The Hare Read online

  Rosie gazed at the velvet sofa in bright bottle green against a citron wall, plush cushions with pink silk fringe and orange tassels. Oil paintings. She recognized some of the Hudson River school, and, incredibly, a Miró above an elegant antique desk. Persian rugs on polished cherry-wood floors, looming vases of cut flowers, heavy drapes in peacock blue. She loved the confident riot of colors, she could not imagine being so bold.

  “Yoohoo!!!” The high trill belonged to a tall, brittle blond in a black dress, waving, the many rings on her fingers glittering. “There you are!” Rosie watched as this woman threw her charred arms around Bennett. Her lips were bright peach. “You are adorable! Thank you for coming! Oh, you do look like your mater!”

  Her appearance was entirely constructed. Her movements jerky and imprecise. She was a kind of puppet, and inside there was another woman, perhaps a tiny, quick brunette, busily working the gears and levers.

  “Mitzi, darling, you look spectacular!” Bennett kissed her taut cheek.

  “And you are Posie!” Mitzi pivoted to Rosie, who imagined she could hear the mechanical whirring and clacking.

  “Rosie.”

  “Of course, Rozzzeeee. Is that Rosemary? Rosalind? You prefer Rozzzeee. How sweet! Welcome. How is everything at the boathouse? We’re so glad you’re staying there. We do like to have it used. No point in leaving such a divine little place to rot.” Mitzi smiled, the little woman inside her frantically pulling and pushing the levers, locking them into the smile position. “Do you need another drink?” A twiglet arm extended into the air with a clatter of gold, diamonds refracting like a disco ball. “Selena! Selena!” As Selena abruptly turned and approached, Rosie noted the little white cap she wore to match the white frilly apron over the black uniform. “Posie needs another glass.”

  “No, I —” Because the first glass was fizzing the cauldron of her stomach.

  “Or would you prefer something else?” Mitzi began to speed up, something was wrong inside her. “We have a full bar bourbon Scotch gin and of course wine very nice Napa Chardonnay surprising what is coming out of California these days though my father would roll over in his grave he was with the 82nd Airborne and would only ever drink French wine absolutely banned Riesling bloody Krauts he’d say though didn’t think much of the French either they fight with their feet and fuck with their face he’d say so no Riesling even with pudding and brandy if that’s your thing vodka —”

  Rosie looked to Selena but Selena’s expression remained blank.

  “Ouzo Grappa a fruity Beaujolais —”

  “Water,” Rosie blurted.

  “Water, Selena.”

  Selena turned on a dime like a soldier, and Mitzi’s crazed eyes locked on to Rosie. “Water? You’re not pregnant, are you? Good God! Bennett as a father!” She laughed in a short, hard spurt, then her gaze shifted abruptly. “Do excuse me.” Her hand briefly perched on Rosie’s shoulder, and she marched into the crowd, performing again and again a flawless turn, pivot, twist while chiming “Yoohoo!!” like a faulty doorbell.

  In the quiet eddy of Mitzi’s wake, Rosie caught her breath. Then she turned, surveyed the room. She did not see Bennett and noted the hallway to the left. Escape, she thought, and eased through the crowd. Here, the decorator had picked up the peacock blue on the walls in a vibrant wallpaper print, contrasting with a bottle-green carpet. The carpet was so plush that Rosie took off her shoes to feel it against her feet and to relieve the squeeze of her right big toe. Hunting prints lined the hallway — caricature horses with spindly legs, arched necks and bulging shoulders leapt over ditches or pranced against a screen of autumnal woods. Midway along, a table with delicately turned legs displayed a cluster of photographs in silver frames. Rosie scoured the images: attractive people in white Victorian ruffles with tennis rackets; in riding clothes with hounds; a debutante’s ball — a pretty girl with a chin like Hobie’s; sailing (was that a Kennedy at the helm? Certainly the teeth); a couple on a tropical beach (was that Princess Margaret?). Gran had managed to stick Rosie’s school portraits onto the fridge with free magnets from an insurance company. Her father and grandfather, Jim and Jim, looked down from plain black frames in the hallway. And her mother, her mother? “You’re her spitting image,” Gran had declared. “I hope you will be more sensible.” Rosie’d looked in the mirror, trying to see her insensible mother, for there was no photographic record, and sometimes Rosie felt Gran wanted to wipe her away as well. Then there’d be no trace at all.

