Дуглас Кеннеди - Five Days

‘Come straight up to Lucy’s after you’ve broken the news.’

‘Unless Sally wants to spend the evening with you there.’

‘As I said before the chances of that happening—’

‘Just in case I can always give Dwight a call. He knows how difficult things have been with Muriel, and his wife is also very sympathetic and kind, and they will let me stay in their guest room for a few days—’

‘Anyway, we’ll first be seeing each other on Tuesday night.’

‘So there will just be a night apart.’

‘Which is a night too long.’

‘But as of Friday we will officially be a couple.’

‘We’re a couple already, my love.’

‘That we are. That we are.’

Richard’s phone binged several times during lunch. But he ignored it.

‘I know who it is — that awful man in Lewiston who may have hired a proxy arsonist. And he can wait until after this lunch for me to return his damn calls.’

My phone binged once as well: a text from Ben, telling me he’d spoken to Norm at the art supply store, and he’d be expecting me at three p.m., but he told me that he needs thirty minutes to mix the paints, and won’t begin mixing them until money has exchanged hands. So you really can’t show up later than three-thirty. I so appreciate this, Mom. Hope your good mood is even better this afternoon.

While Richard headed off to use the washroom I texted back:

Tell Mr Norm I’m a prompt person — especially when it involves my son and his work. Will definitely be there in just under half an hour. (My watch read two-forty.) And yes, my good mood is augmenting by the moment right now. I’ll text when I have the paints. Love — Mom.

As I hit the ‘send’ button Richard was back at the table.

‘Everything OK?’ he asked as I put my phone down. I explained the text from Ben and the fact that I really needed to get to the Fenway within the next fifteen minutes.

‘I’ll put you in a taxi,’ he said.

‘But Fenway Park is just seven or eight minutes away by foot.’

‘Then I’ll go with you.’

‘And have to wait nearly an hour while this guy does his prestidigitation thing with his paints? You jump the T to the airport, my love, get our bags. I’ll get my son his magic acrylics, then meet you back at the hotel by five at the latest, and promise to drag you back to bed.’

‘That sounds like a plan,’ he said, all smiles.

A few minutes later we were standing in front of the T-station at the intersection of Newbury Street and Mass Ave. I put my arms around Richard’s neck.

‘Now the idea of letting you go for two hours is not the most pleasing of prospects,’ I said.

‘Then let me come to the paint store.’

‘The faster you get to the airport and get back with our bags the faster we can be making love again.’

We began to kiss. A long, intense kiss.

‘I don’t want to let you go,’ he eventually whispered.

‘Two hours tops and we’re back in each other’s arms.’

‘Hurry back to me.’

‘I will.’

We kissed again.

‘How did we get so lucky?’ he asked.

‘We just did. And do you know what? We deserve it.’

One final long kiss, then I gently disentangled myself from his arms.

‘I really want to get there in ten minutes. If the guy is as finicky as Ben makes him out to be. ’

‘OK then,’ Richard said. ‘Two hours. I love you.’

‘I love you.’

He headed down the stairs of the T-station, turning back to blow me a kiss. For a moment — pulling up the collar of his brown leather Air Force jacket — he looked like a throwback to another era, and had suddenly lost around three and a half decades. He was a twenty-year-old, looking back with poignant wistfulness in his eyes at the woman he loved, as he was about to be shipped out somewhere potentially jeopardous. Then, with a sad smile, he was gone.

I headed out in the direction of Fenway Park, the sun beginning its afternoon slump towards the dark, but still bathing the street in a copper glow. The fall. A season whose peerless beauty — especially in New England — usually provoked a certain melancholy in me. Because after the kaleidoscopic crimson-and-gold hued wonders of the season, darkness then falls. With it the descent into the brumous shadow of winter, and the end of another year. Yet another twelve becalmed months behind me.

And then.

Just two days ago.

This entire extraordinary business underscored something I had not considered before: if allowed, life can also sidestep all its attendant mundanities and demonstrate its capacity to astonish; to remind you that you still have a capacity for the passionate. The thing is, you have to permit yourself to embrace such potential wonderment. If you have submerged your ability to marvel — to forget that you are truly worthy of love, and the benevolence it brings to you amidst all the middling concerns that crowd all our existences — fall after fall arrives with a metronomic regularity. You live a life of silent, ever-increasing longing for a bedazzlement that always seems tantalizingly close, yet so acutely out of reach.

I headed up the Fenway, leaving behind Newbury Street’s atmosphere of elegant consumerism and moving into something a little more gritty, a lot less connected with shopping as a leisure activity. Norm’s Art House was a nondescript shop on a nondescript corner of the Fenway. It was a small storefront, with one display window (in need of a cleaning), within which was a haphazard presentation of brushes, easels, tubes of paint. There was also a sign, in oversized stenciled letters, reading: ‘WE DO ART ’.

This no-nonsense approach continued inside the shop. It was a cramped space, brimming with oils and acrylics and watercolors and every conceivable size of brush, and rolls of canvas waiting to be stretched, and wooden slats for frames.

‘So you must be Benjamin the Brilliant’s mother.’

The voice came from behind a series of overstocked, rather rusted metal shelves behind the sales counter.

‘Are you Norm?’

‘So he’s briefed you. And you’re here for the Tetron Azure Blue — the most lazuline of all modern blues.’

‘Lazuline,’ I said, trying the word out. ‘Not bad,’ I finally said.

‘You have a better synonym, perhaps?’

‘Cerulean?’

Silence. Then Norm emerged from the shadows of his shop’s corroded shelves.

‘Well, I’m impressed. And as it turns out, you’re also beautiful.’

I tried hard not to blush. I failed. Norm was not what I expected. From his name to the way Ben hinted that he was crotchety, I had expected someone out of a Saul Bellow novel: an old-world merchant, avuncular, fussy, but with a knowledge of paints and artists that was as encyclopedic as it was passionate. But the real Norm was a tall stringbean of a man, around my age, with oversized, very hip black glasses and an equally hip goatee. You could easily imagine him lecturing on Abstract Expressionism at one of the colleges nearby — and being regarded by his students as benchmark cool.

‘And you are the Norm?’ I asked.

‘I am indeed “the Norm”. But not, I hope, the norm. ’

A small smile crossed his thin lips. Oh God, he’s flirting with me. Three days ago I would have been flattered. Today.

‘I’m afraid I don’t have much time,’ I said, ‘and I know you close at four.’

‘And Benjamin the Brilliant probably told you that I only mix paint when paid.’

‘Why do you call my son that?’

‘You mean, Benjamin the Brilliant?’

‘Yes, that.’

‘Because he is that — brilliant.’

‘Really?’

‘Did my tone suggest irony?’

‘Well, actually, it did.’

‘A bad habit of mine, as my ex-wife never stopped telling me.’