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  Fall Love

  Anne Whitehouse

  Published: 2008

  Tag(s): fiction amor "absurd comedy" literature "literary fiction" roman love "romantic triangle" "art and artists" "art/teaching artists in love" "gay novel" "bisexual novel"

  Copyright

  Copyright 2001 by Anne Whitehouse.

  Library of Congress Number 00-192772

  ISBN # Hardcover 0-7388-4826-3

  Softcover 0-7388-4827-1

  All rights reserved.

  From “Easter 1916.” Reprinted with permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon and Schuster from The Collected Poems of W.B.Yeats. Revised Second Edition edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright ©1924 by Macmillan Publishing Company, renewed 1952 by Bertha Georgie Yeats.

  For the description of the Aeolian harp in Chapter Twenty-one, the author gratefully acknowledges permission to quote from The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie, copyright Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1980.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Dedication

  For Stephen Whitehouse, who endured it

  and in memory of the Worthens –

  Mark, who encouraged it

  and, especially,

  Eleanor, who transformed it

  Epigraph

  It is hard to withstand the heart’s desire, and it gets what it wants at the psyche’s expense.

  —Herakleitos, 51

  Acknowledgments

  Mark and Eleanor Worthen, in whose memory this book is dedicated, sustained me through years of writing and rewriting with their love, wisdom, and encouragement. They were my great collaborators. I am most deeply indebted to Eleanor, without whom Fall Love would not exist. I cannot imagine a more generous, diligent, and devoted reader or a more painstaking and accurate editor. I am grateful for her graceful phrasing, infallible ear, precise memory, and logical mind.

  In this endeavor, as in so many others, Mark was Eleanor’s true partner. I credit his empathy, insight, and balanced judgment.

  I thank my husband Stephen Whitehouse, to whom this book is also dedicated, for his support, love, and companionship which helped me stay the course from beginning to end. He is my true partner.

  Of other individuals and institutions who offered inspiration and help for Fall Love, I single out for credit:

  Ellen Sirot, for her insight into and knowledge of dance, dances, dancers, and dance companies; and for her sensitivity and perspicacity as a reader;

  Stuart Caplin of The Center for Musical Antiquities who showed me an Aeolian harp and told me its story;

  Dr. Jonathan Deland and Dr. Peter McCann, who told me about Lisfranc fractures;

  Staff of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Joyce Theater, and Auer Van and Express Company, Inc. for expertise and assistance;

  Hugh and Martha Whitehouse, for Sanibel Island;

  The MacDowell Colony, where parts of two chapters were written.

  For those of you who helped me and who remain nameless in these pages, a heart-felt thank you.

  About the author: Anne Whitehouse was born and grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. She received degrees from Harvard College and Columbia University. She is the author of The Surveyor's Hand, a collection of poems. She lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.

  www.annewhitehouse.com

  Chapter 1

  On vacation on an island in the summer sea, Althea lived the life she aspired to: she devoted herself to painting. All year long in New York City she had scrimped and saved to give herself three weeks of solitary inspiration on Block Island. Renting a house sight unseen over the phone, she had come with empty canvases, paints, brushes, palette knives, and hope; and what she found exceeded her fondest imaginings: Althea believed herself to be in Paradise.

  Happiness suffused her like light. She, who considered herself a connoisseur of sights, had fallen in love at once with her island retreat. Low and modest, blue and gray, the house sat on a sloping hillside overlooking fields of bayberries and the sea. She marvelled at how it suited her, as if it had been made for her.

  She wondered about the owner. She guessed he had built the house himself, because it was simple, yet with charming, individual touches. She saw signs of his taste and evidence of his handiwork in the odd angles of his rooms, the iron latches that fastened the windows and closed the closets, in the sunny windbreak behind the house which made a perfect breakfast nook, and on the deck outside the bedroom's double door that looked out to the sea. From the real estate agent she had learned that he was elderly and of foreign birth. Eating from his plates, eyes lifted to a view, she speculated as to whether need of money or ill health caused him to rent his retreat. She blessed her good fortune. It was almost as if the house had found her, rather than the other way around.

  The August days passed, long, languorous, and utterly free. Watching a spider's web in sunlight, Althea imagined that she was like that, alternately shining and hidden, waiting in speculation. What would stumble in? Every day at dusk she stripped for the sea and ran over sand and flat stones into water as smooth as pale isinglass. Thigh-deep she paused, shivering. Then she surface-dived, and the cool water covered her head. She fluttered to the sea floor like a wind and played her fingers over the soft ridges the waves had made.

  She began her paintings, a suite of four which she worked on in succession. They were scenes abstracted from nature: a forest, a meadow, a pond, the sea. So much she knew, the rest she set out to discover. The mud was rinsed from her colors. Each stroke had its place: a center and an edge that met the others. On the flat canvas, she wanted to suggest an inexhaustible depth. "See what drew you in," she told herself as both an admonishment and a rapture, as a jolt to the memory of what had made her turn so long ago to art.

