.
At the age of thirty-two, Bennett was promoted to full professor at Leominster. He was at the peak of his powers. His research was being referred to at major international conferences, he had received job offers from Chicago and Princeton, he got weekly invitations from his old fellow graduate student, Ralph Jenkins, now head of the physics department at Stanford. Bennett couldn't sleep. But his sleeplessness was not from the excitement of success. He would wake up in the middle of the night feeling like he wanted to jump out of his skin, get out of bed and try to read, stare, fidgeting, at the blue metallic street lamp outside his window. His skin seethed. His life was a 500-watt bulb inside a small black box. He was drying up inside, and his skin happened to be the first part to notice. He was not thinking of love. He just needed to soothe his skin and to sleep.
He pursued several women, but without satisfaction. He would sit in restaurants and talk to them and find himself unable to imagine touching them.
For three months, he dated a woman named Janet, a schoolteacher. She was smart and Bennett liked talking to her. I love you, Bennett, she said after the second month, but I can't see you both Saturday and Sunday. Saturday I take Mr. Pips for his lessons. Mr. Pips was Janet's Scottish terrier. Bennett looked at Janet with a baffled expression. Oh, sweetie, she said, I can see that you don't think I love you. Of course I do. I love you, Mr. Pips, my mother, and my house, in that order.
Janet showed Bennett how to double-tie his shoelaces, so that they would never come untied.
.
Bennett sat on a promontory over the Chesapeake, gazing at the water. He had been coming here for several months, ever since his trip to see Florida. When he'd heard she was dying, he has gone immediately to Memphis, then spent two days sitting in the living room of his parents' house with his face buried in his hands, unable to go to the hospital where she lay.
He sat above the bay and thought about nothing and felt the cool dark of the night. The night was exceedingly dark, and the water as still as a held breath, and as his eyes slowly adjusted to the black he saw something fantastic: diamonds shimmering on the water. Reflections of stars in the bay. Occasionally, a gentle ripple would sweep through the black carpet of water, perhaps maybe by a fish, and the stars slipped together, then apart.
He'd been sitting spellbound for an hour when he saw the roving beam of a flashlight. Then the voices of two women. They'd gotten lost and couldn't find the sandy path back to their car. He knew the way. The three of them walked together, single file, their footsteps making muffled thuds in the sand. They had all been hypnotized by the tiny points of light in the water and felt a silent union as they walked.
One of the women was Penny. When they got back to the cars, she and Bennett exchanged names and telephone numbers. They were not courting each other. Rather, they sensed that neither of them might ever see an evening like this again, that they were somehow connected, joined by this night. She scribbled her number quickly, in the small glow of the flashlight. He didn't see her face.
Two weeks later she called. She worked afternoons at a credit bureau in Washington. Would he like to meet her after work for a drink? Yes.
Penny needed him from the beginning, and that need drew him to her. She was twenty-five. Her parents were divorced. She was a painter. She painted in a studio until early afternoon, when the light began to shift, then went to her job at the credit bureau. She lived on very little.
They met the second time at an outdoor cafe called Tivoli, near Dupont Circle. The cafe had five enamel tables with white wrought-iron chairs and window boxes with petunias. There was a green door to the inside with a lot of brass on it and a sign saying Welcome Lucarno.
It was a humid evening in July. They were both perspiring heavily. Penny was blond, with a fine, soft down covering her body, and her perspiration shimmered on her face the back of her neck. They sat at the one empty table, started with the night on the Chesapeake and went backwards from there.
She was fair-skinned and fragile, with light in her hair. She wore a sleeveless blouse, which revealed freckles against the white of her arms. And she had a sad, distant look in her eyes, even when she smiled.
They ordered lemonade. Penny never drank alcohol. Her mother was an alcoholic. So they drank lemonade. Bennett said that he had tried to memorize every detail of that night on the bay, the stillness, the feel of the air, the shape of the shore. She laughed and told him a story about Degas, who was a firm believer in memory drawing. In Degas''s ideal painting school, the first-year students would set up their easels on the first floor, where the model posed. The second-year students had their easels on the second floor, the third-year students on the third. The second- and third-year students would have to run down the stairs, study the model, then run back up the stairs and paint what they had seen. The more advanced the student, the longer he would be required to remember his last glimpse of the model. She laughed again. Her laugh was musical. She told stories about other painters, Tarbell and Sargent and Cassatt, as if she had worked in their studios. The hours disappeared. They forgot about dinner.
He noticed that she rarely looked at him. She looked at her lemonade glass, or at her sketchbook on the table, or off down the street. Even when she talked to him, she didn't hold his eyes. However, he looked at her, and he thought that he had never seen so lovely a woman in his life.
She happened to mention that she had come to the cafe by the subway. Her car was in the shop and needed a new transmission. It would be expensive. He startled both of them by offering to lend her the money. The words just rushed out. After an awkward silence, she thanked him but said she would work it out.
