Doon
The Doon School of Fine Arts occupied the former summer house of Horatio Walker, a modestly celebrated (there is no other kind) nineteenth-century Canadian painter. Two of his canvases, landscapes with sulfurous skies and tossing trees, hung on the walls of the dining room, where art students doubling as waitresses set the long communal tables and served the meals: shepherd’s pie, weeping coleslaw, hard rolls on a side plate. Dinner always began with tomato juice in a slender glass, like the red line in a thermometer.
I had just turned seventeen. My parents, eager to encourage my precocious “way with words” and my “flair for art” (I excelled at drawing horses in profile) had signed me up for summer courses—one week of Introductory Oil Painting, followed by a week of Introductory Creative Writing. My father kept urging me to send something in to Reader’s Digest for the “Humor in Uniform” section, overlooking the fact that I was not in active military service. I was in grade twelve. But I did have a sort of uniform—the pink smock I wore for my part-time job as a shampoo girl for Rico’s House of Beauty. With the word “Rose” embroidered on one pocket. I had a sort of boyfriend too. But I was growing tired of Larry, so I agreed to go to Doon.
It was 1963, the first year the school offered a writing course, and they were pleased to welcome John Hoyer Updike as the inaugural instructor. He had published a book of poems, The Tessellated Hen, which I couldn’t find in the Burlington library. But I didn’t need to read it, or his new novel about an aging basketball player. His stories had been published in The New Yorker and that was godlike enough for me.
The photo in Doon’s brochure showed a mild, goatish-looking young man with a long nose and bushy eyebrows, smiling. His brown hair was cut short, a thatch at war with multiple cowlicks. His gaze met the camera as if sharing a joke, and his upper lip had an appealing dip in the middle, like the waist of a violin. It was an expression of mischief, intelligence, and appetite. He was young, probably not even thirty, but to me anyone over nineteen was generically adult.
On the page opposite was a picture of the art teacher, Emilio Renzetti, looking truculent and disheveled with black hairs curling out of his open shirt. I showed his picture to my father one morning as he was reading the paper. “That guy looks like trouble,” he said, snapping the business section open. I decided not to show him the slightly satyr-faced Harvard grad who would help usher me into the pages of Reader’s Digest.
It was the summer I wore my blond hair short, in a “cap cut” with comma-shaped side curls that I Scotch-taped to my cheeks each night. This sometimes left faint shiny patches on my cheeks. My legs were long and tanned and I wore shorts most of the time, although these were always part of carefully engineered outfits. A pair of pale-yellow Bermudas with a matching halter top, both reversible to a blue plaid fabric, was my number-one outfit. I wore it the day my parents drove me to Doon to meet my fellow students—all women—for Art Week.
The seven of us shared an airy dormitory at the top of the stairs where we kept our suitcases under iron-frame beds covered with chenille spreads in pastel shades. There were two brisk and wiry older women who wore unusual eyeglasses. Real painters, they had brought along folding chairs for working outdoors. I was by far the youngest of the group, with my three stiff, never-used brushes.
Horatio Walker’s house sat in a sort of dell across from a willow-shaded river. The Grand flowed through Doon with a Wordsworthian stateliness that set it apart from the stolid farmland and creeping suburbs of southern Ontario. Languid, pastoral, and somehow secretive, Doon already felt fictional to me—the perfect setting for a murder, or a love affair.
On our first morning, the dorm ladies convened downstairs for a Life Drawing session. This took place in the dining room with a naked model posed on the same draped table we would later sit around for dinner. With sticks of charcoal we worked at easels on big sheets of beige newsprint. The idea, Emilio told us, was to work fast; if a sketch wasn’t getting anywhere, we should flip the sheet and start afresh.
I found I was good at it, the quick, intuitive first strokes. I liked the focused silence of the room, all of us scratching away in a circle, heads tilting up and down. For me—a virgin—it was also sexual in a perfectly manageable way. Sometimes the model was one of the waitresses who would later serve us, which was a little shocking. There was a stool in place for her to step up onto the table. I learned that the trick was to take in the fact of her nakedness and then to see through it, break it down into lines and shadows. Soon you were inside the state of nakedness with her, which almost caused it to disappear. This made the prospect of my own potential nakedness less alarming.
In the afternoon, we switched to oil painting, outside. We trailed across the lawn behind Emilio into the woods, where we were expected to find a particular stump or rock or split-rail fence that took our fancy and paint it en plein air.
“Just paint what speaks to you,” said Emilio, who seemed faintly irritated by all of us.
I had no idea how to discover the contours in the mess that was Nature. One tree looked like another to me. My new wooden palette fit the curve of my thumb in an agreeable way, and I liked squeezing wet rosettes of paint onto it, then twirling them flat with my brush. But while the rest of the group got down to work, dabbing away in silence, I couldn’t seem to find a subject that drew my eye.
As I wandered more deeply into the woods, I stumbled on the foundation of a ruined barn—a dark, stony tooth socket in the earth with a still-intact staircase in one corner. Stairs to nowhere. I tried to paint these red pointless steps rising out of the earth, perhaps recognizing something hopeful, aspiring, but wildly out of context, like me.
On our second day, fed up with my efforts, I filled another canvas with an agitated pine tree that at least had some turmoil and energy to it. It was every color but green. Emilio came by, frowning. He studied my tree for a moment, then pointed to a whirling ochre bit. “Very painterly,” he murmured and passed on.
That was encouraging. But the next afternoon, when I tried to repeat myself, it didn’t work.
So I gave up on art.
* * *
Still, the daily routines at Doon pleased me. I liked sleeping in the dorm with the gentle snoring ladies, and coming down at the end of the day to tomato juice and jellied salads on the two long tables. We’d wait for the swinging doors to open as the waitresses, some of them local girls with dancing ponytails and other things on their minds, came in and out carrying metal water jugs. I liked playing sad, precocious bits of Erik Satie on the loose-keyed piano in the parlor, or taking solitary walks in the rain down to the stone bridge over the Grand, dressed in a man’s yellow rain jacket that came to the bottom of my shortest stretch-terrycloth shorts.
