A Way With Words - Chapter 42b
Note: In chapter 13 (third-person narrative), Ennis visited the Fell home for the second time. If you want to reread it, it's HERE. Since I wrote that chapter, I've changed Jay's mother's first name to Rachel.
October-November 1985
"What are you doing for Thanksgiving?"
"Uh, going to Philadelphia?"
"So you didn't forget."
"My chance to observe your folks in their own environment, right?"
Silence.
"I want to see your mom's paintings. And your dad's study."
"How's your work going?"
"Not as good as yours."
"That tiny house I had last year is available again. I'm thinking of renting it."
"That was a nice little place."
"Best for one person."
"You and Ralph getting on each other's nerves now?"
"That's about it."
Gloria had upended a lot of things - homes and trees, Jay and me.
Our rental house on the Cape was badly damaged during the storm, so I stayed in Boston and Jay crashed with a co-worker. She took a series of dramatic photos during the height of the hurricane - which had been downgraded to a tropical storm by the time it reached Cape Cod - that were picked up by the wire services and for which she won a photojournalism award several months later. By the time I went down to survey the damage, I'd been offered a job working for a sign company. It didn't pay much, but clam bake season was over and I didn't know what employment I'd find on the Cape off-season. I could still go down to visit Jay, like before. I vowed to myself that I wouldn't let our relationship slide away the way it had the previous winter. But I was also motivated by jealousy, or so I thought.
I went down in early October to move my stuff out of the flooded house. The landlord had to make repairs and didn't know when it would be habitable again. That's when I found out Jay was staying with the editor who'd hosted the July Fourth clam bake.
I told her about the job offer in Boston. She didn't try to dissuade me from taking it.
"How long… are you going to stay… at Ralph's place?" I demanded as we struggled, panting, to haul a rolled up, waterlogged carpet through the front door.
"It's Rafe," she snapped. "I don't know. There's been so much flood damage. Lots of renters are in my situation. And he has plenty of room."
"I'll come down every weekend. It won't be like last winter." I winced at the note of begging in my voice.
"Sure."
I didn't end up visiting Jay every single weekend. Her shift changed in late October and her days off were in the middle of the week. I called her most nights, then she got moved to the 4 to 11pm slot. I kept trying to maintain the connection, and felt my anxiety increase as she remained elusive and evasive about her living situation. Now I recognize that sharing Jay with another man wasn’t what I feared. I was afraid of losing altogether the only woman I'd found with whom I could imagine building the kind of life I was not only expected to have, but wanted.
But just as I was working myself into a panic, Jay called me in the middle of November and invited me to come with her to her parents' house for Thanksgiving. She'd alluded to this visit during the trip to Kansas and during all this time apart that holiday had been a mental landmark for me, like watching a puffy cloud in the distance, knowing that if I just kept going, eventually I would drive underneath it. I was surprised that she was surprised I'd remembered. And to my relief, she mentioned she was moving out of the editor's house and back into the little shack she'd rented when she first moved down there.
I didn't know what had gone on between Jay and Ralph-pronounced-Rafe but if she was ready, even eager, to move out then it had been brief and, I hoped, unsatisfying.
We took the train from Boston to Philadelphia instead of driving, because once we were there we wouldn't need a car and the roads were crowded the day before Thanksgiving. Jay didn't say much, just stared pensively out the window. I sat reading a book, but glanced often at her reflection in the window. The way her eyes moved, I knew she was both lost in thought and taking in everything.
Jay's parents still lived in the house she'd grown up in just outside the city, less than a mile from a small college founded by Quakers, Haverford, where both of them worked, her father as a professor of classical Greek literature and Mrs Fell as a student counselor. The house was a short walk from the train stop; it looked small from the street, because the front door was at the gable end. As we walked up the steps to the porch, the door opened.
At 22, I couldn't guess the age of anyone over thirty (and it didn't even occur to me that they might care whether I could) so I simply thought of Rachel Fell as middle-aged. Now that I'm closing in on 50 myself, I realize how youthful she looked at 52, without a strand of gray in her straight, black, shoulder-length hair. Since I was oblivious to fashion, her loose black trousers, gray tunic and long black cardigan with mother-of-pearl buttons only struck me as practical. It had been several years since I'd had to think about my own clothes matching when I dressed in the morning. I remembered her from the BU graduation visit as a reserved woman with high cheekbones and a gaze that managed to be both piercing and kind, and I was very curious to observe Jay with her - I wanted to see for myself both sides of their difficult relationship.
