All Things Cease to Appear Read online

  After the three men ordered, she brought their food on a large round tray, balancing it on her shoulder. As she set down plates of oysters and smoked trout with lemon, he noticed her thin fingers, the chipped black polish on her nails. Bending and rushing in her short little dress, she had a tart, wistful arrogance that made him feel useless. They switched to wine, a peppery Cabernet, and watching her open it was like witnessing something sexual, her hands on its green throat as she twisted out the cork, and after a few glasses George was under the impression that her complete avoidance of him held some deep significance. He followed her down the empty hallway toward the bathrooms.

  She turned on him, fiercely. What do you want?

  He couldn’t answer.

  I saw you watching me.

  So? Is that so unusual?

  So what do you want?

  You already know what I want.

  It just happened, he rationalized. Maybe he’d coaxed her into it. He was older, and he had a certain influence. Maybe she liked his looks, as other women did—his longish hair, his new beard. Catherine used to say he had noble eyes. They were brown, he thought, totally ordinary. He hung around, waiting for her to get off work, and they went to her room, the bed narrow and hard as a coffin. On the small table was a tea tin she used as an ashtray, a miniature Aladdin’s lamp that held incense. He sat cautiously on the very edge of the bed and watched her kick off her boots. He was thinking about Catherine, how he shouldn’t be here with this girl, up to his old tricks, how he should get up and leave, but she pulled off her socks and he looked at her thin, dirty feet and her small hands and he couldn’t move. Her face was pale, her hair dark like a hood, and a sharp light came from her eyes. Stop thinking about her, she said. And then she kissed him and he came back at her and her mouth tasted milky and warm and he couldn’t stop.

  Afterward, they lay there in the tiny room. It was very quiet. He was conscious of the world outside her window. Of the cold air, the smell of the earth, the dead leaves. It was beginning to get dark.

  You look sad, she said.

  He nodded, because he knew that everything was suddenly different.

  We’ve done a horrible thing.

  Yes.

  She appraised him coldly. You need to go.

  Walk with me?

  They walked into the woods. The air was cool. She shivered in his arms, her mouth warm, salty. He pushed the hair from her forehead and it was damp and he wondered if she was feverish and then he thought if she were he would take the fever from her, he would kiss it out of her. The trees moving overhead, a vigil of mourning. They walked under the trees for miles.

  The day had been like a kind of music, a song you hear once and remember imperfectly and never hear again.

  Later, at home, he was glad for its comfort and warmth. His wife at the stove, the table set, daisies in a white pitcher. Everything clean and in its place, laundry folded, beds made. His daughter’s little boots by the door, scattered pinecones. He had a Scotch, he felt he needed it, and Catherine played the piano. He watched her as she played, the fine muscles in her back, her lovely, expressive shoulders. She was playing Grieg, the music like a river bringing him back to her. He thought about the afternoon with Willis, how she’d smelled of fresh air and earth. She was like some treasure you discover and wipe clean, acknowledging its history, its beautiful tragedies. The music slowly unraveled and he returned to her little room, how she’d suffered beneath him, and he felt a supreme sense of contentment. His life was simple, glorious. The old house full of music, his daughter pretending to be a cat and traipsing across the floor on all fours, then climbing into his lap. Meow, she said, and kissed him.

  —

  HE’D BEGUN to see again.

  The landscape opened up to him. The brown fields. The pale horizon.

  She was too young for him. He knew this. But he trusted her. It was too early to say he knew her, but he did feel they knew each other. Body and soul. It went beyond sex, he thought. It was something else, something deeper. He possessed her. She had given herself to him.

  I think I’m in love with you, he told her.

  You hardly know me.

  He sat and watched her. She was free in her body. Unlike his wife, she moved without choreography.

  Naked, she stood at the window, the white curtain brushing her thigh. Sipping from a mug of tea, she looked at him. The room was close, the floor puddled with mustardy light, the smell of horses on her boots.

