He did eventually return, but India sensed things had changed. He didn’t like her anymore. Didn’t he realize that she had only lied to spare his feelings? She couldn’t confront him about it; he wasn’t the kind of man you could apologize to. He was the kind of man you tried to keep happy because one slip and…
Well, it was never the same. There were no more compliments, no more shared cigarette breaks, no more offerings of sand dollars or fish. They left that summer, and when they returned the following summer, Barrett was doing the deliveries.
And now Barrett, too, was gone. India couldn’t help feeling a bit bereft.
On the afternoon of the second day, Trey Wilson appeared with a package for India. He wasn’t even sure which one of the women India was, so it was fortunate that India was sitting at the picnic table, smoking. Chess was down on the beach, Tate had driven the Scout to North Pond-the two girls still weren’t speaking-and Birdie had gone for “a walk,” which meant she was off to either secretly console Tate or make another one of her clandestine phone calls.
“India?” Trey said. He was so young that he rightfully should have called her “Mrs. Bishop,” but they were on Tuckernuck, where things were insistently casual, and the kids’ friends had always called her “India” anyway. Trey held out the small, flat package to her.
“For me?” India said. She put on Bill’s reading glasses. The familiar handwriting, the absurdly sparse address. “Well, thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” Trey Wilson said. He smiled at her. “What should I do with the groceries?”
“Just leave them on the counter, thanks,” India said.
He did this, then loitered at her elbow as if he expected to be tipped. He didn’t expect to be tipped, did he? India hadn’t touched money in weeks; she wasn’t even sure where her wallet was. She smiled at him, and he said, “Do you have anything for me?”
What was he asking?
“Trash?” he said. “Laundry? The list?”
“Oh!” India jumped up. Barrett had emptied the trash automatically, and he had taken the list from its usual spot-under the jar of shells and beach glass on the kitchen counter. India wasn’t the woman of the house, but it was falling to her to teach this young man the ropes. Was there really any point, with only five days left?
She said, “The trash is here.” She lifted out the liner and cinched its yellow plastic handle; then she set in a new liner, even though this was something Barrett had always done himself. “And the list is always kept right here.”
Trey nodded glumly and accepted the list.
“Okay,” he said. “Thanks.”
“Thank you,” India said.
The boy loped away. India missed the real Barrett. And she missed Chuck Lee, the original man of her dreams.
At the picnic table, she turned the package in her hands.
She wanted a glass of wine or a cigarette-or preferably both-but there wasn’t time. The others might appear at any second. So open it, open it!
It was a painting. Rather, it was part of a painting, part of one of the nudes of India, which Lula had cut into a five-by-five-inch square and reframed. India studied the small canvas; she turned it in the sun. Then she got it: it was the curve of India’s hip, delicately shaded to accentuate the sensual sweep toward what lay south. India immediately knew which canvas Lula had cut up: it was the magnificent canvas that Spencer Frost had bought for the school. India gasped at the thought of that breathtaking painting now vandalized; Lula had snipped the hip from the painting like a woman clipping a coupon. But the act was anything but casual, India knew. Lula would have had to lift the painting off the wall and carry it to her studio. This would have been a fairly easy thing to do undetected; in the summertime, the halls of PAFA were deserted, and the school had zero budget for security measures for student work. Although Lula had withdrawn from the school, she wouldn’t have to turn in her keys or vacate her studio space until mid-August.
India pictured Lula’s studio: She had one of the coveted corner units, with a big window looking south over the city. She had a battered leather sofa, which was smudged with paint, and an old steamer trunk that she used as a coffee table. She had a half fridge, a full-size drafting table that she had salvaged from outside a big architecture firm, and stacks and stacks of art books and magazines-Vogue, Playboy, Nylon. She had a docking station for her iPod, and a makeshift closet, where she kept clothes so that she didn’t have to go back to her apartment to change before she went out at night. The studio was her holy space. Lula had laid the canvas on the drafting table, perhaps, and studied it to decide where and how much to cut. Her procedure would have been as serious as a surgeon’s. In cutting the painting, she was cutting herself. What she had sent, India realized, was her own version of van Gogh’s ear. It was love and it was insanity.
In some ways, the small painting reminded India of the details of paintings shown in art history texts-portions of paintings were zoomed in on to show the reader the exquisite brushwork or technique. But in another way this small piece became something else. It could be the inside of a shell, or the swirl of a sand dune. Lula was, as ever, a genius. This small painting was its own whole.
There was a tiny white envelope with the painting, the kind used by florists when delivering flowers. India ripped it open. One word.
Try?
The question mark got her. Lula was asking, begging, pleading.
Try? Could she try?
Barrett kept a tool box in the bottom of the downstairs closet. India raided it and found a hammer and a nail. Upstairs in her bedroom, she pounded the nail into the wall. Her first try punched the nail right through the plaster. She had to find a joist. She tried another spot, and the nail met with resistance. India hammered; the walls of the house shook, and India imagined them folding like a house of cards. She got the nail in, however, and she hung the painting. It was perfect here, she decided. It looked like the curve of Bigelow Point, or like the peachy inside of a whelk shell that the kids had picked off Whale Shoal.
She regarded Roger. “What do you think?” she asked.
His seaweed hair waved in the breeze.
BIRDIE
From the tip of Bigelow Point, she called Grant.
“He’s in a meeting,” his secretary, Alice, said. “Shall I have him call you back?”
“No,” Birdie said. “That’s okay.”
She hung up the phone, immediately disenchanted. Now see? This was the Grant Cousins she had known for thirty years. In a meeting. On the eighth fairway. On a conference call with Washington, Tokyo, London. At dinner at Gallagher’s. Unavailable. Can I have him call you back? Can I take a message? Yes, tell him I need him. Tate pushed another child off the slide and that child has broken her arm. It will be a miracle if the parents don’t sue. It’s urgent. I’m miscarrying, again, on my way to the hospital. Please make sure he picks the girls up at preschool. It’s an emergency. Tell him I’d like to speak to him about Ondine Morris. Someone overheard her praising Grant’s fine physique in the ladies’ locker room at the club. Have him call me immediately. I’m bored, I’m lonely, I should never have left my job at Christie’s, I loved carpets, the stories they tell, the hands that knot them, he knew that. Why did he ask me to quit? Tell him earning ten million dollars a year doesn’t mean he can effectively ignore his children. They’re clamoring for him.