She greeted us with a smile, a kiss on the cheek for her daughter and a firm handclasp for me. She began to ask us about our journey, but just then Jason Fell erupted from another room. Sometimes you can look at a friend's mother and father and think they resemble one another, but it's really because you see a little bit of your friend's face in each of theirs. That wasn't the case with Jay's parents. From her mother Jay got her dark hair and blue eyes, and her penchant for sober colors. But from his unruly salt and pepper hair, mischievous brown eyes and his enthusiasm as he bounded toward us, I understood immediately that underneath, Jay was more like her father. I blinked at his wild, multicolored pullover, which looked like it might have been knitted by one of the abstract expressionists I'd studied at BU.
He looked at me intently through his wire rim glasses as he pumped my arm, but I couldn't meet his eyes for long - the shirt was too distracting.
"Is that Kandinsky?" I blurted out as I stared at his chest.
Jay laughed. "No, but his shoes are Mondrian."
Mr. Fell stuck his right foot out, heel down and toes pointing up, displaying his sneaker, which was decorated with the distinctive primary colors divided by black bars for which the Dutch painter was mainly known. "Robin bought them for me for my fiftieth birthday," he said proudly. "I save them for special occasions.”
I glanced at Mrs. Fell, standing straight and slim as a reed and smiling fondly at her husband. Yes, Jay's parents were an odd pair.
When we walked into the living room, it felt familiar for a reason I couldn't immediately pinpoint. It's not accurate to say the walls were white. Jay later explained to me that her mother had rag-rolled them using four different shades of white, plus a touch of lavender and pale gray, and that they were oil-based so they had a slight sheen. The effect was almost iridescent.
The fireplace mantel was ash gray, there was no carpet on the varnished maple hardwood floors. The wooden furnishings were spare and painted either white or cream. The one exception was the large couch upholstered in leather the color of eggplant. The windows had no curtains but pale blue-gray slatted blinds.
Pictures on the walls provided the only bit of color, and when I first glanced at them I thought they were photographs. But in fact they were hyper-realist oil paintings depicting interiors of other homes. Unlike this one, those rooms actually looked very lived-in. One was a cluttered sitting room with dolls on the floor in front of the television, a ball of yarn on the seat of an armchair, a beer bottle on the cheap coffee table, and a basket full of laundry in the corner. Two of the paintings showed a Thanksgiving dinner laid out on a dining room table, one in a home with modern suburban decor, another in a tidy but old-fashioned dining room. There were no people in them. In the corner of each painting were the initials RF.
"Yes, those are Mom's," Jay said when she saw me looking at them. "They look like photos, don't they? But she completely made up the scenes. Well, sort of."
"They were for movie sets," Rachel Fell explained. "A friend who is a director asked me to do them. I read the script, and from that I decided what the houses the characters lived in would look like. Then I painted what I saw in my mind." She stepped up to the painting of the messy living room and smiled at it as though it were a cherished grandchild that she didn't have to live with.
"I didn't know they worked that way," I said.
"Most of them don't. The film was a special case."
"What was it called?"
"You wouldn't have heard of it," she answered. "Now, what would you like to drink, Ennis?"
That night we both slept on the double fold-out couch in Mrs. Fell's painting studio. Jay still had a room in the attic but it had only a single bed. At my family's house, we'd slept in the bunk beds in my old room, with my parents maintaining the illusion that we would remain chastely apart even though they knew we lived together. Jay's mother had left her couch opened out and made up with sheets and blankets. Pinned to the wall were pages torn from furniture catalogs and home-decorating magazines. Jay explained that other commissions had followed after the series in the living room. She joked that her mother had a gift for designing rooms for people who didn't exist in reality and never would.
I asked to see Jay's room, so she led me upstairs.
"I see you didn't let your mother up here," I deadpanned. The shag rug was orange and the purple walls were covered with of posters of 70s movie stars and black and white pictures torn from magazines. It was hard to believe that this room and the sitting room on the first floor were in the same house. Then something occurred to me.
"The living room… it's like the inside of an oyster shell," I said. When Jay gave me a puzzled look, I reminded her that I'd spent hours prying open and laying out raw oysters as hors d'oeuvres for high-end clam bakes. "Remember how I used to dream about clam bakes? In one dream I was an oyster myself, lying inside my shell with the top halfway open. It was so cool and peaceful. It looked a lot like that living room. That couch is even like the purple spot in the shell where the foot's attached."
