She took a break and flew herself down to see Jamie, who was living in a drafty clapboard house overlooking a drizzly, melancholy Oregon beach. He’d stopped working for the WPA because he didn’t feel right taking employment meant as relief. Collectors had started buying his paintings; three landscapes had gone in a traveling exhibition as far as Boston and New York, one had been bought by a museum in St. Louis. He’d parted ways with Flavian—been seduced away, really, by a prominent dealer in San Francisco.
“I don’t know why I think Alaska should stay as empty and difficult as it’s always been,” she told him as they walked on the broad, empty beach. The waves left behind gleaming skins of water on the sand, silver with reflected fog. “It’s ungenerous of me, and less for the sake of the place than for my own vanity.”
“You went there because you needed a place to hide,” Jamie said. “It makes sense your instinct would be to keep people out.”
“Maybe. I do have an idea of it as a fortress.” She picked up a shell, tossed it out into the water. “You should come see it. You should paint it.”
“I’d like to. I will.”
His new paintings pulsed with an eerie, internal light. They retained some of the warp of the first landscapes he’d made after leaving Vancouver, and although the ocean, which has no angles, was his most common subject, the work still conveyed a sense of folding, a compacting that, paradoxically, suggested expansive openness. One large canvas was propped up across from the narrow iron-frame bed where Marian slept, as wide as the wall and nearly as tall. Looking at it, she had the feeling of flying toward the horizon.
After a few days, she left without saying goodbye, flew on to Missoula over a landscape rusted with fall. A real airport had opened west of town. Some of the same pilots were still around, incredulous at the sight of her. They told her they’d been sure she was dead, one way or another.
A history professor from the U and his family had bought Wallace’s house, and when she walked past it on her way to Caleb’s cabin, she saw the paint was bright and new, the roof mended, the windows clean. The barn appeared unoccupied, but the cottage had been spruced up, with fresh paint and flowers in window boxes. A little girl in a blue dress playing with a doll on the porch stopped to watch Marian. Another woman might have paused to say hello, explained that she and her brother had slept on this very porch when they were small. Another woman might have been wistful for a childhood lived in a well-kept house, in apparent safety and security, but Marian’s wistfulness was only for the particular simple wildness of the years when her only concern had been how to enlarge her world. She went on her way, along the trail into the trees.
* * *
—
“I have a girl,” Caleb said. “I thought I should mention it.”
Marian felt an unpleasant jolt. They were sitting on the back step of his cabin, drinking whiskey from tin cups. “Good for you.”
“I thought if I wrote and told you, you might not come.”
“I would have come,” she said, not knowing if that was true. She had been enjoying the nearness of his body, the cool air and the orange leaves, the pleasant anticipation of sex. But now she felt hot and furious and, to her horror, near tears. She cleared her throat. “You should have told me, though, so I could have figured out somewhere else to stay.”
“Stay here. I’ll sleep on the floor.”
“Would your girl like that?” He didn’t reply. She said, “Who is she?”
“She teaches English at the high school. She came here all alone from Kansas. You’d like her—she’s gutsy. Brave, actually.”
“Yes, so brave, being a schoolteacher.”
He was very still. In a low voice, staring into his cup, he said, “I knew you wouldn’t like it.”
“But you let me come here anyway. Were you testing me?”
“If I had been, now I’d know that you don’t care about seeing me unless we’re—” He broke off. “I don’t know what to call it. I don’t even know what we do. Do we fuck? Make love?”
She’d never had a word, either. “What do you call it with her?”
“We don’t do that.”
“You don’t?”
“She’s not like that.”
She seethed. “Not like me.”
He stood up. “No, not like you, because with her I know where I stand. I know what she wants from me.”
She stood, too, facing him. “All right. Go on. What does she want from you?”