“What if the phone doesn’t ring?” I said.
Spike said, “It always has.”
It did.
Two
I’d loved the waterfront loft in Fort Point that I’d shared with the original Rosie.
I’d loved the light it gave me to paint in the late afternoon, when I felt as if I usually did my best work. I’d loved that it was completely mine after Richie and I broke up, and even remained mine after some very bad and very dangerous men had done their best to ruin it when I was once protecting a runaway girl. Mine and the original Rosie’s, before and after the repairs. Ours.
But once Rosie died, there were simply too many memories for me to endure staying there. There was no place for me to turn without expecting to see her. She was supposed to be in the small bed next to where I painted, or sleeping at the foot of my real bed, or on the couch in the living room, or waiting at the door when Richie would come to get her for a weekend, back when the two of us shared custody of her.
So I’d moved, to a town house at the end of River Street, parallel to Charles, at the foot of Beacon Hill, a couple of blocks from the Public Garden and Boston Common, around the corner from the old Charles Street Meeting House. It was owned by my friend Melanie Joan Hall, an author for whom I’d once served as a bodyguard on a book tour, and then saved from a stalker who happened to be one of her ex-husbands.
Melanie Joan had bought the place not long after all that, falling in love with it the way she so frequently fell in and out of love with men. But now she had remarried again, to a Hollywood producer, and had moved Out There. When I’d mentioned the new Rosie and I were moving, she’d insisted that we make River Street Place our new home. At first she wanted to let me have it rent-free. I insisted that I couldn’t do that. We’d finally agreed on a rent that was ridiculously low for the area, she’d put a lot of her stuff into storage, Rosie and I had moved in, with a lot of my stuff, but not all.
There were four floors. The place had been built in the nineteenth century, and legend had it that back then ship sails had been woven in the loft next door. It was all kind of funky and wonderful, built like an old railroad flat, not one of the floors more than twenty feet wide. Living room and kitchen on the first floor, master bedroom on the second, guest room on the third. The fourth floor became my art studio. I still thought of it all as Melanie Joan’s house, as if it were a halfway house before I would find something more permanent eventually. But Rosie and I were still doing the best to make it ours. For now we were content, if in an impermanent way, in our twenty-by-fifteen rooms, and it was doing both of us just fine, Rosie more than me. As long as I was around, she didn’t care if we lived in a shoe.
In the late afternoon she slept in a bed near the table where I was painting the small stone cottage Richie and I had come upon in the Concord woods last fall, when we had gone hiking up there. It was at the far end of a huge piece of property that belonged to a high school friend of Richie’s who had gotten extremely wealthy in the real estate business.
“He’s always telling me that there’s a Thoreau inside me waiting to bust out,” Richie said that day.
I told him that knowing what I knew about my city-boy ex-husband, busting out of a prison would be easier.
Richie’s friend had told him about the cottage, which he said had been originally built in the early part of the twentieth century by a writer whose name Richie couldn’t remember, and had gone empty for years. But I thought it was perfect, the masonry still beautiful, the place framed by autumn leaves and birch trees, and, beyond that, sky and God.
I had snapped some photographs with my iPhone but hadn’t gotten around to finally painting the cottage until a month ago. I was still going slowly with it, still experimenting with which colors I wanted to dominate the background and which ones I wanted to mute, how dark I wanted the gray of the cottage to be setting off the leaves around it, how much contrast I needed between the stones of the cottage and the lone stone wall in front.
For the next few hours, I existed only in that world, trying to imagine what it must have been like to live in those woods nearly a hundred years ago, lost in the satisfied feeling of the work finally coming together, the shapes and color and proportion almost assembling themselves, as if exploring all of their own possibilities.
Over the years I had managed to sell a fair amount of my paintings. But it had never felt like a job to me, or work. It was nothing I would ever say out loud, not to Spike or to Richie or to anyone, but it was about the art in me. It had always been about the joy the feeling of a brush in my hand and then on the paper had always brought to me once I had gone back to working with watercolors.
There was also the sense of clarity and purpose it gave me, a completeness that my real job had never brought to my life, or my marriage.
“Rosie,” I said when I finally put down my brush, pleased with the work I had done today, “why can’t the whole world be like this?”
Rosie raised her head. Sometimes I thought that whatever I said to her always sounded the same, as if I were asking her if she wanted a treat.
I cleaned my brushes, put them away, took one last look at what I’d accomplished today. And smiled.
“Sunny Randall,” I said, “you may be getting older. But this is one goddamn area where you’re getting better.”
I showered, changed into a T-shirt and new skinny denims, rewarded myself for a good day’s work with a generous pour of pinot grigio. Then I inserted one of my favorite jazz CDs into Melanie Joan’s player, John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk at Carnegie Hall.
It occurred to me that I hadn’t thought about dinner until just now. It was, I decided, a good thing. Spike said another marker for getting older was when you started thinking about what you wanted to have for dinner as soon as you finished lunch.
“Once you’re doing that,” he said, “the next stop is the home.”
I reviewed my takeout options in the neighborhood, finally settled on chowder and a Cobb salad from the Beacon Hill Hotel and Bistro.
I took Rosie with me when it was time to pick it up, brought the bag back to Melanie Joan’s, and ate at the small kitchen table closest to the television in the downstairs living room. I stayed strong and didn’t turn on the TV until I’d finished eating. I wasn’t an animal.
When I finished cleaning up, I poured myself another glass of wine. There was no music now, just the sound of Rosie’s snoring. And an aloneness, an aloneness that I had chosen for myself, that still swallowed me up sometimes in the night.
I thought about calling Spike, knowing he would find a way to make me laugh and feel less alone. I could call Richie, but I knew better than doing that. You had to have a purpose for calling him; he was built less for small talk than anyone I had ever known.
Did I want him to come over? Did I want him to drink wine with me and make love later and share the ridiculously big bed upstairs? There was a part of me that did. But I knew that sometimes being with him that way made me feel even more alone afterward. As if there was an impermanence to that happiness, too.
I called Spike.
“Are you calling to tell me that since we parted you have somehow found gainful employment,” he said, “even on a Sunday?”
“I am calling to tell you that I love you,” I said.
“Red or white wine?” he said.
“White.”
“I knew it!”
“How, might I ask?”
“White usually makes you sentimental,” Spike said.
“What about a good bottle of red?”