One night after a downpour, the river turned the color of milky tea and rose almost to the height of the banks. A crew from a local TV show came by in a van and shot me standing pensively (needless to say) on the bridge. I saw myself on the news that night and was shocked by how normal and round-faced I looked. I thought I was working on a different sort of character, the girl with cheekbones who reads Albert Camus and plays sarabandes at dusk.
Doon was less than a hamlet—just a cemetery, a gas station, and a general store. Nothing ever happened there after dark, except Ping-Pong. In the evenings some of us would wander down the road, passing under the single moth-orbited streetlight as the frogs kept up a chorus as loud and rhythmic as a polka band. When we reached the Shell station, we’d throw stones at the orange metal sign, which would silence the frogs. Then the chorus would start up again and we’d head back to the dorms.
One of my roommates, I noticed, was reading Rabbit, Run. Sherry was the best painter of the group and the oldest. I asked her if she liked it and did she know that John Updike himself was coming to Doon in a few days.
“He’s quite good at description. But the hero is a man who sells vegetable peelers and doesn’t much like his wife,” she said with a dismissive flap of her hand. “It does have spicy bits though. Very spicy.” She looked over the navy-blue frames of her glasses. “Not for you, my dear.”
I reviewed the thin sheaf of writing I would present to John Updike. This included the grad notes I had written for our high school yearbook, many of which were shockingly inappropriate. (“Most likely to die young.”) A story about a picnic, told from the point of view of an ant. Several self-deprecating essays about trying and failing to do something, such as knitting a sweater for my dog.
But the quality that most equipped me for writing, perhaps, was a chronic sense of unease. I felt outside most things, a shy and yearning observer—if not a fly on the wall, then an ant at the picnic. At seventeen I was already the omniscient narrator of my own life, both everywhere and nowhere at once. I also had the remnants of a childhood stutter, and dreaded being called upon in chemistry class in case I had to say the word “carbon” with its unforgiving hard c. My stutter did make me choose my words more carefully, though. It fed writing.
No, the most remarkable thing about me that summer at Doon was the fact that I was full of longings I couldn’t name. I thought these longings had to do with art. And in a way, they did; first loves are partly works of fiction.
Day after day the weather was humid and lethargic, with pulses of sheet lightning in the evenings. All the women dressed skimpily. I had no sense of being pretty, but did feel in possession of some mysterious new power, a little. I noticed that men were willing to take their time with me, to help me out, and that I didn’t seem to have to do anything to earn this attention. I believed they were interested in my “talent.”
Then the week ended, the lady painters all left except for me, and the writers arrived. My heart sank. They were an ungainly group: a stooped fellow in a short-sleeved shirt who made claymation films and wished to learn how to write crime novels; a retired Ottawa Valley schoolteacher documenting her dead husband’s war experiences; a poet named L’Orren who had actually published her poetry in journals with names like Axis and Penumbra. L’Orren had a stormy mass of dark hair that she kept capturing in a large saw-toothed barrette and then releasing, like a little animal. She wore black liquid eyeliner and semitransparent Indian shirts with black tights, despite the heat.
There was a playwright, Steve, hoping to improve his dialogue. Also a fellow with cloudy glasses who said that he had been working on his “picaresque sci-fi” novel, Dark Matter, for the past four years. I thought he’d said “picturesque.” Dinner that first night was awkward and there was no Ping-Pong afterward.
The next morning, the group gathered on the deep front porch, dragging the wicker chairs into a semicircle. We exchanged names and a few words about our projects then lapsed into silence, waiting for the arrival of John Updike. He was late. “Well, I have some poems I could read,” said L’Orren, but just then a tall, ruddy-faced, bony-shouldered figure dashed up the steps with a stack of books and papers in his arms. He wore khakis and a button-down oxford-cloth shirt with pale blue stripes.
“I apologize, everyone—crossing the border took longer than I expected.” He took in our listless group and patted one of the white faux-colonial columns that framed the porch.
“This is all rather grand. I was expecting little cabins.”
He handed out the week’s assignments and a long, long reading list. I recognized a few names—Philip Roth, James Thurber, Marcel Proust. None of which I had read. One woman, Edith Wharton.
L’Orren offered him her chair but he sat on the top step of the porch with his back against a column, smoking a cigarette. He’d been going through customs at Niagara Falls, he explained, when the authorities undertook a very thorough search of his car, an “unremarkable” Ford Falcon.
“I had nothing to hide,” he said, “but I was overwhelmed by a t-tidal wave of irrational g-guilt.”
A stutter! I looked away. What if it triggered mine?
“Everyone feels like a criminal when they cross a border,” said L’Orren. That earned a smile from John Updike.
Our first assignment was to describe one five-minute period in our day. It was to be a close description of what we observed, not our finer emotions, or, God forbid, ideas. “Ideas are easy,” he said. “First, tell me what you see.”
What I saw was L’Orren beside me, gazing at the lawn and the push mower that had been abandoned there with avid, writerly eyes, already basking in the radiance of the ordinary. “I thought Art Week was over,” I whispered to her, but her frown shushed me.
He set up appointments with each of us and collected our bits of writing. Then, with a kind of relish, as if describing a good meal, he told us that writing was “mostly an ongoing experience of self-doubt and falling short of the mark.” He laughed, a sharp sound, almost a bray. “But an absolute freedom exists on the blank page, and we must make use of it.”
The next morning after breakfast I found him waiting for me on the steps of the porch, smoking. His way with a cigarette was languid, a little feminine. The day was already still and hot; the cicadas had begun to make the sound that marks the zenith of summer just before the downward tilt.
He fanned the pages I had given him, including my prize-winning senior essay “The Lonely Road.” (“A road is only lonely when there’s someone walking down it…”)
“Anything else you want me to read?”
“No, not really,” I said. It was my entire oeuvre. “Except for this.” I opened my notebook to a poem and passed it to him. It was inspired by a LIFE magazine photograph of a homeless black man with anger burning in his eyes.
