Bush Friend – Summer Fiction

This story was written several years ago but I had to change its working title because people thought it was something to do with the Cheney regime.  Now, with people trying to put that time out of their heads as quickly as possible, I think I can restore its original, and apt, “Bush Friend”. It is here,

Bush Friend

Lionel would not wait for the “big news”.   What were Shawn and Jeff thinking; not talking about it until coffee and dessert? Lionel wasn’t even out of his boots before he demanded, “What is it?”

But Jeff insisted they wait until the four of them were in the living room with drinks. A set piece for pity’s sake – the living room with drinks! Marlene didn’t seem to care one way or the other; said nothing in the porch, just tossed her mackintosh at Jeff. Marlene, once a gleeful gossip, refused to engage in a guessing game during the drive over, responding to Lionel’s “What could it be?” with a drowsy, “We’ll know soon enough”.

Jeff was playing.  He was such a dreadful actor though, not having the faintest what it took to convince. You saw it in his hurtful critiques of shows put on by the drama students, students of Lionel’s. Jeff thought it was easy.

Jeff handed Lionel his whiskey and Marlene a glass of some wine snob-white before squatting on the ottoman, an action rehearsed. “So, you won’t wait for it? Our news.”

Shawn was grave enough at that moment, not bothering to brush away hair fallen before her eyes, that Lionel worried it was bad big news.  Cancer sort of big news.

“Is that we are moving.”

Big enough.

“Shawn has,” Jeff continued, “been offered a great, you know, just too good to … at The Cooper Union, in New York.”

“Cooper Union. Well … congratulations,” said Lionel. Why wasn’t Shawn telling them this?  Was there more?

“That’s incredible, not that you don’t deserve it,” said Marlene, “… just that … who ever gets what they deserve.  Someone at Cooper Union got it right.”  Marlene rose from the floor and went to hug Shawn.  Shawn was sunken in the couch and Marlene leaning in over, back bowed like a saddle, fought not to fall.  Lionel was closer to Shawn than was Marlene.  It was he who should have gone to her.

“Did they … ‘head hunt’ you?” asked Lionel.

Shawn nodded.

“I got a call, out of the blue, and then, when I was in that group show in New York, the “Veiled Structure” show, I did the interview.”

Shawn had grown more attractive and confident in the seventeen years since they came to teach at the college.  She was the youngest, eight or nine years younger than Jeff.  When Lionel first met her Shawn was almost homely, with boney features she obscured with bituminous bangs and a slouch. Lionel might have said back then, not only about her looks, but also of her mind, her future as an architect, that prospects were poor.  But Shawn  (a name without prospects,) more than any of them, changed.  She put on fine muscle that gave her, with her angles and colour, an Iberian sort of beauty. Lionel could admit, with genuine happiness, that he had been wrong about Shawn.  Indeed without Jeff and Shawn it was difficult to imagine how he and Marlene could have coped in the remote little back-of-beyond.  Would soon have to cope.

“Naturally,” Shawn was saying, “I was interested, Cooper Union, but I worried about housing and all that …”

“Taken care of,” said Jeff. He couldn’t yet believe it.

“Yeah, housing … they really wanted me,” said Shawn. “I guess the conservatory job in Madison, all the attention it received.”

“They got it right, Shawn,” said Marlene again, standing now in the middle of the room. “And the shelter here in town, and the daycares in Peterborough and Sherbrooke.”

The college did not have a school of architecture but Jeff made the creation of a position for Shawn in the Visual Arts Faculty a condition of his accepting a post.  Jeff was bolder then.  He boasted, in private moments with Lionel, that he was ambivalent about the job offer so made it difficult, with attachments. It was Jeff, the hot young prospect of the fellowships and the talked about show at Power Plant, they wanted back in the day, not Shawn.

