North Haven Read online

  “From Brigham and Women’s, when Kerry was born. The swag was all so baby-centric, I had to take something for myself.”

  Melissa sat on the edge of the cast-iron bed, its white paint peppering the floor around its legs. The sagging springs wheezed as Melissa crossed her legs. She leaned back on her hands while Gwen set up her materials: a small wooden easel; six tubes of watercolor of various sizes (three large: red, yellow, blue; three small: brown, black, white); and five brushes (one just a few bristles wide, something for fine detail; a fan; a large teardrop like the tip of a cat’s tail; a smaller version of the same thing; and one with flat, wide-angled bristles). Gwen chose brushes not based on their intended purpose but on how the shape struck her that day. She saw the shape of the tool itself, not just the quality of its mark, as part of the composition. She used a plastic white plate, often used for sandwiches and chips at lunch, and the empty egg tray from the fridge as her palettes. Gwen looked over her work area—the heavy-tooth paper taped to the easel, the large jar of water on the bureau, which was so clear and would soon be clouded and then black—then said, “Let’s get this show on the road.”

  Melissa slipped her robe from her shoulders and laid it tidily over the footboard of the bed next to her. Then she sat back down on the bare mattress that they had stripped after kicking poor Danny out.

  Melissa adjusted the ancient down pillows beneath her head and shoulders. “No, the other way,” Gwen directed, pointing one finger at her and another at the bed and then moving them over each other. Now, with her head toward the foot of the bed, she lay down, letting one foot dangle over the edge of the mattress.

  “Perfect. You comfortable there?”

  Melissa nodded.

  “Good, just holler if you need a break.”

  Melissa scratched her nose, flexed and relaxed both feet, and then settled into the pillows and the trough of the horsehair mattress. After sharpening her pencil, Gwen began to lightly sketch in the curves of the bed frame, of Melissa’s hip, of the heel of that dangling foot. This was always the hardest part, seeing the composition in her subject and deciding where to start on the page. But having a model was excellent motivation. A still life wouldn’t care if she stopped before she started. A bowl of apples beside an old boot doesn’t care if she had to have a snack and the smallest glass of wine and possibly a cigarette first. But with a model there was no room to stop, to judge herself. She just had to push through.

  The light in the nursery was warm and gold coming in straight from the top of the ridge, shining in over the blueberries and the meadow, giving the whole room a sepia quality. Gwen sat with her back to the windows, the shadow from her easel falling across the amber wood planks between the two iron beds. They could smell coffee coming up the back stairs from the kitchen, and they could hear the soft murmurs of the classical radio station from Blue Hill. That would be Tom. She was happy to keep their little project from him. Gwen encouraged secrets, and in this case, it lent the scene that much more tension, that much more of a bordello flavor. As if just in the next room, removing his sidearm, was a young member of the French Foreign Legion back in his beloved city for just two days. Or better still, a poet whose wife, unable to put up with his self-loathing, kicked him out when he had writer’s block. He would turn to lovely Melissa, his muse, his Venus rising from the mist of her dust-filled apartment, the froth of motes around her, her bare mattress a shell. Gwen wondered if Melissa had any real secrets from Tom.

  “Do you hear from Reed at all?” Melissa asked. Gwen looked up from her canvas and let her eyes focus on Melissa’s, not just on her subject, but on the person herself.

  “The ex? No, we don’t do that,” said Gwen, circling her pencil in the air as if encompassing all that they no longer did. She had tried, but he wouldn’t return her calls. Well, he returned one, to say he’d never return another.

  They had been married on the dock, just a few days before the Fourth of July nine years ago. She had married Reed, the attorney from Rochester, who promptly took her to DC. Their marriage lasted a total of eighteen months. Even Danny, at age twelve, had said she couldn’t live in a coat-and-tie town like that. She assumed he saw the city as suited men going into polished white buildings, where great shining machines turned out something known as Politics. Machines that all looked like the printing press in the mint he had seen on a class trip. Although, Gwen had been twenty-seven when she was married; her image of Washington wasn’t much different.