She stared hard at me for a moment. "I have to show you something," she said and headed back down the stairs. I followed her into the studio where she pulled a large volume from the bookcase, the paintings of Piet Mondrian. A yellow Post-it note was sticking up from the pages and she opened the book to it. On that page was a painting from the artist's earlier, pre-abstract period that most people aren't familiar with. A man is standing in a wooden boat in a canal, hauling on a rope. The tones are cool and muted, except for the water, which reflects the sky. The title is Going Fishing.
"My sophomore year at BU, I gave Dad this book for Christmas. Soon after that, my mother had a dream about this painting, about being the man on that boat. She said all the colors were just the same, and that it was really peaceful. She got it into her head to redecorate the living room like that." Jay ran her finger over the picture. "The colors aren't the same, though. But she insists it has the same feel…" She gave me a wry smile. "Maybe she knew you were coming."
Jay and I spent most of the next morning with her mother in the kitchen, which looked like one an actual cook would design rather than an artist. Eventually we reached a point in the meal preparations where only two sets of hands were needed, and I sensed as well that one pair of ears would be made more welcome elsewhere. Mrs. Fell poured two glasses of cranberry juice, placed them in my hands and told me I'd find her husband hiding out in his study, though she didn't indicate where that was.
I wandered away to look for him. Off the living room was another room and I paused in the doorway. Jay had described her father’s study to me in such detail that I recognized it immediately. It wasn't the type of office I would have imagined for a professor of classical Greek literature, and it most definitely was not a room that Jay's mother had had a hand in decorating. On every flat surface were leaning towers of books and papers. Every inch of the wall was covered with posters of jazz musicians and prints of abstract art from the fifties. I made a mental calculation and realized Jay's father had been my age back then. Something told me that it had been his decade, the one that had formed him, and most important things in his life harked back to it. A quick glance in the bookshelf near the door revealed rows of books of poetry and novels by names I recognized from my American literature course: Ginsburg, Snyder, Ferlinghetti, Kerouac. How had he gone from Beat poetry and jazz to teaching Plato? All at once I felt sorry for him; I had the feeling that he'd wound up with a life very different from that of his youthful dreams. At that moment I didn't mind so much that I was directionless.
He wasn’t in there, though music was coming softly from the stereo speakers in the far corner. I didn't care much for jazz, but I did kind of like what was playing, especially the man's voice, which sounded lazy and laid back. Ironically, the chorus of the song he was singing was "I live the life I love and I love the life I live."
I was about to turn away when I spotted Mr. Fell. He was lounging in an orange canvas chair, his hands close to his face fiddling intently with a Rubik's cube. His clothes were the same ones he’d been wearing the day before, including the Mondrian shoes, and since the room was a riot of color he blended right in.
"Did Jay give you that, too?" I asked. I wondered if I should make some remark about the difference between this room and the living room and decided not to state the obvious.
"Who?" He looked up at me, startled.
"I mean, Robin. Was that a birthday present?"
"You called her Jay."
I moved into the room and handed him a glass of juice, then looked around for a place to sit. He pointed at a folding chair a few feet away. "Just move that stuff somewhere."
"It's my nickname for her. Nobody else uses it," I said hastily.
I shifted the stack of books to the floor and sat down. We each drank some of the ruby red juice, and made the same face.
"I don't really like cranberries, either," he laughed, and set his glass down on the floor. "But why 'Jay'?" he persisted.
I recounted how we'd met, and described the pattern and colors of the swimsuit she'd been wearing at the time. He nodded thoughtfully while I talked and continued to twist the cube. I wondered if he’d ever managed to get all the colors lined up.
"Well, you certainly have a way with words," he said when I'd finished. "I was impressed with your Scrabble game last night, by the way."
"But I lost badly," I pointed out. We'd played a couple rounds of the game after dinner and Jay's parents had expressed great surprise when I told them I had no Scrabble experience, as though it was a requisite for a college degree.
"You came up with some long, obscure words but didn't pay attention to the points, that's all."
Jay's mother had been skilled at creating two or even three words at once with one or two tiles, and I'd helped her by stringing six letter words across the board while failing to cover any double or triple letter squares. Jay hadn't played with us, using the time to call old friends. But I didn't believe she had the patience for the game.
"I understand you found work again in Boston after your summer job was done," Mr. Fell said. It occurred to me that Jay's parents had probably always assumed my move to the Cape was temporary.
"Yeah, with... an advertising agency."
"Really? What are you doing?"
I hesitated, debating whether to lie outright or stretch the truth. If I did the former, he would eventually find out from Jay what I really did there.
"I coordinate the open air publicity."
"Open air?"
"Like, signs on buildings, buses…"
"So this is an outdoor advertising agency."
"Yes."
