Chapter Twenty-Eight

 

Marianne had a doctor’s appointment on Saturday morning. Eleanor drove her there, only because Marianne’s morning sickness made driving somewhat difficult for the moment. A sudden wave of nausea in a crowded traffic lane made Eleanor worry about the possible consequences.

After the health scare which had occurred a few days ago, she saw no reason to take chances. Marianne had seemed so frail and helpless, so vulnerable beneath the infection's tide of symptoms. The picture of a recurrence haunted Eleanor occasionally, a prick of fear with each phone call or unfamiliar number in her message bank.

Not that Marianne showed any signs of such fear. As soon as she was free from the hospital, she went home. No bed rest, an insistence that returning to normal was the best medicine. Under Eleanor's pressure, she reluctantly agreed to take off from work at the secondhand music shop.

The first signs of Marianne’s pregnancy were noticeable now. A slight swell beneath her striped sweater, the dark circles which Marianne did not bother to conceal with makeup. Her skin was not as pale or waxen as before, however; and there was an improvement in her energy which boded well in Eleanor's estimation.

Still, worry was worry. Eleanor watched for her to appear from inside the clinic’s exam room as she waited outside, flipping through an outdated issue of Mother and Me.

“Everything’s fine,” said Marianne, afterwards. “All normal and right on schedule.”

“That’s good to hear,” said Eleanor. They were at lunch, a healthful bistro which Eleanor selected with the baby’s nutritional needs in mind, after having read two articles on vegetables and child development while waiting.

"They said no further time off was necessary," Marianne continued, casting an I-told-you-so glance at Eleanor. "I'm perfectly healthy and being active is good for me, the doctor said. So it's fine for me to go back to work now – thank heavens for the sake of my rent, I mean."

"Good," said Eleanor. "Very good." She tried not to let her relief seem too evident to Marianne's watchful gaze.

Eleanor waited a few minutes, allowing a pause to fall between them before changing the subject. “So,” she said. “I’m seeing someone.”

Across from her, Marianne’s plastic fork froze in the midst of spearing a cherry tomato.

“You are?” said Marianne. “Who?” She looked both confused and intrigued – Eleanor was uncertain which one was the dominant emotion.

“It’s the one I mentioned before,” she answered. “His name is Edward. We’ve been out once now. Twice, really, but only once officially.”

“And it’s serious?” said Marianne. “You and this – Edward?” It was concern in her voice, Eleanor realized.

“You sound surprised,” said Eleanor. “I thought you of all people would be pleased. Excited for me.”

“I am,” Marianne answered. “I just pictured something different for you. Not something quite so sudden.”

Eleanor laughed. “Sudden?” she repeated. “You are the queen of sudden relationships, Marianne. You fell in love with someone on the first day – at least I’ve known Edward for weeks. Months, even.”

“I know,” Marianne answered, defensively. “I just didn’t think it was for you.”

“At my column’s anniversary party, you told me that you saw me ending up with a spontaneous love match,” Eleanor said, in an incredulous tone.

“Things change,” Marianne answered, vaguely. “People change. I changed a great deal in the last few weeks.” There was something sad in her voice, as if for the old Marianne swept away by the recent events.

She reached across and squeezed Eleanor’s hand. “Forget I said anything, really. You’re happy and that’s what matters, Elly.” Eleanor smiled, although not with the same open happiness as before.

“So, what’s he like?” Marianne asked. “What does he think of me? Does he know about the baby?”

“He does,” said Eleanor. “At least, he has a general idea, since he was with me at the hospital. I haven’t told him everything, though.”

“Why not?” asked Marianne.

“Because I haven’t, that’s all,” said Eleanor. “I don’t tell people everything about myself as a general rule.”

“But there are people who know everything about you,” argued Marianne. Which was true, of course – Marianne, Brandon, Eleanor’s mother, when she was still alive. “I just think he should be one of them.”

“In time, yes,” said Eleanor. She pushed an oversized crouton aside with her fork. She did not wish to discuss the hesitation between herself and Edward – the omission of “Ask Eleanor” and of Lucy’s existence, for starters – during their first few weeks of knowing each other.