  She had known Reed for a year and had some thought of helping him live out his thwarted creative side, being his muse so that he might feel connected to all the dreams he had sequestered, choosing law school over art school. She envisioned them as a balanced pair in a brick town house with a bright-pink door. She knew there was a problem when he refused to let her paint the door pink. She knew that she had fooled herself into thinking opposites could lead anywhere but opposition.

  Reed had loved her spirit, her fire, all the things she wanted to inspire in him, but once married it became clear that they had each expected the other to change. She wanted to spend Saturdays posing naked for his figure-drawing hobby he occasionally fantasized about pursuing. He assumed she would turn her creative mind to more domestic ventures. That together they would renovate their crumbling town house, painting rooms that were “studies” or “guest” rooms in pale hues with convenient nooks for cribs and shelves for toys. But the house felt like a set piece to her, and then her life, their life, started to feel that way as well. The dust and billowing plastic curtains gave the place the feeling of a radiation quarantine. It was Silkwood, or Chernobyl, or the Eastern Bloc. It was only the suggestion of a home, like a black box theater. An armchair in a shaft of light was the living room, a skillet hanging from a hook and a bare wood table were the kitchen. She knew the renovations would end, that the place would become something real, and that a child could fill it all with light.

  She knew a baby had the power. It had for her parents. It had the power to eradicate darkness from a relationship, to banish doubt and draw the two of them into the tightest of unions. But all of it—the union, the covenant, the oaths and promises and forms signed and gifts opened—they were all ropes around her, all pulling her deeper into some dark watery grave, no place for a baby. No baby deserved a pale and wavering mother, too long in the deep, too long underwater.

  The whole city seemed to exist underwater, a place without color or air, beautiful and dead. And that, eventually, was how she saw her marriage, beautiful and dead. It took her eighteen months to swim to the surface, to turn on lights and pull back curtains, to dismantle the set and come home.

  Her family actually seemed relieved when it happened. Even her father said to her simply, “Life is too short to stick with bad decisions.” Tom was the only one who seemed surprised, or not surprised so much as disapproving. Marriage, Tom told her, was not a convenience that could be tossed aside because it felt hard; often what people saw as a lack of love, he told her, was just an abundance of laziness. Reed had told her approximately the same thing as she loaded her favorite chair into the back of her Civic wagon with two suitcases, a lamp, and a can of pink paint. He had stood there, his briefcase in one hand, keys in the other, stunned.

  “You don’t want me this way,” she had said. “You don’t want this pretend life.”

  “Don’t tell me how I feel. I want you to stay. I’m not the one giving up. This is real. You’re the one who wants a pretend life. This is work, and you’re a fucking coward.”

  She drove three blocks away and sat in the car for an hour before she was sure she wouldn’t turn around.

  “This is dark, this is cold, but this is not nuclear winter,” she had said to herself sitting in her car. But she saw their house frozen and bent under the rush of a nuclear blast. She knew that she wasn’t a coward. She had done what he was afraid to do.

  “I hear he moved to New York to focus on tax law,” said Gwen. “Sometimes I think, God is really on my side, say
ing ‘see, you made the right choice. See, tax law.’”

  She had felt so sure of Reed as they stood together on the pier, as if the sea itself was presiding over their union. She didn’t want to believe that certain types could not mesh. Or that she was any type of anything. And she didn’t like to think that there were wrong choices. She never experienced what Danny called “Entrée Envy,” when after the food arrives you want what your dinner companion has ordered. Nor did she have a problem putting a book down halfway through and never picking it up again. Life was too short for bad books, or even good books that you just don’t like. That was Reed; he was The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, he was The Waves, he was Infinite Jest. He was Jasper Johns and Eva Hesse. Something she wanted to love but couldn’t.

  “Did you ever doubt your choice?” said Melissa. Gwen didn’t hear her.

  She had already set to work on the square of sun on the wall just above her subject, pulling out the white bars of the iron headboard from between her golden strokes. This was the room she and Libby had shared when they were kids. She and Libby.