  She rarely spoke of her life, her childhood—anything before they’d come together in this place. She was a girl, just a girl. The only evidence of family was a small framed photograph of Willis and her mother on the nightstand, taken, she told him, on her first day of college. The wind must have been blowing, and it was obvious from their tousled hair and distracted expressions that the photographer had snapped the shot prematurely, before they were ready.

  —

  SHE WANTED to be a poet. She was obsessed with Keats. She would sit naked on the only chair and recite poems, “The Human Seasons” her favorite. He’d watch her in the smoky light, her little mouth as the words came out of it, her fingertips on the book, her straight back, her long thighs on the tattered cane seat, her dirty feet on the worn rungs. He could feel the world slipping away and he liked the feeling.

  He has his lusty Spring, when fancy clear

  Takes in all beauty with an easy span….

  He has his Winter too of pale misfeature,

  Or else he would forego his mortal nature.

  They would go for walks and lie in the grass looking up at the sky. He felt free with her; he felt like himself, even though he didn’t know who that man was. He would look at her—her luminous skin, her full dark lips, her black hair—and find himself lost.

  They drank wine sometimes at noon, when his wife thought he was at the college. They made love with the shades pulled, horses stomping in their stalls below.

  I’ll leave my wife, he told her, knowing that he wouldn’t.

  No, George. This thing we have, it’s temporary. It has no true relevance.

  For a moment she seemed superior to him. He couldn’t look at her. She got off the bed and pulled on her trousers, pushed her feet into her boots. The smell of the barn clung to her and for a very brief instant he despised her.

  We have no past, no future. Just now.

  Walking back into his life was like waking from a troubling dream. He knew he should end it, never see her again, this sort of thing was beneath him. But there seemed no stopping it now.

  How was your run? his wife asked.

  I’m up to six miles now.

  Impressive. Good for you.

  I want to run, too, Daddy, Franny said.

  He took his daughter’s perfect little hand. Okay, let’s chase Mommy around the house.

  And so they did. And Catherine laughed to be chased. And her pretty face rose with color. And when they were sweaty and tired he made a fire and they read Franny’s books until evening, when the windows filled up with darkness and his wife went in to make supper.

  Animal Husbandry

  1

  THEY’D MET at Hampshire, in an animal-husbandry class. It was a young college that encouraged freethinking and boundless inquiry. On warm spring days they were out on the lawn with their fists in the air. In winter they piled into cars, traveling the interstate to fight corruption wherever it could be found. D.C.; Groton; Harrisburg. They protested Corporate America, apartheid, environmental toxins, negligence, greed. They read Emma Goldman, Kropotkin. They knew how to go limp in the hands of cops. They stood in the cold, shivering, eating a stranger’s chili out of Styrofoam cups. They linked arms, making human chains, and sang “We Shall Overcome!” Anarchy, as a concept, was intoxicating. And through its discourse she’d discovered her true self—a feminist, a humanist, an agrarian, a romantic, peeling away the carefully wrought costume designed by her parents to find what glimmered beneath. Gone were the ethical charades promoted in religio
us school. Gone were the scare tactics that indicted her body as a biological enemy, routine strategies of degradation that made her nearly desperate for a partner, someone who could love even her.

  Here was the real Justine: earthy, busty, hairy-legged, fragrant. She had pale skin and dark, somber eyes and wore her hair in a long, thick braid. She had a kind of rare, painterly beauty that seemed old-fashioned. Further, she was not a woman with fragile appetites. Her mouth watered for strong flavors, turnips and onions still dusty with earth, sweet radishes, leafy beets that stained her fingertips, bread as warm as flesh that she made with her own hands.

  Her husband, Bram, short for Abraham, had a certain masculine purity, with loose flannel shirts that smelled of sheep and scraggly black hair and brown eyes and the books that fell from his pockets—Rilke and Hamsun and Chekhov. Where would we be without Chekhov? he once said to her. They would make love in his little room at the college, and then she’d sit in the old brown chair he’d found on the street, drinking bourbon and eating tangerines, listening to All Things Considered. Mornings, they’d cut through the apple orchard to Atkins, where they ate doughnuts and drank coffee and read the newspaper. They were friends who had become lovers. No, they were lovers who’d become friends. They were married the following summer, after graduation, on a flower farm in Amherst. They had the party at the Lord Jeffrey Inn, under a tent, and went to Provence on their honeymoon. She would never forget all of those sunflowers, fields and fields of them, or the little cinema where they’d watched Lolita dubbed in French.

  At first, Bram had wanted to be a philosopher. Then a novelist. Now he was a farmer who wanted to be a novelist. The land had been left to him by a distant uncle who’d used it for hunting a few weeks a year. They both came from money but made out like they had little—the renovation of the old farmhouse still unfinished, the scuffed-up floors, the poorly heated, undecorated rooms that contained one or two priceless antiques, the boxy green Range Rover in the dirt yard. Bram was an only child. His father was a famous conductor who had been married to a variety of histrionic women, none of whom particularly fancied music; they saw him every summer at Tanglewood, and the current wife always prepared elaborate picnics in wicker baskets. Bram’s mother, an unrecognized painter, had died when he was only a boy, and he once told Justine, in a rare display of vulnerability, that he’d never gotten over it. Justine’s mother owned an antiques shop in Savannah, having tired of being a psychologist, and her father was an orthopedic surgeon; she had two prodigious sisters, twins, who lived in Maine and each did everything in threes—three degrees, three houses, three jobs, three kids. Bram and Justine were childless.

  Justine made her studio in the borning room, off the kitchen. They raised sheep and alpaca, and she dyed the wool and spun it herself in the farm’s old creamery. With all that yarn, the floors swarmed with color and ran through the house like colored rivers. Her loom waited by the window, a patient confidante. Two days a week, she taught weaving and textiles at the college. For a woman, Justine was not especially vain and prided herself on her reliance on the cerebral as opposed to the physical, and on her disdain for ornamentation of any kind. She wore baggy men’s jeans, a flannel shirt and work boots, and her beauty regime consisted of soap and water. Her hands were large and thin—the hands of an aristocrat, her father always said—but they were rough and callused and rarely idle. After her work all over the farm and house was done, she wove blankets and scarves, which she sold in a shop in town frequented by the extravagant parents of her Saginaw students.

  Justine feasted on the simple blessings around her, the farm table scattered with crumbs and pomegranates and acorns. These images were like lines of poetry, she thought, and she greatly admired poets and people like Bram, who could see beauty in the ordinary. To Justine, happiness was a good soup simmering all day. Wind crossing the field and whistling through the window screens. Burly yarn transforming in her hands. She loved her husband’s face and his smell and how his hair dripped over his collar like black paint, but most of all how she felt in his arms—warm, strong, loved.

  Besides the alpaca and sheep, they had chickens and rabbits and two big dogs, Rufus and Betty, and far up in the hills there were coyotes and bears and sometimes mountain lions and wolves. She would walk the property and marvel at its splendor. It was almost frightening, and when the wind blew hard at night it could undermine her own small position in the scheme of things. The house itself was cold. That was all right, but in winter the flat and austere light gave back nothing at all. The old pine boards were freezing underfoot. The windows trembled in their frames.

  This was where they had come. They had chosen this. It was their life.

  —

  THROUGH THE USUAL Saginaw channels, she’d heard about George Clare. He and his wife were the poor suckers who’d bought the Hale farm. Supposedly, he was some kind of wunderkind in art history. On the day he’d interviewed, she pretended not to know who he was when they met standing in line at the cafeteria.

  I’m new, actually, he’d said. And they shook hands, shifting their trays and notebooks. I start in the fall.

