The Hare Read online

  “Picasso —”

  “Picasso!” He wheeled now to face her. “Perfect example, yes! He was brilliant. He upended all that stuffy realism and opened up a new way of seeing and creating. Art didn’t have to be replication or even representation. Art could be anything. Everything followed on from Picasso — surrealism, dada, modernism, postmodernism, post-postmodernism, Julian Schnabel with his silly broken pots. But Picasso found out he could wipe his ass on a piece of paper, and it would sell for millions. My parents had a Picasso in the dining room, it was crap, and the reverence they held for it infuriated me, it was an altarpiece to all that’s bogus and pretentious, and so when I was 13 I spray-painted a penis on it.”

  Rosie gasped and laughed, “What did they do?”

  “Didn’t matter, because I was right.”

  In front of her, Boccioni’s men, his horses swept on, they were still moving a century later, vibrating ferociously. She knew the futurists were fascists, war was glorious progress to them, yet none of them fought in the trenches. If they had, their art would have certainly become contaminated personal experience. What she loved about Boccioni, even Léger and Giacometti, was their focus on the metaphysical. “Art is an invitation to participate in ideas, not feelings,” she said boldly.

  “I’d argue against such didacticism. Our conversation proves the point that good art makes you think, and thinking isn’t the opposite of feeling — merely the opposite of intellectual posturing.” He held out his hand in introduction, “Bennett. Bennett Kinney.”

  “Rosie Monroe.”

  “Rosie Monroe, why do you know so much about art?”

  “I’m at Parsons.”

  “Rosie Monroe, you should read less and do more.”

  “I like the reading. Art is history, not battles and kings but the history of how people interpret the world. And anyway, I’m not very good at the doing.”

  “Who has told you that?”

  She looked at him now, and he was looking back, as if peering over a pair of eyeglasses, with sincere expectation. He had beautiful eyes — large like a woman’s with long lashes, and that thick dark blond hair, loosely curled. He was much older than her, he was a grown-up man. “I’m not an artist.” She wanted him to know that she knew her limits, she wasn’t conceited. “I’m a careful drawer, a painter of mediocre still lifes.”

  “You don’t know what gifts the angels will bring.” He leaned forward, continued in a low conspiratorial tone: “Listen, Rosie Monroe, I have to go. An auction at Christie’s, I’m bidding for a client. A tea set owned by the Duchess of Devonshire.”

  Rosie felt herself nodding like a normal person yet she was suddenly desolate. Her sweater was itchy, the crotch of her tights had sagged to mid-thigh and Bennett Kinney was going to leave her.

  Then, as he was walking away, he turned, smiled: “I’ll find you, Rosie Monroe.” And he did.

  The sea reflected light into the boathouse, wavering in morning, as if the building was underwater. The wood walls had been painted a deep sea green to amplify this effect. Rosie was a mermaid. A pregnant mermaid. The home-pregnancy test left no doubt. Since starting Parsons, her periods had been irregular, and she couldn’t remember the last one — certainly before she’d come to the boathouse in June with Bennett. She’d been careful, but there had been a couple of times when she’d gone to remove the diaphragm and found it already dislodged. And a few instances when she hadn’t replenished the spermicidal jelly between love-making. She had not anticipated how frequently she and Bennett would have sex. He desired her and it was grown-up to be able to fuck at will, she felt sometimes unsure but Bennett did things with his hands and his mouth and he wanted her to come, and she let herself roll on the waves of her orgasms while he watched and admired. Somewhere inside, Rosie had the idea, like a stone buried deep in the Presbyterian loam of her soul, this pregnancy was punishment for being greedy. Her orgasms were rich as chocolate cake or red velvet. Layers of sweetness and dripping icing.

  Gran believed in Fate, a force far more powerful than God because Fate could not be appealed to. Gran’s idea — drawn from the bitter experience of losing her husband and son — was that if you kept your head down and your mouth shut, Fate wouldn’t notice you. You were the dull girl the rapist walked right by, the plain flower that kept its head, the unsmiling mother who kept her child. Fate kept score, like a golfer. Once, Rosie had told this to Bennett and he’d scoffed: “The score sheet is millions of years long and in a language unspoken by humans.”

