John Parrish was sitting in the grass when a little black beetle crawled onto the back of his
hand. He felt the tickling as it crossed over the black hairs that covered the skin thickly
there. Absently, he looked at it, his mind elsewhere, for he was sitting in the morning sun,
looking across the lake to where the old house could just be seen through the trees. He had
feelings for the woman who lived there, an artist who kept a studio in the old barn--in full
view just to the right of the house--and who could be seen now and then walking between
the house and the studio. Her name was Livia.
After her husband died she had become reclusive, being seen in town only at the supermarket and at the UPS office, where she went to ship her paintings to the gallery in New York. She refused all efforts on the part of her friends to get her out and into the world again.
John Parrish felt stirrings for Livia because he imagined her reclusiveness as an expression of the same longings and sorrows he felt at the death of his wife some months before Livia’s husband’s. Imagining they were soulmates in loss, he dreamed about her and about falling in love. He dreamed of the consolation each would be to the other as they embraced. He tried to find ways to introduce himself--excuses for visiting, for example, or for doing some errand or performing some service for her. But nothing he could think of seemed plausible. He was timid by nature, reticent, and inexpert in the social games and genial banter so necessary to the cause of romance, which for him meant more a tender twining of solace than the risky adventure of love. Besides, she was fairly securely isolated in her home on the lake, and word had spread that she wouldn’t answer the door if someone uninvited came knocking, and she never answered the phone, it being put on an answering machine.
He looked at the old house, half obscured by the tall Siberian elms planted on the side facing the lake to shade the yard from the sun, and wondered how it would be if he took a boat across the water and landed at the rickety dock that once served the house’s people when it was the only house on that side and they, the Morrisons, farmed the whole section west of the lake and kept the lake itself as their private domain. The city, eastward, had grown up to and around the lake, incorporating it and establishing parks and beaches and children’s summer camps on its banks, and the old Morrison place has now been crept up to on both sides. But the people who have lived in the house over the years since the Morrisons quit it have kept the crawl at bay on both sides by lining the property with cedars two and three rows deep, keeping only the lake view empty of them. It would be impossible to justify such a breach of Livia’s privacy, he thought, so he put the idea out of mind.
The idea, nevertheless, wouldn’t quit him, and, taking on another form, it rose with him, vividly implanted in his head. Brushing the little black beetle off his hand, he turned and walked into the trees with the beginnings of a notion, one which he would dwell on often in the coming week. This idea grew, of course, until it became an absurdity, calling upon resources of character and an audacity which Parrish wholly lacked. But it was a great notion, and all during the week he ran it through his mind and shook his head and wished he dared.
For her part, Livia was unaware of the existence of John Parrish. She knew who he was, or, rather, she knew that he was, but he figured not at all in her calculations. He was as one of the innumerable, faceless “others” who moved in and out of her life formerly but who, like the others, had never had any meaning to or influence upon her. She just never thought of him.
She spent the first weeks after the death of her husband, whose name also was John, collecting and boxing his things--his clothes, mostly, but, most bitterly for her, also those little inconspicuous things that one wouldn’t think to look for but which she came upon by chance going about the house: tickets for the concert series he kept in the box on the refrigerator; the CDs he liked to listen to on quiet evenings sitting on the back porch looking out upon the lake; the old jacket he kept hanging on a hook in the garage; the photographs in the piano seat, which she found when she put away the music he had last been playing. She realized she’d be finding things months hence and hoped it would be with less and less pain as the time passed.
She lived in the big house alone now, but the thought of leaving it never entered her mind, for she had her studio out back, air conditioned and heated, skylighted and bay-windowed, so that she could look upon the lake in all the moods of the year, a thought which was her greatest comfort. But the studio was also the one thing that made it possible for her to live through the empty days, for in it she could work and find release. And she worked furiously. Sometimes from early morning to dark. In those first months, she painted the lake over and over, so that she had some fifty canvases hanging on the walls, stacked on the floor leaning against the walls, propped on the chairs, set in the window projection, everywhere there was a place for one. In these paintings the lake looked darkly funereal, so somber did she make the sky and windswept the water’s surface. Never did a ray of sun intrude into its underworldliness, so that in many of them it was impossible to tell where the water and the sky met.