  Part by painstaking part, her paintings grew. Very quickly, she poured her mind in a thin layer over the surface and instantly sucked it back, a flash of consideration to balance the obsessive priorities of the brush. It was a way of ferreting out a wrong choice against the harmony she invoked, hard and clear as glass though rendered in the compliance of pigment.

  Althea's sense of how she benefitted from painting differed from the opinions of "the outside world." Still, she flinched when she was faced with questions about her earnings from art, for she was ambitious and proud. Though she would have liked it to be otherwise, art was presently her luxury, and teaching art was her livelihood. The time she had off from the latter she felt obliged to give to the former. How wonderful it would be if this house were really hers! But when her tenancy was over, she'd have no money left.

  In the meantime Althea relaxed, and her moods were submerged in the island's changeable weathers and her adaptable routines. She worked in the morning, ate at noon, swam at dusk; and many afternoons she whiled away in daydreams, letting the sun tan her, or the fog wrap her in white moisture.

  Against the hazy sky, she watched the consecutive flights of swallows constantly defining new spaces in the air that she seemed to possess and then instantly lost. She thought that if, in her paintings, she could manage to evoke the impermanence around her, then she would reclaim it forever.

  The waning summer deepened its promise. Each day seemed eternal even as it ended. She conceived of her paintings in isolation, and, while she was contented, she nevertheless began to feel lonely. In New York City she treasured her friendships, and some days she seemed rich; she was blessed by chance encounters, and their comprehending interest wove her to a wider world. Other days she was bereft; she dialed and heard the phone ring uselessly or a
rare tape machine click on where she was obliged to record a message. People were always leaving and arriving, and often she missed them. But she, too, was a restless city woman, and the proof was her present removal to an island of farms made over for remote summers.

  * * *

  On a Friday noon two weeks into her stay, Althea set off for town on her bike to do shopping and errands. She went up and down roads past overgrown fields that were themselves divided by ancient criss-crosses of low stone walls. These were said to have been erected by eighteenth-century slaves who could win their freedom if their wall spanned the island. On her way she stopped at the top of a hill to sit on the coarse green grass above the road. Lavender thistles, black-eyed Susans, and Wedgwood-blue chicory bloomed around dark-green shrubs. The air was almost still. Shielding her eyes from the sun reflected off the sea far below her, she thought of whom she might summon to visit her. "If only letters could fly like birds," she mused, idly picturing an envelope folded like origami paper in the shape of a bird, soaring aloft, bearing its contents to Manhattan.

  One guest was expected already: Jeanne was to come the last weekend of Althea's stay. She had offered her car to move Althea back to New York. But Jeanne was more than a useful companion. "Like to a double cherry seeming parted, two lovely berries moulded on one stem," Jeanne once quoted to Althea, and under her teasing, she was sincere. Their friendship went back to their adolescence in the comfortable town of Greenwich, Connecticut.

  Jeanne had been timid while they were growing up. She was afraid and in awe of the city of New York, for example, worried about dangers lurking in asphalt alleys, nervous about missing their train back to Greenwich. Althea remembered a brisk autumn weekend long ago, when they'd been allowed to come into Manhattan together to see a matinée theater performance. Afterwards, walking up Fifth Avenue, Althea had watched Jeanne agape before shop windows already decorated for the holidays, and Jeanne's ingenuous stare had made Althea smile. Althea was selective; from the first grasp of her baby fist, she had discriminated. Jeanne remarked and marvelled; the world's variety terrified her at the same time that it brought the rose to her cheeks. Althea remembered standing next to Jeanne at the fiftieth-floor window of Jeanne’s father's office on Madison Avenue. Together they had looked down the tall buildings to the toylike traffic and dreamed of falling.

  Who would have thought then that they’d both live in New York? Jeanne spoke of California, Althea of Europe, but they moved to Manhattan. Jeanne found a career in theater management; the shy girl grew into a woman capable with accounts, adroit in raising funds and a following. Small, always neatly dressed in a skirt and blouse, her nut-brown hair in bangs across her forehead, Jeanne grew accustomed to being depended on. When her eight hours were put in, she came home, changed into comfortable clothes, and curled up like a kitten that wanted to be entertained. Yet Jeanne admired Althea's strictness, the serious, unswerving track her friend's life had trodden, and when Althea's tongue was trenchant, Jeanne knew how to turn it back with a witty phrase.

  It was like Jeanne to be a chauffeur, thought Althea, like her also to get a holiday out of it. And like her to scribble a note when Althea was only dreaming of letters, so that Althea was to receive a message before she wrote one, not borne in on the wings of a bird, but placed in her outstretched palm via general delivery at the Block Island Post Office.

  But Althea was not thinking of Jeanne on the noon before she was handed Jeanne's letter. In fact, she was not meditating on any established friendship, but on an acquaintance only recently made but instantly cherished. She admitted a deeper interest; the object of her musings was a man, although the evidence told her that he preferred his own sex. A neighbor of hers in New York City, Paul was a dancer. She hadn't yet seen him perform.

  On first sight, his apartment had charmed her: a wooden penthouse constructed right on the roof of a large brick apartment building, with an ornamental garden laid out over the tar strips in raised beds, a tinkling fountain worked by a hidden pump, and another plot of home-grown vegetables.

