she was sure it would. She took a sip and watched the rain drip down the windows. All she could see beyond them was a gray-green field with some blurred brown smudges.
When the rain subsided, Florence went to collect her bag from the trunk of the car and met Helen behind the main house. They followed a path of gray slate slabs embedded in moss.
“The person who lived here before me was an arborist,” Helen said. “He crossbred a lot of these trees. So I have some odd specimens out here—half one thing, half another.”
Florence looked at one of the trees that Helen was gesturing toward. It didn’t look like a mixed breed but rather like two trees grafted violently together.
Helen continued the tour. “Over there is a pretty modest vegetable garden, which I do my best not to destroy, and behind those pines is my deep, dark secret”—she turned to Florence with a mock grimace—“the compost pile. And before you say anything, yes, I realize I’ve become the full-on cliché of the Hudson Valley hippie.”
Florence smiled, as she knew she was supposed to.
They reached the carriage house, which lay about a hundred yards from the main structure. Behind it, a dark line of trees marked the beginning of the woods. The front door stuck when Helen tried to open it but she popped it loose with a swift kick to the bottom corner. “I’ll do something about that,” she said. And then a moment later: “Actually, I probably won’t, but there are worse things in life than a sticky door, right?”
Florence nodded and followed Helen inside to a bright, open space with a sitting area and a small kitchenette tucked away in one corner. A pink rotary phone was mounted on the wall next to the fridge. A peek into the bathroom revealed a deep, old-fashioned tub. Wooden steps, closer to ladder than stairway, led up to a lofted bedroom. She loved it. She’d never had her own space before—her own building—and this one felt right in a way no place she’d lived before ever had.
Helen left her to get settled and told her to come over for a drink before dinner around seven. Florence immediately started unpacking. She had always been orderly. She couldn’t go to sleep unless her shoes were lined up properly in the closet.
It took only twenty minutes to put away all of her belongings and stow the duffel bag under the bed. She sat on the couch and opened up the brand-new notebook she’d bought that morning at Grand Central. It was for the novel she planned to write while she lived up here. She needed a bigger canvas than short stories, she’d decided. She stared at the blank page for a few minutes. She wrote the date and “Cairo, NY” at the top. After a few more minutes, she shut the notebook with an exasperated sigh.
Oh well, she’d have more to say soon. Having met Helen Wilcox, she doubted that life would be dull.
She opened a book instead—she’d been slogging her way through Proust for a month, pretending to enjoy it more than she actually did—but soon she shut that too. She felt restless and at loose ends. She thought about calling Lucy, but she hadn’t returned any of Lucy’s messages since she’d been fired. Florence hadn’t wanted her sympathy; she preferred the balance of power to stay as it had been, firmly weighted in her own favor. Besides, she wouldn’t even have been able to brag about her new job.
If she’d been back in the city, she might have gone for a walk or settled for chatting with Brianna and Sarah in the living room. Now she realized how truly isolated she was. She closed her eyes and listened. There was only silence. She was utterly alone.
14.
At five to seven, Florence knocked tentatively on the front door of the main house. Hearing no response, she opened it and went in. Music was playing from the kitchen, so she followed the sound.
Helen was wearing an apron over her clothes, drinking a glass of wine, smoking a cigarette, chopping tomatoes, and stopping every now and then to conduct the orchestra with her knife.