Perhaps there was something suicidal in those images, undifferentiated as they were, though she denied this to herself over and over. Because she felt like only half the being she formerly was, as though she literally lost half her body, lengthwise, she told herself the lake images expressed a yearning to join again with that missing half.
But John had died just before Thanksgiving, and by now, late May, she had finally begun to respond to the new light. She had lived, she said to herself, all these months in the dark and awful chaos of the night. But now, with a new palette, she gazed across the lake in a different mood. The sun fell in a bright swath across the bank on the far side, where a man was sitting in the grass looking across the lake, seemingly right at her. Behind him, back a way from the bank, the maples and elms made a dark, contrasting mass between the bright foreground and the airy brilliance of the sky. Quickly, she sketched the image on a pad and began washing the canvas with its undercoat.
“So much depends upon,” she said to herself, “sunlight on the grass. Just that and nothing more. Glazed with dew. Beside the lake.”
The thought filled her as she worked. But soon after she began, the man, who seemed so intently to be looking across the water at her, rose, brushed himself off, and walked away, fading into the trees until she lost him completely in their shadows. Something strangely went out of her with his departure. Her zest, her curiosity, her connection to the scene, her desire—all disappeared like the dew from the grass as the sunlight lay upon it. For a long time she stood in the big bay window staring across the lake, holding a brush. The sense of half-life she had become so used to returned, and, looking at the bright wash on the canvas, felt no desire to continue with it. She put up her brush, cleaned off the palette, and left the studio, wandering for a while in the yard and standing on the bank, staring into the water, before going in and getting an orange and a cup of coffee for breakfast.
John Parrish left the lake with a still-vivid vision imprinted in his mind of huge, brightly colored hot-air balloons floating in the sky, their gondolas suspended beneath like dark little fruit baskets. Spheres and globes! Drifting worlds! Demonic fires belching into their inner spaces! The vision filled him with wonder and anxiety, for he was the kind of person who could not reach the third step of a ladder without getting dizzy. As he walked to his car he said to himself that there were so many impossibilities he should just forget it and think up something doable. But the idea wouldn’t quit him. He spent his workday and his evening thinking of Livia. Why shouldn’t they meet and know each other? Why should the gods of trees and water conspire to keep them apart? As he prepared for bed, he imagined his wife in her box underground. He recalled those moments when late summer turned into fall and the trees threw their leaves into the swirling wind. Hell is more than half of paradise, he thought, as he went to sleep, and soon he dreamed of balloons.
The next morning, as she put up coffee and stood by the sink, looking at the lake through the window as the rising sun altered its surface from ash-gray to the palest of blues, Livia saw a man walk from the trees to the grassy bank on the other side and sit, his legs stretched in front of him, and seem to stare across the distance right at her.
“How odd?” she thought. “Could that be the same man?” She felt prickly strange and wondered about him. He must find some kind of solace, she thought, in being near the lake, why else would he come at this hour? She felt an odd kinship with him for, riven as she was, she could imagine no other reason for his being there. And so, her eyes fixed upon him, she made her way to the studio and began to work on the canvas she had abandoned the morning before. She worked rapidly, not correcting, not worrying about getting it right, but concentrating instead on making the colors and the masses express the sense of bewildering coincidence she was feeling, coincidence mixed with mystery and permeated with a feeling of something reaching out and comforting her. She paid no mind to the colors she had observed yesterday and knew were playing their lights upon her “subject” as she worked. She was looking for expression, now, not exactness, accuracy, or faithfulness—these would come later and would be laid over the sense of life her emotions and desires were shaping as they flowed with incredible rapidity from her heart through her arm onto the canvas. She kept her eye on the man as she worked, not to reproduce him but to fix him, to root him into the moment she was creating.
John Parrish felt rewarded. He saw Livia leave the back porch and follow the path to the studio. She was far away and he knew it was her only because she lived alone in the big house. Nevertheless, to see her was why he came, and he felt rewarded and grateful. He longed to speak with her and to be near her. This longing propelled him once again into his fantasy, and he sat for many minutes day dreaming. Accompanying this wishful mood, however, was another mood, a darker one, a mood that was a response to his ineffectualness and timidity, both of which he knew were truths he could neither deny nor overcome and which meant the absolute unfullfillment of his dream. So contradictory did he feel that he pulled his knees to his chest and sighed a tremulous breath.
