Creep Around the Corner. Douglas Atwill
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After breakfast, Henry and I went swimming in the lake just beyond Parthenon, bog water clear as brown glass. Rounding a bend, we swam way out, not talking above the splash of our arms. Climbing up the ladder to the raft moored in the middle of the lake, we lay down in the sun.
I said, “Sarah thinks I love you too much.”
“Do you?”
“She says I will become a part of you, get filled by you and that I won’t be myself. I’ll have to fight to be a separate person, an artist.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad,” he said.
“I thought so, too. To become saturated with you, permeated by you. It gets me excited to just think about it.”
“Sarah can complicate things.” Henry took off his swimming shorts and I saw as he turned toward me that he was as aroused as I was. I pulled him close and kissed him, my hand stroking him gently. I could that see his brown eyes were open, looking past me. Sarah knew there was an attraction between us, but she got it wrong by one hundred and eighty degrees. I was the one who would take Henry, make him give in to me. Henry John, the dark brooding manly one, was just about to get himself suffused by the artistic one. The buzzing sound of an outboard motor around the bend stopped us cold. We hustled back into our trunks and down into the water. The outboard went past us and turned down into another inlet as we swam back to shore. Henry came close to me and returned a long kiss while the cars went back and forth on the pond road.
He said, “Let’s not forget this back on Water Street.”
But we would forget. That night at dinner, Sarah saw that something had happened because she looked at me in a different way. It was as if I had become larger or taller, a change she would now have to deal with. She was charming to me, solicitous of Henry. Francie brought in a dessert soufflé, portioned it between us on rose-painted plates. Sarah raised her glass of iced water as if it were wine.
“I have a sort of toast to make. Henry John, the Grand Vert farm is yours now if you will come and live there with Harold. We can build him a north-facing studio, get you some farm machinery, maybe even a swimming pool. I will have the papers drawn up tomorrow in town.”
Henry said, “Why now, Sarah? Why give it to me now?”
“Because I fear for the two of you on Water Street, never growing up, never coming back here to Parthenon. Middleton’s dusty power will take hold of you, pull you in like it did Henry Sr. If you have an obligation here, a home for both of you, maybe that won’t happen.”
He said, “Won’t the farm come to me in your will?”
“That could be a long while down the line. Even if I feel poorly at times, Blanchetts tend to live into their nineties, testy and frail. And, who knows, I might give it all to the church. The new pastor at St. Bede’s has come calling, talking about a thirty-foot rose window for Big Earl and a permanent endowment for an English choirmaster.”
Henry said, “Thanks Sarah, but let me think about it. Back in Middleton, in the house with the brown woodwork. It’s hard for me to make sense here.”
From what I knew of Henry, he had already thought about it, made sense of it. As we drove on the two-lane roads back to Middleton, we talked about other things as the green amber faded into the drier air. The promise of sensual adventure that teased us at the pond never took root in the hardscrabble acres of Martin County, even on the nights when we drank too much and watched the dawn. I kept the hope that we would make our love in the near future, that it would happen by itself.
But the ranch had a thirty-year mortgage on Henry, a long-term obligation with no hope of an early payoff. On snowy nights in Bad Issel, I still wondered what might have happened if he did not spurn the rolling fields of Parthenon, eating Francie’s chicken dinners and lemon soufflés over at Sarah’s, spending warm nights with me in the upper bedroom at Grand Vert, Big Earl looking down upon us without amusement.
PLUM BLOSSOMS FALLING
Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee
and I’ll forgive Thy great big one on me.
–Robert Frost
THE EBB AND FLOW OF THE DAYS at Schloss Issel insulated me from the matters of real concern in the outside world. Politics, presidential speeches, hydrogen explosions in Polynesia and unrest in Algeria were of no matter. Follum and I had become accustomed to walking across the street from the schloss to the Bierstube Langenscheidt after dinner. Corporal Murgon sat by himself at a small table, wary of being associated with friends of Callard. I felt comfortable with Follum, as if we had grown up together. We nursed two or three beers in as many hours, talked, looked idly at the other beer-drinkers, German civilians and American army, who looked idly back.
After a long stretch of silence, Follum said, “I wrote my girl friend, Melanie Petersen, about life here, how exciting it is.”
“This is exciting?”
“For a man who wants to be a music director, Germany is the land of Beethoven, Bach and the grand cathedral organs. It is exciting to be so near to Bonn and Ulm. My professors at college said that the high notes from the organ in Ulm take a full ten seconds to die out.”
“I’ll try to understand that as exciting. We should take a trip to Ulm, Eric. Soon. We’re getting behind on our Mercedes hours.”
He continued, “I’d like that. I also wrote that I’ve met this artist named Bradford; how we’ve become friends and talked every night over beer. Melanie loves museums and paintings, and she wants you to promise to be in our wedding, after we all get home.”
“I would love to be in your wedding, Follum.”
“I knew that, but there’s something else.”
“She wants to come over here to get married?”
“No. She’s sensible and definitely prefers to wait, Bradford. Melanie wants you to paint my portrait.”
“I’m not really good at portraits, Follum.”
“Melanie said you would say that.”
“I can try. No guarantees, though.”
We agreed to start on the week-end. I earlier had found an art supply store in Stuttgart and put together all the supplies in my wall locker. After morning formation was dismissed, we set up a chair next to the easel in my quarters. My roommates were off together on a trip to Heidelberg, so we had the morning to ourselves.
I mulled the portrait over in my mind since Follum asked about it and I decided upon a front view of his face and shoulders. It would be like the pioneer ancestor portraits you see in family sitting rooms, nothing fancy or self-consciously arty, but a modern version of the naïve paintings that I imagined must be on every Wisconsin wall. Since Follum was a light-haired Norwegian, I chose a background nearly the same pale-yellow color as his abundant hair. It would enhance his complexion, the natural light from the windows coming from his left.
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