  The hallway smelled of lemon and silver polish, of the freesias in the vase by the photographs, of Mitzi’s perfume, and, she thought, of shoe polish. She dug her feet into the carpet and felt the real wool, thick and soft: plush. Could she recall one plush thing from Gran’s house? One of the lodgers had been a woman with a satin wash bag. Rosie could even now recall the wonder of it in the second-floor bathroom, the pale blue glimmering fabric, a tuft of lace and sequin on the front, and inside, pots of fragrant cream and make-up. Rosie had licked the satin as if she might assuage the hunger it made her feel — the coveting. The blue washbag mocked the rough towels, the tacky linoleum, the polyester sheets that snagged on the tiniest hangnail. Yet Rosie had feared for the woman. No good would come to someone with such an indulgent washbag. Fate would see it, glowing like a flare, and stamp her out.

  “Are you looking for the double u c?”

  Hobie, drink in hand, the ice gently clinking.

  “Yes,” Rosie waivered. “No.”

  “Usually, one’s not ambivalent about such things.” He smiled. She was suddenly aware of how clean he was. He was white linen on a breezy day. Maybe money made you cleaner than other people. His hand rested on the pretty wooden table — nails, neatly trimmed, the cuticles obedient.

  “I don’t know —” Her words wandered away, dandelion seeds in the breeze.

  He smiled, kind, and what lovely teeth. “What a double u c is?”

  Instead of a nod, she pressed her lips together.

  “Ah.” Another smile. “W dot C dot. W.C. Water Closet. Toilet, bathroom, john. Loo if you’re from across the pond.”

  Rosie could lie, that would be easiest, but then she would have to go to the bathroom, and she’d have to come back from it and he’d expect her to re-enter the party. “No. I don’t need the W.C.”

  Hobie leaned in, a co-conspirator, “I hate parties, too.”

  “Your house is so beautiful.”

  “Mitzi is a genius.”

  “I love the wallpaper.”

  “Ah, the wallpaper.” He chuckled privately. “And you’re at college?”

  “Parsons School of Design.”

  “An artist. I say! Are you any good?”

  As she faced him, she wondered if he was attracted to her. “I’m not sure.”

  “Are you working on anything this summer? Painting the sea?”

  Rosie flushed, lowered her gaze. Her body reacted to him — she wanted to curtsey again. “Not the sea. Gloves.”

  “Globes?”

  “Gloves. A pair of gloves.”

  “What kind of gloves?”

  “White gloves,” she said.

  “Interesting!” He gave a short laugh. “We used to have to wear those to dancing school. The waltz, the cha cha cha. Had to escort the debutantes, you see. I used to wonder about the gloves. Were they to keep me clean or the girl? I rather think, as a sweaty boy, it was the latter.”

  Rosie hadn’t thought of this, she hadn’t wondered at all why The Giggle Man wore the gloves. Now, she considered the purpose, and the purposefulness. Gloves were a barrier. And why white? Not rubber gloves, washing-up gloves, winter wool or even the kind doctors wore. She said: “I think the gloves were like masks for the hands so his hands weren’t his hands.”

  “Hand masks?”

  “The gloves create an objectivity.”

  “I never thought of that.” Hobie now thought. “It’s a way of creating the impersonal while doing something as intimate as dancing. You are clever.”
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br />   Rosie pressed her lips together, she didn’t want to smile. Hobie put his hand lightly on her arm, a moment only; then he released her. “Let me show you something.”

  He led her down the hall, turned right into a large drawing room. This was not a room for drawing, she knew, but for withdrawing from the dining room after dining. The walls and ceiling were crimson, huge windows overlooked the gardens to the sundimming sea beyond. The overstuffed sofas were pale blue satin with maroon trim — a daring contrast to the walls. What must it be like to walk in these rooms with a sense of complete possession? Mine. Everything was perfect, beautiful, tasteful. Here, too, were fresh flowers — tumbling roses among a twisting dark creeper and a wild ruff of Queen Anne’s lace.