"The ones that put up billboards?"
"Um, yeah."
"Well, that would be a natural for you, since you seem to like to work outdoors."
"I… well, I don't really think I'm an office type." I looked around at the clutter surrounding us and when I met his eyes again, he smiled kindly.
"If you were, I suspect your office would be neater than this".
"Probably. But not by much."
We were joined for Thanksgiving dinner by four Haverford students who were from far away states and couldn't afford the time or the plane fares to travel home for just a few days. One of the female students was living in the two-bedroom apartment at the rear of the house that the Fells rented out. At one point, the conversation among the students, who all lived off campus, turned to the difficulty of finding both a decent apartment and a decent landlord.
"We've mainly had girls in that apartment," Mr Fell remarked. "When Robin was little we had babysitters right on site. It was very handy."
"Glad I wasn't here in the 70s," their tenant said, grinning at Jay.
"Yeah, you’re lucky. I wasn't an easy baby to sit," Jay replied. She turned to her father. "You did have a couple of guys back there one year. How come?"
"When you turned fourteen we figured we could leave you on your own when we went out," he said.
"And of course by then it was sexist to assume female students were all potential babysitters," Mrs Fell added.
"You know, I used to sneak over there to see them. I'd watch Saturday Night Live at their place," Jay said, grinning.
"We knew," her father smiled. "We could hear the TV through the wall and you laughing."
"Why, I'm shocked that you let your teenage daughter go visit two handsome young guys in their apartment at midnight!" Jay said teasingly.
"We weren't worried. Ethan and Jeff were gay," Mrs Fell said. "Surely you knew. Carolyn, more mashed potatoes?"
I looked across at Jay. She stared fixedly at her plate as she cut her meat, her mouth a thin line. A deep flush was rising up her neck to her ears and her cheeks. Her knife clattered on the plate; she picked up her wine glass and gulped from it, meeting no one's eyes.
"Yeah, she told me about them," I said. "Said she had a fabulous time watching Patti Smith the first time she went over there." I went on to tell the story of our drive back from Kansas two months earlier, and how Jay stood up through the sun roof and we sang along to Gloria as we sped along the highway.
When I'd finished, Jay's eyes were still on her food, but I caught her expression of gratitude when she glanced up at me. She looked down again and said quietly, "Have you heard anything from them since that year?"
I happened to look at Mrs. Fell at that moment and saw the stricken glances she and her husband exchanged. My gut understood before my brain what they meant. My hand lowered my heavy fork to the table.
"I ran into Ethan downtown a few months ago. He's teaching at Temple University," Mr. Fell said. I heard pain in the pause, though his tone was neutral. "He and Jeff are no longer together."
I saw his gaze flick to me and then to his wife and then his daughter and a dozen other places around the room. Silence settled on the table, broken only by the clink and scrape of cutlery.
That night in bed, after the Scrabble games and the TV movie and the turkey sandwiches, as I reached across Jay to switch off the lamp, I noticed her eyes were glistening as she stared at the ceiling. I brushed my finger along her cheek.
"Listen, you don't know for sure that-"
"She always does that!" she exclaimed bitterly.
"What?"
"She can make me feel like an idiot with just three words!" She dashed away a tear with her thumb.
Mrs. Fell had been disappointed when she took up photography, Jay had once told me. Her mother was a talented draftswoman and Jay was convinced her mother believed her daughter had became a photographer because she was no good at drawing. I couldn't imagine Jay remaining still for the hours it would take to render a scene as realistically as Rachel Fell, and said so. That had made her laugh. Now I wondered if my role in Jay’s life was to counterbalance her mother. I felt a little flash of competitiveness. Could I make her feel better with fewer than three words? Twirling one of Jay’s curls around my finger, I let my thoughts swirl.
Jay sniffed. I plucked a sheet of tissue from the Kleenex box on the shelf behind us and handed it to her. She blew her nose and said something I didn't catch.
"What?"
"Sometimes I think that I just generally irritate her."
That seemed to me too harsh an assessment of her mother's attitude. I mentally wandered through the house, so different from the one I grew up in. After the accident, nothing I did had seemed to make much of an impression on my own parents, aside from a foot rub or two. It might have done me some good to be an irritant.
I smiled down at Jay, then kissed her forehead. "That's how you became what you are."
She looked at me quizzically. "What's that?"
"A pearl."
chapter 43 >>
The musician Mr. Fell was listening to:
The song playing as Ennis stood in the doorway of Mr. Fell's study: http://youtu.be/G55YlSkSScQ
The chair Mr. Fell was sitting in and the shoes he was wearing:
The Mondrian painting that inspired Mrs. Fell to redecorate the living room:
>>
October-November 1985
"What are you doing for Thanksgiving?"