Around eleven, she said that she needed to go home. She let him walk her to the subway stop.
They began calling each other in the evenings. She hated her job at the credit bureau. She had low status there because she worked only half-days. She was paid minimum wage and treated with contempt. But it was the only part-time job she could find. She had to have the mornings to paint.
She had painted since childhood. At the age of seventeen, during her last year of high school, she ran away from home, from Pittsburgh, landed in Washington, and met Jeremy Gaunt. Gaunt was a master painter who had been trained in the classical tradition, and he taught in the classical tradition. She had been painting in his atelier for seven years. Gaunt ministered to about a dozen students. Many of them were now so accomplished that they exhibited their own paintings and sold them at good prices.
Bennett began taking off mornings to watch Penny paint, leaving Baltimore at dawn, coming back at noon for his classes. The studio was on a busy street in Silver Spring, a large airy room with twenty-foot ceilings and huge north-facing windows. It was an old building with creaking floorboards. Charcoal dust and the odor of turpentine filled the air. Vases, dried flowers, small porcelain figures, coins, folded fabrics lay scattered about, bric-a-brac for still lifes. He sat in a chair in the back of the room, breathing in the turpentine air and watching Penny and the others work. He watched the way she studied her subject, the way she selected her colors and frowned, the way that she tilted her head. He wanted to know everything about her. In the middle of the morning, she took a break, would walk back to his chair and smile at him, without saying anything. They would leave the studio and walk slowly down the creaking hallway, past the old hand-opened elevator. On Tuesdays and Fridays, Gaunt appeared to give critiques. A short, bearded man of about fifty, Gaunt would walk up to each easel, say a few words, then walk to another, the apprentices straining to catch every word.
After a month, Bennett saw one of Penny's portraits. It was an exquisite pastel picture of a little girl holding a doll. The child had moist eyes, as if she'd been crying, but at the same time seemed like she was stifling a smile. She was alive. The painting had been neglected. Its edges were beginning to curl and the pastel to smear. Can I frame it? Bennett asked. What for? Penny answered and dropped it behind a radiator with her other paintings. She never framed or exhibited her work.
Some evening, they met at restaurants. Their favorite was an underground place in Georgetown. It had three small rooms, each lined with bookshelves, like a private library. The walls were brick and cool and gave a red tint to the air in the candlelight. They would sit at one of the wooden tables and have fruit juice and order dinner and talk about painting. One night he wanted her to draw something for him. She protested that the light wasn't steady, and he kept asking her, and finally she said she would like to draw a portrait of him. He moved to the other side of the table and sat very still, and she began to draw his head and his shoulders. It was the first time she had looked directly at him. She used a sketching pencil and worked very slowly, and the shadows jumped around in the flickering light, but she waited patiently for the periods of even light and kept working. After an hour she began to get a fine likeness. People came over from another table to watch. Immediately, she closed her sketch pad and put it back in her bag. The people whispered something to themselves and went back to their table. I'm sorry, she said softly, I don't like to be stared at. He smiled at her and held her hand and she looked beautiful in the candlelight. Tell me about your work, she said. Tell me, really. He began explaining the details of his research. She listened for a few minutes and then said, You're doing something important, Bennett. He knew that she didn't understand what he was talking about, but he believed her.
He invited her to Baltimore. Oh no, I couldn't do that, she said, shaking her head and looking down at the table. But she began letting him drive her home, to her apartment on Lamont Street, near the navy yard. He never went in. They would sit in his car outside the apartment for an hour and watch the wavering of a streetlamp, masked and unmasked by the leaves of a tree, and she would learn her head back in the crook of his arm. Sometimes they would turn on the radio, very low, and listen to jazz. It would be ten or eleven at night.
One night very late, when Bennett couldn't sleep, he called her. It was two in the morning. He had to see her, he said. She said something sleepily, and he got in his car and drove to her apartment. He didn't wait at the red lights. When he walked in, she was wearing a white cotton robe. She whispered that they had to be quiet, her roommate was sleeping. They sat on the couch. She started to cry. Just hold me, she said softly. I can't stand it any longer, he said. I know, she replied. They sat for a while without talking, just holding each other. Then she took his hand and led him into her bedroom. The next morning, she allowed him to give her the $200 she needed to release her car from the repair shop.
