Martin Sloane Read online

  Martin Sloane was fifty-four when I started writing to him, fifty-six when we became lovers, now that’s the thing that seems shocking, the raw fact of that. Before then, I had a clear vision, so I thought, of the kind of person I would eventually love. It would be someone a little like me. Like me, but with improvements. Someone more open, someone a little smarter, a little stronger emotionally. But someone who’d fit in back at home, should I have ever wanted to return. After meeting Martin, I went down my list. He seemed more open, but I couldn’t really tell. He was smarter, but emotionally stronger? Did I really want that tested? Did I want to lose that test?

  The problem of what other people would think was more serious (I dreaded the gossip) but in the end it was more easy to deal with. By the time I couldn’t live without Martin, it didn’t matter what anyone thought.

  The first time we met in person his face surprised me. Although he was thirty-five years my senior, his face was smooth, his short mussed hair jet black with only flecks of silver. (I was to have more grey in my hair by the time I turned thirty.) His nose was too big for his face, and his eyes were as dark as his hair. His face made me think of the busts of dead men, the illusion of living eyes made by holes in the stone. So that from one angle, they would seem pitiless, and from another, they’d spring to life.

  He’d just walked off the bus in Annandale, where Bard College was. I was waiting with a car I’d gotten from Rent-a-Duck, a rusted-out VW bug with a pipe for a gearshift and a steel plate over a hole in the floor. He was lugging his artworks in a plain old garbage bag, and I rushed over to him and forced him to put the bag down and let me stack the artworks, so they could be carried, tower-like.

  Just dump them in the back, he said.

  Let me be in charge of them. You’re a guest now.

  If anything breaks, I’ll fix it. We’d gotten to the bug. This is a great little car, he said.

  They were out of Jaguars. I put down the boxes gingerly to unlock the trunk. The lid had to be propped up with a stick. Then he began plunking them in, like they were groceries. He put the last one in and took the stick out, and the lid slammed shut. I’d watched him with paralyzed wonder.

  You can’t treat them like they’re permanent. He went around to the passenger side. They’ll get ideas. He tried to put the seatbelt on, but the business end of it had been melted into a glob in some previous disaster. This is going to be an adventure, he said happily.

  I started down the country road that wound between towns, one side a river, the other a forest.

  Can I work the shift? he asked.

  What do you mean?

  You say shift, I change gears.

  Do you know how to drive?

  No. But when I was just a kid, my dad had a Saloon car and once we drove it from Dublin to Galway and part of the way I sat on his lap and shifted the car. So I have that part down good.

  Did you travel a lot with your family?

  Just that once. So, you tell me when, all right?

  You’re not sitting on my lap.

  I can do it from over here.

  Shift, I said. And so we drove the eight miles back to Bard, me calling the shifts over the labouring engine, and Martin trying to get the gear into the right position, until we were on campus and he jammed it in reverse as I was trying to get him to gear down. I heard something big and metallic drop down and smack the road and the car leap-frogged over it and we both flew out of our seats and hit our heads on the roof. The car came to rest in some grass. We sat there panting as people I knew gathered around.

  Well, this is Martin Sloane, I told them, getting out. He’s going to have a show at the Blithewood. Martin was still sitting in the passenger seat, looking at his palms, dazed.

  My friends helped him out, introduced themselves; some of them knew he was coming, knew how hard I’d worked to get him to town. Then everyone took a box and we all crossed the field to the gallery, the glass fronts catching and reflecting the light at odd angles so the little crowd looked like a broken mirror spreading across the green. Martin glanced back at me and laughed.

  You having fun now? I said.

  You think we’ll see any of those again?

  You obviously don’t care.

  He made an Oliver Hardy face and shrugged, then got in step with me and linked his arm in mine. I like your friends, he said.

  I tightened my arm, my heart whacking against my ribs, and I pulled him against my side. I like you.

  But I crashed your car.

  That you did.

  Bard College was close enough to my hometown of Ovid but far enough away that no one from there could walk to it in half a day. The campus was a pastoral green hidden in the woods. Grassy patches, whitewashed buildings, a chapel in the trees. Towering maples clenched in brilliant vermilion down the main drives. The big athletic field with its unmown edges reeking of springtime through the summer and fall.

  I’d been assigned one of the smaller dorms at the edge of the playing field, more a cabin than a dorm, with an angled rooftop and a jumble of windows, called Obreshkove House. I was on the second floor, with a window pointing out to the forest, where I sometimes saw deer in the gloaming. Molly Hudson was my suitemate; she’d arrived on the first day of school while I was out registering for classes. She liked me, she later explained, on the evidence of my bookshelf, and alphabetized her own books in with mine, a gesture that touched me.

  She was well prepared for college, and determined from the start to run our social lives with ruthless efficiency. I’ve bought us a little fridge, she announced on the day we met, in case we want to have cocktails with the friends we’re going to make. She opened the door to the fridge to reveal four cocktail glasses frosting underneath the ice-element, and beneath them a loaf of bread, a small bottle of mayonnaise, and a single packet of corned beef. For anyone who comes over peckish, she said.

