J R

But only the wallpaper’s patient design responded to his obedient query, glancing from habit to an unfaded square of wall where no mirror had hung in some years. — It’s empty… he brandished the can, — I just thought I’d…

— You recall the time James came home so late from the Polish legation his hand, what’s happened to Edward’s hand?

— And his coat hem all out in the back.

— It’s nothing it’s just an empty beer can, I came in…

— Well don’t wave it around. We can smell it over here.

— I came in the back way by the studio and picked it up on the lawn out there, just to throw it away…

— We don’t care to have it seen in our trash, thank you. He’ll have to throw it out somewhere else. Did I hear Stella’s cab outside?

— No I have a minute before it comes, I thought Edward could show me the studio? I don’t think I’ve ever seen it, and we might find that paper…?

— Yes wasn’t there something we meant to tell Edward?

— He had a telephone call this morning.

— That was some wretched woman selling dance lessons, Anne.

— They don’t mind how they run up our telephone bill. Why we don’t simply have it taken out…

— Well it’s certainly outlived its usefulness, why we ever had it put in in the first place…

— When we bought all that telephone stock Julia, I think we felt we should give them our business.

— No I think it was the other way round, Anne. I think we decided to buy their stock because they already had our business, and if we’re having it taken out they may as well have their stock back too.

— We might let Edward just take it in to town and sell it to someone at the Stock Exchange, I’m sure someone down there would be happy to have it. Did you see it in the drawer there Stella?

— Where, they must have gone out. Waving that beer can, if he could have seen himself…

— That hem’s out again where I mended it. I wish he could get a nice blue suit.

— She certainly was full of questions, wasn’t she. You remember how she spread those stories about Thomas and James, about James and Nellie, that summer, she was still just a child. It all came back through that Mrs, Mrs, fat, she had part of one finger missing, who spread it all over the countryside.

— And did you notice? I don’t think she was wearing a girdle.

— No, it’s something about her eyes. They don’t match her face.

— Now, the hammering, hammering…

While with the effort of being contested from the other side by the robust emanation from the simmering tenderloin he’d got the door closed against its pursuit and set off on his own where Stella moved over the grown grass with the assurance of a nurse up corridors as though she’d brought the indoors with her, past the invalid trees and that horticultural Laocoön of honeysuckle, grape and roses, pausing inured at an excruciating attempt by Japanese crabapple to espalier its unpruned limbs against the studio’s shingles to call — this way…? and then lead on, returning his eyes to her sawing haunches rounding yew overgrown at the brick terrace that fronted the place against the lowering threat of oak. He fumbled the beer can, digging in pockets. — But it’s open…

— Open? the door…?

— Here… She thrust a thigh against the heavy door pushing it in on its hinges, showing the neatly broken pane with a thrust of her elbow, crushing glass underfoot with her entrance, asking — is there a light? and as surely finding the switch, dropping the heavy shadows of overhead beams down upon them, bringing the brooding outdoors in, paused, as he came up short behind her, apparently indifferent to the lingering collision of his free hand in its glide over the cleft from one swell to the other brushing up her waist to the elbow, where only the tremor of uncertainty in his grasp moved her on into the vacant confines of the room to murmur — it needs airing…

— That’s the, it’s damp yes it’s the stone floor, he came on off balance as though trying to get around her, gesturing the beer can at chance meetings of beam and scantling that niched the walls haphazard — it used to be a barn it’s, they say it was the first wet wash laundry on Long Island it’s always been a, breaking in who would break in…

— But nothing’s missing?

— That’s not the…

— Or broken…? she’d paused at the piano, came around to open its keyboard and tap C — they didn’t run off with this…