They went for a drive in her resuscitated car. They didn't care where they were going. They just drove, alighting at random places. It was a warm day in September. They rode with the windows down. In mid-afternoon they found themselves following a small road west of Washington. The sun was angling across a tall field of grass and a light wind was blowing, stirring up little whirlpools of dust on the road. They parked their car by the side of the road and wandered across the field. After about a quarter of a mile, from the top of a ridge they spotted an abandoned railroad car, sitting by itself in the grass. Strangely, no tracks were in sight, as if the car had been dropped from the sky. They raced down the hill and climbed into the car through one of its open doors. It had evidently been a freight car. Sacks of flour stood in the corners. They were alone and it was cool inside the car and the sun threw shafts of light on the soft wooden floor. They stood there in the cool, and without saying a word she took off her clothes and rubbed flour all over her body. Then she did the same to him. The flour felt cool on their bare skin. The flour floated in the air, caught in the sunlight slanting through the car, turning the air white. They made love leaning against the wall. Afterwards, as they stood there naked and white, still locked to each other, she wiped the flour from his nose and whispered, I don't deserve you. How can you say that? he said. Don't ever leave me, she said, looking directly into his eyes. I won't ever leave you, he said. He didn't want her to leave him either, but he never told her so.
She knew the richest gardens in Maryland and took him there, taught him to see beauty in even common flowers--the delicate white wisps of baby's breath, the soft red centers of China pinks, the layered puffs of portulaca. She knew the songs and the colorings of birds and taught him the white-crowned sparrow, the sanderling, the phoebe, the nuthatch. She knew every indentation of the Chesapeake.
She told him that outside, shadows have cool colors and lights have warm colors, while inside, shadows have warm colors and lights cool. He told her that bubbles are spheres because a spherical shape minimizes surface area for a given volume. She told him that sea anemones and hermit crabs live in harmony; the anemones hide the crabs from their enemies, while the crabs carry the anemones on their backs to new feeding grounds. He told her that gravity has the elegant property that it accelerates all objects equally; thus astronauts orbit the earth on precisely the same trajectory as their spaceship and float within it.
When she woke him at dawn by lightly sweeping her nipples across his back, he sometimes forgot who he was.
.
Two years after they were married, Branscombe, the most prestigious art gallery in Washington, had a show of contemporary classical realism and invited Penny to exhibit her paintings, alongside those of several other leading artists in the area. Gaunt had recommended Penny's work. The gallery director had visited Gaunt's studio one day when Penny wasn't there and privately viewed the paintings behind the radiator.
Bennett was sitting on the sofa in the living room when he first read the admiring letter from the director. He threw down the other mail and began crowing. Penny had been rejecting his compliments for several years, but here was a compliment she couldn't ignore. And, for the first time, her work would be publicly recognized. People came down from New York to see the openings at Branscombe.
I'm not doing it, Penny said quietly. What are you talking about! Bennett shouted in disbelief. I'm not doing it, she repeated. They're showing Kresky and Ingbretson. So what? he said. I'm not in that league, she replied. What do you call this? Bennett said, waving the letter. Lippmann has seen your work. He says you're in that league. She went back to her art magazine. Dammit, Penny, Bennett yelled, the first time he had yelled at her. This is your chance. What have you been doing for the last fifteen years? I've been learning to paint, she answered.
They went to the opening. Penny didn't even introduce herself to Mr. Lippmann as he circled through the crowd shaking hands. Bennett was so angry that he couldn't look at the paintings of Kresky and Ingbretson. He sat in a chair for the evening, holding a half-glass of pink wine.
Perhaps if he hadn't pushed her, things might have been different. What right did he have to be ambitious for her? He shouldn't have pushed her.
No, thinking back on it later, it wasn't his ambition. It was Penny. She had no confidence in the future. She often said that she couldn't believe she was married, as if she had given herself to the past, to being alone for her life. She wouldn't quit her dreadful job at the credit union, even though he pleaded with her to leave it, to devote herself completely to painting. He was earning enough for them both. But she wouldn't do it. She didn't trust the future.
She was afraid that she would turn into her mother, who arrived on a bus once or twice a year, without any notice, and stayed with them a few days. Penny's mother had carelessly dyed hair and a wild, bloodshot look in her eyes, but you could see that she had once been beautiful. Bennett would find her sitting on the front steps when he got home. He would tell her when Penny was due and help her to the extra bedroom. She was always exhausted when she first arrived and would collapse on her bed without taking off her clothes and sleep through the night. The next morning, Penny would begin crying, half in joy over being near the one person she loved besides Bennett, half in sorrow at her mother's disintegrating condition. She would scold her mother about her shoddy clothes, and why didn't she cash the check Penny had sent her. Then they would hug and kiss, and Penny would make her mother a big breakfast and take her to the doctor's.
That night, she and her mother would have a terrible fight in the living room about her mother's drinking. Finally, Penny would come to bed in tears. A half-hour later, lying in bed in the dark, they would hear the liquor cabinet quietly open. Penny begged her mother to come live with them, but her mother always refused.
Penny carried with her everywhere a small, blue brocaded purse containing fifty dollars. Bennett never saw her without it. At night, she put it on the table beside her bed. What's that for? he asked her once. Just in case, she answered, and wouldn't say anything more. As if a flood might come in the night, washing her far away from him, from everyone who could help her. As if she expected that any day she might get fired from her job, come home, find that he had deserted her and left nothing.