Marianne leaned forwards. “In my first date with Will, I told him the name of the first boy I loved and the last one I kissed. I told him everything about you, how you dot your ‘i’s so perfectly and like the smell of fresh linen –”

“And I see no need to rush out and tell Edward that you think white chocolate is fake and painted sunflowers in the third grade,” said Eleanor. “It can wait, Marianne, for at least a few more dates.”

They would be starting over, she presumed. Meeting as two different people from now on, who no longer needed to brush over the more uncomfortable aspects of their lives in order to be happy.

Marianne sighed. “I’m sorry,” she said. She hesitated. “Isn’t it an irony – me scolding you for your relationship and you falling in love with someone overnight?”

Eleanor laughed. “Yes, I suppose,” she answered.

“And it used to be me in your seat,” mused Marianne. “And here we are now, like this.” She spread her hands out, one gesturing towards the noticeable bulge beneath her shirt.

“True,” said Eleanor.

Marianne told her about the latest canvas she was working on, in preparation for showing it to Eleanor later that day. A large tarp affixed to the ceiling of the studio, its surface splattered in paint, making it almost identical to the ones below, covering the sofa and the boxes and the surface of Marianne’s work table.

She was painting it upside-down. Using long-handled brushes and pools of watered-down oil paint poured into bowls and containers. It splashed below on her kerchief and t-shirts, a dribble of jade-green rain down the front of her denim overalls.

“Henri was so impressed with the first one, he wanted another like it,” Marianne explained. “I can’t do it the same way twice, of course, so I came up with this.”

She demonstrated it by changing into her painting clothes and swiping streaks on the surface of the painting. A series of lines intercrossing in different colors, with splash marks from the first contact between brush and tarp.

“I am proud of you, Elly,” she said, puffing slightly for breath. “You did take a risk. Bucking the caution and calm of your ordinary life.” She dipped her brush into a puddle of green paint on one of the floor tarps.

“It’s not quite as dramatic as you make it sound,” said Eleanor. She had consented to help, donning one of Marianne’s oversized painting shirts and covering her head with a kerchief equally as paint-covered.

“Don’t make your lines even, Elly. And please, don’t try to fix mistakes!”

“I’m just giving that line an actual ending –”

“It’s supposed to be that way. Leave it and paint a new one. It’s an expression, not a six-lane intersection.”

Eleanor lowered her brush and dipped into a can of powder blue paint open conveniently nearby.

“Anyway, it – the feeling for Edward – was more like a high-school crush. And, in the end, I didn’t have to do anything. I had already given him up and it just happened.”

“You make it sound unromantic.” Marianne grunted as she reached up to plaster a swathe of yellow on the corner of the tarp.

“No, it was romantic,” said Eleanor. “Passionate.” Here, she had Marianne’s attention again. “It’s more passion than any intellectual connection, if that satisfies you.”

Marianne lowered her brush. “I don’t know if it does,” she answered, thoughtfully. She didn’t say why, although Eleanor waited for it.

“Are you sure this is good for the baby’s health?” Eleanor asked. Another pool of paint, yellow, this time, had dribbled across Marianne’s kerchief and hair as she lowered her brush.

“Well, this is its life, so it had better get used to it,” said Marianne. At the sight of Eleanor’s look, she rolled her eyes. “Don’t you think my baby is already used to these things, Eleanor? Since the start, this has been its world. I’m not hearing any complaints thus far.”

“I just worry,” said Eleanor. “About chemicals and rusty nails and the crime rate of this neighborhood.”

Marianne’s smile was slightly wan. “There’s no getting around this, Elly,” she said. “Not all of it is a choice, of course. But it was time to grow up a little, and this is how I have to do it.”

So there was still no willingness to move into Eleanor’s apartment. No reason to paint the spare room in nursery colors, or clean out a corner of her basement storage allotment for Marianne’s boxes.

There was no place to cook in Marianne’s studio, barring the existence of a hot pot plugged into one corner, so Eleanor drove Marianne to her apartment for the evening. Where Marianne dutifully helped dice three mushrooms for the pasta sauce before wandering out of the kitchen again.

Eleanor’s blade sliced through two onions, dicing them meticulously before adding them to a pot of tomato sauce. She could not help but picture Will at this moment, his deft maneuvers in making lunch in the kitchen he and Marianne had shared. Was Marianne imagining that too, she wondered?