It wasn’t the same circumstance with Lionel and Marlene.  Though it was Marlene they recruited, to run the art gallery, the drama department was fortunate to get a scholar of Lionel’s standing.  Back then his book on Sheridan was just out and he had a play at The Tarragon in Toronto the coming fall. Despite Shawn’s joking that she and Lionel were “unwanted parts of a package deal”, their situations were different.   While it hadn’t seemed so at the time Shawn cut the best deal; even if it was shitty sessional pay, teaching a single survey course gave her time to design.  Her extension to the library, the job that started it all, was really a make-work project for Jeff Monroe’s wife. More or less. The competition was juried, but those things were never as blind as all that.  Having Shawn imagine the annex saved the college hundreds of thousands of dollars flying in a “name”.  Soon after, waiving a fee, Shawn designed the town’s new animal shelter – a modest, utilitarian structure of concrete that was deemed a miniature marvel.  Someone of great significance in architecture, Lionel could not remember who, said the building was “as audacious, unpredictable and yet organically bound to its setting as a wildflower.”  High praise for a dog pound, said Marlene. Shawn played it down, said that her timing was right, that there was lately a backlash against “celebrity architects” and their extravagant museums and air terminals. (It was all timing.  Hadn’t Lionel’s play at The Tarragon ended up being a few years ahead of critical taste?) Now with her star rising, the folks who awarded Shawn those early commissions, like Marlene kept saying of The Cooper Union, looked to have gotten it right.

“What about you, Jeff?”  Lionel asked. Was this an appropriate question?  Or the wrong way to put it?

“It’s a dream set-up.  I have access to a small studio space.  No teaching.  Not forever or anything, but …”

“Access to space,” said Lionel.

“All according to the original plan.”  Marlene said, waving her empty glass toward Jeff.

“Yes, the original plan,” said Jeff, conveying the bottle to Marlene. “This is Bellet.” He poured.  “I ordered it in.  You know that I’ve got over three hundred bottles of wine in the basement.  I don’t see shipping them to New York and I mean, with customs and duties … it would be complicated. You guys might inherit them.”

Keeping a cellar was so Jeffdiculous, thought Lionel, even as he wondered how to, in the coming weeks, tactfully keep alive Jeff’s notion of leaving it behind.

In the beginning none of them were naïve enough to think that they could live, straight out of grad school, from their art.  Even Jeff, then a commodity, understood that teaching was an inevitability for all but very few. They dared to be smug in their realism, enough so that Shawn once said that Jeff wasn’t being practical but cynical.  The original plan, one they shared, was to put in enough time in the hardship post to become established, then to practice full-time in a Montreal or New York.  Here, early in their careers, they could afford to buy a place, one big enough for a studio.  To start families. And it turned out they were closer to things than they imagined.  You could go to Toronto on a whim, even if you rarely did.  Shawn made the location an asset, getting design commissions for which she would never have been considered in larger centers.  You could make the big-fish-small-pond observation except that Shawn kept pace with international currents in her field. She read the literature.  She took advantage of seat sales to catch exhibitions and symposia in places like Glasgow, Hamburg and Genoa.

“You guys will have a place to stay.  The apartment they are offering … loft in DUMBO, guestroom/study set up …” said Shawn.

“But no teaching for you?” asked Lionel of Jeff. “None at all?”

“Nope.  It’s amazing, hey?”

“Just … what?” asked Marlene, “… see Shawn off to work, coffee and the New York Times … then amble down to the studio and … what? … actually paint away, make paintings?”

“Yeah,” said Jeff, “that’s the plan.”

What was it Marlene used to say about Jeff’s work, that it was “too literal” to move the viewer, that there was nothing more, whether the piece was representational or not, than what one saw on first viewing?  Lionel didn’t understand how this judgment could apply to Jeff’s abstract images. They meant nothing to him on the first or the twentieth viewing.  For whatever reason, perhaps only because the four had become such good friends, Marlene said less and less about Jeff’s pictures.  Lionel supposed, too, that Jeff was making fewer of them.  There hadn’t been an opening, even as part of a group, for a long time.