Even when she was outdoors, which she adored, he could sense her feeling of hopelessness. She would smile for a moment, lost in the picture before her, and then that sad, distant looked returned to her eyes. That look became Bennett's enemy. What was she thinking about? Her wretched childhood? Her poor mother? The imaginary life in the magazines?
****
They sat in the living room, in dim light, after Bennett had finished the dishes. She was reading her art magazine, reading by the light from the kitchen. I still haven't learned how to get the big look, she said, sighing. I've been with Gaunt eleven years. Bennett was silent. After several years of contradicting her when she bemoaned her slow progress in the studio, he was now silent.
Let's dance, she said. She went to the cabinet and pulled out an old record, one that she'd listened to as a girl, and put down the needle on Someone To Watch Over Me. They began moving around the room very slowly, her head turned away from his, her eyes closed. I'm not losing the edges, she said. My pictures look like number paintings. He was silent. They moved slowly around the room, passing the sofa, the table with the carved boxes, the embroidered wing chair. There's a somebody I'm longing to see, I hope that he, turns out to be, someone to watch over me, Penny sang softly along with the record. They moved in languid circles. The room brightened for a moment as a car came down the street, its headlights sweeping the curtains. Then the half-darkness again, the shadows of cobalt. Bennett felt as if he were watching himself from a corner of the room, watching the two of them. He said nothing, he just watched as his life happened, angled through glass to this room and this moment. The song finished, but they kept dancing. They kept dancing as if still hearing music, circling slowly past the sofa, the table with carved boxes, the embroidered chair. All of which he saw from his other place in the corner. They kept moving, slowly and without words.
That night, as she undressed before bed, he didn't remark on her beauty. She always denied what he said of her beauty. That night he said nothing.
He began helping her tear herself down. He would point out that such and such a person in her studio was showing his work at some gallery. She would nod her head silently. He would make references to books he knew she hadn't read. One Sunday afternoon, while she was in the bathroom, he hid her blue brocaded purse under the mattress in the spare bedroom. She noticed it was gone and she panicked and flew through the house looking for it. My God, she repeated, turning over pillows, opening drawers, slamming them shut. My God. What's the matter, Pen? he said. I've lost it, she said, terrified, and continued to search. After a half-hour he returned the purse to the kitchen table, where she had left it.
He was vicious. What little dignity she had, he destroyed. He despised himself for the way he began treating her but was astonished to find that he had no control of his actions. He couldn't understand how he could have no control of himself. Minutes after he'd said something cruel, he would go outside and slam his hand against the brick front of the house, hoping the pain would give him control. But the next day, it would happen all over again.
In the last year of their marriage, he stayed many nights at the college, working late. He did long and tedious calculations. Those calculations saved him from himself. When he would get home, she was usually up, waiting. She had made extra dinner and sat with him while he ate. Afterwards, they would walk from room to room turning off lights, until the house was as dark as that first night on the Chesapeake. Then they would go to bed, without saying a word.
One evening, as he sat in his office, something changed in his mind. He suddenly felt he had regained control. He had been acting illogically. He had a problem, like any other problem. The problem just hadn't been well posed. The problem was: Should he leave Penny or not? He began reviewing their relationship, listing the pros and the cons, which became zigzags of a curve in his mind, a curve arcing to some definite conclusion. A wave of relief swept over him.
When he arrived home that night the house was dark. She had not waited up for him. He sat in a chair in the living room and resumed analyzing the curve in his mind. He turned on a single lamp, and the air glowed in a dim, yellow light. He must have been pondering in that low yellow light for a long time when he felt a hand on his shoulder. What time is it? she said. He looked at his watch. Midnight. She stared at him oddly. What's the matter, Bennett? she asked. Nothing, he said. You're crying, she said. He put his hand to his face, and he found it was wet. I'm all right, he said. Let's go to bed.
The next day, he told her he wanted a separation. She didn't ask why. She didn't argue. He insisted that she stay in the house. He rented a small apartment for himself several miles away and moved out, in the middle of the night so that the neighbors wouldn't notice.
He sent her weekly checks, more than she needed. She began calling him at the college. How are you? she'd say. I'm all right, he'd answer. When will we see each other? she'd ask. I don't know, he'd say. You left your blue denim coat, she said once. I don't need it, he answered.
Bennett didn't tell anyone at Leominster about the separation. He was too embarrassed. He didn't know anyone well. He called his mother. She waited a while before replying and then said, We knew that something like this would happen. She paused again, as if thinking, then said, Your father and I would be grateful if you could wait a few days before telling anyone else in Memphis. I'm sorry for you, Bennett.
He sent John a letter. He hadn't seen John for nearly twenty years, and he knew John wouldn't answer, but he wanted him to know.
...
from Good Benito by Alan Lightman. there's so much i leave out. ...