  This home belonged to Paul's companion, Bryce. She'd met him, also, and was expecting to get to know him better at a dinner party they had invited her to after Labor Day. Courtesy and convention prevented her now from issuing an invitation to one if not both. She was thwarted in her desire. Even if Bryce, who rarely left home due to a physical infirmity the details of which she was still in the dark about, were to be miraculously absent, would Paul care to exchange country living in Manhattan for the real thing with her on Block Island?

  She couldn't write that in a letter, however roundabout the way in which she might put it. She concluded that her speculations were as idle as her drowsy self on the scratchy grass, and her solitude until Jeanne came would be enlivened only by thoughts of this man. In the warm sun she fell asleep.

  In her dream she was squeezed into a seat on a crowded train in the dark noisy depths of the New York subway. She was on her way to teach at a new school, but she had forgotten the street address, and her mind blurred when she tried to place its approximate location in the context of subway routes. Shuttled from station to station, she believed herself to be near only to find herself farther away. The fluorescent lights flickered on illegible graffiti scribbled over the walls of the car. People's backs bumped against the seats; their heads jerked and lolled on their necks. The straphangers were drooping with weariness. The train writhed in a spasm and stopped at a grimy, deserted platform, but the doors of her car stuck. She felt the cold fix of her fellow passengers' eyes on her. The car stank with suspicion, and no one looked away from her puzzled, frightened face.

  She woke with a jolt from her nightmare and looked around, startled, at the sunny peaceful scene. She climbed on her bike with a residue of fear, and rode into town.

  * * *

  On the island of Manhattan in the middle of August, Jeanne stood on the congested subway platform under Fifty-ninth Street and Lexington Avenue, clutching her purse. Briefly she checked to make sure her necklace was safe under the blouse buttoned up despite the humidity. Before her, heat sparked on train rails. She craned her neck to see down the empty tunnel where, alone, a green light winked. She stared at her wristwatch; the second hand pulsed round its measured circle once, twice, half a dozen times. She sighed; again she would be made late, and it was out of her hands.

  The city was falling to pieces around her. In summer the benches in the parks were threaded through with dusty weeds, and the streets oozed at their broken cracks. And Jeanne, whose work helped to light the city's spangled gleam, took in its indifference in her mid-August exhaustion. She could hardly breathe the air, so close was it with the stench of dirt grimed in crevasses and over the surfaces of the ground and walls. Next to her a tall, fair man lapped up a melting ice cream cone as it ran over his fingers. A train passed in the other direction, and briefly she envied its boarding passengers. "Hearts with one purpose alone/Through summer and winter seem/Enchanted to a stone/To trouble the living stream… Too long a sacrifice/Can make a stone of the heart./O when may it suffice?"

  The verse came from her viselike mind like a message. She had been waiting too long for something to happen, for a train to come with its chance meetings and departures, for a new country to visit, a foreign language to learn, preferably with the memory of effort expunged the way an infant acquires its first words: she was waiting for another life to surface into her own.

  So intent was she on what was not that she didn’t notice the tall man at first who, while wiping his sticky fingers on a diminutive napkin, a leather satchel tucked awkwardly under his arm, was attempting to engage her attention.

  "Do you have the time?" he inquired twice before she heard him, for she was involved in her interior recitation and felt the intensity of his concentration on her before she took in his question. There was something so avid in his demeanor that she inadvertently began to step back, but just in time she sensed a person behind her. They were too hemmed in on the crowded platform
for her to avoid the tall man, but because the presence of many imposed constraints on the behavior of one, she felt reasonably safe. She might as well answer his question.

  It was clear he wanted to talk though she would rather remember verses. He guessed aloud that the train would be air conditioned; he asked her opinion.

  "I wouldn't bet on it," she said.

  But he insisted; Jeanne shrugged; and so she found herself slipping into easy familiarity with a stranger as the train pulled into the station, and they discovered they were both in the right. Most of the cars had open windows; a few that were jammed with people hadn't, but it was so hot they had opted for cool though confined air.

  "We might get seats at Grand Central," she found herself predicting over the screech of the subway starting its next lap downtown. They were both clutching the center pole, but, while she was limited to a view of nothing but the immediate bodies around her, his head stood over most of the crowd. Still, he watched only her. The subway reached Fifty-first Street; the doors opened. The passengers adjusted their positions; he moved toward her, his largeness around her smallness. She felt a hand heavy and warm on her cotton-clad shoulder though it had recently held an ice cream cone.

  Across her back, the muscles contracted. Already small, she tried to grow slighter, but she did not shake her shoulder, nor did his hand attempt to add to its territory. But she resented his easy advances, and at Forty-Second Street, she slipped into the just-vacated, love-seat size bench by the door. People were streaming out before they were streaming in; over a loudspeaker the conductor shouted, "Let them off, let them off," and her self-chosen companion stumbled over another passenger's briefcase in an effort to sit beside her. Under his thin-woven slacks, she saw his thighs flex; how could she help it, at her eye level? She moved for him; he crowded her into a wedge, but he must have felt her earlier cringe, for a narrow division of space kept him from touching but not from talking as the train lurched once more forward.