"Uh, going to Philadelphia?"
"So you didn't forget."
"My chance to observe your folks in their own environment, right?"
Silence.
"I want to see your mom's paintings. And your dad's study."
"How's your work going?"
"Not as good as yours."
"That tiny house I had last year is available again. I'm thinking of renting it."
"That was a nice little place."
"Best for one person."
"You and Ralph getting on each other's nerves now?"
"That's about it."
Gloria had upended a lot of things - homes and trees, Jay and me.
Our rental house on the Cape was badly damaged during the storm, so I stayed in Boston and Jay crashed with a co-worker. She took a series of dramatic photos during the height of the hurricane - which had been downgraded to a tropical storm by the time it reached Cape Cod - that were picked up by the wire services and for which she won a photojournalism award several months later. By the time I went down to survey the damage, I'd been offered a job working for a sign company. It didn't pay much, but clam bake season was over and I didn't know what employment I'd find on the Cape off-season. I could still go down to visit Jay, like before. I vowed to myself that I wouldn't let our relationship slide away the way it had the previous winter. But I was also motivated by jealousy, or so I thought.
I went down in early October to move my stuff out of the flooded house. The landlord had to make repairs and didn't know when it would be habitable again. That's when I found out Jay was staying with the editor who'd hosted the July Fourth clam bake.
I told her about the job offer in Boston. She didn't try to dissuade me from taking it.
"How long… are you going to stay… at Ralph's place?" I demanded as we struggled, panting, to haul a rolled up, waterlogged carpet through the front door.
"It's Rafe," she snapped. "I don't know. There's been so much flood damage. Lots of renters are in my situation. And he has plenty of room."
"I'll come down every weekend. It won't be like last winter." I winced at the note of begging in my voice.
"Sure."
I didn't end up visiting Jay every single weekend. Her shift changed in late October and her days off were in the middle of the week. I called her most nights, then she got moved to the 4 to 11pm slot. I kept trying to maintain the connection, and felt my anxiety increase as she remained elusive and evasive about her living situation. Now I recognize that sharing Jay with another man wasn’t what I feared. I was afraid of losing altogether the only woman I'd found with whom I could imagine building the kind of life I was not only expected to have, but wanted.
But just as I was working myself into a panic, Jay called me in the middle of November and invited me to come with her to her parents' house for Thanksgiving. She'd alluded to this visit during the trip to Kansas and during all this time apart that holiday had been a mental landmark for me, like watching a puffy cloud in the distance, knowing that if I just kept going, eventually I would drive underneath it. I was surprised that she was surprised I'd remembered. And to my relief, she mentioned she was moving out of the editor's house and back into the little shack she'd rented when she first moved down there.
I didn't know what had gone on between Jay and Ralph-pronounced-Rafe but if she was ready, even eager, to move out then it had been brief and, I hoped, unsatisfying.
We took the train from Boston to Philadelphia instead of driving, because once we were there we wouldn't need a car and the roads were crowded the day before Thanksgiving. Jay didn't say much, just stared pensively out the window. I sat reading a book, but glanced often at her reflection in the window. The way her eyes moved, I knew she was both lost in thought and taking in everything.
Jay's parents still lived in the house she'd grown up in just outside the city, less than a mile from a small college founded by Quakers, Haverford, where both of them worked, her father as a professor of classical Greek literature and Mrs Fell as a student counselor. The house was a short walk from the train stop; it looked small from the street, because the front door was at the gable end. As we walked up the steps to the porch, the door opened.
At 22, I couldn't guess the age of anyone over thirty (and it didn't even occur to me that they might care whether I could) so I simply thought of Rachel Fell as middle-aged. Now that I'm closing in on 50 myself, I realize how youthful she looked at 52, without a strand of gray in her straight, black, shoulder-length hair. Since I was oblivious to fashion, her loose black trousers, gray tunic and long black cardigan with mother-of-pearl buttons only struck me as practical. It had been several years since I'd had to think about my own clothes matching when I dressed in the morning. I remembered her from the BU graduation visit as a reserved woman with high cheekbones and a gaze that managed to be both piercing and kind, and I was very curious to observe Jay with her - I wanted to see for myself both sides of their difficult relationship.