At the age of thirty-two, Bennett was promoted to full professor at Leominster. He was at the peak of his powers. His research was being referred to at major international conferences, he had received job offers from Chicago and Princeton, he got weekly invitations from his old fellow graduate student, Ralph Jenkins, now head of the physics department at Stanford. Bennett couldn't sleep. But his sleeplessness was not from the excitement of success. He would wake up in the middle of the night feeling like he wanted to jump out of his skin, get out of bed and try to read, stare, fidgeting, at the blue metallic street lamp outside his window. His skin seethed. His life was a 500-watt bulb inside a small black box. He was drying up inside, and his skin happened to be the first part to notice. He was not thinking of love. He just needed to soothe his skin and to sleep.
He pursued several women, but without satisfaction. He would sit in restaurants and talk to them and find himself unable to imagine touching them.
For three months, he dated a woman named Janet, a schoolteacher. She was smart and Bennett liked talking to her. I love you, Bennett, she said after the second month, but I can't see you both Saturday and Sunday. Saturday I take Mr. Pips for his lessons. Mr. Pips was Janet's Scottish terrier. Bennett looked at Janet with a baffled expression. Oh, sweetie, she said, I can see that you don't think I love you. Of course I do. I love you, Mr. Pips, my mother, and my house, in that order.
Janet showed Bennett how to double-tie his shoelaces, so that they would never come untied.
.
Bennett sat on a promontory over the Chesapeake, gazing at the water. He had been coming here for several months, ever since his trip to see Florida. When he'd heard she was dying, he has gone immediately to Memphis, then spent two days sitting in the living room of his parents' house with his face buried in his hands, unable to go to the hospital where she lay.
He sat above the bay and thought about nothing and felt the cool dark of the night. The night was exceedingly dark, and the water as still as a held breath, and as his eyes slowly adjusted to the black he saw something fantastic: diamonds shimmering on the water. Reflections of stars in the bay. Occasionally, a gentle ripple would sweep through the black carpet of water, perhaps maybe by a fish, and the stars slipped together, then apart.
He'd been sitting spellbound for an hour when he saw the roving beam of a flashlight. Then the voices of two women. They'd gotten lost and couldn't find the sandy path back to their car. He knew the way. The three of them walked together, single file, their footsteps making muffled thuds in the sand. They had all been hypnotized by the tiny points of light in the water and felt a silent union as they walked.
One of the women was Penny. When they got back to the cars, she and Bennett exchanged names and telephone numbers. They were not courting each other. Rather, they sensed that neither of them might ever see an evening like this again, that they were somehow connected, joined by this night. She scribbled her number quickly, in the small glow of the flashlight. He didn't see her face.
Two weeks later she called. She worked afternoons at a credit bureau in Washington. Would he like to meet her after work for a drink? Yes.
Penny needed him from the beginning, and that need drew him to her. She was twenty-five. Her parents were divorced. She was a painter. She painted in a studio until early afternoon, when the light began to shift, then went to her job at the credit bureau. She lived on very little.
They met the second time at an outdoor cafe called Tivoli, near Dupont Circle. The cafe had five enamel tables with white wrought-iron chairs and window boxes with petunias. There was a green door to the inside with a lot of brass on it and a sign saying Welcome Lucarno.
It was a humid evening in July. They were both perspiring heavily. Penny was blond, with a fine, soft down covering her body, and her perspiration shimmered on her face the back of her neck. They sat at the one empty table, started with the night on the Chesapeake and went backwards from there.
She was fair-skinned and fragile, with light in her hair. She wore a sleeveless blouse, which revealed freckles against the white of her arms. And she had a sad, distant look in her eyes, even when she smiled.
They ordered lemonade. Penny never drank alcohol. Her mother was an alcoholic. So they drank lemonade. Bennett said that he had tried to memorize every detail of that night on the bay, the stillness, the feel of the air, the shape of the shore. She laughed and told him a story about Degas, who was a firm believer in memory drawing. In Degas''s ideal painting school, the first-year students would set up their easels on the first floor, where the model posed. The second-year students had their easels on the second floor, the third-year students on the third. The second- and third-year students would have to run down the stairs, study the model, then run back up the stairs and paint what they had seen. The more advanced the student, the longer he would be required to remember his last glimpse of the model. She laughed again. Her laugh was musical. She told stories about other painters, Tarbell and Sargent and Cassatt, as if she had worked in their studios. The hours disappeared. They forgot about dinner.
He noticed that she rarely looked at him. She looked at her lemonade glass, or at her sketchbook on the table, or off down the street. Even when she talked to him, she didn't hold his eyes. However, he looked at her, and he thought that he had never seen so lovely a woman in his life.
She happened to mention that she had come to the cafe by the subway. Her car was in the shop and needed a new transmission. It would be expensive. He startled both of them by offering to lend her the money. The words just rushed out. After an awkward silence, she thanked him but said she would work it out.