  “Gwen?”

  “What?”

  “Did you ever wonder, what if I tried harder, what if I did more? Did you doubt yourself?”

  Gwen pulled her brush away from the paper, laid it across her knees, and shook out her hand. She thought of those three blocks, of how she stared at the stitching on the steering wheel and wondered how they sewed the vinyl on, what kind of machine could even do that?

  “Not really. That’s the beauty of choices, right? They’re endless.”

  The letter she had written two months later went unanswered. He didn’t want to run away to Bali and start a new life. He didn’t want to become the friends they never were. He didn’t want any of the options she gave him. All those doors painted on the envelope remained shut. Eventually, it was a relief. She never had to tell him about the baby. She never had to show Reed how much he had lost, or how much she had taken from him.

  She picked up her brush and continued to work, thinking how afraid of regret she was when it came to painting, how each stroke was a potential mistake. Sometimes she just had to move ahead, jump into a cold pool instead of wading in, because if you take it slow there is always the risk that you will turn back, that you won’t make it. She left a blank space she would fill in later for the black sconce on the wall, its two bare bulbs showing their caps of dust in the direct sun.

  “I know you guys had your issues,” said Melissa. Gwen rolled her eyes, like “issues” barely covered what they’d had. “But was there anything else, was there someone else?”

  Gwen had been too sad for someone else. Who can you meet at the bottom of the sea?

  “There’s always someone else eventually.”

  The color on her paper was still so light, like a painting already faded from years in the sun. It was as if more color had ended up in the rinse water than on the page itself. She added more yellow from a tube to her palette, tried to resist the urge to dilute it.

  With art there was no relief, but also no end, no way out. Doing it was hard; not doing it was worse. Her own way of working was dark and twisted, a path in a medieval wood that existed perpetually in shadow, all hooting owls and gnarled branches. Hard to navigate, the fear almost paralyzing. But you can’t stop here, she would think. Miles to go, she would think. And yet there was no goal, there was no light in a distant window, there was only the path. She was afraid of never becoming the artist she was in her mind. She was afraid of making something good and then, in trying to make it better, she would ruin it completely. In every other part of her life it was easy to be fearless, but with a brush in her hand she flinched at every snapped twig on the path.

  Gwen clinked a slim brush in the jar of clear water and made the palest pool of yellow, adding dots of red and brown to deepen it to a gold hue.

  “Do you have any regrets?” Melissa asked. She wiggled the toes of her extended foot and rolled her shoulders.

  “You need a break?” Gwen asked. Melissa shook her head and settled back into the mattress. Gwen began a different pool of yellow, much more red this time, the smallest dot of brown, and a large one of white, yielding a pale-peach tone.

  “I’m not saying I never change my mind. Some choices are awful even when they’re the right ones. I think when you listen to yourself, the right decision is hard to ignore. I mean, what is regret, really? It’s just fear, fear of loss. Most people think that loss is avoidable. But I’m pretty sure it’s not. You just have to ride it out. Like winter. Like people who move to California for the weather. They’re leaving out of fear. And probably regret. I bet you money.”

  Gwen would’ve run to California after her split from Reed. She needed to thaw out. She wanted to fly from the pale-white eye of DC for the golden hills of the Marin Headlands, the pink walls of The Mission. But she couldn’t face that much space between her and everything she was used to. After that lifeless house, she couldn’t be in another place alone. So she went back to the red bricks of Cambridge, and it was a warm kiss on the forehead; it was her sister standing in her yard like a warrior holding pulled weeds by their greens, a severed head by its hair. It was Danny curled like a dog asleep in one corner of her couch. It was even Tom, dragging her to Costco to save money on salsa.

  It was her parents too. Her father had been a jovial, sometimes distant king, crowned in a ring of pipe smoke. But once she was an adult, really once she was fifteen, he was her secret keeper. He would lean toward her when she was doing dishes after a family dinner and say, “Now what do we really think about this guy?” jabbing a thumb toward the dining room as if to clarify who he meant, her date, the yahoo with the wallet chain. He always wanted the truth.