She greeted us with a smile, a kiss on the cheek for her daughter and a firm handclasp for me. She began to ask us about our journey, but just then Jason Fell erupted from another room. Sometimes you can look at a friend's mother and father and think they resemble one another, but it's really because you see a little bit of your friend's face in each of theirs. That wasn't the case with Jay's parents. From her mother Jay got her dark hair and blue eyes, and her penchant for sober colors. But from his unruly salt and pepper hair, mischievous brown eyes and his enthusiasm as he bounded toward us, I understood immediately that underneath, Jay was more like her father. I blinked at his wild, multicolored pullover, which looked like it might have been knitted by one of the abstract expressionists I'd studied at BU.
He looked at me intently through his wire rim glasses as he pumped my arm, but I couldn't meet his eyes for long - the shirt was too distracting.
"Is that Kandinsky?" I blurted out as I stared at his chest.
Jay laughed. "No, but his shoes are Mondrian."
Mr. Fell stuck his right foot out, heel down and toes pointing up, displaying his sneaker, which was decorated with the distinctive primary colors divided by black bars for which the Dutch painter was mainly known. "Robin bought them for me for my fiftieth birthday," he said proudly. "I save them for special occasions.”
I glanced at Mrs. Fell, standing straight and slim as a reed and smiling fondly at her husband. Yes, Jay's parents were an odd pair.
When we walked into the living room, it felt familiar for a reason I couldn't immediately pinpoint. It's not accurate to say the walls were white. Jay later explained to me that her mother had rag-rolled them using four different shades of white, plus a touch of lavender and pale gray, and that they were oil-based so they had a slight sheen. The effect was almost iridescent.
The fireplace mantel was ash gray, there was no carpet on the varnished maple hardwood floors. The wooden furnishings were spare and painted either white or cream. The one exception was the large couch upholstered in leather the color of eggplant. The windows had no curtains but pale blue-gray slatted blinds.
Pictures on the walls provided the only bit of color, and when I first glanced at them I thought they were photographs. But in fact they were hyper-realist oil paintings depicting interiors of other homes. Unlike this one, those rooms actually looked very lived-in. One was a cluttered sitting room with dolls on the floor in front of the television, a ball of yarn on the seat of an armchair, a beer bottle on the cheap coffee table, and a basket full of laundry in the corner. Two of the paintings showed a Thanksgiving dinner laid out on a dining room table, one in a home with modern suburban decor, another in a tidy but old-fashioned dining room. There were no people in them. In the corner of each painting were the initials RF.
"Yes, those are Mom's," Jay said when she saw me looking at them. "They look like photos, don't they? But she completely made up the scenes. Well, sort of."
"They were for movie sets," Rachel Fell explained. "A friend who is a director asked me to do them. I read the script, and from that I decided what the houses the characters lived in would look like. Then I painted what I saw in my mind." She stepped up to the painting of the messy living room and smiled at it as though it were a cherished grandchild that she didn't have to live with.
"I didn't know they worked that way," I said.
"Most of them don't. The film was a special case."
"What was it called?"
"You wouldn't have heard of it," she answered. "Now, what would you like to drink, Ennis?"
That night we both slept on the double fold-out couch in Mrs. Fell's painting studio. Jay still had a room in the attic but it had only a single bed. At my family's house, we'd slept in the bunk beds in my old room, with my parents maintaining the illusion that we would remain chastely apart even though they knew we lived together. Jay's mother had left her couch opened out and made up with sheets and blankets. Pinned to the wall were pages torn from furniture catalogs and home-decorating magazines. Jay explained that other commissions had followed after the series in the living room. She joked that her mother had a gift for designing rooms for people who didn't exist in reality and never would.
I asked to see Jay's room, so she led me upstairs.
"I see you didn't let your mother up here," I deadpanned. The shag rug was orange and the purple walls were covered with of posters of 70s movie stars and black and white pictures torn from magazines. It was hard to believe that this room and the sitting room on the first floor were in the same house. Then something occurred to me.
"The living room… it's like the inside of an oyster shell," I said. When Jay gave me a puzzled look, I reminded her that I'd spent hours prying open and laying out raw oysters as hors d'oeuvres for high-end clam bakes. "Remember how I used to dream about clam bakes? In one dream I was an oyster myself, lying inside my shell with the top halfway open. It was so cool and peaceful. It looked a lot like that living room. That couch is even like the purple spot in the shell where the foot's attached."
She stared hard at me for a moment. "I have to show you something," she said and headed back down the stairs. I followed her into the studio where she pulled a large volume from the bookcase, the paintings of Piet Mondrian. A yellow Post-it note was sticking up from the pages and she opened the book to it. On that page was a painting from the artist's earlier, pre-abstract period that most people aren't familiar with. A man is standing in a wooden boat in a canal, hauling on a rope. The tones are cool and muted, except for the water, which reflects the sky. The title is Going Fishing.