In the living room, Marianne was cross-legged on the floor before an open box. Brandon’s box, Eleanor realized, its lid removed and lying flat on top of the table.

“What is this, Elly?” Marianne held up a folded sheet of yellowed paper. Inside the box, several more like it were plastered against the bottom, with spiral-bound notebooks and a leather journal piled atop them.

“Those are some of Brandon’s things,” said Eleanor, who was slightly annoyed at Marianne for rummaging through it without asking permission. “He wanted me to look at some of his war work before he decides what to do with all this stuff in storage.” She refrained from mentioning Brandon’s book.

“He sent me a baby present,” said Marianne. “The Colonel. A set of rubber ducks for a baby bathtub.”

“Did he?” said Eleanor, feeling surprised.

“It came the same day as Maggie’s. You know, she made a nightlight for the baby out of refuse stained glass. She did the lead soldering herself.” Marianne unfolded one of the yellow sheets of paper, studying it with a little frown that gradually melted to perplexity.

“I don’t think this is war correspondence, Elly,” she said. Her face restrained some unidentified motion as she read.

“What is it?” Eleanor snatched it away. Glancing over it as Marianne pulled another one from the bottom of the box, one with a circular water stain on the outside of the paper.

“A recollection of her lines ... a symmetry of grace and breath ...” Marianne snorted. “Was he in high school, do you think? Obsessing with some girl in love beads and a peace sign shirt?”

“If there were words. Not words, but feelings in those lines ... what would I say... I would…” The lines rambled on without point, scribbled in a blue pen with a series of numbers – locker combination, foreign phone number – scribbled in the opposite corner. Eleanor looked up from them to see Marianne’s wickedly amused expression.

“Do you suppose his actual poems are like this?” she asked, her lips twitching with laughter.

Eleanor snatched away the sheet of paper from her sister’s fingers and crammed it into the box again. “I doubt it,” she answered. “And you shouldn’t be so cruel, Marianne. Not everyone is a budding genius upon first try.”

“I didn’t say he wasn’t good,” protested Marianne. “Only he was so ... sentimental. So very ‘un-Colonel’ in those lines. For the girl with the symmetry,” said Marianne. “I expected something with more of a military swell –”

“Enough, Marianne.” Eleanor reached for the lid to the box, although her lips twitched slightly as well. Brandon the lovelorn schoolboy was not a picture which came to her without a mixture of amusement and sympathy.

"There's more," Marianne crowed, sifting through another handful. "'She is not the unbending stone, the upright pillar, the unyielding post. She is the steadfast and the constant. Say she is the grounding rod ...'"

"Marianne, enough." Eleanor shifted the scattered papers together again. Despite knowing better, she could not help herself from laughing at Marianne's previous caricature.

"'... the rooted tree which bends and rises again...the ground alive beneath the waving grass...'" Marianne's smile was filled with laughter despite her dramatic reading voice. "It's you, Elly."

Eleanor's laughter suddenly died away. "What?" she asked, the traces of her previous mirth still faintly present.

"It's you. The bending tree and constant heart and all that," Marianne answered. "Can't you see it?" The poem in her hand, the lines on its paper seemed nonsense to Eleanor's eyes, even though it was close enough for her to read.

"No. I can't." Eleanor was stuffing the rest of the papers into the box again. Her cheeks felt hot. "I can't possibly imagine that's the case. Me, the subject of anyone's poems..."

"And why not?" Marianne asked. "Why shouldn't you be an object of desire, the subject of someone's poems? Even Brandon–such as he is– could see that. Is it so hard for you to believe?"

"It is," Eleanor answered, calmly. "Somehow I would have thought you'd agree rather than argue against it."

She couldn't laugh about it anymore, although she wished she could. The lines had changed for her, the suggestion of something between them having more power than the actual words written. Not because Marianne's perception was accurate–it was the thought of herself on those pages, embedded in someone's lines in a manner beyond her ability to define.

“Here,” said Marianne. “If you want something in return for laughing at him, then you can have these.” Digging through her bag, she pulled out a fabric-covered volume which Eleanor recognized. Marianne’s poetry journal, from which she pulled a handful of loose-leaf cards and pages slipped inside.