  I stood in the doorway, looking suspiciously on her good sheets and her fabric-wrapped clothes hangers. How old are you, Molly?

  Nineteen, she said. Today. Just squeaked into the class of ’88.

  She had no doubt that she was already the centre of a coterie that didn’t exist yet. Coming from a grief-darkened house (since the death of my mother, almost ten years earlier, my father had remained in a state of evergreen loss), I suddenly realized that a bright room on the edge of a forest was the perfect coming-out for me — a gradual emergence from sadness into a new life, fronted by one of the daughters of Syracuse. Molly was enrolled in a general arts program, but her father — an important attorney in that city — had made her promise to declare law as her major by the end of her sophomore year. They’d shaken on it, a “gentleperson’s agreement,” she put it, and one she was to keep.

  I stood back in a kind of awe as I watched Molly adapt to the rituals of freshman life. She joined clubs, started petitions, put graffiti forward as an important grassroots expression of discontent. (She reversed this position when she entered an ecofeminist phase for three months in second year, declaring that spraypaint was an ejaculatory rape of the environment.) Naturally, she also began blazing sexual trails, ones I couldn’t follow due to an inborn shyness, and a rational bent of mind that was still working over the mechanics of sex. While Molly was mapping sensation, I worried where my eventual caring, expressive, gentle partner would put his knees. A parade of paramours began tramping through our suite as Molly (so I believed) methodically made love to our freshman year in alphabetical order. The sounds of sex — quiet, musical, desperate, or exquisite as they were — became the general music of those rooms. She never seemed to settle on anyone, which I took as a sign of incredible impartiality, but she surprised me late one night with the sound of her weeping. Moments before, I’d heard another of her lovers quietly close the door on his way out. I crept into her room, my housecoat cinched around my waist.

  What did he do?

  He left, she said.

  I went to sit on the end of the bed. The air in her room smelled bearish. They
all leave, I said. I thought you didn’t like them staying over.

  I don’t. She was holding a pillow tightly over her belly. But I want them to come back. And with that, she lowered her face into the pillow and started crying again. I waited, bewildered, unaccustomed as I’d always been to giving comfort. I don’t think I was a cold person then, only that grief undid me. After a moment, she raised her red-streaked face and gamely smiled. Men like to leave me, she said.

  At least they like you. I can’t get anyone to look at me.

  Looking’s the problem, said Molly. They don’t care about anything they can’t see.

  I moved closer, tentative, and put my hand on hers. Then they’re really blind, I said.

  I suppose that’s the moment we became friends, rather than roommates; the moment the future started to get written.

  The first-year classes at Bard were like panning in a river: they sifted people into groups, and before long it was easy to see the aggregates forming: the athletics groups, the drama people (with their little moustaches), the ghostly druggies, the frat boys. In the ranks of the English majors, I wasn’t sure where I fit in. I was neither welcome nor spurned by my classmates, but this was only because the rigours of reading left little time to develop social graces, and many of us were lonely. Relationships of a kind sprang up when you discovered someone in class held your opinion, although you might only discover this in the form of a well-rehearsed answer to one of the prof’s questions in a room of two hundred other English majors. “I liked what you said about The Faerie Queen” would be a safe opening gambit, but on the whole, the first-year English students were a raccoon-eyed, oily-haired group, whose interests (at least through to December) were restricted to epic poems declaiming the rewards of clean living. Without Molly at cocktail ground-zero, I wouldn’t have made any friends that first fall.

  I took up racquet sports in the hope of meeting people on my own, and learned that panting and sweating was not the way to do it. Then Molly decided to sign us up for sculpture in our second semester. Mrs. Borovin, our teacher, arranged for the class to see a sculpture expo in Toronto that March. I’d never been to Toronto, even though it was only five hours north of Ovid, and I’d hardly even had a sense of it or Canada. The country above us always struck me as storage space, like an attic, so the revelation that there was art there was interesting, although odd. I have no memory of crossing the border in our old school bus, nor of coming into the city. I don’t remember the March weather, nor the look of the people, or even what the buildings looked like.

  The art was boring. Blotchy clay sculptures of men in motion, or women with breasts so heavy the statues had to be braced to the gallery wall with strips of metal. Mrs. Borovin stood us in front of one dull bronze or miasmic fabric draped over steel mesh after another, and talked the class through the basics of three dimensions. I drifted away, and eventually into the street. There was another gallery beside, smaller, with only a couple of what appeared to be display cases on the walls. I was surprised to find that the cases themselves were the artworks. Wood-framed boxes with glass fronts behind which some antic arrangement of things gave off a feeling of intense nostalgia. I had never felt anything from art (so I realized then): I was more interested in the brush stroke, the way the canvas was stapled to the frame, or the evidence of a pencil line erased. But here, I was distracted toward another place. The boxes contained bereft little worlds — a sand-filled teacup, a broken clay doll. One (it appeared empty) had a little drawer at the bottom with a jewelled handle, which, when you opened it, revealed a handwritten story pasted to the bottom. For the rest of time, it said, it was as if the little place was getting smaller and smaller, although they could still see it, a dot on the horizon. I closed the drawer and looked again into the space above it, and finally saw, against a backdrop of greyish blue, an almost infinitesimally small pebble with an even smaller pine tree — carved out of the broad base of a single pine needle — standing on it. Another box, embedded right into the wall, featured a front made out of wooden slats, and peering past them, I could see the backs of four birds — two large, two small — in a miniature living room. It took me a moment to realize I was looking down onto them from above, like a god in their ceiling, their smooth brown forms among the furniture a family settling down after supper. Another had a blue curtain drawn shut over the contents, with handles coming out of the top of the box to open them, but I was afraid to touch it.