  Clare was the sort of man people called good-looking. Something just slightly off, slightly amiss—but she could be a snob. He was dressed in his interviewing clothes—khaki trousers, a white oxford shirt, a pretentious red bow tie (perhaps a new, defining accessory) and a tweed blazer whose fabric resembled granola. He had the benign, uninteresting beauty of the Disney prince who, out of stupid luck, always got the girl. Challenging his otherwise conservative image, his toast-colored hair was long and shaggy and his wire-rimmed spectacles gave him a kind of John Lennon coolness that was, she realized, a complete fantasy. Within two minutes he’d walked her through his educational pedigree, including a prestigious scholarly prize named for some eccentric millionaire who collected Hudson River School landscapes. Really? she said, already bored. She’d run into people like him all her life. He was the type who’d gone unscathed through adolescence, with no distinguishable marks or scars, no apparent history.

  As it turned out, they had a few things in common, tennis for one. George was quick to reveal that he’d been on the team at Williams. Bram was an inelegant player, but powerful and consistent. The men played doubles every Saturday while she and Catherine and the other wives watched from lawn chairs or stretched out on the grassy field behind the courts. Children ran around barefoot. The Clares’ little girl, Franny, would sit in the grass, pulling the petals off of daisies, then letting them run through her fingers like flakes of snow. Occasionally, one of the men would bark a curse, much to his wife’s dismay; in particular, George was known for his temper on the court. Once, he’d been so incensed when Bram blew an easy point that he threw his racket at him, and Bram needed stitches over his eyebrow. It seemed revealing to her that his partner never bothered to apologize. Still, it was a small town; you had to accept people for who they were. Sometimes, after a game, they’d all have drinks together in the gloomy clubhouse bar, which was famous for its hair-raising Bloody Marys, horseradish as thick as paint chips floating on the surface. Slivers of revelation would emerge as she observed the Clares’ practiced charade of love. They weren’t country people. They didn’t know how to live with all that land. People said the farm they’d bought was cursed. The Hale tragedy was a favorite subject at dinner parties, when people drank too much and made allowances for impolite talk about neighbors and weird fatal accidents. You’d see the boys in town with their uncle. Justine often saw them at Hack’s, racing around on the carts, making a ruckus and being generally disruptive, but people felt sorry for them and didn’t say anything. Once, a few weeks after their parents had died, she’d caught the youngest boy—Cole was his name—stealing packages of steaks, shoving them down the front of his jacket. Waiting for her to call somebody, he just looked at her, at once surly and vulnerable, and she thought he might break into tears. If you saw those eyes you’d pray he’d get away with it, and she held her breath until he got
out of the store.

  A lot of townspeople had gone to the memorial service at St. James’s Church, where she and Bram went to pay their respects. The boys sat in a front pew, next to their uncle and his girlfriend. Justine had been preoccupied by the boys’ faces, each one a derivation of the others’, all three with the most remarkable blue eyes she’d ever seen, and it was then that she’d felt, deep inside of herself, the desire to become a mother. She and Bram went home that night and made love like rabbits, and didn’t use anything, and she cried in his arms for those boys, and for the child she hoped they’d made. But that spell of maternal longing didn’t last, and to her relief her period came the next week.

  —

  SHE DIDN’T HAVE to teach. She was doing it, she supposed, as a kind of community service, and to break the assumptions people had about weaving, often considered just an expensive hobby, not an art form. For all the years she’d spent at Saginaw, she felt routinely excluded by the intellectuals in Fine Art, the painters and sculptors who relegated her status to that of a craftsperson, expressing interest in her work only when they wanted to buy scarves at Christmastime. For her and Bram, money was not an issue. They were both accustomed to having it, plenty of it. However, when evaluating herself in relation to others, she thought she could easily live without it. She could still function creatively, and she and Bram were committed to living off the land as much as they could. She spent easily, not frivolously, always in order to procure a good life, a meaningful life. She was selective, too, often traveling some distance for certain items—organic meat, for instance, which they bought from a farmer in Malta, or the wine they favored from a vintner in Amenia. As much as she loved tending the livestock and maintaining the farm, it was all rather demanding work, and she liked having the time alone in the car on the thirty-minute drive to Saginaw, along the river. And she liked her large classroom full of looms, her handful of students working with their nimble, inexperienced fingers in silence, as devoted at harpists.