  This was why she loved him. He was wise, he set her free. With him, her blood felt different in her veins, warmer, smoother, just as her hair was blonder from the sun. He told her to stand naked in the window, silhouetted against the sea, and raise up her arms, and slowly turn around.

  He had brought her here to this light sea-place for the summer, which she’d otherwise be spending in Lowell, probably working at Dairy Queen and maybe seeing Chris, though she’d heard he was staying out in California. Bennett had given her an expensive set of pastels and charcoals and quality vellum paper because he saw her as an artist.

  His mother had been an artist, she’d studied in Paris and been friends with Lee Miller and Man Ray. In her day, in her family, in her marriage, art wasn’t encouraged as a serious endeavor, merely a hobby. “It was a great tragedy.” She’d settled for watercolors, a medium devoid of drama or ambition. “Sail boats,” Bennett said. “Thousands of fucking sail boats.” Rosie wondered if his mother was still alive and when they might meet. But, except in anecdotal form, Bennett never spoke about his family.

  An artist was a serious person, someone with visions and unique sensibilities, and every day Rosie aspired to visions, she waited for them through long, barren hours and she sometimes moved the pastels around in their box, rearranged the sequence of colors, and smudged them on her hands so Bennett would think she’d been working. She wanted to make up for his mother.

  And now she was pregnant. Which should feel momentous — wondrous or disastrous. But felt, instead, improbable.

  Rosie shifted on the bed to see the view out across the sound. The studio apartment perched high above the slips where Hobie and Mitzi kept an Atlantic and a meticulously refurbished lobster boat. She could hear the water below her gently slapping the boats. Elsewhere, in the gardens that sprawled between the boathouse and the main house: the ubiquitous droning of the lawnmower. The gardener was always mowing, the lawn short and thick as a high-quality wool carpet. The morning was breathless and hot, her skin damp with sweat, and the sea sprawled luxurious as Chinese silk, deep jade with hues of gentian further out. The sky was less interesting — a watery blue. Through the haze, she could just make out the distant cigar shape of Long Island.

  The entire day stretched ahead of her, the same intimidating blank canvas she faced every morning since the start of summer. Bennett was out, a private auction at Sotheby’s. Or perhaps an estate sale in Kennebunkport. An old chum selling off key pieces of her art collection to pay a blackmailer. A famous rock star — who must go unnamed, even though Rosie had no one to tell — needing to fund a stint at an expensive rehab in Switzerland. Sometimes, Bennett was away for the night, even two or three. It was easier than driving home. He stayed with his many dispersed friends, in their cottages and compounds, their penthouses and something he called peed da tear.

  What to draw? Rosie stared out at the blue indifference of the sea and felt bloated with boredom. A shower would take 15 minutes, breakfast another 15. That would leave only seven hours before Bennett had said he’d return. She tried to read the books he wanted her to, but even the best of these eventually had her nodding off in the heat. At Parsons, her days had been so neatly collated, classes, assignments, studio time, homework. Was this adulthood? Great slabs of meaty time, hanging loose. Gran had always been busy, scurrying, tired, she worked at a school for special ed children, not with them — they were too needy, too noisy, too messy — but filing, answering phones. This work left Gran exhauste
d, a fragile exoskeleton, who sighed and placed cold food from the SPED kids’ cafeteria on the table instead of dinner, the food jumbled together, the Jello and the beef stroganoff or what was supposed to be beef stroganoff but rather a fatty, gritty blob that smelled like an armpit.

  If Rosie was an artist. Wearing only black. She’d be Georgia O’Keeffe in her red desert, staring through bones. O’Keeffe astride a motorcycle, looking back at the camera, was a woman in complete mastery of herself. She had shed all impediments to her art — the jealous Stieglitz, the noise of New York, the clutter of other people. Childless, she lived alone in a house with large windows and empty rooms in a remote corner of New Mexico. She was an arrow with a singular direction. She was heroic. Even in photographs of her younger self, there’d been no hesitancy — she’d never been a foolish young woman: she stared boldly at the camera.

  Rosie lined the pencils up with the pad of paper. The dishes were done, the floor swept, bed made. These days were translucent like eggs without yolks.