  “What do you think?” Hobie was saying, standing in front of a small painting hung discreetly on a side wall. “I just got it last week.”

  Rosie stepped closer, and Hobie stepped aside. “That’s not —”

  “Yes. It is.”

  The low, bland light of a Dutch winter, the claustrophobia of a life lived primarily indoors — how the black and white tile flooring and wood paneling narrowed that interior space so it pressed upon the thin, upright couple who stood deep within the framework. The husband seemed bored — something about the focus of his eyes, as if he was looking beyond the artist who’d been working in the foreground. But his young wife, much younger — pale, almond-eyed — stared boldly and immediately at the viewer, as if in challenge. The artist had chosen to maximize the interior, possibly to show the couple’s wealth through the quality of the woodwork and flooring. Yet, the effect was a subtle sense of imprisonment. Just glimpsed in the background, a maid stood by an open door. In the sunlit outer world, she held a dead hare by the ears.

  “You have this in your house.” Rosie was breathless.

  “Would you like to touch it?”

  “No!”

  “I’m giving you permission.”

  “I can’t!”

  “Go on!”

  Rosie lifted her hand, her fingers lightly caressed the paint.

  “Mitzi doesn’t understand.” Hobie had put even more distance between them. “We had a terrible row about where to hang it. She says it ruins the pink.”

  “I can see her point.”

  “Really?”

  “I mean, this is the wrong room for it.”

  He tilted his head to one side, waiting for her to continue. She felt a rush: this incredibly rich man was listening to her.

  “You never come in here. Or you come in here only to see the painting. And that’s not enough. Look at the girl.” Hobie looked. “She wants you to look at her. Maybe vanity. She’s proud.”

  Hobie nodded.

  “But she doesn’t see the house is a kind of prison for them.”

  Hobie looked closer.

  “See how he’s contracted the space, used lines to create a kind of claustrophobia.”

  “There you are!”

  Rosie and Hobie were standing several feet apart. They had never touched, only his hand briefly on her arm in the hallway. There was nothing to hide. Mitzi glanced down at Rosie’s bare feet and smiled — slowly; as the wires seemed to catch on the little levers behind her face, so that the smile stopped then started, stopped then started, requiring effort to have it achieve full height. “Bennett’s looking for you, Rosalee.”

  For their first date, two weeks after meeting at MoMA, Bennett had taken Rosie to The Stanhope Hotel on Fifth Avenue for tea. The maître-d’ led them across the room to a table in the corner. The room was unexceptional, pea-green wallpaper and fusty furnishings, and the patrons were mostly old ladies. Two of them knew Bennett, and he stopped to fuss over them and they kept touching him, one of them murmuring something about poor, sick Pookie. The woman spoke in indulgent singsong, “Poor widdle Pookie-wookie.” Bennett was very sorry to hear about Pookie, he had kissed her hand.

  The maître-d’ had pulled Rosie’s chair out and she didn’t know why, she thought she’d dropped something, so she looked down.

  “Rosie,” Bennett had whispered. “Just sit.”

  Expertly, the man put the chair under her ass and she gave a little laugh. A waiter was already there, and even as he held out the tombstone-sized menus, Bennett told him, “The usual, please.”

  “What’s wrong with Pookie?” Rosie asked in a low voice.

  “Lung cancer.”

  Rosie had said, “I didn’t know dogs could get lung cancer.”

  Bennett’s eyes had sparkled, his mouth stilled a smile. “Pookie is her husband. Smoked three packs a day.”

  The tea came. Not the tea Rosie had ever seen — a Lipton teabag in a mug — but in a china pot with china cups, saucers, side plates, silver spoons, tiny silver forks and tiny round knives like dolls’ cutlery. A jug for milk. A silver dish for the butter, beading with cold. A tiered tray of pastel-colored cakes and scones. Bennett poured the tea, which curled out of the pot and into her cup with a smoky aroma.

  “Lapsang souchong,” he’d told her. “Have it with the tiniest dash of milk.”

  As well as the table, he had reserved a room with a view of the park, and after tea he took her there, which was presumptuous and also thrilling. He took off his clothes while she sat on the bed, remembering to keep her shoulders back. Bennett had the bulky body of a man, he was tanned even though it was midwinter, and when he moved to stand in front of her she traced the line of white around his waist with her finger.

