Andrea Barrett - The Middle Kingdom

He was chanting his words, almost singing, and as he did he danced around the canvas, dipping his brushes in blue and green paint and flicking them at the taut surface. Green and blue fire, green plants in a blue sea, green teeth in a deep blue mouth.

‘Paint,’ he commanded.

I laid down a base of light green and started a pattern of blue boxes over it, precise and geometric and repetitive, pretty in the worst sense. The pattern resembled expensive drapery material; it was horrible, but I couldn’t help it. I tried to paint with my ass canted away from Randy, so he couldn’t see where those doughnuts had landed. I tried to keep one arm across my stomach. I needn’t have bothered; Randy wasn’t looking at me. For every stroke of green paint he laid on the canvas he laid one on his body, so that he was green almost everywhere when we were done. His half of the canvas radiated weirdness, green and blue and blue and green and blue, and he looked like the stem of some strange flower. I feared that he might hack off an ear at any moment.

But he was strangely calm. ‘There,’ he said, pointing at the finished painting with a brush. His face was green; green paint matted his chest hairs and pooled in his navel. ‘Look at that.’ The painting was wildly schizophrenic, my obsessive, overlapping boxes crowning his flares. ‘That’s us, Grace,’ he said. ‘You and me. How did we get this way?’

I stood staring at him, open-mouthed, and he leaned forward and drew green circles around my breasts. ‘I used to want to draw you,’ he said bitterly.

One of the Swedenborgian accountants took me in. His wife made up a bed for me in their spare room; his children, blond as dolls, were unfailingly kind. I stayed with them for four weeks, while I got myself a lawyer and started divorce proceedings and decided what I wanted to do, which was to go back to Massachusetts and finish school. I called the university admissions office and wheedled my way back in; I filled out forms and applied for loans. I worked overtime at the accountants’ and tried to save some cash, and I didn’t go back to my apartment until the day I was ready to leave the city for good.

I went in the heat of the day, hoping Randy might be asleep, but he was wide awake. The apartment was littered with paintings and he was working on a new one, the stereo still blaring and him still not wearing any clothes. He was drunk that morning, not because he’d started drinking early but because for him it was still night. How long had he been awake? A week? A month? How long since he had eaten anything? All the paintings were blue and green.

‘You’re back,’ he said, when I walked in. ‘I knew you’d come back.’

‘I’m leaving,’ I said. ‘Going back home. I just came to pick up some things.’

‘Coward,’ he said, jabbing his brush at the canvas. ‘Drone.’

He kept painting as I carried armfuls of clothes and books down the stairs. When he saw that I was almost done, he wrapped a towel around his waist and followed me to the sidewalk, lugging the painting we’d made together.

‘Take it,’ he said, ignoring the fat women in house-dresses who pushed their chain forward on their porches for a better look at us. ‘You ruined it. I don’t want to see it.’

‘You take it,’ I said. ‘It was your idea.’

He tried to shove the painting into the front seat. The frame on which he’d stretched the canvas was bigger than the tiny car door; anyone could have seen that the painting would never fit. I got into the driver’s seat and started the engine, but Randy kept pushing at the painting.

‘Take it!’ he screamed.

He drew back and aimed a kick at the bottom, shattering the stretcher frame. I pushed the broken painting out of the car, pulled the door shut, and drove away.

A White Picket Fence

When I came back to Massachusetts in the early summer of 1979 — hurt, discouraged, looking only for a haven — what I noticed first was the white picket fence framing the green yard that sloped around the nicest house on the village square of Sunderland.

The fence had a sign on it that said ‘Room for Rent,’ and a room was what I needed. A place to lick my wounds, look over what had happened. Figure out what I’d done wrong. Outside the fence was the town’s main street and a leafy square marked by a pink gazebo and a granite statue of a soldier; inside was that white house shaded by old trees, stately and calm. I looked at that house and thought it was just what I wanted, just where I needed to live. Square. Solid. Respectable. I lifted my eyes to the second floor, admiring the shutters, and a woman threw open a window just then and started shouting and tossing things into the air.

Red, green, black, pink, lilac, aqua, lemon. Soft bits of fabric — stockings, leotards, skirts, and scarves — spun and drifted and fell silently to the ground. Soft-colored dancing shoes with elastic straps across the insteps. ‘You shit !’ the woman screamed. For a second I thought she was screaming at me. ‘Stand there like that — why don’t you say something?’ She threw more shoes, more delicate clothes. They rained down on the man below her, who was standing so still that I’d almost missed him.

‘Eileen,’ the man said quietly. ‘Do you have to make a scene?’

I stood just outside the fence, leaning on the black Volkswagen in which I’d fled Philadelphia. As I watched, the woman tossed out a white fur jacket, a long red dress, an emerald hat with a wide brim. A flashy dresser; perhaps a dancer from the look of all those slippers. She postured at the window as if aware I was watching her.

‘Asshole!’ she shouted at the man below her, who had his back to me. ‘Prick! Stupid, self-absorbed piece of stone! ’ She threw out an armful of silky underclothes and slammed the window shut.

I was close enough to hear the man sigh. He was very tall, thin but slack around the middle, and he stood in the drift of bright discarded clothes like a tree by the riverside. He was close enough for me to see the pale skin of his back where his shirt had untucked itself. I walked a few steps closer to him and rapped my knuckles on the fence.

‘Excuse me,’ I said, as softly as I could.

He whirled to face me. ‘Who are you?’ he said. His high forehead was creased with unhappiness. ‘What are you doing here?’

I knew it was a bad time, but I couldn’t afford to wait. ‘Your sign?’ I said. ‘You have a room for rent?’

He straightened himself and walked over to me, an aqua slipper in his hand. I rested my hands on one of the fence posts. He held onto two of the slats. Him inside, me outside, the fence between us; the sun burning on our shoulders. The day was very warm. ‘Who are you?’ he said.

‘Grace Martone,’ I told him, sticking my hand over the fence. Quickly I corrected myself. ‘Grace Doerring.’

He ignored my hand. ‘Which is it?’

‘Doerring. Grace Doerring. I just got divorced.’ Of course I wasn’t, yet, but I’d filed the papers before I left Philadelphia and so that felt true enough.

He shook his head. ‘You’re still so young. My wife …’ He turned toward the house, but the woman at the window was gone.

‘That was your wife?’ I asked.

‘That was,’ he said. ‘Is, was … hell.’ He stuck his hand over the fence toward me. ‘Walter Hoffmeier,’ he announced. ‘I suppose you want to look at the room?’

I wasn’t so sure anymore; I didn’t think I wanted to share a house with this man’s wife. ‘I’ll come back,’ I said. ‘Maybe in an hour or two, when things have calmed down — I’m sorry, I wouldn’t ask at all, but I really have to find a place to live today.’

He shook his head, his eyes fixed on the statue in the square. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. His voice was quiet, abstracted or resigned, I couldn’t tell which. He unlocked the gate and held it open for me, his manners as formal as a butler’s.