Around eleven, she said that she needed to go home. She let him walk her to the subway stop.
They began calling each other in the evenings. She hated her job at the credit bureau. She had low status there because she worked only half-days. She was paid minimum wage and treated with contempt. But it was the only part-time job she could find. She had to have the mornings to paint.
She had painted since childhood. At the age of seventeen, during her last year of high school, she ran away from home, from Pittsburgh, landed in Washington, and met Jeremy Gaunt. Gaunt was a master painter who had been trained in the classical tradition, and he taught in the classical tradition. She had been painting in his atelier for seven years. Gaunt ministered to about a dozen students. Many of them were now so accomplished that they exhibited their own paintings and sold them at good prices.
Bennett began taking off mornings to watch Penny paint, leaving Baltimore at dawn, coming back at noon for his classes. The studio was on a busy street in Silver Spring, a large airy room with twenty-foot ceilings and huge north-facing windows. It was an old building with creaking floorboards. Charcoal dust and the odor of turpentine filled the air. Vases, dried flowers, small porcelain figures, coins, folded fabrics lay scattered about, bric-a-brac for still lifes. He sat in a chair in the back of the room, breathing in the turpentine air and watching Penny and the others work. He watched the way she studied her subject, the way she selected her colors and frowned, the way that she tilted her head. He wanted to know everything about her. In the middle of the morning, she took a break, would walk back to his chair and smile at him, without saying anything. They would leave the studio and walk slowly down the creaking hallway, past the old hand-opened elevator. On Tuesdays and Fridays, Gaunt appeared to give critiques. A short, bearded man of about fifty, Gaunt would walk up to each easel, say a few words, then walk to another, the apprentices straining to catch every word.
After a month, Bennett saw one of Penny's portraits. It was an exquisite pastel picture of a little girl holding a doll. The child had moist eyes, as if she'd been crying, but at the same time seemed like she was stifling a smile. She was alive. The painting had been neglected. Its edges were beginning to curl and the pastel to smear. Can I frame it? Bennett asked. What for? Penny answered and dropped it behind a radiator with her other paintings. She never framed or exhibited her work.
Some evening, they met at restaurants. Their favorite was an underground place in Georgetown. It had three small rooms, each lined with bookshelves, like a private library. The walls were brick and cool and gave a red tint to the air in the candlelight. They would sit at one of the wooden tables and have fruit juice and order dinner and talk about painting. One night he wanted her to draw something for him. She protested that the light wasn't steady, and he kept asking her, and finally she said she would like to draw a portrait of him. He moved to the other side of the table and sat very still, and she began to draw his head and his shoulders. It was the first time she had looked directly at him. She used a sketching pencil and worked very slowly, and the shadows jumped around in the flickering light, but she waited patiently for the periods of even light and kept working. After an hour she began to get a fine likeness. People came over from another table to watch. Immediately, she closed her sketch pad and put it back in her bag. The people whispered something to themselves and went back to their table. I'm sorry, she said softly, I don't like to be stared at. He smiled at her and held her hand and she looked beautiful in the candlelight. Tell me about your work, she said. Tell me, really. He began explaining the details of his research. She listened for a few minutes and then said, You're doing something important, Bennett. He knew that she didn't understand what he was talking about, but he believed her.
He invited her to Baltimore. Oh no, I couldn't do that, she said, shaking her head and looking down at the table. But she began letting him drive her home, to her apartment on Lamont Street, near the navy yard. He never went in. They would sit in his car outside the apartment for an hour and watch the wavering of a streetlamp, masked and unmasked by the leaves of a tree, and she would learn her head back in the crook of his arm. Sometimes they would turn on the radio, very low, and listen to jazz. It would be ten or eleven at night.
One night very late, when Bennett couldn't sleep, he called her. It was two in the morning. He had to see her, he said. She said something sleepily, and he got in his car and drove to her apartment. He didn't wait at the red lights. When he walked in, she was wearing a white cotton robe. She whispered that they had to be quiet, her roommate was sleeping. They sat on the couch. She started to cry. Just hold me, she said softly. I can't stand it any longer, he said. I know, she replied. They sat for a while without talking, just holding each other. Then she took his hand and led him into her bedroom. The next morning, she allowed him to give her the $200 she needed to release her car from the repair shop.