He read it with a pencil in his hand, ticked an image here and there, and put an X through the weeping part. “No tears,” he said, “especially not in poems.” Then he made diagonal slashes to indicate line breaks that would improve the rhythm.
I saw that he was right; a poem was more than fetching similes in a stack of arbitrarily short lines. The point, he suggested gently, was not to put my own sensibility on display but to arouse thoughts and feelings in others. He turned the page to finish the poem and came upon some sketches of the naked model.
“Are these yours?”
I nodded, praying that he wouldn’t go further and find the childish cartoons that filled the back of the notebook. But he kept studying the nude.
“This line is strong.” He traced one of her parabolic thighs. “Very graphic. Do you like Edward Hopper?”
“I think so,” I said. I held my breath and he turned the page. There was Mickey Mouse, with his impenetrable black irises and dimpled white three-fingered gloves. There was Donald Duck, having a tantrum as he stomped on his sailor hat, releasing little puffs of dust.
Mortified, I reached for the notebook.
“Don’t be embarrassed,” he said. “In college I only wanted to become a cartoonist—writing was my second choice.” He tapped the page. “I am jealous of your Mickey.”
“My father taught me how. You start with the three circles, ears and head.”
“Is he an artist?”
“No, but when he was young he was really good at drawing. The local newspaper published his cartoons.”
“So you have his gift.”
“He even got a job offer from Walt Disney when he was nineteen, but he couldn’t afford the trip down for the interview.”
“Too bad, you’d make a good California girl. What did he end up doing?”
“Engineering. He said there wasn’t much call for cartoonists on the prairies, in the D-D-D-Depression.”
There. It had happened. But John Updike said nothing, only asked if I had written about my father.
“No. After that he just worked, got married, had us kids, and things like that. Ordinary stuff.” He nodded.
“But to write well about the ordinary stuff—that’s the hard part, don’t you think? To give the mundane its beautiful due.”
He flipped back to my stories and ticked the phrase “lozenge-shaped” to describe a patch of sunlight. He approved of my yearbook’s typeface. “It’s Dutch, from the seventeenth century. Not often used these days.” He liked my description of crows on a hydro wire looking like musical notes on a staff, “although crows are not really round, are they?”
I found his attention to my lines—more attention than I had devoted to them in the first place—both pleasing and unsettling. It also made me acutely aware of my outfit that day, the blue-and-white capri pants and a blue sleeveless top with white rickrack along the bottom. For the first time I questioned my fondness for things that matched.
“I like that,” he said pointing toward the white trim. “Does it have a name?
“Rickrack.”
“Rickrack.” He smiled.
“My mother sews. She’s always adding stuff to my clothes.”
“You’re lucky. I have an embellishing mother too.”
Then L’Orren banged through the screen door behind us, impatient for her appointment. She carried a thick three-ring binder and smelled of patchouli oil. I ducked past her into the coolness of the foyer.
Before lunch I went into the gallery to play the piano as usual and found John Updike examining one of Horatio Walker’s tornado-green landscapes. He beckoned me over.
“There’s more than a little Constable going on here, don’t you think?”
Why did he assume I understood all his references? Didn’t he know any normal seventeen-year-olds?
“Especially that figure in the red hunting jacket,” he said, pointing to a man on horseback, scarcely visible.
“Well, seeing things is not my forte,” I said.
“What makes you think so?”
Then I told him about the failed red stairs in the forest.
“Are you sure about that? Why don’t you show it to me?”
Reluctantly, but already excited, I went upstairs to the dorm, where I had turned the botched canvas against the wall. I brought it down to John Updike, who held it at arm’s length for some time. I had to look away. I saw nothing in it but turbulent, vegetal mud, with a raw geometry of scarlet in the middle, a gash.
“I like what you chose to paint,” he began carefully. “The way it juxtaposes the human and natural worlds.”
“You mean the barn and the trees?”
His hand floated across the bottom of the canvas, as if painting over it.
“The foreground is a little nebulous, but the overall sense of gloom is good.”
“The forest makes me nervous.”
“That much is clear.”
“I don’t hate this part”—I pointed to a troubled triangle of sky visible through the tree branches—“even though it’s that weird yellow.”
“You’re very adventurous. A chrome-yellow sky would never occur to me.”
“Well, I only brought eight tubes of paint. Some of the others have that many different shades of red.”
He gave the canvas back to me.
“I know a little something about this, you know,” he said. “I spent a year at art school in England after college. If you like, I could help you. You shouldn’t give up on this so easily.”
Was he saying that my writing was hopeless?
“I don’t know. Art Week’s technically over.” In the next room, the waitresses dashed the cutlery onto the long tables, setting up.
“Let’s go find your stairs after lunch. I could use the walk.”
“Okay. Maybe Emilio would lend me extra paints.”
“I wouldn’t involve Emilio if I were you. Meet me down by the mailboxes, where the lawn ends.”
I raced back upstairs, where L’Orren was sprawled on her bed, writing in a notebook. She gave me a searching look but I said nothing, only changing out of my capris into something that would protect my legs in the woods.
* * *
Lunch was salmon patties, potato salad, and the fat, cushion-shaped tomatoes that Emilio grew behind the painting studio. John listened politely to the war widow beside him as she discussed the architecture of Normandy. He sent me a look, not quite a wink. Then everyone drifted away for Individual Work Period. I gathered up my paints and canvas and went down to the mailboxes. All empty.
He had changed into a polo shirt with a logo on the pocket, a little black man golfing. His forearms were golden-haired and deeply tanned; this was from walking on the beach, he said. He and his family lived near the ocean, north of Boston. His wife, Mary, stayed at home with their four children.
“Holy cow,” I said, “that’s a lot.”
He laughed. “Yes, it is. That’s partly why we left Manhattan for the suburbs. That and the fact that New York is overstocked with writers and agents and other weisenheimers.”