"My sophomore year at BU, I gave Dad this book for Christmas. Soon after that, my mother had a dream about this painting, about being the man on that boat. She said all the colors were just the same, and that it was really peaceful. She got it into her head to redecorate the living room like that." Jay ran her finger over the picture. "The colors aren't the same, though. But she insists it has the same feel…" She gave me a wry smile. "Maybe she knew you were coming."
Jay and I spent most of the next morning with her mother in the kitchen, which looked like one an actual cook would design rather than an artist. Eventually we reached a point in the meal preparations where only two sets of hands were needed, and I sensed as well that one pair of ears would be made more welcome elsewhere. Mrs. Fell poured two glasses of cranberry juice, placed them in my hands and told me I'd find her husband hiding out in his study, though she didn't indicate where that was.
I wandered away to look for him. Off the living room was another room and I paused in the doorway. Jay had described her father’s study to me in such detail that I recognized it immediately. It wasn't the type of office I would have imagined for a professor of classical Greek literature, and it most definitely was not a room that Jay's mother had had a hand in decorating. On every flat surface were leaning towers of books and papers. Every inch of the wall was covered with posters of jazz musicians and prints of abstract art from the fifties. I made a mental calculation and realized Jay's father had been my age back then. Something told me that it had been his decade, the one that had formed him, and most important things in his life harked back to it. A quick glance in the bookshelf near the door revealed rows of books of poetry and novels by names I recognized from my American literature course: Ginsburg, Snyder, Ferlinghetti, Kerouac. How had he gone from Beat poetry and jazz to teaching Plato? All at once I felt sorry for him; I had the feeling that he'd wound up with a life very different from that of his youthful dreams. At that moment I didn't mind so much that I was directionless.
He wasn’t in there, though music was coming softly from the stereo speakers in the far corner. I didn't care much for jazz, but I did kind of like what was playing, especially the man's voice, which sounded lazy and laid back. Ironically, the chorus of the song he was singing was "I live the life I love and I love the life I live."
I was about to turn away when I spotted Mr. Fell. He was lounging in an orange canvas chair, his hands close to his face fiddling intently with a Rubik's cube. His clothes were the same ones he’d been wearing the day before, including the Mondrian shoes, and since the room was a riot of color he blended right in.
"Did Jay give you that, too?" I asked. I wondered if I should make some remark about the difference between this room and the living room and decided not to state the obvious.
"Who?" He looked up at me, startled.
"I mean, Robin. Was that a birthday present?"
"You called her Jay."
I moved into the room and handed him a glass of juice, then looked around for a place to sit. He pointed at a folding chair a few feet away. "Just move that stuff somewhere."
"It's my nickname for her. Nobody else uses it," I said hastily.
I shifted the stack of books to the floor and sat down. We each drank some of the ruby red juice, and made the same face.
"I don't really like cranberries, either," he laughed, and set his glass down on the floor. "But why 'Jay'?" he persisted.
I recounted how we'd met, and described the pattern and colors of the swimsuit she'd been wearing at the time. He nodded thoughtfully while I talked and continued to twist the cube. I wondered if he’d ever managed to get all the colors lined up.
"Well, you certainly have a way with words," he said when I'd finished. "I was impressed with your Scrabble game last night, by the way."
"But I lost badly," I pointed out. We'd played a couple rounds of the game after dinner and Jay's parents had expressed great surprise when I told them I had no Scrabble experience, as though it was a requisite for a college degree.
"You came up with some long, obscure words but didn't pay attention to the points, that's all."
Jay's mother had been skilled at creating two or even three words at once with one or two tiles, and I'd helped her by stringing six letter words across the board while failing to cover any double or triple letter squares. Jay hadn't played with us, using the time to call old friends. But I didn't believe she had the patience for the game.
"I understand you found work again in Boston after your summer job was done," Mr. Fell said. It occurred to me that Jay's parents had probably always assumed my move to the Cape was temporary.
"Yeah, with... an advertising agency."
"Really? What are you doing?"
I hesitated, debating whether to lie outright or stretch the truth. If I did the former, he would eventually find out from Jay what I really did there.
"I coordinate the open air publicity."
"Open air?"
"Like, signs on buildings, buses…"
"So this is an outdoor advertising agency."
"Yes."
"The ones that put up billboards?"
"Um, yeah."
"Well, that would be a natural for you, since you seem to like to work outdoors."
"I… well, I don't really think I'm an office type." I looked around at the clutter surrounding us and when I met his eyes again, he smiled kindly.
"If you were, I suspect your office would be neater than this".
"Probably. But not by much."
We were joined for Thanksgiving dinner by four Haverford students who were from far away states and couldn't afford the time or the plane fares to travel home for just a few days. One of the female students was living in the two-bedroom apartment at the rear of the house that the Fells rented out. At one point, the conversation among the students, who all lived off campus, turned to the difficulty of finding both a decent apartment and a decent landlord.
"We've mainly had girls in that apartment," Mr Fell remarked. "When Robin was little we had babysitters right on site. It was very handy."
"Glad I wasn't here in the 70s," their tenant said, grinning at Jay.
"Yeah, you’re lucky. I wasn't an easy baby to sit," Jay replied. She turned to her father. "You did have a couple of guys back there one year. How come?"
"When you turned fourteen we figured we could leave you on your own when we went out," he said.
"And of course by then it was sexist to assume female students were all potential babysitters," Mrs Fell added.
"You know, I used to sneak over there to see them. I'd watch Saturday Night Live at their place," Jay said, grinning.
"We knew," her father smiled. "We could hear the TV through the wall and you laughing."
"Why, I'm shocked that you let your teenage daughter go visit two handsome young guys in their apartment at midnight!" Jay said teasingly.
"We weren't worried. Ethan and Jeff were gay," Mrs Fell said. "Surely you knew. Carolyn, more mashed potatoes?"
I looked across at Jay. She stared fixedly at her plate as she cut her meat, her mouth a thin line. A deep flush was rising up her neck to her ears and her cheeks. Her knife clattered on the plate; she picked up her wine glass and gulped from it, meeting no one's eyes.
"Yeah, she told me about them," I said. "Said she had a fabulous time watching Patti Smith the first time she went over there." I went on to tell the story of our drive back from Kansas two months earlier, and how Jay stood up through the sun roof and we sang along to Gloria as we sped along the highway.
When I'd finished, Jay's eyes were still on her food, but I caught her expression of gratitude when she glanced up at me. She looked down again and said quietly, "Have you heard anything from them since that year?"
I happened to look at Mrs. Fell at that moment and saw the stricken glances she and her husband exchanged. My gut understood before my brain what they meant. My hand lowered my heavy fork to the table.
"I ran into Ethan downtown a few months ago. He's teaching at Temple University," Mr. Fell said. I heard pain in the pause, though his tone was neutral. "He and Jeff are no longer together."
I saw his gaze flick to me and then to his wife and then his daughter and a dozen other places around the room. Silence settled on the table, broken only by the clink and scrape of cutlery.
That night in bed, after the Scrabble games and the TV movie and the turkey sandwiches, as I reached across Jay to switch off the lamp, I noticed her eyes were glistening as she stared at the ceiling. I brushed my finger along her cheek.
"Listen, you don't know for sure that-"
"She always does that!" she exclaimed bitterly.
"What?"
"She can make me feel like an idiot with just three words!" She dashed away a tear with her thumb.
Mrs. Fell had been disappointed when she took up photography, Jay had once told me. Her mother was a talented draftswoman and Jay was convinced her mother believed her daughter had became a photographer because she was no good at drawing. I couldn't imagine Jay remaining still for the hours it would take to render a scene as realistically as Rachel Fell, and said so. That had made her laugh. Now I wondered if my role in Jay’s life was to counterbalance her mother. I felt a little flash of competitiveness. Could I make her feel better with fewer than three words? Twirling one of Jay’s curls around my finger, I let my thoughts swirl.
Jay sniffed. I plucked a sheet of tissue from the Kleenex box on the shelf behind us and handed it to her. She blew her nose and said something I didn't catch.
"What?"
"Sometimes I think that I just generally irritate her."
That seemed to me too harsh an assessment of her mother's attitude. I mentally wandered through the house, so different from the one I grew up in. After the accident, nothing I did had seemed to make much of an impression on my own parents, aside from a foot rub or two. It might have done me some good to be an irritant.
I smiled down at Jay, then kissed her forehead. "That's how you became what you are."
She looked at me quizzically. "What's that?"
"A pearl."
chapter 43 >>
The musician Mr. Fell was listening to:
The song playing as Ennis stood in the doorway of Mr. Fell's study: http://youtu.be/G55YlSkSScQ
The chair Mr. Fell was sitting in and the shoes he was wearing:
The Mondrian painting that inspired Mrs. Fell to redecorate the living room:
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