  She put her hand on her belly. Who was in there? A wayward seed. She decided to walk along the shore to the country club before the plastic heat melted everything. It was not a pretty walk, just hemming the golf course and a narrow, weedy beach. The sea was flat, a few boats bobbed about. The haze folded the water into the sky, giving the feeling of containment. She could just see the shore beyond Southport Harbor — a continuation of the large, leafy properties with private docks and boathouses. The views of the residents were only ever a reflection back of their own wealth, or of the sea. Wealth was Bennett’s word; he’d said the very rich never say rich. “The wealthy don’t live in ocean-front properties,” he’d told her. “They live by the sea.” Rosie still had trouble understanding Bennett’s idea of wealth because her only measure was Lowell, where the rich had big new cars and went to Florida for spring vacation, and had brick and cement gateposts and statues of Roman gods flanking their front doors. They were usually involved in construction or real estate. Yet Bennett dismissed such people as “the kind who wear white after Labor Day.” His voice had lowered in mock horror: “And even white clothing with gold jewelry.”

  The beach improved on the other side of the PRIVATE BEACH MEMBERS ONLY sign. There was hardly anyone around this early, just a few nannies and their kids, a clutch of older women in tennis whites, their brittle limbs tanned to a roast chicken tint. Rosie ambled up to the clubhouse, hoping for a glass of water.

  A short, tightly muscled man in tennis whites smiled at her as she attempted to sit in a chair on the porch. “Can I help you?”

  “I was just —” she began. She thought about the pregnancy test. Bennett wanted to be careful, he’d suggested the pill. Why hadn’t she just gone on the pill? She’d worried it might make her fat. Pregnancy would make her fat all right.

  “Are you meeting someone here?”

  “Just walking.” She must have said something else — did she? — because he left and came back with an iced water. He stood right there while she drank it. The water was wonderfully cold. Was he a member? A waiter? A tennis coach?

  “I’m staying at the Wallace’s boathouse.” She thought he should know this.

  He took her glass. “Should I put a day membership on their chit?”

  Chit? What was a chit? It sounded like shit but Rosie was certain this wasn’t about shit. Sweat pricked her underarms, she felt nervous, even though there was no threat, this tidy man, here on this warm day in full view of nannies. The lifeguard on the beach was rubbing thick white sunscreen on his face. But something was happening between her and this man — a low frequency transmission.

  “Do you know Bennett?” she ventured.

  “I know Bennett.” His tone was obscure. She saw the slow sea crinkling in the sun. Long Island, a finger smudge. “But he is not a member here. Either.”

  She regarded his blank face. The either was said with a slight thrust. His smile remained fixed, exhibiting nothing but excellent dentistry.

  “Thanks for the water.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  In a way, she was fascinated by how words and their meaning could so completely diverge. She was not welcome at all. She wondered at the invisible power already moving her back down onto the beach, his mind like a leaf blower, getting rid of litter. She was trash. He was Uri Geller. Her face flushed, her mouth was dry as she gave him a little wave and walked back from where she’d come. He didn’t return the wave.

  When Bennett came home that evening, she told him, and he snorted, “Chip, what an ass.”

  “His name is Chip? Like chocolate chip? Wood chip?”

  “It’s actually Charles.”

  “How do you get Chip from Charles?”

  Bennett opened the fridge and took out a couple of beers, handed her one. “It’s a WASP thing. Chip, Skip, Pookie, Whip, Chat, Buffy, Muffy, Minsy, Miffy, Mitzy.” Then he laughed that private laugh he had. “Matty, Twatty.”

  “I don’t know what a wasp thing is.”

  “White Anglo Saxon Protestant. Although, occasionally, an Irish Catholic sneaks in the tradesman’s entrance. My mother famously referred to Rose Kennedy as ‘The Arriviste.’ But then my mother married a Kinney, also a papist. Her father was not happy.”

  Often Bennett’s sentences were a kind of lace — an antimacassar — full of pretty holes she didn’t understand. “I’m a white Anglo-Saxon.”