Perhaps, thought Lionel, Jeff might have more time to paint if he did not spend so much time in the kitchen. Supper was excellent, as usual. He cooked in spite of the place, having fanciful food stuffs – pomegranate molasses and cailletier olives shipped in, or substituting ingredients, like local lobster for langoustines, all in aid of putting on a meal the like of which you would eat in Paris.   For the main course tonight Jeff gave them leg of lamb, deboned and stuffed with tapenade, accompanied by a delicately sweet and sour preparation of eggplant that Marlene once proclaimed the “best thing I have ever eaten”.  The dish was delicious when Jeff first served it (but how anyone could say it was the “best ever”?) and, to Lionel’s palate, even better this evening.   But Marlene offered no praise. Jeff and Shawn were close enough friends, “old friends” now, that it didn’t matter.  A slight was easily forgiven.

“You make all these connections that …  this lamb is from Waddell’s farm,” Jeff was telling a story he had told many times before, “I was here two years, and asking constantly where I could get good local lamb before I found it. I actually saw the things grazing and went and asked.”

“In New York there are lambs,” said Marlene.  She was tired.  Jeff, too. It put years on them.  The same years that made Jeff look silly in that lurid t-shirt promoting some Goth-rock outfit and white jeans.  He should dress his age.  Marlene, just of late, was taking less care with her appearance, the floral pattern on that skirt did not agree with tangerine stripes of the blouse.  And was there a stain? Ink or a splash of red? Lionel caught himself in a mirror in a pisser on campus the other day and, without his glasses, saw Mr. Weatherby from the Archie comics.  He would mount a program of exercise next semester, the college possessed facilities for such of which he never took advantage.

Ritual at these dinners was that between the main course and desert Jeff and Marlene would go into the backyard for a cigarette.  Neither admitted to being smokers but both would occasionally cadge one (often from students), especially if they’d been drinking.  While those two were off having their puff Lionel and Shawn would clear the table.  The tone would change and Lionel and Shawn might even talk about art, seriously and with a youthful passion that Jeff and Marlene mocked.  Not tonight.  Lionel began ferrying plates to the dishwasher but Shawn remained seated.

“Mixed feelings?” Lionel asked from the kitchen.

“No,” answered Shawn.

“Didn’t, in all the time here … didn’t …?”

“Made friends, of course.  And the countryside, the natural world here is … but I’m finally getting to do what I want.”

Through the window above the sink Lionel could make out only the red embers of the two cigarettes.  Jeff and Marlene were all the way to the rear of the yard (large enough for the children Jeff and Shawn never had), out of range of the light above the backdoor. One of the two was seated or leaning against the fence, inhaling with clockwork regularity, the lit end of the filthy thing pulsing like an emergency beacon.  The other was pacing, scarcely smoking at all but waving the cigarette around, animated about something.

“Jeff,” Marlene continued, “has more here. I didn’t expect he would follow me.”

“Not go to New York, to paint?”

“Do you think he’ll do any painting?”

“You don’t?”

“What does Marlene say about Jeff’s work?”

“She’s had some issues in the past.  Hasn’t said much lately. And what, if Jeff didn’t go to New York? I mean, you two?”

“Are they smoking?” asked Shawn.

“Of course.”

“Who brings the cigarettes?”

“I don’t understand,” said Lionel.

“Both of them say they don’t smoke, that they only bum them.  But when you guys come over …”

The question nagged at Lionel.  He was going to put it to Jeff and Marlene when they came in from the yard but Marlene said she had to go, apologized, she was exhausted, andLionel hadn’t the chance.

…

Lionel recalled the problem later, just as Marlene put out the light when they’d gone to bed.

“Who brings the cigarettes?” he asked.

“What?”

“Tonight, at Jeff and Shawn’s, you went out for a smoke with Jeff.  Who had the cigarettes?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Marlene. “It’s irrelevant anyway.  He’s quit.”