One Thousand Chestnut Trees. Mira Stout

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СКАЧАТЬ Harry’s other blond brothers Mark, Randy, and Junior were all lined up at the enormous mirror-polished dining-table with their blonde-highlighted, nautilized wives. It was like being cast in an East Coast setting of a Tennessee Williams play. Mr Walter Palmer, rheumy-eyed, ruddy-faced manufacturing magnate and patriarch, sat at the head of the table sallying and interrogating his slightly cowed sons with brittle humour. Mrs Betty Palmer, with spun-sugar hairdo and kind, suffering expression, made conversation with Junior’s new wife Donna about the upcoming Cancer Benefit at The Pierre.

      Harry smiled a little too encouragingly at me over his cut-crystal wine goblet. That I was an apprentice artist had been bad enough, but when Mr Palmer asked what my father did for a living, he took the news that my father was an artist too as if it were a personal insult. He couldn’t quite place me socially, which irritated him; artist-father – could be some Communism there – the slightly Oriental eyes, the prep-school and ivy-league background, it didn’t tally squarely on the balance sheet. Mrs Palmer was just asking where my mother was from, when Mr Palmer launched into a well-rehearsed anecdote about how Mr Palmer senior had worked his way up and across from air-conditioning units to the dizzying heights of the peanut butter world. We laughed tactfully, and filed into the equestrian-print-lined, chintzy study for coffee and Mrs Palmer’s special-recipe peanut brownies à la mode, as prepared by Dolores, the Filipina cook. I smiled inanely, and sat down on a needlepoint cushion that read, Nouveau Riche is Better Than No Riche At All.

      Why had I gone? What was I now doing in a taxi with him and these other strangers? I didn’t really know. Muddling along, trying anything once. Lost. That most people I knew appeared to be equally lost blurred this fact, and removed the stigma.

      During the cab ride Wen accidentally dropped his fisherman’s sweater out of the open window. The taxi driver refused to stop for it. Back out on the pavement Laura, now sober, paid for the cab as the rest of us were having considerable trouble finding correct change. Harry’s pale blue eyes looked more puzzled and washed out than usual, and he said that he was going to walk home. I told him I would be keeping an eye on Laura. As I said this, it occurred to me that I might not be seeing Harry again. I felt a needling regret as I remembered that Harry was quite nice really. I wished him well, and selfishly, disliked losing an admirer. Harry walked away, head down and hands jammed in his coat pockets, and disappeared into a gap of dark pavement between the streetlights.

      Wen, Tommy, Laura and I crushed into the carved wooden elevator under the disapproving stare of the doorman, and entered Wen’s aunt’s apartment with a respectful silence as we took in the regulation upper East Side brocades, severe Chippendale and grandiose blackamoor figures flanking the doorway to the dining room.

      Tommy, the polite one, decanted generous glasses of Aunt Stanley’s vintage Armagnac. A lock of Laura’s hair caught fire as he lit her cigarette. It wasn’t serious, but she was a bit shaken. We ate some Baskin Robbins Rocky Road ice-cream and leftover microwaved macaroni, in that order. After a couple of Armagnacs and some frugal lines of cocaine from a little waxed envelope in his wallet, Wen emerged from a bedroom without any trousers on, and sat down wittily on the ottoman at Laura’s feet in his socks and protruding boxer shorts.

      This seemed like a good moment to leave. Wen, still trouserless, and Tommy escorted us downstairs in the elevator, and Laura – nursing her singed lock of hair – and I got into a cab and went home. We never saw them again.

      

      As I lay on my mattress trying to get to sleep that night, my head throbbed. I was terribly thirsty, but refused to get a glass of water, having just drunk an unbelievable amount of water only moments before. I was too lazy to get up again, and could not guarantee a successful reprise of going up and down the ladder. It seemed unfair to have contracted a hangover while still technically drunk.

      The garbled mess of the day circulated through my head like hard lumps of batter through an eggbeater, gradually growing smaller. Each diminishing thought was accompanied by increasing feelings of disgust, and surprising sadness. Oliver’s impending departure and Harry’s retreat formed one lump of ambivalent, unmelting loss. Laura’s troubled, sleeping presence nearby did not lessen the loneliness which seemed to have welled up from beneath the darkened furniture and flooded the room.

      Was anybody else’s life so disjointed? If so, didn’t they worry about it? Perhaps this was just the normal texture of postgraduate life in New York at the end of a fractured, narcissistic decade. Even couched in the sedative language of Newsweek, the condition hurt. The disjointed bits had spikes, and the missing piece, whatever it was, had left behind a canyon of emptiness around which I had organized my life quite well.

      At first I thought the missing thing might be Love, but wasn’t sure. Was Love so big?

      Perhaps the force itself was still mighty, but its public image had been diminished by the same hype as less important things; it had been used to sell economy cars, diet soft drinks, untrue songs, banal movies, and anti-wrinkle creams. Although cheapened, private Love still exacted the same high price.

      Dull thoughts followed, so boring that they slipped from beneath me, half-formed. I found myself thinking again of Korea.

      The roar of traffic held me in web of continuous noise. The light of the cinema marquee across the street flooded beneath my closed lids and strained my eyes, despite their being closed. Thoughts racing, I longed for rest, for peace.

      Often, when my mind tired of its ineffectual wonderings, I would think of cool, green leaves and imagine fresh, verdant smells. Fanned, rustling leaves enfolded me. The woods were so deep I couldn’t tell if it was night or day. I lay my head on some moss, and to the sound of rushing leaves, eventually I fell asleep.

       CHAPTER FOUR History

      Cardboard boxes and canvases slid across the back of the rented station wagon as the car’s wide hips swung around the corners of Route 9. Driving up the Interstate earlier, my spirits felt progressively lighter the farther from New York I sped; Bridgeport, New Haven, Hartford, Holyoke, Northampton, Greenfield, and finally Exit 3 to Starksboro. The names of the towns on these green-and-white signs were tattooed in my memory; their familiar sing-song syllables, like nursery rhymes, prompting the mixed emotions of childhood, with its maddening dreads and comforts. The landscape growing steeper and wilder, I floored the accelerator up the final hill, impatient to arrive.

      The next morning, sitting at the dining-room window, I gazed out at the high clouds and pine branches tossing in the March wind, drinking coffee from my preferred blue-willow cup and saucer. I smiled at the sight of my mother, weeding as usual, at the edge of the window frame. She would never run out of weeds in Vermont. For years, she had tried to grow tiger lilies, her favourites, by the front steps, but they always died. Resigned to the cantankerousness of the Vermont soil, my mother discovered an unusual answer. She made a garden out of the weeds themselves: cultivating the prettiest, and uprooting the nastier-looking ones. Growing up, I had found this practice – as well as making monster bonsai out of scots pines – rather embarrassing, but now thought it quite inventive. Looking at the scots pine-bonsai next to her, now much taller, I thought of Hong-do.

      After quite a lot of thinking and worrying, I had moved out of New York and bought a one-way ticket to Seoul. It sounds a bit melodramatic, but the open-ended ticket had more to do with ignorance of how long the trip would take than with a desire to stay forever. It almost felt as if I were going to Korea against my will. Although no one was forcing me to go, thoughts of going to Seoul kept returning insistently during quiet moments, creating a pressure impossible to ignore.

      Despite being unhappy about giving up my studio, it felt likely that if I didn’t go now, I might easily resist it later. The paintings СКАЧАТЬ