The forest, crosshatched with deadfall and nettles, was not easily penetrated. I showed him the shy white three-petaled trilliums, the “provincial flower,” illegal to pick. We struggled on.
I had a moment of panic when I couldn’t find the stairs. Had I invented them? But once we had leaped over a boggy ditch, there it was, the ghost barn with its dark cavity. One slumped wall remained, like the hindquarters of a lame animal.
“I see what you mean,” Updike said. “Nice.”
As I set up my easel he sat nearby on a stony ledge, the remnants of some enclosure. The staircase seemed duller and less meaningful to me than before.
“If I can suggest something,” he said. “When you look at it, try to banish the words ‘stairs’ or ‘barn.’ Just keep looking and let what you see flow onto the canvas.”
I did as he said and it helped. I lost track of the literal thing and only received its presence in the dappled, trembling light of the forest. The stairs became shrine-like—an Incan altar or a broken letter of the alphabet, some forlorn human shape rising out of green decay.
John sat in silence as I painted. Not silence—birds darted among the treetops and sang their repetitive, ardent songs. We shared a spell, the charm of work going along. I no longer felt apart from things.
When we emerged from the forest I held the newly wet canvas away from my white pants. I stole another glance at it; yes, it was better, it was all right now. It might even be the beginning of a story, although its meaning was still obscure to me.
As we crossed the deep sward of grass I saw with a sinking heart that Emilio was in his glass-walled studio, painting. He glanced up and gave us a curt nod.
“See you at dinner,” John said with a little salute as we parted.
* * *
That night, after the expedition to the Shell station to throw stones at the sign, as everyone was heading for bed, John Updike came to the foot of the stairs.
“Miss McEwan?” he called up to the dorm. I think he meant this as a joke about our teacher-student relationship.
I came halfway down the stairs.
“I brought these for you.”
He handed me a short-story collection, including one by him, and a slim anthology of Canadian poetry called Love Where the Nights Are Long. “I just reviewed this,” he said, wagging the poetry, “and thought you might like it.”
I thanked him and went back up to the dorm, where I kept my light on long after the others had fallen asleep. First I read his story, about a teenage boy who worked as a cashier at the A&P. Three girls in bathing suits come in and cause a stir. There wasn’t much to it. And it had so many details, especially about the way one girl let the straps of her suit fall down her shoulder. Did he see me in such detail? The thought made me nervous.
I opened the poetry book. P. K. Page, Irving Layton, Milton Acorn, Al Purdy, Leonard Cohen. “As the mist leaves no scar on the dark green hill/ So my body leaves no scar on you/ nor ever will…” In school they taught us only British or American authors, and I didn’t know that such writing, full of snow and longing and places that I recognized from my own life, was allowed. The love poems struck me with the force of samizdat, something clandestine and illegal.
The next day, I found a picnic table near Emilio’s studio, where I set up my portable green Olivetti to do some serious work. Not the boring details of five minutes in my boring day, here in Doon where nothing happened; instead I was going to write a play about three women—but in fact, they were all aspects of one woman! The “real” woman sits on a bench at the front of the stage and does nothing. Behind her, two women talk to her, representing her hidden thoughts and everything she can’t bring herself to do or be. I had read a play by Harold Pinter, and had seen a Little Theatre production of Edward Albee, so this premise felt modern and edgy to me. I wanted to write something out of the ordinary to impress John Updike.
“This is an intriguing start,” he said when I showed him the three pages I had managed to type. “But don’t forget that in the theatre, things happen. It might be a good idea to include an event.”
He was right. It was a play in which absolutely nothing took place. The woman never even left her bench! But hadn’t that worked for Samuel Beckett? Didn’t he bury one of his characters up to the neck in sand? What about his play where one character is always saying, “Well, shall we go?” and then nobody moves? I flounced up to my dorm and pulled out my canvas with the whirling pine tree. Screw writing. I could always paint.
“Miss McEwan?” John called up the stairs after lunch, which I had skipped. I showed myself at the top of the stairs.
“How about a walk?”
I said nothing, but went and got my insect repellant, and also my red jacket with the navy patch pockets and the nylon hood rolled up inside the collar. I came down the stairs, vaguely aware that the other students might notice us slipping off during Individual Work Period. We headed across the back lawn without saying a word, complicit already, and trudged up the road, cresting the hill, where we would soon be out of sight of the others.
The cicadas shrieked. When I looked back at the house and the cottages behind it, that little world seemed somnolent and far away. I tried to restrain myself from chattering nervously. I had already alluded to Larry.
“Your boyfriend must be missing you,” John said.
“He’s not actually my real boyfriend,” I answered, feeling it at once as the treachery it was.
“Oh?”
“I just don’t want to hurt his feelings.”
“That doesn’t sound promising.”
Two could play this game, I thought, turning toward him.
“Your wife must miss you too. With all those kids.”
“Yes. But I think she’s also secretly relieved to run the house as she likes when I’m away.”
“Larry writes me every day,” I said, rolling my eyes. My callousness knew no bounds.
We reached a cemetery and turned into it. The path faded into uncut grass and scatterings of wildflowers, yellow and white. Most of the old tombstones were drifting down into the earth. A bunchy-looking tree stood in the middle of the cemetery, laden with small green apples. We sat under it. I had on my second-favorite seersucker shorts and was careful to avoid any mushy fallen ones.
“Did you get a chance to read any of that poetry?” he asked.
“Yes, I read it all, last night.”
“And?”
“I loved it.”
“Good. I’ll give you more.”
“And I read your story about the A&P boy too. It’s very well written.”
At this he smiled.
“Burlington has an A&P too,” I added.
In the shade of the tree, the ground was a little damp. To avoid getting a wet spot on my shorts I jumped up and went over to a tombstone and read the epitaph aloud. “‘Here Lies our Belov’d Annabelle/Who Is with the Angels Now.’ Look at the dates,” I said; “she was only fourteen years old when she died.”
He came over to read it and we stood together, arms touching. As I brushed away some vines that were creeping over the inscription, he took my hand and inspected the back of it.
“What’s this?”