  Scarlet didn’t often ask questions. Like she already knew all the answers. Once Gwen left Reed and was back in Cambridge, her mother would come over with a bottle of wine, salad niçoise, vine charcoal, and a kneadable eraser. Together they would sit quietly and sketch. Gwen stopped thinking of Scarlet as her mother when they were able to just be women, to just be artists together. Then things worked much better. Now Gwen had one less person to tell her secrets to, and one less person who already knew them. At least she was sure she’d meet them on the other side.

  The sun rose higher, grew brighter, slowly bleaching out the sepia. The down on Melissa’s earlobes, her arms, the sheen of her fingernails went from gold to white.

  “What about that guy you were seeing, Libby said he’s out of the picture?”

  Gwen felt a wave of nausea. From her brush she swirled a black cloud into the jaundiced rinse water.

  “Libby has high hopes for every guy. He was just a good time.” She wished that he had mattered, that he was somehow unique and separate from the array that came before. Maybe if he were a lobsterman. A longshoreman. An explorer. The paddler of an ancient canoe, keeping the tradition alive. Even a gondolier. She wished there was more of the sea in his genes. At least he was a musician. Not that it mattered. In a few weeks the nausea would be eradicated and a new good-time man would be found. Maybe one that could lead somewhere. One who’d want a pink door.

  “Do you have regrets? Some long-lost love you stalk online?” asked Gwen.

  “Just the one I’m married to.”

  “He’s the love or the regret?”

  The door opened, and in walked Tom saying, “Dan, get your butt out of bed, Libby is making us dig that trench.” He was waving a pair of work gloves. He stopped.

  “Melissa.” He said it sharp and quick, the way one calls a dog away from sniffing at the kitchen counter.

  “Look how beautiful she is.” Gwen waved at her painting. “I had to have her.”

  “Well, I guess you’ll take your clothes off for anyone,” he said to Melissa. Melissa sat up and stared at Tom but made no move to put on her robe. The two of them just looked at each other. Her skin was iridescent in the sun.

  “Seriously, Tom, this is the guy you want to be? Grow up,” said Gwen.


  “I am the only grown-up in this house.”

  “How’s that working out for you? Just because our lives don’t look as picture perfect as yours doesn’t mean—”

  Melissa laughed.

  Tom looked at her and shook his head, then turned back to Gwen. “While you’re having fun painting pictures and sleeping late, the rest of us, and by that I mean me, have to get things done. Some of us have to pay the bills.”

  “No one asked you to be Atlas. We are perfectly capable of taking care of ourselves,” said Gwen.

  “Is that why you borrowed money from me in March? Is that why you had me pull Mom’s plug? Because you’re so capable?”

  “You volunteered. Don’t put your weird guilt on me just because you’ve hated her your whole adult life. For no fucking reason. What was the worst thing she did to you? Have another son? Poor baby. You should hear some of the fucked-up shit she put Libby through before you act like your life was so hard.”

  “I have to go dig a trench. Have fun masturbating.” He walked out, slamming the door behind him.

  “That’s probably the first time you’ve ever said that word,” Gwen shouted after him. She turned to Melissa. “I can’t believe he’s anyone’s father.”

  “That’s exactly how Kerry and Buster feel. What did Scarlet do to Libby?”

  Gwen got up, opened the door, looked down the hallway, shut the door, and sat back down.

  “Libby got the worst of it, but somehow ended up the most sane,” said Gwen.

  FIFTEEN

  ANOTHER SUMMER

  Now the sun down, dinner done, the water dazzles with waves of phosphorescence. The children lie down on the float on their bellies, stretching their arms into the water, waving them back and forth like the long fronds of kelp below them. They skim their arms just under the surface to see the lights slide over their skin, curl in on themselves as they pull in the opposite direction.

  “The ocean is alive,” they say. “It glows. So many little bugs, or are they fish?”