Chapter 1

On vacation on an island in the summer sea, Althea lived the life she aspired to: she devoted herself to painting. All year long in New York City she had scrimped and saved to give herself three weeks of solitary inspiration on Block Island. Renting a house sight unseen over the phone, she had come with empty canvases, paints, brushes, palette knives, and hope; and what she found exceeded her fondest imaginings: Althea believed herself to be in Paradise.

Happiness suffused her like light. She, who considered herself a connoisseur of sights, had fallen in love at once with her island retreat. Low and modest, blue and gray, the house sat on a sloping hillside overlooking fields of bayberries and the sea. She marvelled at how it suited her, as if it had been made for her.

She wondered about the owner. She guessed he had built the house himself, because it was simple, yet with charming, individual touches. She saw signs of his taste and evidence of his handiwork in the odd angles of his rooms, the iron latches that fastened the windows and closed the closets, in the sunny windbreak behind the house which made a perfect breakfast nook, and on the deck outside the bedroom's double door that looked out to the sea. From the real estate agent she had learned that he was elderly and of foreign birth. Eating from his plates, eyes lifted to a view, she speculated as to whether need of money or ill health caused him to rent his retreat. She blessed her good fortune. It was almost as if the house had found her, rather than the other way around.

The August days passed, long, languorous, and utterly free. Watching a spider's web in sunlight, Althea imagined that she was like that, alternately shining and hidden, waiting in speculation. What would stumble in? Every day at dusk she stripped for the sea and ran over sand and flat stones into water as smooth as pale isinglass. Thigh-deep she paused, shivering. Then she surface-dived, and the cool water covered her head. She fluttered to the sea floor like a wind and played her fingers over the soft ridges the waves had made.

She began her paintings, a suite of four which she worked on in succession. They were scenes abstracted from nature: a forest, a meadow, a pond, the sea. So much she knew, the rest she set out to discover. The mud was rinsed from her colors. Each stroke had its place: a center and an edge that met the others. On the flat canvas, she wanted to suggest an inexhaustible depth. "See what drew you in," she told herself as both an admonishment and a rapture, as a jolt to the memory of what had made her turn so long ago to art.

Part by painstaking part, her paintings grew. Very quickly, she poured her mind in a thin layer over the surface and instantly sucked it back, a flash of consideration to balance the obsessive priorities of the brush. It was a way of ferreting out a wrong choice against the harmony she invoked, hard and clear as glass though rendered in the compliance of pigment.

Althea's sense of how she benefitted from painting differed from the opinions of "the outside world." Still, she flinched when she was faced with questions about her earnings from art, for she was ambitious and proud. Though she would have liked it to be otherwise, art was presently her luxury, and teaching art was her livelihood. The time she had off from the latter she felt obliged to give to the former. How wonderful it would be if this house were really hers! But when her tenancy was over, she'd have no money left.

In the meantime Althea relaxed, and her moods were submerged in the island's changeable weathers and her adaptable routines. She worked in the morning, ate at noon, swam at dusk; and many afternoons she whiled away in daydreams, letting the sun tan her, or the fog wrap her in white moisture.

Against the hazy sky, she watched the consecutive flights of swallows constantly defining new spaces in the air that she seemed to possess and then instantly lost. She thought that if, in her paintings, she could manage to evoke the impermanence around her, then she would reclaim it forever.

The waning summer deepened its promise. Each day seemed eternal even as it ended. She conceived of her paintings in isolation, and, while she was contented, she nevertheless began to feel lonely. In New York City she treasured her friendships, and some days she seemed rich; she was blessed by chance encounters, and their comprehending interest wove her to a wider world. Other days she was bereft; she dialed and heard the phone ring uselessly or a rare tape machine click on where she was obliged to record a message. People were always leaving and arriving, and often she missed them. But she, too, was a restless city woman, and the proof was her present removal to an island of farms made over for remote summers.