“Warts,” I said. I withdrew my hand. “I’ve had them since I was ten.” There were three on my ring finger, small and white, scarcely noticeable, but I was self-conscious about them.
“In the Middle Ages, people thought warts were caused by someone putting a curse on you, and that a charm could cure you too.”
“Witches, you mean.”
“For instance, they thought that driving nails into an oak tree could prevent a headache, or that wearing a ring made from the hinges of a coffin could heal cramps.”
He ran his fingers over the pale bumps with their mottled, brainlike surface. “What do you think—shall I try?”
“I don’t know. The doctor burnt them with some frozen liquid stuff last year but they just grew back.”
He brought the back of my hand to his lips. That’s when I got scared. The sound of a truck laboring up over the hill, unseen, grew louder. I turned and began walking quickly toward the gate.
“But you have to believe in the spell, or nothing will happen,” John said, right behind me.
“What is it with you and things happening?” The truck driver with his load of lumber sped past us without a glance at this ill-matched couple walking single-file in the afternoon heat.
“It’s a perfectly good beginning for a play, Rose,” John said. “You just need to keep working on it.”
When we reached the grounds of the school, we made our separate ways into the house, him through the back door. It was understood that we had embarked on something secretive. Up in the dorm, L’Orren was sitting cross-legged on her bed writing in her notebook with a thick-nibbed fountain pen.
“Where were you?” she asked. That girl did not beat around the bush.
“I went down to the bridge for a walk. I’m having trouble with my opening scene.”
“We missed you at lunch,” she said unconvincingly.
It soon became evident that no one in our class was a writer of any real promise, so John busied himself organizing entertainment to fill our evenings. He found some National Film Board shorts in the parlor cabinets, and we screened them on a tacked-up bedsheet in the rec room. There were two live-animation, stop-motion films called Neighbours and A Chairy Tale by Norman McLaren—little comic parables about the childishness of human conflict. Like the love poems they made a deep impression on me about what is possible in art. I didn’t think playfulness and humor were allowed.
We found some records on the basement shelves too, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, and Ravel’s Bolero. L’Orren and the novelist danced around the Ping-Pong table to the orgasmic pulse of Bolero, eyes closed, waving their arms like seaweed, a sight that mortified the rest of us.
Earlier that day L’Orren had spent a good two hours with John, going through her narrative cycle of poems about an Inuit woman who wants to become a hunter like the men, but is stoned to death by her relatives instead. For some reason the two of them met in the greenhouse. I could see them both from my perch on a window seat in the dorm. I was working on my assignment that day, a descriptive scene about nature using no figures of speech. This I found challenging, as I believed similes and metaphors to be the sine qua non of fine writing.
I had a good view of her facing John, braiding and unbraiding her hair. Through the streaky glass I could see him, occasionally laughing, tipping back in his chair. After a long time L’Orren left the greenhouse and strode toward the house, hugging her binder with a hopeful, preoccupied air.
I had moved over to my bed by the time she came into the dorm.
“How was your meeting?” I asked.
“A-mazing. He wrote his thesis on Robert Herrick and I have this whole sonnet cycle about the metaphysicals.”
I worked all afternoon and sat at the opposite end of the table from John at dinner. He looked tired and bored. The war widow was sitting next to him, talking steadily, sometimes tapping the back of his hand. I felt sorry for him, stuck with all these amateurs. I left the table before dessert was served and in the hall I heard his chair scrape back.
He caught up to me by the big newel post at the bottom of the stairs.
“Miss McEwan. Feel like an excursion later on?”
I shrugged. “Maybe. If I get my work done.”
“Work now, then meet me at the greenhouse at ten. Wear something warm.”
L’Orren came into the hallway and gave us a look.
“Prepare to lose!” said John, and he headed downstairs to play Ping-Pong with her and Axel, the claymation man. But instead of finishing my story I left the house and walked down to the bridge to watch the swollen river run. Then I came back to the house to use the communal phone in the hall to call Larry.
He was working in his dad’s car dealership for the summer and he missed me tons, he said. “There’s a brand-new 1961 LeSabre here with room in the back for both of us,” he said.
“I miss you too,” I said wanly, although it wasn’t the least bit true. This is how you marry the wrong person, I told myself.
“I have to go now, Larry, I’ve got work to do.”
“Bye, doll,” he said. “Be good, and if you can’t be good, be careful.”
* * *
“You’re not going to read late again are you?” said the war widow, who slept in the bed next to me. It was almost ten p.m. She had her hair up in pink brush rollers and wore a quilted blue housecoat and sock-slippers with leather soles.
“Actually, I think I’ll read downstairs for a while. I’ll just take a blanket.”
“You won’t need insect repellant in the parlor,” she observed. I had my sneakers on and a roll-up stick of 6-12 in my hand.
“The screen door has holes in it,” I said, and gently closed the door. I almost flew down the stairs; I was about to write my first love poem, my first Best Canadian Short Story. The narrative of the night, rich with similes and metaphors, raced ahead of me. All I had to do was catch up to it.
* * *
The lights were still on in the painter studio, where I could see someone moving around. Emilio probably, he liked to work at night. I circled around the back of the lawn to the greenhouse, which was dark. No sign of John. I thought about Larry, and my parents, and felt a little sick. But maybe he just wants to talk, I thought. Maybe he’s just missing his family.
“There you are,” he said. He saw the blanket. “Good girl,” he said with a laugh. I held up my little baton of 6-12. He showed me a flashlight.
“Let’s go the front way. We don’t want to run into Emilio.”
In the shadows we crossed the lawn, wet with evening dew, to the road. There were no streetlights, no moon. But if we kept feeling the gravel under our shoes that would mean we were still on the road as it rose toward the top of the hill and the cemetery.
“I can carry that,” he said softly, taking my blanket. When we were out of sight of the school, he said, “I brought some candles too.”
Candles! He was so not Larry, who had to have the hockey game on the car radio when we went parking.
