CHAPTER TWO
The Study
Eleven years ago, a man in a seersucker jacket paid four hundred dollars for a painting of mine because it made him laugh, and I want it on the record that I fell for the laugh before I knew whose mother came with it.
It was the school’s spring benefit auction, held in the gym, which smelled the way gyms smell no matter how much hydrangea you truck in.
The art department had been asked to contribute, and I’d given them a small study — the harbor at dead low tide, the mud all wrong colors on purpose, a tourist’s sailboat heeled over in the distance at an angle that, if you knew boats, meant somebody’s afternoon had gone very badly.
Whit knew boats. He stood in front of that little canvas for a full minute and then laughed out loud, alone, in front of the silent-auction table — a big, delighted, unguarded laugh that turned heads.
Then he bid four hundred dollars on a painting marked at seventy-five, found out which teacher had done it, and crossed the gym.
“You put the boat in on purpose,” he said. No introduction. “Everybody else here painted the harbor like it was behaving. Yours has a casualty in it.”
“The mud’s the subject,” I said. “The boat’s the joke.”
“The boat’s the truth,” he said, and grinned at me, and I — who had been raised sensibly in Mount Pleasant by a schoolteacher who told me handsome men get one good line and you should wait, smiling politely, for their second — did not wait for the second.
The first was that good. Pluff mud at low tide came in through the propped gym doors, and somewhere across the river the bells were going, and that was that.
What you have to understand is that Whit Calhoun, encountered in the wild, away from the Hall, is the easiest man in South Carolina to love. This is not an excuse. It’s a fact, the way the harbor being beautiful is a fact, and you can drown in the harbor.
He courted me in town — galleries, my classroom on a Saturday helping me staple three hundred construction-paper kites to a corkboard, his truck with the vineyard dust still in the seams. He talked about grafting the way other men in this city talk about their boats, and the first time he took me up the Ashley to see the rows, he walked me down the middle of one at golden hour and said, “My grandfather planted these on rootstock everybody said was wrong for the soil. You can’t argue a vine into taking.
It takes or it doesn’t.” Then he’d looked at me sideways and said, “It’s taking,” and I had laughed at him for a solid minute and married him fourteen months later.
I met Dot in the third month. Lunch at the Hall, just the three of us, eighteen place settings’ worth of silver for three people, and she was lovely to me.
I want to be fair, because fairness is the thing I have left: Dorothea Calhoun has never once, in eleven years, been unkind to me in any sentence you could repeat to a third party and have it sound like what it was.
She asked about my school. She asked about my painting, and said the word painting the way you’d handle somebody else’s baby — carefully, briefly, glad to give it back.
She told me Whit’s father had loved the rows the way Whit did — he had died young, she said, a soft-spoken man who never once raised his voice in his life, and the careful way she said never raised his voice was a thing I would not understand for another ten years — and for one moment something in her face was a hundred years old, and I liked her, that first lunch.
I think some part of me went on liking her the whole time, which is the part nobody warns you about.
The wedding is where I should have read the picture.
I’d wanted my mother’s garden. It isn’t grand, but the camellias were her pride and the light comes in low and gold over the marsh at six o’clock, and I’d seen the whole composition in my head since I was nine years old: forty chairs, the marsh going copper, me barefoot.
The Hall sent regrets. Not in words — nothing at Calhoun Hall is ever in words.
Dot simply began, gently, to be practical.
The Hall had the tent already (“from the centennial — it would be silly not to”).
The Hall had Reverend Sessions. The Hall had parking, dear, and her sister’s hip couldn’t do a marsh lawn.
Every individual point was reasonable, was generous, even — that was the genius of it.
She offered the Hall the way the bank offers an umbrella: you can certainly keep walking in the rain if you like, but everyone will watch you do it, and won’t it seem strange, when there was a perfectly good umbrella.
I remember the night I conceded — though I didn’t call it that; nobody calls them concessions for years; that’s the whole mechanism.
We were on the carriage-house porch and I said something light, something sunny, because I’d already learned which voice carried best in that family: “Your mother got the church, the reverend, and the tent. I’d like the cake and my mother’s camellias on the tables. ”
And Whit — twenty-nine, golden, easy — kissed my forehead and said the sentence for what I realize now was already not the first time, though it was the first time I heard it as a sentence and not as a husband:
“You know how Mother is. It’s just one day, Pose. You’ll have all the rest of them.”
The arithmetic of that statement is the kind you redo ten years later, the way you walk back into a room you’ve lived in all your life and finally look at what’s hanging in it. One day to her. All the rest to me. I have done the math since. The rest were Sundays, and the Sundays were hers too.
We married under the centennial tent. It rained on my mother’s garden that day anyway, which everyone agreed proved the wisdom of the thing, and there is exactly one photograph from that wedding that I have ever loved: Bitsy took it, sideways, before the ceremony — me in the dressing room mirror, alone, in the two seconds before the family came in.
Just a girl in white, mid-turn, looking over her shoulder at something out of frame.
I didn’t understand for a decade why I kept going back to it.
It’s the last picture of me where I’m the subject.
The auction study — the mud, the capsized joke, the painting that started everything — Whit hung it in his dressing room at the Hall, on the wall you face when you tie a tie.
He was proud of it, I believe that. He told the story at parties for years: four hundred dollars, best money I ever spent, married the artist. The story got a laugh every time, and every time, some part of me stood very still inside the laughing, because I had noticed — the way you notice a pin in a chair before you understand you’ve noticed — that the only painting of mine ever to enter Calhoun Hall in ten years hung in the one room in that house where nobody would ever, ever see it.
A study, in painting, is the thing you make before the real thing.
It is allowed to be unfinished. It is allowed its flaws, because the flaws are information, and you are going to use what you learned and make the finished work, and the finished work is the one that gets the wall, the light, the frame, the room with people in it.
He bought the study. He married the study.
And for ten years, in the kindest possible way, in the most comfortable house in the lowcountry, with the gentlest of smiles at the far end of the loveliest of tables, the Calhoun family waited for me to be finished — by which they meant: revised toward the family palette, varnished in their colors, hung where assigned.
The dressing room. East wall. Where he could see me every morning, alone, while he dressed for the day on which everyone else would get the version his mother preferred.
I was the best thing that man ever hung. He just never moved me into the house.