THAT NIGHT, THE phone rang after Maude was in bed, in the dark. She knew who it was. Maybe it was the hour or the awareness that college admission letters had arrived that day, hers included—two wait-lists, both wanting her to finish high school—but she always knew when Danny was calling. She used to say she could tell from the sound of the ring. But why had he taken so long? Who on earth, if he loved you, would be stopped by being told not to call?
It wasn’t her phone. Danny didn’t know about her phone. It was her father’s, and he had picked up, upstairs. She heard his footsteps. It always seemed as if they were on her head. She went into the black hall and called, “Tell him I’ll call back on my phone” before Milt said anything.
“All right.” Thump, thump, thump.
“I hope it didn’t wake you up,” she called up to him.
“It’s okay.”
There were these moments, like truces, like love showing up in the middle of the battle.
She got back into bed and lifted the gratifying receiver. The little gizmo sprang into light.
He picked up during the first ring. “Maude?”
“Hi. Congratulations.” She knew Harvard had accepted him.
Danny was the only person who had ever been in any doubt.
“It’s not what I wanted.”
Maude knew he meant her, that he wanted her. “Oh, Danny, don’t be a . . . Yes, it is. Anyway. It’s not as if I could have gone with you. I never would’ve gottten into Radcliffe.”
“Yes, you would. Of course you would!”
“I don’t think so. Not the way I was struggling in math. And anyway, they have like zero studio art. Just art history. I hate art history. I mean, I don’t hate the actual history of art, but it’s so arid the way they do it. That Clement Greenberg person is there, who Milt thinks is hot shit. It’s all formalism.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. Maudlin, it’s so wonderful having you say stuff I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She could just about laugh at Danny’s enjoyment of the novel sensation of ignorance he could receive at her hands.
“You remember what formalism is.”
“Like painting in a tuxedo, right?”
An old joke. She had always loved it.
“So, what I’m calling about is—Maude?”
“I’m here.” She could see the ridges of her legs under the covers, like a mountain range on a relief map.
“I wondered—you know, I don’t have any paintings by you. You are still painting, aren’t you?”
“Of course I’m painting. Jesus, how could you ask?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. Anyway—I’d like to have a painting of yours. To take with me.”
“To Harvard? Well—I guess you could come pick one out. In August or something.”
“Hey, as soon as that, huh?” It was mid-April.
“You’re right. Maybe that is too soon.”
A silence ensued, one of the expensive, ocean-in-a-shell wired kind that happens between people connected by mutual injuries.
“What I was hoping was, you’d do a picture for me. I mean, just for me.”
“A commission. Huh.” He was approaching her as an artist, not a girl. Safe, wasn’t it?
“Kind of.”
“What would you want in it?”
He reeled off what amounted to an anthology of her style. It always surprised her—sometimes like doom or fate—how Maude her pictures always looked, how irrepressibly her touch and perceptions insisted on their recognizable identity. She might have liked to subdue them. Maybe that was why Milt painted squares. You could not derive Milt from a set of squares. She painted from imagination. There wasn’t much outside for the paintings to look like.
He wanted a nude, in a room, with a plant or flowers. She did stuff like that all the time.
“Okay.”
“You’ll do it?”
“I’ve never done a painting to order before.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I don’t have to anything, Danny.”
“Sorry.” Why was he so obedient? Why didn’t he rescue her, overcome her refusal? Overcome her. Court her, beg, apologize and apologize, call ten times a day, appear with flowers? She knew he wanted her, but not enough to do anything about it. Or he thought of himself as so without standing that he couldn’t. He left it all to her.
“I like the idea.”
“I’m glad.”
Another expensive succession of message units passed in silence. That was what they were called on the bills, message units. “Danny?”
“Yes?” he said eagerly.
“I want to hang up.”
“Maude—”
“I’m going to hang up. Do you want to say good night?”
He didn’t say anything. Slowly, so there would not be any harsh sound, not even a click, she depressed the button that controlled the circuit. About halfway down, the light went out. The lovely light. The mountain range of her legs disappeared.