Эд Макбейн - Mothers and Daughters

“Don’t you think I’d make a good model?” Julia asked, and she smiled a bit coyly.

“You might,” Arthur said. “It’s very difficult to hold a pose for any considerable amount of time.”

“I’d like to try sometime,” she said shamelessly. “If you’d let me.”

“Well, I’ll think it over,” Arthur said, slightly bored.

“Well, I guess I’ll see you around,” Julia said.

“I guess so,” Arthur said airily, and when he left her his heart was pounding.

She posed for him on the Thursday of the following week. It was springtime, and the air of Talmadge was afloat in a thousand crosscurrents of aroma. Breezes flirted in the treetops, carrying murmurs of far-off Cathay, clouds were billowy with the juices of romance, she was sixteen and he was seventeen, and the world was turning green, the world was opening, it was good to breathe, and good to look, and good to touch. They went to the bird sanctuary at the end of town, and lifted the unlocked catch on the cyclone fence and walked in past the caretaker’s shack, and onto one of the hidden paths, crossing freshly unbound streams over rough wooden footbridges, seeing a scarlet tanager suddenly darting through the foliage in a burst of fire, hearing a chatter that went still all at once as they moved deeper into the woods. They found a hidden glade, an oval of grass surrounded by pines. They could hear the wind in the treetops, a gentle soughing wind, a sigh, the exhalation of spring. They felt shy in the presence of nature, they were silent, they moved slowly, unwilling to disturb the calm, they averted their eyes as if in the presence of divinity. She sat on a low flat rock. She put down her books, and she tucked her skirts around her and lifted her chin. Her brown hair trailing down her back, she looked at him as he sat opposite her with his pad open in his lap, his pencil poised.

“Well,” she said. “Begin.”

“I’m trying to find the best place to start.”

“Are there different places with different people?”

“Well, I like to find a key to the face and then take it from there.”

“And what’s the key to my face, Arthur?”

“Your mouth,” he said. Quickly, he added, “Or maybe your eyes.”

“Or maybe my nose?”

“Well, maybe.”

He began sketching rapidly. His sketches were not really too good. He managed to capture each of her features separately, but they did not combine to form the face of Julia Stark.

“They’re beautiful,” she said. “Arthur, you’re really very very good.”

“I can do much better. They’re not you at all, Julia.”

“How do you see me, Arthur?”

He was hesitant at first. He did not want to talk about her beauty because this was old stuff to her, but surely he couldn’t lie, surely the evidence was hers to see, she knew she was beautiful. And suddenly, in the tick of an instant, their relationship reached honesty. And in that instant, Julia Stark fell in love with Arthur Regan. She barely listened to what he was saying, because she knew the words, the words were part of a familiar litany. But he raised his head slowly, and he found her eyes, and he debated in that instant with himself, and the debate showed on his face — the lie or the truth? And he decided in favor of the truth, and he said very softly, “You’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen in my life, Julia.”

She did not prompt him, she did not turn coy or flirtatious, she did not say, “Beautiful? How am I beautiful?” She returned his honest stare and said, “Thank you, Arthur,” and he got up slowly from the grass, the world was moving in adolescent slow motion that day, and he walked toward her slowly, and he reached out with one slender hand and cupped her chin, and brought his face down slowly to meet hers, his lips to meet hers. Gently, softly, he kissed her on the mouth.

There was no passion in the kiss. It was a physical act stripped of physicality. It was less a kiss than an exchange of faith, a seal of trust. It shook them both to their roots. They backed away from each other in the same absurd slow motion. They seemed to have achieved a sharpness of focus in the touching of lips, they stood out in vivid clarity against the landscape, the world seemed to shimmer as their mouths parted and they moved from each other and looked at each other and said nothing. Sound would have destroyed the crystal, sound would have shattered spring and trampled youth. They had exchanged an honest kiss, and they were too young to appreciate its rarity, but they knew that something very special had happened to them both, and that it might never happen again as long as they lived.

In time, she forgot that day completely. There were other things to occupy her. There was all this business of loving and being loved, there was this machine of romance, constantly needing lubrication and new parts. There were plans, so many plans. Arthur going off to New York and Cooper Union, she herself going to the University of Connecticut, timetables to synchronize, where would they meet and when, the announcement of their engagement, and finally their marriage, and Arthur’s first job, and a rented house in Talmadge, oh she forgot that day. There was no need for remembering it, really. She loved Arthur and his quiet ways, and the gradual tempering of his ego, and the forceful efficiency and imagination he brought to his work, and the fervent way he discussed art and his role in advertising. She enjoyed the house they moved into, the old Regan heirloom that became theirs when his mother died, a huge sprawling old house with thousands upon thousands of rooms to discover and a wide springy lawn, and wild laurel filling the horizon with subtle pink-and-white each year. You could see the university spires from the old Regan house. Sometimes she would sit out back alone, and her eye would follow the slope of the hill, the town laid out at her feet, the hazy outlines of the college buildings in the distance, and she would feel very much at peace with herself and the life she had made with Arthur.

The birth of David did not change the steady rhythm of her existence at all. The child was another fact to be stored into the catalogue of accepted realities. There were things she believed and things she refused to believe. Arthur, David, her own beauty, the house, Arthur’s frenzied work, the child’s steady growth, the town, all these were realities. She refused to believe in death. When Arthur’s mother died and the house and two hundred acres of land became the property of the newlyweds, she refused to associate the sudden bonanza with the event that had brought it their way. She simply refused to accept the death. In much the same way, she refused to acknowledge the Spanish Civil War or Adolph Hitler. She knew these things had happened or were happening, she saw the headlines, she understood the meaning of events, but in her mind they refused to become factual; they remained instead intrusions from a fantasy world, vague shapes that did not belong in the ordered life of Julia Regan. She did not believe in infidelity and would not listen to town gossip concerning the peccadilloes of this or that citizen. She believed she was Arthur’s sole reason for existence — he had told her so often enough — and she accepted this knowledge without a feeling of superiority over him; this was simply the way things were. She herself was the nucleus of a life governed by a selected group of rock-bottom facts, the sole arbiter, the sole censor, the sole judge of what was real and what was not. There was room for only so much in her life, she felt — so much giving, taking, loving, accepting of love, believing. There wasn’t time or space for more. She thought herself incapable of more.

And now she was in Italy.

And now, suddenly, she found herself responding in a way she never had — oh yes, perhaps once, perhaps, a silent glade and sunshine, the twitter of a solitary bird, the smell of pine, the memory was indistinct.