They went for a drive in her resuscitated car. They didn't care where they were going. They just drove, alighting at random places. It was a warm day in September. They rode with the windows down. In mid-afternoon they found themselves following a small road west of Washington. The sun was angling across a tall field of grass and a light wind was blowing, stirring up little whirlpools of dust on the road. They parked their car by the side of the road and wandered across the field. After about a quarter of a mile, from the top of a ridge they spotted an abandoned railroad car, sitting by itself in the grass. Strangely, no tracks were in sight, as if the car had been dropped from the sky. They raced down the hill and climbed into the car through one of its open doors. It had evidently been a freight car. Sacks of flour stood in the corners. They were alone and it was cool inside the car and the sun threw shafts of light on the soft wooden floor. They stood there in the cool, and without saying a word she took off her clothes and rubbed flour all over her body. Then she did the same to him. The flour felt cool on their bare skin. The flour floated in the air, caught in the sunlight slanting through the car, turning the air white. They made love leaning against the wall. Afterwards, as they stood there naked and white, still locked to each other, she wiped the flour from his nose and whispered, I don't deserve you. How can you say that? he said. Don't ever leave me, she said, looking directly into his eyes. I won't ever leave you, he said. He didn't want her to leave him either, but he never told her so.
She knew the richest gardens in Maryland and took him there, taught him to see beauty in even common flowers--the delicate white wisps of baby's breath, the soft red centers of China pinks, the layered puffs of portulaca. She knew the songs and the colorings of birds and taught him the white-crowned sparrow, the sanderling, the phoebe, the nuthatch. She knew every indentation of the Chesapeake.
She told him that outside, shadows have cool colors and lights have warm colors, while inside, shadows have warm colors and lights cool. He told her that bubbles are spheres because a spherical shape minimizes surface area for a given volume. She told him that sea anemones and hermit crabs live in harmony; the anemones hide the crabs from their enemies, while the crabs carry the anemones on their backs to new feeding grounds. He told her that gravity has the elegant property that it accelerates all objects equally; thus astronauts orbit the earth on precisely the same trajectory as their spaceship and float within it.
When she woke him at dawn by lightly sweeping her nipples across his back, he sometimes forgot who he was.
.
Two years after they were married, Branscombe, the most prestigious art gallery in Washington, had a show of contemporary classical realism and invited Penny to exhibit her paintings, alongside those of several other leading artists in the area. Gaunt had recommended Penny's work. The gallery director had visited Gaunt's studio one day when Penny wasn't there and privately viewed the paintings behind the radiator.
Bennett was sitting on the sofa in the living room when he first read the admiring letter from the director. He threw down the other mail and began crowing. Penny had been rejecting his compliments for several years, but here was a compliment she couldn't ignore. And, for the first time, her work would be publicly recognized. People came down from New York to see the openings at Branscombe.
I'm not doing it, Penny said quietly. What are you talking about! Bennett shouted in disbelief. I'm not doing it, she repeated. They're showing Kresky and Ingbretson. So what? he said. I'm not in that league, she replied. What do you call this? Bennett said, waving the letter. Lippmann has seen your work. He says you're in that league. She went back to her art magazine. Dammit, Penny, Bennett yelled, the first time he had yelled at her. This is your chance. What have you been doing for the last fifteen years? I've been learning to paint, she answered.
They went to the opening. Penny didn't even introduce herself to Mr. Lippmann as he circled through the crowd shaking hands. Bennett was so angry that he couldn't look at the paintings of Kresky and Ingbretson. He sat in a chair for the evening, holding a half-glass of pink wine.
Perhaps if he hadn't pushed her, things might have been different. What right did he have to be ambitious for her? He shouldn't have pushed her.
No, thinking back on it later, it wasn't his ambition. It was Penny. She had no confidence in the future. She often said that she couldn't believe she was married, as if she had given herself to the past, to being alone for her life. She wouldn't quit her dreadful job at the credit union, even though he pleaded with her to leave it, to devote herself completely to painting. He was earning enough for them both. But she wouldn't do it. She didn't trust the future.
She was afraid that she would turn into her mother, who arrived on a bus once or twice a year, without any notice, and stayed with them a few days. Penny's mother had carelessly dyed hair and a wild, bloodshot look in her eyes, but you could see that she had once been beautiful. Bennett would find her sitting on the front steps when he got home. He would tell her when Penny was due and help her to the extra bedroom. She was always exhausted when she first arrived and would collapse on her bed without taking off her clothes and sleep through the night. The next morning, Penny would begin crying, half in joy over being near the one person she loved besides Bennett, half in sorrow at her mother's disintegrating condition. She would scold her mother about her shoddy clothes, and why didn't she cash the check Penny had sent her. Then they would hug and kiss, and Penny would make her mother a big breakfast and take her to the doctor's.
That night, she and her mother would have a terrible fight in the living room about her mother's drinking. Finally, Penny would come to bed in tears. A half-hour later, lying in bed in the dark, they would hear the liquor cabinet quietly open. Penny begged her mother to come live with them, but her mother always refused.
Penny carried with her everywhere a small, blue brocaded purse containing fifty dollars. Bennett never saw her without it. At night, she put it on the table beside her bed. What's that for? he asked her once. Just in case, she answered, and wouldn't say anything more. As if a flood might come in the night, washing her far away from him, from everyone who could help her. As if she expected that any day she might get fired from her job, come home, find that he had deserted her and left nothing.
