Читать книгу Blood Orange - Drusilla Campbell - Страница 13

Chapter 7

Just before dawn Dana rose from bed, put on shorts and a hoodie, and ran the twelve blocks from Miranda Street to Goldfinch, passing unnoticed through safe and silent, sleeping Mission Hills, with its stately Spanish colonial residences, angular, Forties-style Hollywood mansions with carefully tended yards and pristine paths from sidewalk to door, and classic Craftsman homes built half of wood and half from river stones the size of footballs. A four-bedroom pale pink stucco Spanish colonial in Mission Hills proved how far Dana had come since that night on Imogene’s front porch. In these days of hugely inflated prices the home they could really afford would probably be three cramped bedrooms baking under a flat roof on a treeless street in El Cajon. Dana wondered if Frank Filmore and more of his kind were worth the neighborhood’s high price tag.

The spring night was clear and cool, and her nose tingled with the smell of jasmine and damp gardens. Overhead the sky glowed a yellow-gray from the reflected city lights. On Arboles she surprised three raccoons scrambling into a garbage can set on the street for morning pickup. They stared at her brazenly from behind their masks. A homeless person slept on the porch of the Avignon Shop. Embarrassed, Dana looked away too quickly to note if the figure was male or female. She thought of her mother and wondered what had happened to her. Margaret Bowen had been twenty-two the night she drove off.

Dana let herself into Arts and Letters and locked the door behind her. As she did she felt a jab of alarm between her ribs and turned around quickly, half expecting to see someone standing in the shadowy store; but of course there was no one there. There had never been a break-in on Goldfinch as far as Dana knew. Her knees were doughy with adrenaline as she felt her way upstairs and into the loft, where she turned on a small corner light and sat down.

She had just begun work on her doctorate in art history when a professor told her that Arts and Letters had the best collection of art books in San Diego County. Dana had seen the store dozens of times—it was in her neighborhood, across the street from Bella Luna, where she bought her coffee—but she had never done more than browse the best-sellers and deeply discounted remainders on the first floor. Once she saw the second-floor loft full of art books, she became an habitué; and two years ago Rochelle, the shop’s eccentric English owner, had given her a key and hired her to work a few hours every week.

She dug a dust cloth from its place lodged behind an ancient edition of Tansey’s book on the Sistine Chapel. Using a wooden step stool to reach the top of the six-foot shelves, she dusted the heavy books one by one as she reran her conversation last night with David. He was right. Bailey was not safe in school when there was someone out there making threats; keeping her home was the logical course. Thinking this, Dana felt trapped. And then ashamed. She did not want to be the kind of woman who felt trapped at the thought of spending more time with her child.

Margaret Bowen’s daughter.

Imogene Bowen’s granddaughter.

She lifted down and dusted a huge book of reproductions of works by Early Renaissance Italian painters. This was Dana’s period; and someday she would buy the eight-hundred-dollar book, but for now she was content just to look at it. She laid the heavy volume on the refectory table in the center of the loft. Turning on one of the brass table lamps, she bent its swivel neck so a band of yellow light fell on the pages. Then she turned to page four hundred and thirty-six, the Nerli Altarpiece.

Just six weeks earlier Dana had been in Florence doing research for her thesis. While she was there, Lexy’s brother, Micah Neuhaus, who had lived in Florence for more than ten years, had taken her to Spirito Santo to see the great painting.

In the immediate foreground pious-faced Nerli and his wife kneel in profile facing each other. The Virgin Mary sits between them with the baby Jesus, who is mischievously eyeing his cousin, John the Baptist. The gilded frame holds other figures, but what interested Dana in Early Renaissance paintings were the background scenes—in this case, a village street scene and a nobleman pictured embracing a younger woman in a doorway. Scholars had determined those figures were Nerli and his daughter. For Dana the detailed painting opened doors into a story of ordinary lives that had nothing to do with the sacred figures. It was the mysteries of the secular narrative present in many early Italian masterworks that captured her imagination as nothing else in art had.

She closed the book and rested her head on her hands. She had to find a way to do it all. Somehow. Rekindle the excitement about her thesis; be a better, more loving wife; homeschool Bailey. It will all work out, she told herself. There had to be a way to make it all happen. She tried to pray, but her thoughts had frozen solid. She wondered if it made any sense to ask the God of Year One for help in modern times. Faith and prayer must have been simpler for Tanai Nerli and his wife.

When she was young prayer had come as easily as speech, as automatically as a language she was programmed to speak. Her grandmother had made fun of her devotion, and once she even hid Dana’s good shoes on Sunday, but Dana went to church wearing rubber flip-flops. No one cared what she wore at Holy Family Episcopal—a royal name for a storefront church that housed, as well as Episcopalians, a congregation of Korean Methodists. In that shabby church she belonged not simply to the congregation—that was easy—but to something she felt in her bones but lacked the words to describe. Years later Lexy had helped her understand that what she’d felt was a hunger for transcendence. This soul-longing was a gift, Lexy said.

Dana lifted her head and listened. Someone was knocking on the door of Arts and Letters. She glanced at her watch and saw that it was not yet six A.M., much too early for Rochelle to appear, and anyway, she was the owner and had a key. Dana turned out the lights and sat still as the knocking continued. She heard a voice say her name.

“David?”

“It’s me, Micah.”

Her thoughts shut down.

“Let me in, Dana.”

If she ignored him, Micah Neuhaus would bang with his fists until the neighbors called the police. He would like nothing better than to make a public demonstration. But if she let him in . . . He was a python curled in the darkest corner of her life.

This was ridiculous. He was an adult human being, nothing like a snake. She did not know what he was doing outside Arts and Letters, but she could guess, and it would not do. He had to leave her alone. She stood up, rubbing her damp palms on her running shorts, beginning to feel angry. What was he doing in San Diego? He had no business intruding on her life this way, and she would tell him so, and he would hear the steel in her voice and know that she meant every word.

But her knees were jelly as she went downstairs and fumbled with the doorknob.

He pushed past her into the dark bookstore.

In the weeks since they’d parted she had forgotten how young he looked, though he was almost forty, not much younger than she. He wore sandals, a pair of snug Levi’s, and a baggy black sweater. His dark hair curled near the nape of his neck and was more untidy than she remembered it. But the piratical gold earring was still in his left ear, and the bruised, sensuous mouth had not changed. She remembered how his lips felt against the inside of her elbow, the pinpricks of pleasure, the half-drunk sense of simultaneously dropping into the center of her body and lifting out of it.

“Why are you here?”

“I saw your husband on TV.”

“How did you know I’d be here?”

“I watched you leave your house.”

“How dare you spy on me?”

“I’m really sorry about the dog. Is it okay?” He added, “I worry about you, Danita.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“It’s your name.”

“No one calls me Danita.” Except her grandmother. It was a memory of the old life, the life before she met David and began to live as normal people did.

“I’m glad the dog’s okay.”

For a few moments she had forgotten the terrible afternoon and night just past. Now the fear and panicky confusion, the tactless policeman, and her argument with David rushed back at her with the power of a flash flood.

He put his hands on her arms, and she jerked away. “Don’t be mad, Dana.”

“What do you expect me to be?”

“Just listen to me, okay?”

“What’s the point? We’ve been over this a dozen times.”

“No, I’ve got something new to say.” His face was bright with conviction. “Where can we sit?”

“Say what you have to say, Micah.” There would be no sitting down, no getting comfortable.

He laughed as if he read her mind. By the light of the street lamp outside the store Dana saw his blue-black eyes crinkle with amusement. “I’ve got this friend, he owns a great little house on the beach down in Mexico south of Ensenada, and he wants to sell it to me.” As he talked, he walked back and forth between the rows of bookshelves, letting his fingers trail along the spines. His nervous energy filled the store, crackled through the bookshelves and along the countertops like heat lightning.

“You could come down sometimes. It’s only a couple hours’ drive, and David’d never have to know.” He grinned at her. “I’ll stay out of the way; you won’t have to worry about me.” Another grin. “I’ll be a good boy.”

Groaning, she slumped onto the stairs and rested her head in her hands.

“Dana, I’ve had time to think. I was way out of line before. I know that. But you’re important to me.”

He crouched before her, taking her hands.

“My beautiful Dana, I don’t want you to suffer.”

His back was to the window, his face in shadow; but a gray dawn light had begun to fill the store, and as he spoke she watched his mouth, wanting to trace the sulky outline of his lips with her fingertips.

She spoke to break the spell. “What about Lexy?”

“Forget my sister. Think about what I said.”

“She loves you, and she worries, and you won’t answer her phone calls.”

His lips pinched in irritation. “I’ll call her, okay? Okay?” He stood up and paced in front of her.

Dana felt her will strengthen.

“You never should have come back here.”

“I want to be near you.”

“Go back to Italy. You had a good life.”

“First say you’ll think about Mexico,” he said.

“No, I won’t.” He was not a python. There was no lightning. “I told you, Micah. My life is in San Diego with David and Bailey. You can’t be part of it.”

She stood and pulled her back and shoulders straight. “I want you to go.”

“What’s wrong? Why did you change?” His question was almost a whine.

“This is a pointless conversation.”

She expected him to argue with her, but instead he walked to the door. With his hand on the knob he said, “I love you. You either don’t know what that means or you’re fooling yourself. Either way . . .” He pressed his fist against his chest. “The pain, Dana, I can’t stand it.”

He waited, but she refused to speak. If she did not respond to his drama, he would leave.

“Okay, I’ll leave, but don’t tell me to go back to Italy. I’m not gonna do it until you come with me. In the meantime, if you want to see me, I’m living in that apartment house on Fourth and Spruce, second floor front.”

And then he was gone, and it was as if a tornado had passed, sucking the air from the bookstore, leaving Dana with a bruised pain in her chest. She sat on the stairs again and by the gray light of dawn stared into the grain of the wood as if she hoped to read a message there.