* * *

On a Friday noon two weeks into her stay, Althea set off for town on her bike to do shopping and errands. She went up and down roads past overgrown fields that were themselves divided by ancient criss-crosses of low stone walls. These were said to have been erected by eighteenth-century slaves who could win their freedom if their wall spanned the island. On her way she stopped at the top of a hill to sit on the coarse green grass above the road. Lavender thistles, black-eyed Susans, and Wedgwood-blue chicory bloomed around dark-green shrubs. The air was almost still. Shielding her eyes from the sun reflected off the sea far below her, she thought of whom she might summon to visit her. "If only letters could fly like birds," she mused, idly picturing an envelope folded like origami paper in the shape of a bird, soaring aloft, bearing its contents to Manhattan.

One guest was expected already: Jeanne was to come the last weekend of Althea's stay. She had offered her car to move Althea back to New York. But Jeanne was more than a useful companion. "Like to a double cherry seeming parted, two lovely berries moulded on one stem," Jeanne once quoted to Althea, and under her teasing, she was sincere. Their friendship went back to their adolescence in the comfortable town of Greenwich, Connecticut.

Jeanne had been timid while they were growing up. She was afraid and in awe of the city of New York, for example, worried about dangers lurking in asphalt alleys, nervous about missing their train back to Greenwich. Althea remembered a brisk autumn weekend long ago, when they'd been allowed to come into Manhattan together to see a matinée theater performance. Afterwards, walking up Fifth Avenue, Althea had watched Jeanne agape before shop windows already decorated for the holidays, and Jeanne's ingenuous stare had made Althea smile. Althea was selective; from the first grasp of her baby fist, she had discriminated. Jeanne remarked and marvelled; the world's variety terrified her at the same time that it brought the rose to her cheeks. Althea remembered standing next to Jeanne at the fiftieth-floor window of Jeanne's father's office on Madison Avenue. Together they had looked down the tall buildings to the toylike traffic and dreamed of falling.

Who would have thought then that they'd both live in New York? Jeanne spoke of California, Althea of Europe, but they moved to Manhattan. Jeanne found a career in theater management; the shy girl grew into a woman capable with accounts, adroit in raising funds and a following. Small, always neatly dressed in a skirt and blouse, her nut-brown hair in bangs across her forehead, Jeanne grew accustomed to being depended on. When her eight hours were put in, she came home, changed into comfortable clothes, and curled up like a kitten that wanted to be entertained. Yet Jeanne admired Althea's strictness, the serious, unswerving track her friend's life had trodden, and when Althea's tongue was trenchant, Jeanne knew how to turn it back with a witty phrase.

It was like Jeanne to be a chauffeur, thought Althea, like her also to get a holiday out of it. And like her to scribble a note when Althea was only dreaming of letters, so that Althea was to receive a message before she wrote one, not borne in on the wings of a bird, but placed in her outstretched palm via general delivery at the Block Island Post Office.

But Althea was not thinking of Jeanne on the noon before she was handed Jeanne's letter. In fact, she was not meditating on any established friendship, but on an acquaintance only recently made but instantly cherished. She admitted a deeper interest; the object of her musings was a man, although the evidence told her that he preferred his own sex. A neighbor of hers in New York City, Paul was a dancer. She hadn't yet seen him perform.

On first sight, his apartment had charmed her: a wooden penthouse constructed right on the roof of a large brick apartment building, with an ornamental garden laid out over the tar strips in raised beds, a tinkling fountain worked by a hidden pump, and another plot of home-grown vegetables.

This home belonged to Paul's companion, Bryce. She'd met him, also, and was expecting to get to know him better at a dinner party they had invited her to after Labor Day. Courtesy and convention prevented her now from issuing an invitation to one if not both. She was thwarted in her desire. Even if Bryce, who rarely left home due to a physical infirmity the details of which she was still in the dark about, were to be miraculously absent, would Paul care to exchange country living in Manhattan for the real thing with her on Block Island?

She couldn't write that in a letter, however roundabout the way in which she might put it. She concluded that her speculations were as idle as her drowsy self on the scratchy grass, and her solitude until Jeanne came would be enlivened only by thoughts of this man. In the warm sun she fell asleep.