“I understand you’re a painter.”
“Not a good one. But I work at it.”
She took me into a large, high-ceilinged room. The walls were hung with canvases. Most of them were unframed, and their whorls and splotches of color looked unfinished, perhaps unfinishable.
The windows of the room were heavily draped, except for a triple window in an embrasure. Through the trees outside I could see the lights of Sausalito scattered down the hillside.
“Nice view,” I said. “Do you mind if I draw the curtains?”
“Please do. Do you suppose they’re out there watching me?”
I looked at her, and saw that she was serious. “Who do you mean?”
“Jerry and Susan and the little boy.”
“It isn’t likely.”
“I know it isn’t. But I’ve been feeling watched, tonight. Drawing the curtains doesn’t really help. Whatever it is out there has X-ray eyes. Call it God, or call it the Devil. It hardly matters.”
I turned from the window and looked at her face again. It had a certain nakedness, unused to the pressure of eyes.
“I’ve been keeping you standing, Mr. Archer. Won’t you sit down?” She indicated a heavy old perpendicular chair.
“I’d rather sit in another room where we’re not so visible.”
“So would I, really.”
She led me through the front hallway into a kind of office under the stairs, so small it was claustrophobic. The slanting ceiling at its highest part was barely high enough to accommodate my head.
Gary Snyder’s broadside “Four Changes” was thumbtacked to the wall. Beside it and in contrast was an old engraving of a whaling ship beating its way through mountainous seas around a jagged black Cape Horn. There was an old iron safe in the corner with a legend on the door: “William Strome Mill and Lumber Co.”
She perched on the desk beside the telephone, and I sat on a teetering swivel chair. At these close quarters I could pick up her odor. It was pleasant but rather lifeless, like wood ash or dried leaves. I wondered vaguely if she was still used up by the passion that had driven her up the mountain with Leo Broadhurst.
She caught the look in my eye and misinterpreted it, though not by much:
“I’m not as far out as you think. I have had one or two mystical experiences. I know that each and every night is the first night of eternity.”
“What about the days?”
She answered shortly: “I do my best work at night.”
“So I’ve been told.”
She turned on me. She was quick on the uptake. “Has Martha been talking about me?”
“Just in the good sense. Martha said you saved her life when she was a kid.”
She seemed pleased to hear this, but not to be diverted. “You know about my affair with Leo Broadhurst, or you wouldn’t have brought his name up.”
“I brought it up to identify his grandson.”
“Am I being paranoid?”
“Maybe a little. You get that way living alone.”
“How do you know that, doctor?”
“I’m not a doctor, I’m a patient. I live alone.”
“By choice?”
“Not mine. My wife couldn’t live with me. But now I’m used to it.”
“So am I. I love my loneliness,” she said rather unconvincingly. “Sometimes I paint all night. I don’t need sunlight to do my kind of work. I paint things that don’t reflect the light – spiritual conditions.”
I thought of the paintings on the wall of the other room. They resembled serious contusions and open wounds. I said:
“Did Martha tell you about Jerry’s accident? Apparently he broke his arm.”
Her changeable face was pinched by compunction. “Where can he be?”
“On the road, unless he’s thought of a better place to go.”
“What’s he running away from?”
“You’d know better than I.”
She shook her head. “I haven’t seen him in fifteen years.”
“Why not?”
She made a gesture with her hands which seemed to say that I knew all about her. It was the gesture of a woman who spent more time in thought and fantasy than in talking and living.
“My husband – my former husband hasn’t forgiven me for Leo.”
“I’ve been wondering what happened to Leo.”
“So have I. I went to Reno for my divorce, and he was supposed to join me there. But he never did. He stood me up cold.” Her voice was bitter but light, like an anger that was no longer fully remembered. “I haven’t seen him since I left Santa Teresa.”
“Where did he go?”
“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never heard from him.”
“I heard he left the country.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“Martha Crandall. She said she got it from you.”
The woman seemed a little confused. “I may have said something of the sort. Leo did a lot of talking about taking me to Hawaii or Tahiti.”
“He did more than talk, didn’t he? I understand he booked passage for two on an English freighter going to Honolulu by way of Vancouver. The Swansea Castle sailed from San Francisco about July 6, 1955.”
“And Leo was aboard?”
“He bought the tickets anyway. Weren’t you with him?”
“No. By that time I’d been in Reno for at least a week. He must have gone with another woman.”
“Or alone,” I said.
“Not Leo. He couldn’t stand to be alone. He had to have someone with him in order to feel really alive. Which is one reason I came back to this house after he left me. I wanted to prove that I could live alone, that I didn’t need him.
“I was born in this house,” she said, as if she’d been waiting fifteen years for a listener. “It was my grandfather’s house, and my grandmother raised me after my mother died. It’s interesting to come back to your childhood home. And creepy, too, like becoming very young and very old, both at the same time. The spirit that haunts the house.”
That was how she looked, I thought, in her archaic long skirt – very young and very old, the granddaughter and the grandmother in one person, slightly schizo.
She made a nervous self-depreciating gesture. “Am I boring you?”
“Hardly. But I’m interested in Leo. I don’t know much about him.”
“Neither do I, really. For a couple of years I went to sleep every night thinking about him and woke up in the morning hoping to see him that day. But afterwards I realized I hardly knew him at all. He was just a surface, if you know what I mean.”
“Not exactly.”
“I mean, you know, he had no interior life. He did things well. But that’s all there was to him. He was what he did.”
“What did he do?”
“He took part in nine or ten landings in the Pacific, and after the war he raced his boat and competed in tennis tournaments and played polo.”
“That didn’t leave him much time for women.”
“He didn’t need much time,” she answered wryly. “Men without insides usually don’t. I know this sounds like bad-mouthing, but it really isn’t. I used to love Leo, and I probably still do. I don’t know how I’d feel if he walked in this minute.” She looked at the door.
“Is he likely to?”
She shook her head. “I don’t even know if he’s alive.”
“Do you have any reason to think he’s dead?”
“No. But I used to tell myself he was. It made it easier to bear. He never even bothered to phone me in Reno.”
“I gather you took it hard.”
“I cried a lot the first winter. But I crept in here and weathered it. Whatever happens to me now happens on canvas.”
“Don’t you ever get lonely?”
She gave me a hard look, to see if I was trying to move in on her. She must have seen that I wasn’t, because she said: