Clare awoke to a tiny clink, a bit of background noise that seemed now oddly out of place. Had it come from the kitchen? Two glasses slipping together in the dish drain? For a long while she lay terrified and still, wondering if it was darkness that was about to consume her or something much worse.
Since childhood Clare had hated the old house. It was her only inheritance, and it had made her cower like this for years with its somber portraits and dark furnishings. With its accumulated sorrow. It was a classic clapboard monstrosity too mired in New England’s bloodless generations; and it had never been fully hers. Now, in the damp early morning emptiness, Clare imagined stepping out of bed and into a spider’s web, then further into some unspeakable horror. So when the clinking noise came to her again, she pushed the man lying next to her and said “Royce.”
“What?” someone said.
“The kitchen.”
“The kitchen?” The man did not sound awake, and she pushed him again.
“I heard something,” Clare told him.
“Okay,” he said. Then again “okay,” as if willing himself to move. Royce swung his feet from beneath the covers and sat on the edge of the bed, rubbing his face with both hands. He stood up and sniffed. Took a deep breath. In underwear and t-shirt, he made an unsteady step or two toward the bedroom door. Clare watched him dissolve in the darkness. And after he was gone, there came no sound at all.
Within a minute she was wondering why he had not turned on the kitchen light. And somewhat later she was wondering why she hadn’t heard a clatter, a shout, a confrontation. Or why he was not back already saying “It’s okay. It was nothing.” Soon enough, though, she had lost any distinction between a minute or an hour. She laid back down and pulled the sheet around her shoulders as tightly as a second skin. When dawn finally arrived, she was still cowering, alone.
Clare forced her bare feet to the floor and felt a bracing shock of cold. It helped her take hold of reality and propel herself toward the kitchen. In the hallway she passed an ancestral portrait that glared at her–a face so flat and white it could have been starched and then pressed with an iron. In the kitchen, though, Clare could find nothing out of place. The dishes were orderly, the tablecloth straight. The lights, the appliances worked. The clock said seven thirty-five. Her mind went unaccountably to the brushes, the stiff tubes of paints, the canvases littering her studio upstairs. The artistic clutter that she had not touched since the miscarriage.
“Royce?” Clare called. He had been urging her to begin painting again. “Royce!”
There was no answer. She looked in the driveway and saw that the red pickup truck was missing. It was a relief in a way. An explanation of sorts. He’d gone out on a call. Royce was the only pediatrician within fifty miles. Probably the only one in the state to drive a pickup truck, and certainly the last to make house calls. But they lived in Quilby now, didn’t they? It was their life. And every woman in two counties was in love with him. Clare had seen it a hundred times: a sick child in rumpled pajamas and a mother’s adoring eyes.
She put on her housecoat and slippers. Found her car keys on the dresser. Then went out to the gray Camry, turning on the heater as soon as she had started the engine. Cold air blew across her legs, gradually warming as she drove into town. The clinic was still dark, and there were no cars parked nearby. The only other moving vehicle was a fat yellow school bus, outward bound.
Clare turned onto Doster Street and from there onto Poultney. The red pickup truck was in the driveway, three doors down on the left, as she had feared. Clare parked across the street and opened the driver’s side window so she could see clearly. Inside the house, she could make out Royce plainly enough, seated at a kitchen table, nothing but a steaming cup between him and the woman. They were talking about ordinary, terrible things.
After some time he looked out and noticed her, saying a word to the woman before he stood up and walked toward the front door. The woman with the tepid, dimensionless face looked at Clare and then picked up the coffee cup and stepped out of view. She was monstrously pregnant. Then Royce was at her car window saying “Clare.”
“We have an arrangement,” was all she said.
“You have to go home,” he said in his doctor’s voice.
“Everyone in town knows that we have an arrangement.”
“I can give you something to make you sleep,” Royce told her. “But you have to go home. You can’t come to my home and sit in the street.”
“Everyone knows,” she insisted. “Don’t think that you can just walk out of someone’s life. That you can just give me something for sleep.” Clare put the car in gear and released the emergency brake, forcing him to step back as she sped away. In the rearview mirror she saw him rubbing his face with both hands, the way he always did.
Back in her own driveway, Clare shut off the car. Closed her own kitchen door against the narrow, colorless world of Quilby. Her slippers were cold and wet. She kicked them off and, instead of returning to the bedroom, climbed the stairs to her studio that, for some in her family, had been a nursery. The only room with good light. Months ago she’d walked out leaving some of the brushes still caked, most of the canvases still scattered about. She thought of setting fire to the house. She thought of driving her car into a bridge abutment.
The gruesome portrait she could make at high speed.
Instead, she took up tubes of raw umber and Vasari Capucine Red. Threw a canvas flat onto the work table and set her hands to work. They had had an arrangement! One that had made the old house tolerable for a time. Now though. Now. She would work wet on wet, with only the barest underlayer. Now she would clean her brush after every stroke so that the flesh would be constantly variable. She would make herself on canvas as terrible as any Lucian Freud in blue and brown and red. Then hang it over one of the crude portraits in the hall where he would see it when he returned.
Clare dipped the first brush into turpenoid. Tapped it on the glass edge of the jar, where it gave a deep, satisfying clink; but the cap of the Capucine Red was stuck, glued almost, with old residue, causing her to twist the tube into a grotesque shape. Yet it was required at this point. For depth. So she had to open it with a hammer, dispersing the vital makings of herself about the room.