  “You’re not a WASP.” He explained: “WASPs are tribal, like Jews. We intermarry to keep our money and our bloodlines, we congregate in certain places, dress a certain way, speak a certain patois. We have pugs but not chows, never chows. We have sensitive radars for interlopers and can spot a fake school tie from a hundred yards.”

  As this was intended to clarify, Rosie nodded. “How did Chip know I wasn’t a WASP?”

  Bennett laughed, “Aside from the way you dress, you have no native sense of entitlement.”

  Rosie had no idea what he meant.

  “That,” he pointed out, “is my point.”

  They took the beers down to the sea. The water moved slickly over the brick slipway, the daintiest tugging of the tides. Rosie had been to York Beach in Maine as a little girl, she’d gone with another family who’d wanted to be generous. The sea there had humped and smacked the sand, and Rosie was a fearful swimmer. While the others screeched and dove, she’d paddled only knee deep and they had jeered her from beyond the breaking waves. Now Bennett struck out, a fine, strong stroke, he barely made a ripple on the water’s smooth surface.

  “Come on,” he urged.

  Rosie was again knee deep. She felt a sudden surge of anger at not being good at anything; she was undefined, like a giant amoeba in the shape of a 19-year-old girl. Why did Bennett even love her? She wasn’t beautiful or funny or interesting. He believed she was an artist, but she wasn’t. She imagined his other lovers, blond and golden and bold — WASPs who sailed and skied and wore lime green and bright pink and certainly didn’t get pregnant. He hadn’t had to teach them how to give head or how to sit astride him that’s it, that’s right, just liiikke thaaat moving back and forth. They’d be out there swimming with him, stroke for stroke.

  Bennett swam far out. He didn’t worry about sharks or undertows. Rosie drank her beer — she shouldn’t be drinking if she was pregnant, which she was, but hardly pregnant. She didn’t need to be pregnant, she didn’t even need to tell Bennett and she’d get unpregnant.

  Small birds bobbed about in the frill of surf, pecking and skittering. “I envy the bird at home in his garden” — a line, a poem from one of Bennett’s books, he was so well read, he’d studied at Oxford. Modern Literature. Or was it History? She wasn’t envious of the birds, for they were small and flew through wild storms; but she yearned for their sense of purpose, their ergonomic design. The loose, gelatinous shell of her wobbled around her narrower, psychic self. She had no idea even how to occupy her own body, and now a little, polyp thing was burrowing into her flesh, nesting.

  Bennett
had turned toward the shore, his arms arcing in perfect rhythm. He was an excellent swimmer, the muscles on his sun-freckled shoulders bunched and released. He suddenly reared out of the water and ran at her and caught her, she screamed as he dragged her into the sea. The cold water surged around her, she clung to him in terror. He did not hear her terror, only her excitement, and this urged him on, he plunged her and tossed her, ravishing her like Neptune. Finally, she bit him hard on the shoulder and he let her go — he threw her aside. “What the fuck, Rosie?”

  “I can’t swim, I can’t swim.” Her voice at a strange high pitch.

  His face contorted, he took a step back. “Everyone can swim.”

  “I’m sorry —”

  He rubbed the teeth marks on his shoulder.

  She was shaking. He watched her, repelled by her. She turned and ran up the stairs, she shut the bathroom door behind her. Of course she could swim, she could swim, just not very well. She’d bitten him! He would send her back, he would send her back like a dog from the pound. Rosie put the toilet lid down, sat. Her teeth chattered as if she was cold. Bennett had turned on music — Dire Straits. She heard the screen door as he moved out onto the deck to drink another beer. Money for nothing and your kicks for free. What was wrong with her? She was demented, faulty. She must go back to Gran of her own accord, she would take a bus, she would walk the streets, the lefts and rights until she was there, she would bow her head and knock on the door. Gran waited therein, with her crossword and her one glass of sherry. Oh, she’d always been waiting, she’d always known Rosie would come back, unwanted by the outer world.

  Bennett knocked on the bathroom door. “What’s going on, Rosie?”

  She leaned against the door, her hand encircling the handle.

  “Open the door.”

  Gran wouldn’t even look up, Rosie would walk past her and up the stairs. Not her bedroom on the right. But the one at the end of the hall. The lodger’s room.

  “Rosie?” Bennett persisted. He knocked louder.