As we made our way into the cemetery, I felt flat bare rock underfoot. John’s light found the inscription:
ESTELLE CHRISTINA BETZNER BORN 1910, DIED 1959.
I lay down on the stone and crossed my arms over my chest.
“Here lies Estelle/she’s not very well,” I said, laughing nervously. John shone his light on my hands and then my face. His face had an odd, bright expression.
“Up you get,” he finally said, giving me his hand. The night was cool; I thought I could even see my breath. The starry blackness above us seemed curved, like a cupola.
“Will we see the Northern Lights?” he said.
“No, of course not. This isn’t the Arctic.” Americans, I thought.
“What do they look like? I’ve only seen pictures.”
“Sort of like curtains. Spooky green curtains that billow and move across the sky. I saw them a couple times, up at camp. Usually all we can see from Burlington at night are the lights of Buffalo.”
“Mary has a great romance about the aurora. She was jealous that I might get to see them up here.”
“Well, we won’t.”
I didn’t want to know too much about him, or Mary. That wasn’t part of our story. I was proud of understanding the rules without him having to spell them out. It would be only this time for us, and only here in Doon. When the week was over, we’d never see each other again.
Looking up at the blackness was making me dizzy. I spread the blanket under the apple tree, our spot.
“Wait,” he said. He cleared the grass away from a flat tombstone close to the roots of the tree, and lit a candle. He let it drip onto the stone and lit the other candle, rooting them both in the warm wax. The flames wavered but the night was still and they kept on burning. We lay down. John wrapped the edges of the blanket around my back.
“I’m a virgin,” I said with my face inches from his.
“Sure, okay,” he said, “I wondered.”
“It’s not a big deal either way, I just, I want to wait.”
“In a sense that makes things easier.”
“But I’m up for anything else,” I said brightly.
He laughed and slipped his hand inside my rust Shetland sweater. “I can see that, Miss McEwan.”
John Updike kissed me. Our teeth clicked at first; he seemed to have a lot of them. His mouth was warm and his tongue felt quick and intelligent and questing, just like the rest of him. Blue light blossomed behind my eyelids as the kiss went on, changed, settled.
“You’ve obviously done this before,” he said.
I was so happy in the crook of his arm like that, looking into his shiny, candlelit eyes.
“Yes, I’m an old whore at kissing.” I felt cocky and comfortable. He was married to someone else, anchored in a family, and I would be back home in Burlington soon.
My hand on the back of his neck came across a rough, scaly patch. He reached up and covered it with his collar.
“D-Don’t worry, it’s not contagious,” he said, pulling out of the stutter smoothly. “Psoriasis. It tends to flare up when I’m away from home.” For a moment he looked like a fourteen-year-old country boy.
Then we stopped talking. Under my sweater I had on a padded bra because my breasts weren’t perfectly symmetrical, a secret that mortified me. But he didn’t seem to notice or care. We were lying on our sides, pressed together. I could feel his erection but we ignored it. That happened with Larry too. John Updike seemed happy just to cover my breasts with his hands and to kiss me again and again, like someone reading a book in braille.
“Could I look at you?” he said. “Just look.” He propped himself on one elbow. I pulled my sweater up in the wavering candlelight.
What a power I felt then, the power that my body, the mere sight of it, had over him. He was gazing at me as if I were a Dutch painting, something valuable and important.
“You look like moonlight, a thin sheet of moonlight.”
“Show’s over,” I said, pulling down my sweater and settling back into his arms.
We were safe; I was in bliss. The tree above us created a dark, starless scallop in the middle of the sky, a kind of roof. The candle flames shivered but persevered, like a tiny aurora. Even the mosquitos stayed away.
* * *
The postman for Doon was a handsome boy my age who drove a cube van and left the mail in a basket on the porch, ignoring the mailboxes. I had already had six letters from Larry, written in ballpoint on his dad’s dealership stationery. Ronnie Craig Autos. He wrote about missing me and how boring Burlington was in the summer. In the last one he had folded the letter around some cartoon stickers because we shared a thing about Yosemite Sam.
The morning after the cemetery, I got another letter from Larry but didn’t open it right away. There was an envelope in the basket addressed to John. I turned it over to read the return address: Mary Updike, 26 East St., Ipswich, Mass.
Nice handwriting. A little on the prim side. I left Larry’s letter on the stairs up to the dorm and took the envelope around the back of the house to John’s cottage. I knocked on his door. Normally this was off limits.
“Well, good morning,” he said. He looked as if he’d just woken up, although I glimpsed paper rolled into his typewriter on the desk. He pulled me into the shadow of the door and kissed me as if it were still the night before.
“I brought your mail,” I said, pulling away and tossing the letter on the bed. I didn’t mean it to sound the way it came out.
“Thank you. Did you talk to Roy?”
“Roy?”
“The handsome postman, who always rings twice.”
“No, I did not,” I said, vaguely insulted.
“Anyway, this is nice of you. Cup of tea? I have a kettle.”
“No, thanks. I should really work.” I sighed, like a middle-aged hack with a deadline. I turned to leave.
“Miss McEwan?”
“What.” I was facing him but not looking at him.
“Come here.” I moved sullenly into his arms.
“Have you been down past the stone bridge yet? I know you are famous for standing on the bridge. But I think we should investigate further, maybe take a picnic. We still have three more days.”
“I have to finish what I’m working on first. The scene.”
“Of course. I have a session with Axel too. But skip lunch. I’ll meet you down by the Shell station at two p.m. Bring the blanket, and I’ll bring the food.”
“Okay,” I said, not wanting to leave anymore. “And we’ll need hats too.”
I ran back across the lawn, waving to Emilio as he stood in the painter studio scowling at the canvas on his easel. How stupid it was to waste your time on art, I thought, when there was so much joy available.
* * *
Beyond the bridge the Grand forked and one branch became shallow enough to wade across. Barefoot, we felt our way upriver, over stones, against the current.
“Emilio said that Horatio Walker’s grave is around here somewhere,” I said to John. “A large crypt in its own field.”
“Guess he didn’t want to mingle with the locals.”