  The one I found hardest to turn from was a box on a pedestal, made of glass on all sides, which was filled with a viscous blue fibre draping down from the top. It was difficult to see what was suspended in the middle of the space, and I had to stand for a while on each of the four sides, collecting the visual information, until it resolved into something identifiable. It was a mermaid. Her body hung limply curved, her hair draped on each side of her face, loosely falling into the depths, and her tail curving on the other. I startled when I realized what it was. It was called “Sleep” and I was overcome with greed. I wanted it like nothing I had ever wanted before. It was like the way a lover hungers for the body of the one desired: I wanted no one else to ever see it again except for me.

  I crept over to the man at the desk, palms sweating, heart racing, and I told him I wanted to buy it. He folded his newspaper and looked at me over it.

  I don’t think you can afford it. How old are you, anyway?

  What does that have to do with it?

  You can’t just go buying artwork like it’s candy.

  If I can afford it, it doesn’t matter why I’m buying it.

  Tell me how old you are.

  Twenty, I lied.

  Well, come back when you’re forty, and we’ll talk. He returned to his newspaper. I got out my purse and unzipped the billfold. I had ninety dollars. I took the money out and went over to his desk, slapping it down under my palm.

  That’s all I have. You tell me what I have to do.

  I already told you. Not for sale.

  I’m leaving a deposit.

  Look, honey, you’re not even old enough to vote where you come from —

  Excuse me, I said, but the voting age is eighteen where I come from, and I very much plan on voting in the next election, thank you very much.

  Why don’t you just take a program and vamoose, he said. I’ll sign it for you if it makes you feel any better.

  Why? Are you the artist?

  No, I’m the gallery owner. It’s as close as you’ll get. He shoved the money back across the desk.

  I took one of the programs, then saw the show’s manifest tacked to the wall beside the door and took it down. There were a couple of red dots beside some of the pieces, but “Sleep” was still unsold.

  This says “Sleep” is $180. Ninety’s enough to hold it, isn’t it?

  That’s a typo. It’s $1,800.

  I stood in the doorway staring at him, then took the money out again, folded it, and wedged it into a space between the doorjamb and the wall. That’s my deposit. I’ll come back with the rest. And I’m taking this. I waved the manifest at him as proof.

  Daringly, so I thought, I wrote to the artist when I returned to Bard. I told him about my experience looking at his art, plying my adjectives, and I asked him to wrest, if he could, the thing I loved from Mr. Sullivan. I suggested perhaps he needed someone not quite so allergic to money representing his work. But Martin surprised me by writing back and returning my deposit, saying it was he, not Sullivan, who’d asked the gallery not to allow any sales to individuals. He was skittish about private persons owning his work; he wanted to be able to visit it.

  This admission lit a fire under me, and I wrote him to say I still wanted “Sleep,” and he could come any time and see it. He didn’t bend, but he continued to write me, and over the period of a year or so, I gradually forgot about the artwork that had so moved me and began to want to see him. So I began to machinate a way for him to come to Bard. I asked him to send some slides of his artworks, and I approached a pliable
curator at one of the campus galleries with them, a wraithlike woman named Mrs. Vankoughnet. It was as easy as that.

  Done, I wrote back to him in October of 1985,

  You’re due next April. Now we should talk about where you’ll stay. There are a couple little hotels just outside campus, but since you’ll probably only come for the opening, why don’t you stay in my dorm? Obreshkove’s an open easygoing place and you have a nice view of the field and some big metal sculptures. My roommate says she’ll probably go visit her parents that weekend, anyway. You’d like Molly, but she’s quite a boy magnet. I showed her the slides, by the way, and she likes your work too, so I’m sure she’d jump at the chance of having a great Canadian artist sleep in her bed.

  Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m single. I just want you to know in case your wife is anxious. What I mean is, I don’t want anyone to be uncomfortable with the fact that it’s a single college junior setting all this up. Anyway, I think people should be up front. Is this too personal? So far, I should say, you’ve been very adept at appearing quite personal in your letters but upon rereading them, I can see you’ve actually told me nothing about yourself. Is there anything to tell? I remember reading Flaubert somewhere saying that you had to be orderly in your life so you could be violently original in your work. If he’s right, you must be as interesting as sawmill gravy in person. Still, why don’t you tell me the basics? The name of your wife and children, for starters? (If you have any …)

  My uncle says I am being a mover and a shaker by getting you down to Bard. Is that how you see it? Are Canadians like the English? If so, I’ve been pretty pushy in terms of how you guys are.