Even when she was outdoors, which she adored, he could sense her feeling of hopelessness. She would smile for a moment, lost in the picture before her, and then that sad, distant looked returned to her eyes. That look became Bennett's enemy. What was she thinking about? Her wretched childhood? Her poor mother? The imaginary life in the magazines?
****
They sat in the living room, in dim light, after Bennett had finished the dishes. She was reading her art magazine, reading by the light from the kitchen. I still haven't learned how to get the big look, she said, sighing. I've been with Gaunt eleven years. Bennett was silent. After several years of contradicting her when she bemoaned her slow progress in the studio, he was now silent.
Let's dance, she said. She went to the cabinet and pulled out an old record, one that she'd listened to as a girl, and put down the needle on Someone To Watch Over Me. They began moving around the room very slowly, her head turned away from his, her eyes closed. I'm not losing the edges, she said. My pictures look like number paintings. He was silent. They moved slowly around the room, passing the sofa, the table with the carved boxes, the embroidered wing chair. There's a somebody I'm longing to see, I hope that he, turns out to be, someone to watch over me, Penny sang softly along with the record. They moved in languid circles. The room brightened for a moment as a car came down the street, its headlights sweeping the curtains. Then the half-darkness again, the shadows of cobalt. Bennett felt as if he were watching himself from a corner of the room, watching the two of them. He said nothing, he just watched as his life happened, angled through glass to this room and this moment. The song finished, but they kept dancing. They kept dancing as if still hearing music, circling slowly past the sofa, the table with carved boxes, the embroidered chair. All of which he saw from his other place in the corner. They kept moving, slowly and without words.
That night, as she undressed before bed, he didn't remark on her beauty. She always denied what he said of her beauty. That night he said nothing.
He began helping her tear herself down. He would point out that such and such a person in her studio was showing his work at some gallery. She would nod her head silently. He would make references to books he knew she hadn't read. One Sunday afternoon, while she was in the bathroom, he hid her blue brocaded purse under the mattress in the spare bedroom. She noticed it was gone and she panicked and flew through the house looking for it. My God, she repeated, turning over pillows, opening drawers, slamming them shut. My God. What's the matter, Pen? he said. I've lost it, she said, terrified, and continued to search. After a half-hour he returned the purse to the kitchen table, where she had left it.
He was vicious. What little dignity she had, he destroyed. He despised himself for the way he began treating her but was astonished to find that he had no control of his actions. He couldn't understand how he could have no control of himself. Minutes after he'd said something cruel, he would go outside and slam his hand against the brick front of the house, hoping the pain would give him control. But the next day, it would happen all over again.
In the last year of their marriage, he stayed many nights at the college, working late. He did long and tedious calculations. Those calculations saved him from himself. When he would get home, she was usually up, waiting. She had made extra dinner and sat with him while he ate. Afterwards, they would walk from room to room turning off lights, until the house was as dark as that first night on the Chesapeake. Then they would go to bed, without saying a word.
One evening, as he sat in his office, something changed in his mind. He suddenly felt he had regained control. He had been acting illogically. He had a problem, like any other problem. The problem just hadn't been well posed. The problem was: Should he leave Penny or not? He began reviewing their relationship, listing the pros and the cons, which became zigzags of a curve in his mind, a curve arcing to some definite conclusion. A wave of relief swept over him.
When he arrived home that night the house was dark. She had not waited up for him. He sat in a chair in the living room and resumed analyzing the curve in his mind. He turned on a single lamp, and the air glowed in a dim, yellow light. He must have been pondering in that low yellow light for a long time when he felt a hand on his shoulder. What time is it? she said. He looked at his watch. Midnight. She stared at him oddly. What's the matter, Bennett? she asked. Nothing, he said. You're crying, she said. He put his hand to his face, and he found it was wet. I'm all right, he said. Let's go to bed.
The next day, he told her he wanted a separation. She didn't ask why. She didn't argue. He insisted that she stay in the house. He rented a small apartment for himself several miles away and moved out, in the middle of the night so that the neighbors wouldn't notice.
He sent her weekly checks, more than she needed. She began calling him at the college. How are you? she'd say. I'm all right, he'd answer. When will we see each other? she'd ask. I don't know, he'd say. You left your blue denim coat, she said once. I don't need it, he answered.
Bennett didn't tell anyone at Leominster about the separation. He was too embarrassed. He didn't know anyone well. He called his mother. She waited a while before replying and then said, We knew that something like this would happen. She paused again, as if thinking, then said, Your father and I would be grateful if you could wait a few days before telling anyone else in Memphis. I'm sorry for you, Bennett.
He sent John a letter. He hadn't seen John for nearly twenty years, and he knew John wouldn't answer, but he wanted him to know.
...
from Good Benito by Alan Lightman. there's so much i leave out. ...