I had worn the only dress I’d brought, a white cotton piqué sundress that had a full skirt with a pattern of green leafy vines on it. “Very fetching,” John had said when he found me waiting at the Shell sign. I hoped he didn’t take it as a sign of slippage on the virgin front. In fact, what made our trysts so exciting were their clear boundaries. I had the impression that his life at home was complicated, and that this restored something in him. It was infidelity of a different order.
John had rolled his khakis up above his knees. His legs were skinny and white; I felt a wifely pang of embarrassment for him. He wore a backpack with our lunch in it, plus a bottle of Orangina for me and a beer for him. I had my sandals in one hand. The Grand narrowed as it bent away from the road. After wading upstream for a while we saw something, maybe just a shed, at the top of a mowed field. We left the river and still in bare feet made our way toward it.
“I feel like we’re in that Andrew Wyeth painting,” I said. “The one where the woman is sort of crawling up through a field towards a house.”
“She was his mistress, the model for that,” he said. “Not that it makes any difference.”
The shed was indeed Horatio Walker’s grave, a stone crypt with steps leading down to a sunken entrance. The bronze door had a carved border featuring a stag in one corner and a ship on the high seas in the other. No epitaph. Just HORATIO WALKER, PAINTER, 1847–1908.
John put a small stone on the threshold
“He’s a good painter, actually. I was surprised.”
“Why? Because he’s not American?”
“No, but his work tends to be quite literal.”
“But so is yours. That A&P story.”
“Literal? You think so?”
It was the first time we had talked about his writing.
“I mean, it’s definitely not experimental, like that movie A Chairy Tale.”
“True.” He opened his beer and drank from it. I changed tack.
“What I mean is, the writing isn’t show-offy. It’s more like a real story, with real people.”
“Right. But I do use the present tense. Which some would consider experimental.”
“But … it’s just about three girls going into a supermarket in their bathing suits. Which to me is not a big deal.”
“To a nineteen-year-old boy it is, trust me.”
“How about here?” I said impatiently. I only wanted to lie down with him and stop talking. We were on the far side of the grassy hill, well out of sight of the road. I spread the blanket. Our home.
John poured some Orangina into a plastic glass for me. He lay out some slices of cheese, tomatoes, and buttered bread on a tea towel and began to assemble sandwiches while I kept a nervous eye on the top of the hill.
“I hope there aren’t any bulls around.”
“I wish I could take a picture of you in that dress.”
We both knew this wouldn’t happen; photographs were taken with cameras, on film that had to be developed by other people, in drugstores.
“You could take a picture of my warts too.” I enjoyed being as unseductive as possible around him—it felt connubial and relaxed.
“Okay, let’s deal with those right now.”
He took a piece of paper out of the backpack and began to read, holding my hand in his.
Fleurs du mal
These seeds of night
Long to eclipse
Their field of white
Soul-scouring spirit
Wield your powers—
Maledicta, hence!
Skate off, dark flowers!
I was at a loss. I thought he should at least ask permission before casting a spell on me.
“I like the ‘seeds of night’ part. Should I be feeling something now?”
“In two or three weeks they’ll be gone, trust me.”
“But by then…” I stopped. I didn’t want to break our rule.
“When you go back home,” John said, “look at them every morning, really concentrate on them, and say the word ‘Begone.’ Say it out loud.”
“I can’t, I’ll just feel silly.”
“It’s not magic, it’s scientific. Having faith triggers the body’s own power to heal. Witchcraft and voodoo just tap into that.”
“How romantic.”
He handed me a sandwich.
“All I mean is that your hands are beautiful, you shouldn’t hide them. And you must believe in yourself.”
“Okay,” I said. “I will do it. For you.”
“Here’s something more romantic.”
He took a notebook out of the pack. I put my head beside his so I could look at the words while he read the poems, two short ones, out loud. They were rhyming poems with some words I didn’t recognize, like “weir” and “sein.” One was about a silver fish tangled in a silver net. I could sense the logic that held them together and was relieved they weren’t dopey or sentimental. But I couldn’t really grasp their meaning.
“Wow,” I said. “Can I keep them?”
“Of course, they’re for you. I have copies.”
The heat made us listless but I was content to just lie there on the side of the hill with my head on his chest. His hands moved over me undemandingly. I had become one of the women, not too many I hoped, who could recognize the sound of his heart, its eager pacing. It was all new to me, these feelings. But the week was almost over. I felt almost excited about how this would be the end of us; I would then have a secret, an “affair” with an older man, a writer who had written poems for me, about me.
And nothing would be broken or harmed by this—not me or Mary or anyone. Well, maybe Larry. It would be our story, that’s all. A fiction, almost.
Then we heard shouts.
“I found it!”
Axel appeared on the horizon, followed by L’Orren. They were heading toward the crypt. When they reached it they had a clear view down the grassy hill to our encampment under the young trees. I saw L’Orren shade her eyes. Axel put his hands on his hips, looked our way, then quickly looked down at his feet.
“Don’t move,” said John, holding my face against his chest. “They’re too far away to really see us.”
“But my white dress,” I said. “L’Orren will know.”
“It doesn’t matter anyway,” he said gallantly.
A breeze came up, as if the air had been stirred by their arrival. A crow in our trees gave a warning caw.
Axel and L’Orren took a few photographs of the crypt, then turned and disappeared over the hill. The crow flew away. John smoothed my hair and tried to joke about it, but his touch was distracted now. There was no recapturing our moment.
“If only I hadn’t worn this stupid dress.”
“What can they do? The week is almost over.”
John looked solemn. I had the feeling that he was thinking about his children. I imagined my parents reading a stern letter from the director of Doon about my expulsion. The future was swirling around us now.
We gathered up our things. Instead of making our way down the river we went straight across the field to the road, but slowly, so we wouldn’t overtake the others.
* * *
L’Orren didn’t say a word to me when I got back to the dorm, where I changed into my shorts and the plaid side of my reversible halter top. I considered making up a story about Larry visiting, and how we’d gone on a picnic. But I wasn’t sure I could pull it off. Axel blushed when he saw me in the dining room. John poured some water in my glass. Maybe nothing will come of this, I thought.