  “Use your tongue,” he said.

  Afterward, when he saw the dab of bright red blood on the white sheet, he touched her face, “I had no idea you were a virgin.”

  Virgin had sounded odd, old-fashioned, Mary in her blue robes, clean and pure.

  “Hey.” Bennett had kissed her. “Don’t cry.” He had held her, cloaked in his body.

  “Rosie? Hello. It’s Hobie.”

  She scrambled out of bed, almost dropping the phone.

  “The gent who lives in the big house up the hill,” he prompted.

  “Of course, Hobie.” Did he really think she’d forgotten him?

  “I keep thinking about what you said, about the painting. And you’re right, it needs to be elsewhere. Are you free at all this morning? Could you come and help me hang it?”

  Clearly, there were professional people — tradesmen — to whom Hobie might turn, if he could not wield a hammer and nail himself. What did he want? She recalled his caution when they’d been alone together. Maybe he genuinely wanted her opinion? He even liked her, as a person, found her interesting? He’d actually said Interesting. He actually said You are clever.

  “That would be lovely,” she said, because she knew her art, didn’t she, she had instinct, and he was going to recommend her for a job at a gallery, a museum, Sotheby’s. Maybe he would even ask to see her art, and he’d become a benefactor, a patron, not necessarily a lover, or perhaps a lover in a sophisticated way, he’d appreciate the arterial quality emerging in her work, and there’d be a year in Paris, an attic studio in Montparnasse where the artists lived, or a light-filled loft near Ida Shultz.

  Rosie stood in front of the mirror. Her belly was only slightly convex. Still, she felt a heaviness in her pelvis, like a bad period, and her waist had thickened. She went through her clothes, she didn’t have many, she couldn’t afford them on her student’s stipend and was not one of those women who instinctively understood clothes, who threw this on with that and looked chic, iconic. Sometimes, she caught her reflection in the mirror or a shop window and was crushed by how disordered she appeared. She was slim and long-limbed, but clothes did not flatter her. Even Bennett said she looked better naked.

  Blue leggings, she decided at last, Bennett’s blue Brooks Brothers shirt with the French cuffs over a white tank top. The Ralph Lauren espadrilles. Even though one was too small, she had only sneakers otherwise. Hair up in a clip, trace of mascara, no other make-up. She studied herself in the mirror, then pulled a tendril of her hair loose. If someone reach
ed up and undid the sliver clip, such hair would tumble down, cascade into their hands.

  Ascending along the line of cedar trees that bordered the gravel track from the boathouse, Rosie then cut through to the gardens that spilled over lawns and terraces. In the hazy summer morning light, these were voluptuous, impressionistic — subtle constraint countered wild abandon. The profusion of flowers and greenery obeyed the unseen gardener who tamed them gently — one of those cowboys who whispered to their horses instead of beating them into submission. She could just make him out, by the shed, fixing one of the mowers.

  The veranda door was open, Hobie standing in the door, framed by purple wisteria. “Thank you for coming, Rosie.”

  “I wouldn’t miss the opportunity to see that painting again.”

  “And the older gentleman who owns it?”

  Her armpits prickled, she was suddenly wary. But also flattered. “Is he here?” She gazed around enquiringly. “Can I meet him?”

  Hobie laughed. They moved inside. Somewhere, there was the sound of a vacuum cleaner — Rosie doubted Mitzi was at the helm. They reached the main reception area as Selena appeared in her maid’s costume.

  “Selena, dear, could you bring us coffee in my study?”

  Hobie’s study was on the lower level. In a normal house, this would be the basement. But here it was a kind of Bat Cave replete with pool table, card table, dart board. Nothing so trashy as a wet bar, but a hand-carved, antique mahogany bar along one wall and sofas and chairs covered in a masculine dark hunter-green plaid. The same green covered the ceiling and walls above darkly stained wood paneling, but with the light from the ocean and sky, the room avoided being gloomy. Folders and papers smothered the surface of Hobie’s vast teak desk. No doubt from his bankers, his board members. Books spilled out of the book shelves, stood in piles on the floor.