He decided, feeling rash and almost hasty, to make inquiries about balloons, not that he would actually try to fly one. There was a place at the airport where balloonists went to schedule their times for preparation and flight. He would begin there. Perhaps he could find a little balloon, he thought. Or one that wouldn’t hold too much air, that would let him just drift across the lake and gently settle down in her yard. He knew nothing of balloons. He would find out. Bracing himself as though he had made a momentous decision, he rose, took a last long glance at the studio across the lake, in which he knew Livia was working, and turned into the trees.
When she saw him leave, Livia didn’t feel return to her that sense of abandonment that had sent her back into her emotional darkness the day before. Instead, she noted the time, and made a note of how long the man stayed. She continued to work on her canvas through the morning and after lunch turned to different tasks, to things she had been neglecting, like house cleaning, preparing flower beds in the yard, paying bills. She went to bed that evening feeling tired and relaxed, almost purposeful, and wondered about the morning.
And when she saw him sitting in that swath of sun on the bank across the lake, she felt a thrill, a confusing rush of feeling and emotion which she couldn’t and therefore decided not to interpret. The man was certainly looking across the water at her. Of this she was sure. Who could he be? she asked herself, and Why would he do that? She contemplated the wide water that separated them and wondered why it was so.
For his part, John Parrish dreamed, with his knees pulled up to his chin, of loving Livia, and waited to catch that momentary glimpse of her. In his imagination, he saw himself sail across the water, a human-shaped speck in the dangling basket, the dwarfing, massive, sky-clouding size of the balloon a measure of his heroism and determination. But always there was that fear he felt as a sudden deflation and collapse—perhaps over the water, where he would be dragged under from the weight of the thing and die, his heart bursting with frustration.
And so the two looked longingly across the gulf, each a mystery to the other.
Time ticked slowly for them, like the lowly worm climbing the winding stair.
The next morning, Livia was disappointed when she saw that the man was not sitting on the bank. She went nevertheless to her studio and continued to work on her canvas. She hadn’t been so pleased with her work for a long time. She titled the finished painting “The Coming Glory of the Light,” and immediately prepared another canvas. Light was what she was interested in now. Not objects and colors and their arrangement, but pure light, light as it illuminated the chaos and gave it form, light as the initiator of time and the shaper of matter, light as the arm of the creator himself!
All that day she worked. Wave after wave of perception washed over her, until she found that air and water and solid matter, light and darkness, life and death were all variations of the same theme. She sang as she painted and she danced round the easel and her voice and her motion became one with the light. Her painting became more and more mystical, until, finally, she felt she had no longer any connection with the mundane world of the physical body. She lay on the floor of her studio, overcome by ecstasies, her canvasses surrounding her like worlds in orbit round a sun.
John Parrish meanwhile had gone to sleep determined to fly the next day. He dreamed of himself rising beneath a great sphere, holding onto the rope at the corner of the basket. He felt the lightness of the physical stuff of which he was made as the wind lofted the balloon in a swift gravity-canceling uplift. His stomach dropped to his knees as he held to the rope, and the wind turned him this way and that as he swept over the trees and came to the lake. In his dream, he saw Livia below shading her eyes as she glanced up at the huge globe, and he called to her, as lover to lover, his voice trailing behind as the gaily colored world, of which he was the only inhabitant, rose and swept along, leaving Livia and her tall elms behind. He saw her growing smaller and smaller, and he saw the land below change. He saw how the lake was fed by the various creeks and streams leading into it, and he saw how the lake itself was only one part of a vast waterway draining the land, and then everything disappeared beneath layers of white cloud until he too disappeared. He woke in the middle of the night so lost and alone that not even birds companioned him, and he hollered out of his gondola that all he wants from life is a counter-response, one moment of original love. In the morning, he found himself on his knees hugging the bed post beside his pillow. He never went to the lake again.
The obituary gave no cause of death, and his few friends remarked how he did not survive his wife by much more than eight months. They buried him next to her and put his name on the stone, so that the remains of John and Livia Parrish could rest together as their freed souls wafted to that more permanent home that houses us all.
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