Writers & Lovers(37)
When I get back, the room still smells of printing and I have my first wave of fear about it being read. Silas is coming in twenty minutes, so I don’t have time to wallow in it. I jump in the shower and when I get out my nose is still red from the chilly ride to Cambridge. I put on too much blush to compensate and find a clean shirt I’m pretty sure I didn’t wear to the party where I met Silas. Oscar’s party. But he wasn’t Oscar then. He was the author signing books I couldn’t afford in the other room.
Silas has a lime-green Le Car with a rusted hole that goes clean through the passenger door. On the inside it’s sealed with duct tape.
‘It’s my sister’s car. An old boyfriend of hers gored it.’
‘With what?’
He goes around to his side and gets in. ‘A harpoon. He collected sea weapons. Look, it went all the way through here.’ He touches the edge of my seat and I move my leg to reveal a rip in the fabric.
I’m wearing a skirt so my leg is bare and his fingers so close cause a small commotion in my nethersphere.
Bottles and trash in the back roll around as he shifts gears. The car smells like dirty socks and reminds me of Caleb’s room growing up. He’s wearing the same leather jacket, and it creaks when he moves his arm to the gearshift and back to the steering wheel. I don’t know what we’ll say to each other. I feel confused by the sock smell and wanting his fingers back near my leg again.
When we speed up, the duct tape starts flapping.
‘It was like watching a Viking,’ Silas says. It takes me a second, but I realize he’s still talking about the hole. ‘He had this flaming hair and huge arms. It took a couple of tries.’
‘Was your sister in it?’
‘No, no. She was out with someone else that night. That was the problem.’
We drive along the fens of the Fenway, thick and green, a low stone bridge over the Muddy River, willows dripping into the water. Boston is bright and bejeweled this morning, and my body feels buoyant, having given Muriel my book. I feel like taking off my shoes and sticking my feet out the window. Even if she eviscerates it, it’s movement. Forward motion. I decide not to tell Silas I’ve finished it. I don’t want to sound braggy.
‘What’ve you been up to?’
I scan my life since he left town: Bad moles. Burnt cervix. Oscar. ‘I finished my novel.’ It’s all I got.
‘You finished it?’ He whips around and stares at me until I point to the road.
‘It’s still a mess.’
‘You finished your first novel. You wrote a whole damn novel.’ He pounds his palms on the steering wheel and stares at me.
I point to the road again. ‘I gave it to Muriel to read.’
‘She’s a good reader.’
‘Yeah. That’s what I’m scared of.’
‘Man, Casey. That’s an accomplishment.’ He seems genuinely happy for me. You can’t always count on a guy for that.
At the museum he buys us tickets and we fold the metal tabs of our pins over our shirt collars. I haven’t been to the MFA since I’ve been back East.
We go up the wide marble staircase.
‘My mother used to bring me here when I was little. She’d let me borrow a hard leather purse from her closet, and I’d wear it the way she wore hers.’ I tuck a pretend purse under my arm.
‘What did you look like?’
‘Puffy pigtails. Big front teeth,’ I say. ‘And she’d let me buy three postcards in the gift shop, and they’d knock around in the big empty purse on the way to the car.’ We reach the top of the stairs. ‘I wish I could remember what we said to each other.’
‘It’s weird, isn’t it? My sister and I drove cross country once. She got all these books on tape, big books like War and Peace and stuff. But we started talking and never listened to them. It was kind of a joke we had, that when we ran out of things to say we’d listen. We just kept talking, though. And now I can’t remember what we said.’
The air between us crackles, as it does when you speak of your beloved dead. But it’s hard to know what to say next.
We wander through Art of the Ancient World, past a Babylonian lion, Etruscan urns, an enameled Nubian bracelet, body parts from Greek statues: a sandaled foot, a muscular male bum with one thigh. It’s good to see art, to remember what a natural human impulse it has always been. We move into Art of Europe, the haloes and angels, the sacred birth and bloody murder of one man over and over, a whole continent possessed by one story for centuries.
‘There are a lot of holes in the plot,’ I say when we stand in front of a Fra Angelico. ‘If Jesus was so celebrated when he was born, why are there only stories of him as a baby and a man about to die? Why don’t you ever see him as an eight-year-old?’
‘Or as a teenager. With acne, rolling his eyes at everything Mary and Joseph say.’
Sometimes I go the opposite way around the room, so we can observe some things separately. Sometimes we lose each other and catch up a room or two later.
We drift over to Art of the Americas and come to a stop at Sargent’s The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit. Three of the girls look directly at us. The eldest one can’t be bothered. She almost looks like she’s dozing, her back against the six-foot vase. The next eldest stands erect and uncomfortable beside her, the third off to the left near an unseen window, and the youngest on the floor with a porcelain doll and a skeptical stare.