Then, after dinner, someone had the bright idea to play a game of Charades. “I’ll start,” said L’Orren, of course. Ever the initiator. We descended to the rec room.
L’Orren began. She made a twirling gesture beside her head.
“Movie,” John said.
She held up her fingers.
“Four words.”
She began striding back and forth with her hands clenched in front of her, as if pushing something. She’d push, then back up a bit, then push forward again.
“Pushing a stroller—And Baby Makes Three!” said the schoolteacher. L’Orren shook her head no.
“You’re shoveling snow…” John said. “Rosebud! Citizen Kane … It’s a Wonderful Life…”
L’Orren made the “rhymes-with” sign, turned around, and slapped her rear end.
“Ass,” said Axel. “Gas … grass. You’re mowing grass!” L’Orren stabbed her finger yes at him, then lay down on the floor and hugged herself, looking rapturous.
“Splendor in the Grass,” cried the schoolteacher, leaping up, as the rest clapped. I saw the color leave John’s face. L’Orren got to her feet and brushed off her clothes with a little smile on her face. She shot a look my way as she took her place on the sofa beside Axel. For a long moment no one spoke.
And that was how the week ended, really, although two more days remained. We still had 180 pages of Axel’s novel to read. The schoolteacher’s memoir had veered away from her husband’s experience in the war to her rage at being abandoned at home with a small baby. She was going gangbusters, she said, and wanted to finish it before we all dispersed. As for me, I was still working on my event-free play, which L’Orren had read. She urged me to read Lorca and said she thought absurdist drama was “a bit masculinist.”
On my last night, I stayed away from John’s cottage and wrote a long, newsy note to Larry. It was too late to mail it, but I could give it to him when I got back. I called my parents to find out when they were picking me up. Then I put on my yellow rain jacket and walked down to the bridge, alone. The Grand was milky-brown and swollen but subdued, coursing along.
I crossed the back lawn on my way to the dorm. John’s cottage was dark. I wanted to retrieve my red-stairway painting, which I had left to dry in Emilio’s studio. That too was dark, except for what looked like a throb of candlelight in one corner. I knocked; no answer. As I opened the door I glimpsed L’Orren’s massive hair all but covering Emilio as she lay naked on top of him, on paint-splattered drop sheets. She was making a sound that didn’t seem to belong to her, almost a coo. I closed the door as softly as I could. Was this sort of thing going on everywhere? Was the whole world awash in lust, and I hadn’t noticed?
On the last day, from my window seat in the dorm, I saw the school director walk across the back lawn to John’s cottage. He knocked on the door, John answered, and he stepped in. Maybe he’s just thanking him, I thought, and saying goodbye. About twenty minutes later the door opened and the director emerged, unsmiling. I wanted to run across the lawn and throw myself in John’s arms. Instead, I wrote a new scene in my play, in which the woman lies down and embraces her bench.
“John’s been fired,” L’Orren said when we were packing up. She was going home that afternoon. “Apparently one of the waitresses complained about him being out of line.” She carefully folded her white Indian shirts. “Or something like that.”
“But he’s leaving tomorrow, so what’s the point of firing him?”
She gave me a long-suffering look. “What it means is that he won’t be back. I was going to sign up for next year. Now I’m not so sure.”
“Then they should fire Emilio too,” I said. “He’ll screw anything that walks.”
L’Orren said nothing, just slid her copy of Bonjour Tristesse into the side pocket of her suitcase.
Her mother was downstairs waiting to drive her home, which cast L’Orren in a slightly different light. She looked small and pale, maybe hungover.
“Don’t forget what I said about Lorca,” she said as she left the room. “Reading him truly changed my life.”
“What if I like mine the way it is?”
* * *
At dinner that night, John didn’t seem upset. He stayed on after dessert, playing Ping-Pong with the others. I went into the gallery and sat at the piano. But I didn’t want to play Satie or Bach, because now I knew what I was feeling, and why. If I played that music, it would be like broadcasting our secret through the house.
Everything I wrote, or did, was now about my secret life with John Updike.
On Saturday morning my parents arrived looking heartbreakingly trim, jovial, and innocent. I showed them my pine-tree canvas and my mother was so pleased. “Emilio said it was painterly,” I reported. I added that I was still working on my play about feminine identity. It wasn’t done yet, but Mr. Updike had been encouraging.
“Can we meet him?” asked my mother, peering around the gallery.
“I think he’s already left,” I said. Then John walked in with some books under his arm. I introduced him to my parents. I could tell my mother was surprised by how young he was. She had probably imagined someone more professorial. My father beamed at John, this bright mentor for my untapped talents.
I was dying inside.
“Your daughter’s very talented,” John said to them. “But I want her to keep reading.” He handed me several books, including Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, and his novel. Then he looked at me fearlessly, as if to say, Give me your gaze, it’s all right, we’ve done nothing wrong.
“I keep telling her to send something in to Reader’s Digest,” said my dear, irrepressible father. This remark sent my mother skittering off to study one of Horatio Walker’s paintings on the wall.
“Look at that sky,” she said approvingly.
“Well, I think I’m on my way now,” John said. He shook my hand. “Miss McEwan.”
“Thank you for everything, Mr. Updike,” I managed. I was wearing the green-and-white dress.
My parents drove me down the road, under the willows, past the Shell sign and the field with Walker’s crypt, back home to our split-level bungalow in Burlington, to our own Ping-Pong table, to my job at Rico’s House of Beauty, and Larry.
Our first night together, in the new LeSabre, Larry and I went all the way. I love you, we solemnly told each other.
A week later, I broke it off. He took it badly. I didn’t tell him, or anyone, about John Updike for a long time. Until now.
Every day for the rest of that summer I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, stared at the warts on my right hand, and said, out loud, “Begone!”
By the end of August, they had vanished.
Copyright © 2016 by Marni Jackson