“What are they?” Eleanor asked, glancing at the unfamiliar writing on them – tiny fragments of painted paper and woodblock designs, torn napkins and letterhead, all marked with someone’s lines.

“... the droplets upon your skin ... the blaze of feeling within your eyes...”

“...a thought consumes me, riding the circuit of feeling from nerve to muscle. A pleasure and exquisite pain...”

“...into the depths I see within you. Lose myself within them and never return...”

“They’re Will’s,” said Marianne. “To me.”

Eleanor was quiet. In her hands, she recognized the small fragments of Marianne’s own artwork. The handwriting which resembled Will in some strange manner, with its bold lines and perfect curves.

“If you want to see what truly worthless lines look like, there you are,” she said. “Brandon’s are nothing to them. There’s nothing left in these that’s sincere or true. It’s all gone from them.”

Eleanor looked at Marianne. Crouched there before her, with a look of perfect calm and pain upon her face, her poetry journal tucked into her bag again.

“What are you going to do with them?” Eleanor asked, softly.

“Throw them away,” said Marianne. “I won’t read them anymore. I can’t.”

From Eleanor’s hand, she took the remaining sheet of yellow paper with its scribbles about feelings and lines and folded it in half again. She tucked it in the bottom of the box again with the rest. A gesture gentle, almost respectful, in its movements.

Will’s poems were burned in a wastebasket in Eleanor’s kitchen. Afterwards, they ate pasta and sauce and a loaf of garlic bread which tasted a little freezer burnt to Eleanor’s imagination, but Marianne ate half of its slices without complaint. She laughed during dinner, a sound which Eleanor had missed without realizing it.

Afterwards, seated on her sofa alone, Eleanor pictured those papers going up in flames. The curling ends of paper turning black beneath her match. Will’s words flying apart, flying away in bits of ash and particles beyond the sight of the human eye. Lost in the same manner as his love, she supposed.

How strange to think of it now. All the proof of Will's devotion was destroyed, while a handful of random scribbling tucked in a box still had the possibility of truth in them, a moment of meaning.

Those words in Marianne's possession, the words crafted so carefully in those notes and cards, had been worthless in comparison to Brandon's random scribbling for whoever he had imagined. It would not have seemed possible to her weeks ago, even months ago, that this could be true. She meant this with or without herself as the poem's subject–a possibility that brought a deep and burning blush to her face despite her usual safeguards against such reactions.

On her lap was the leather journal from Brandon’s box. One he apparently kept during his war correspondence years, the two spiral notebooks containing a variety of writings from his years in the military. Essays, patriotic themes, short stories of military and everyday nature, and journal entries which were both ordinary and heart-wrenching in between their lines. Plain lines, much like the rest of Brandon’s writing, she noticed. The eloquence was in the statement as a whole, never in the individual words.

His war correspondence journal was a more polished piece. It carried the strong flavor of his column, a familiarity which stirred an emotion for Eleanor akin to homesickness, for some strange reason. The open page was a description of a badly-burned square in Tibet, where there had been a violent protest only two days before.

“I touched the side of a building and it crumbled away in my hand. A moment before it looked whole, as if covered in black satin paint. But it was nothing more than ashes, somehow still holding together in a solid shape. It was a ghost. A memory the eye could still see but the hand couldn’t touch. I could see through its remains to the opposite side, which was still intact and untouched by the victim’s fire...”

She wondered if he had put that in an article for a newspaper somewhere. Or if he had kept that to himself and only put the bare essentials. A protest, a fire, a government story suspecting rebels or dissenters of stirring up the populace in a border village.

She closed the book and gazed out at the patio instead. Bare earth and brown-grey tendrils were all that remained of the plants in her pots. One chair had been pushed against the rail, carried there by the motion of herself and Edward engaged in an embrace, she remembered.

Marianne was right in saying that she should tell him everything. Their relationship couldn’t remain like this for long. Emotion, passion, personal electricity – it would give way to something more stable, like the clouds dissolving to reveal the solid ground of earth below.

But it was the electricity that she wanted. The feeling of longing when she was seated in the theater, searching for him among the crowd, or imagining him while she was alone with her thoughts somewhere. The exhilaration – when it faded, something would come afterwards, she knew, although it came with a feeling of disappointment instead of relief.

But wasn’t what came afterwards what she knew best?